Customer Reviews

The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life

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Fred Siegel's "The Prince of the City" is not a biography of Rudy Giuliani. It is a political history of New York City, New York State and the forces Giuliani had to face and fight. As such, the book becomes a tribute to a remarkable, but far from perfect, man and a frightening portrait of an American city where corrupt poltiicians, addled academics, clueless socialists and race-baiters have gone mad and imprisoned honest, working people in a neo-Marxist nightmare.

Siegel provides a short history of New York City politics from the 1930s onward. I had no idea of just how far to the left the city was and how the government took so much from working people in order to support a huge (600,000!) cadre of those who wouldn't work and myriad social service "providers" catering to their imagined needs. Siegel provides facts, not opinions. If he has an axe to grind, he's done a superb job of keeping it hidden.

Giuliani, facing the reality of the fiscal devestation wreaked by his predecessors, attempts to bring the budget under control. Needless to say the entrenched bureaucracies, unions and interest groups fight him every step of the way, resorting to lies, ad hominems and even the threat of violence in the form of race riots if Giuliani doesn't retreat or compromise.

Siegel paints a portrait of Giuliani that predicted the man the nation and world became familiar with on and after 9/11. A strong man, secure in his beliefs; a man who was willing and able to stand alone. As it happens, Siegel reveals Giuliani as a skillful poltician who was able to weave a small alliance of forward thinking politicians, even those who were his political opposites, but who had the welfare of New York at heart.

The battles were monmumental, much greater than the national news reported. The corruption and stagnation of New York City is unbelievable. A Board of Education that consumed $11 billion annually, turned out graduates who couldn't read, but protected school custodians who mopped lunchrooms once a week. Principalships were sold. The number of employees was unknown. Corruption was rife. And this was only one of the problems Giuliani faced.

Al Sharpton and Charlie Rangel are portrayed as villains. Each reader, I am certain, will have their own opinion of these men. But their machinations are well covered in Siegel's book.

One of the most frightening chapters talks of how CUNY, once called the "poor man's Harvard" was dumbed down. CUNY's education college turned out most of the teachers for New York City's public schools. More than 50% of these teachers couldn't pass a simple exam. The academics then claimed that these failures were good teachers, but bad test takers --- and further dumbed down the test. With its open admission policy and free tuition, CUNY graduated less than 1% of its 2 year degree students within two years. (Perhaps as a byproduct of CUNY's dumbing down, the editing and proofreading of this book is awful. Spelling and grammatical errors abound. Small factual details weren't checked: the Chicago Institute of Art is mentioned: it happens to be the Chicago Art Institute.)

Siegel recounts the political jockeying when the Democrats attempt to defeat Giuliani. New York City is a wonderland of bizarre political alliances.

Finally, Siegel covers the Rudy of 9/11 and the immediate post-Rudy period.

As political history, "The Prince of the City" is absolutely first-rate. Regardless of your political viewpoint, it should be required reading.

Jerry

I began reading Siegel on New York several years ago. What he had to say changed my views on the proper role of government in the lives of real people as opposed to what theorists or statists believe it should be. When Giuliani was elected, politicians and police were convinced that crime could not be dealt with by law enforcement-"job training and education" were their answers so the police ended up responding to 911 calls and the city became mired in unchecked criminal activity and hooliganism. The liberal gospel had it that since poverty causes crime, nothing short of ridding society of it did much good. Federal, state and local governments, high taxes, an anti-business attitude, a myriad of rules and regulations, racialist politicians plus corruption on the part of unions, criminal enterprises and some in government had the city on the ropes. Giuliani changed all that. What Giuliani accomplished makes him one of the great men of our time. He simply did not accept the conventional liberal wisdom and he brought New York back to life. The other side fought him every inch of the way calling him every name in the book. One man with energy and courage can indeed make a difference. This is an excellent book about a great man. I have waited years for someone to write it and am not surprised that the man was Fred Siegel. At least one Democrat recognized what had happened to New York. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "Liberalism faltered when it turned out it could not cope with truth."

