Prince Rudy's Courtier: a mugged liberal's love affair with a tough mayor.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim
• Position: 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, San Francisco: Encounter, 342 pages, $26.95

TO GRASP THE importance of Rudolph Giuliani's two-term administration as mayor of New York, you have to remember what a mess the city was under Giuliani's predecessor. Mayor David Dinkins led a city where garbage went uncollected for three years, where a still-unknown number of children died of cholera, where two in every three residences were destroyed by arson in any given year, where the average woman was sexually assaulted at least three times every day (the rate for men was slightly higher).

With an infant mortality rate slightly above 100 percent and an adult unemployment rate even higher than that, the Big Apple had been reduced to a one-crop economy, making the city a virtual subsidiary of the United Fruit Company. In New York's crime-plagued subterranean labyrinths, entire subway trains routinely vanished without a trace, with all passengers aboard.

The handful of New Yorkers who had not been killed outright by street gangs were left to suffer from untreated AIDS, with the result that by 1991 the city's population had dropped to zero, the tumbleweeds blowing down Broadway adding little cheer to the Omega Man nightmare-scape that had once been America's proudest and most bustling city.

If this description seems overblown, if you have vague recollections of a Big Apple boom in the Ed Koch years (embodied in reality by soaring stock prices and property values, and in mass culture by sunny films like The Secret of My Success) and a Wall Street boom that seems humble now but dominated the news during the Dinkins era, you must read Fred Siegel's The Prince of the City. Among the horrors facing New Yorkers in the pre-Giuliani era, Siegel cites "a new wave of tuberculosis" on the subways, "often carried by deinstitutionalized mental patients whose right not to take their medicine had been secured by [civil liberties] attorneys."

This was a real phenomenon, actually, and the few of us who survived the Dinkins administration vividly recall the return-of-TB story that dominated the tabloids for a week or so and was subsequently forgotten. Siegel revisits this story but declines to say how Mayor Giuliani solved it.

Why does Siegel, a historian at Cooper Union and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy institute, paint this Boschean vision of pre-Rudy New York? Giuliani's story hardly needs the buildup. There is little serious disagreement that during his administration vast areas of city life, from civil order to taxes to trash collection, improved remarkably. And Siegel, who served Giuliani as a campaign adviser (a connection he fails to disclose) and as an intellectual mentor through his editorship of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal (a connection to which he vaguely alludes), would seem to be the ideal writer for the job.

So why is his breezy and comprehensive history, the first book-length treatment of the Giuliani administration, so unpersuasive? The book aims to show Giuliani as "a Renaissance Prince who revived his republic with more than a touch of Machiavelli's 'corrupt wisdom.'" But through the scrim of Siegel's special pleading, settling of old scores, and undercooked character development, as well as (sorry for the pedantry) numerous typos, unattributed quotations, and grandiose but thinly supported claims, Prince Rudy starts to look like an empty suit.

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