The right man, if ...(The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life)(Book Review)

The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life, by Fred Siegel (Encounter, 408 pp., $26.95)

THERE are two ways to enjoy this important and timely book. Everyone in New York who writes about politics knows Fred Siegel, professor of history at Cooper Union and senior fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute. He is an intellectual and a raconteur. He collects bright details like a magpie, and he remembers damning facts with the stern impartiality of Rhadamanthus, judge of the underworld. He has seen the clowns tumble, and he knows where the bodies are buried. The Prince of the City can be read as Plutarch's Lives of the Ignoble New Yorkers. Who, in the grotesque political culture of this great city, is most memorable? Is it Judge Leonard Sand, who made a First Amendment defense of bums: "It is the very unsettling appearance and message conveyed by the beggars that gives their conduct its expressive quality" (stinking and shouting--the new Federalist Papers)? Is it the Rev. Al Sharpton, who, between lying about Tawana Brawley and running for president, sought the Democratic mayoral nomination in 1997; after Ruth Messinger beat him, according to one of her campaign insiders, Sharpton offered to support her wholeheartedly, provided he was given "a generous contribution of several hundred thousand dollars"? Or is it former city councilman Rafael Colon, "indicted on 706 counts of larceny and fraud ... accused of beating his ex-lover, owing child support for his eight children by four different women, putting a dead cousin on his payroll, and, like many Bronx council members, living outside the city"? Fred Siegel knows, and he wants to share his knowledge with all comers.

The primary subject of The Prince of the City, however, is not Gotham's rascals, but an authentic if limited hero, Rudolph Giuliani, who held them at bay for eight years, and who won some important and still lasting victories. "Prince of the City" is a tabloid honorific bestowed on gods of celebrity, most recently the late John F. Kennedy Jr. But Siegel wants to recall The Prince of Machiavelli. Machiavelli proposed to sweep aside Christianity in favor of ancient pagan virtues that he believed would save Italy. Giuliani, Siegel believes, swept aside the pseudo-Christianity of late liberalism in an effort to save New York. "He self-consciously replaced ... rhetoric of compassion, generosity, and multiculturalism--which in practice translated into more social-service jobs, higher taxes, and ethnic strife--with talk of work, self-sufficiency, and a shared Americanism."

Giuliani's major successes during his eight years in City Hall (1994-2001) concerned crime, and welfare. Neither ill, he argued, was determined by uncontrollable forces. "The economy has been weak," Giuliani said, "and the economy has been strong, and it bears no relationship to the crime rate." Adopting the crime-fighting model of "broken windows" policing, Giuliani directed the cops to take care of the big crimes by taking care of the small infractions too. CompStat, a new computerized system of information gathering and sharing, allowed police brass to track the pulse of crime in daily ebbs and flows. Crime went beyond thugs: The mob took a huge bite out of everything from trash collecting to the Jacob Javits Convention Center. Giuliani rooted the wise guys out. Welfare was not a gift of the economy either. "The welfare explosion," Siegel notes, "had begun during the boom years of the 1960s, and welfare caseloads had increased in New York during the great days of the 1980s." The profiteer in this case was the social-work industry, which battened on the problems it was supposed to solve. Giuliani turned welfare centers into clean, well-organized job centers, and got single mothers into the workforce. "For every benefit," he said, "there's an obligation, for every right, a duty."

Crime and welfare may ...