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

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 erro

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.

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."

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.