This is the first post-9/11 biography of Rudy G. It provides a good retrospective on the Giuliani Era in New York. In a generally favorable examination, noted historian Fred Siegel shows the outsized impact that Rudy had on Gotham's politics and public policy. Not just the well chronicled successes -- the historic, national-pace-setting drop in crime, and his inspired leadership during and after 9/11. But also less frequently recalled achievements like the restoration of basic academic standards at CUNY, fiscal prudence (without resort to tax increases) during a pronounced regional recession, welfare reform, etc. The missteps are also covered in detail, including the tragic Diallo shooting, ill-considered 1999 City Charter reform plan, and the very public dissolution of Rudy's marriage.

Siegel has effusive praise for Rudy's prescience in anticipating, and preparing the City for, another terrorist attack after the first WTC bombing. Giuliani saw a link between the 1990 Meir Kahane assassination and the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and knew the terrorist threat was real and on-going. His crisis management plans, while no panacea, paid dividends in the City's response to 9/11.

On the political front, Giuliani's endorsement sealed the election for Bloomberg in 2001. But a more telling measure of his influence that election year was the extent to which a longtime foe and career Naderite like Mark Green adopted much of Rudy's agenda. Giuliani bequeathed to Bloomberg a City whose economy was deeply wounded by 9/11 and the post-bubble recession on Wall Street, but that was in fundamentally better shape than Giuliani himself inherited in 1994. Still, Bloomberg's failure to meaningfully curb spending, imposition of tax increases and generally more paternalistic approach to governance signaled the end of the Giuliani Era in New York.

While I enjoyed this book a great deal, I deducted one star from my rating due to an inordinate number of typos and several careless mistakes. For example, Browning Ferris Industries, the national waste management behemoth, is repeatedly referred to as "Brown & Ferris."

Siegel's book on Giuliani's New York is the first essential book on the mayor. Siegel offers a compact history of Gotham over the last half century, focused especially on the Dinkins administration, under which crime surged, jobs vanished, and the private sector middle class fled. From there, he looks at how the city's fortunes revived under the Machiavellian stewardship of Giuliani, painting a warts-and-all portrait of the man who revived New York. Siegel's is the first account to look at Giuliani's pre-September 11th concern with and preparations for acts of terror, and to show how those allowed him to rise to the occasion when the city needed him most. In showing how Giuliani served as mayor, he also offers a glimpse of what a Giuliani presidency might look like.

Siegel's last book, The Future Once Happened Here, was an equally essential chronicle of the decline of New York, D.C., and L.A. over the past forty years, and this happier sequel of sorts is both welcome news and a must-read for New Yorkers, historians, urbanists, and, not least of all, lovers of well-told and compelling tales.

This is as much of an indictment of urban liberalism as a biography of Giuliani. The mayor comes across as a giant who cuts a wide swath through short-sighted lilliputians who tried to tie him down. I suspect that if you're a traditionally liberal New Yorker, you might not like this book very much, but it's hard to argue with Giuliani's success. The city was falling apart when Giuliani became mayor. It was considered ungovernable, and through sheer force of will, boundless energy, and sensible policies, he reversed, at least temporarily, the city's decline.

Reading this, I was struck by similarities between Giuliani and his hero Winston Churchill; when things are at their worst, you want him in charge, because you'll know he'll rise to the occasion, as he did after 9/11. Like Churchill, who was pilloried for his unheeded warnings about the need to build up the British army in the 1930's, Giuliani was mocked for setting up an expensive crisis center and constantly preparing for a possible terrorist attack. One characteristic of great leadership is that it's prescient, and when the attack came, the city he ran was ready, and he instinctively knew what to do. On the other hand, he's also like Churchill in that in non-crisis situations, he loses focus and his judgment becomes suspect.

The book has its flaws. Since it's a political biography, I never felt as if it really brought the man to life. And while Siegel goes into a lot of detail, it's also somewhat matter of fact about how Giuliani succeeded at a task that surely was the modern equivalent of Hercules clearing out the Augean stables.

In a national landscape of political mediocrity or worse - times have been pretty good for the last twenty years or so, and we really haven't needed, wanted, or gotten strong leadership - it's comforting to know that Giuliani is there. I doubt he could be elected president in normal times; let's just hope we never need to elect him.

Being a lifelong New Yorker, I know first hand of what this book speaks. It is well written and distills, in a refreshingly politically incorrect way, the issues underlying 70 or so years of mayoral politics in the city. The author is not afraid to call it as he sees it.

What the book does superbly is to clarify some of the more essential issues with the advantage of historical hindsight while comparing the events as they happened then with media obfuscation at the time.

It would have been useful if the author had focused on some of the more senselessly paranoid behavior of Giuliani and his associates but this is a minor criticism. I recommend this book wholeheartedly to students of New York City politics.

Straight-forward, yet rich with detail, Siegel's Prince places New York's sleazy politics under the microscope, zooming in on the transforming power of the Giuliani administration. Instead of seeing Guiliani as the beneficiary of a national urban revival, Siegel places Rudy at the head of it. The book cites the fact that NYC's crime reduction accounted for 40% of the national drop.

However, the book dumps on Bloomberg's post-Giuliani mayoralty despite Mayor Mike dropping crime even further. Siegel seems to prefer an adversarial prosecutor-mayor who gets results over an inclusive businessman-mayor who also gets results. Certainly, Bloomberg is not exactly Giuliani, but it is unfair to call him "Giuliani-lite."

Yet the main thrust of the book is not a comparison with Bloomberg, but an overriding treatise on reinventing urban government. The point is convincly made that the failed liberal policies of the 1960s can only be overcome with a strong-handed mayor dedicated to fighting entrenched special interests.

Two cheers for Rudy, and two cheers for Seigel for this must-have book on the politics that can rescue a city -- and perhaps our nation as well.

This is a completely engaging account of NY's political history in modern times that is hugely informative and entertaining. The Siegels show that the extraodinary City revival of the '90s was not just the result of NY happily riding the coattails of the booming national economy, but rather of a series of tenaciously hard-fought victories over long entrenched interests that had been choking city life. Rather than going along with practices that had been long accepted, like corruption and mob influence at the Javit Center and Fulton Fish Market, Rudy took on the thugs and broke their stranglehold -- to cite two of his more modest, but nonetheless courageous triumphs over the rot that he inherited. Particularly helpful is the account of Rudy refusing time after time to succumb to the racial polarizing of Sharpton, Rangel, and other self-appointed Harlem leaders who consistently fought to retain the failed policies on welfare, schools, public order, social spending, etc. that so depressed NY life pre-Rudy.
Rudy's genius at leadership radiates on the pages of this book.
The last chapter on Bloomberg's tilt toward the old order and his far more muddled leadership style provides a terrific summary of the last four years.

Written by professor of history Fred Siegel, The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life is an eye-opening look at how Mayor Rudy Giuliani successfully turned around one of America's most troubled cities, beset with budgetary woes, white flight, and skyrocketing crime rates, with an efficiency and eye toward achieving results worthy of Machiavelli's "The Prince". The Prince of the City is as much the story of modern New York itself as it is a portrayal of Giuliani, with especial focus on the flaws of Giuliani's predecessor, Mayor Dinkins, particularly Dinkins' vision of social programs that simply failed to prevent crime as effectively as the deterrent of a strong police force. Giuliani's landmark reforms, such as facilitating a police department that shared information more openly and laterally, merging duplicate bureaucracies, pushing workfare over welfare, and much more created a positive cycle of New Yorker pride banishing fear. The Prince of the City also recounts the many attacks on Giuliani's career, and troubles and fallout from such disastrous incidents as the police shooting death of Diallo. The final chapters offer a dramatic account of the September 11th attacks, revealing how Giuliani's eight years in office prepared the city to endure and properly respond to the tragedy. Though written from a conservative perspective, The Prince of the City is heavily researched, strictly respectful of the facts, and first-rate reading for biographers, historians, and anyone wishing to learn more about Giuliani as a statesman, a politician, a moral leader, and a successful problem solver beset with a myriad of complex quandaries. Highly recommended.

The content of this book was very informative. It brought up points that, at the time, I hadn't even noticed. However, it appears that the editor was sleeping on the job. The simple activity of reading this book was difficult due to the horrible misspellings and blaring errors in grammar. I cannot believe that the publisher allowed this book to hit the market in its current state. However, if you can manage to overlook the numerous errors (oftentimes there is at least one on every page), then this book is very informative and enjoyable.