Cracks in the Crown
By BOB HERBERT
NY TIMESor Rudy Giuliani, it's the best of times.
He and his friend Judith Nathan relaxed at the stunning Boca Raton Resort & Club in Florida last week, and then the former mayor, Time magazine cover boy and hero to all and sundry, earned an estimated $100,000 giving a speech to executives from General Electric who had convened at the resort.
For most New York mayors, the final exit from City Hall is the first step toward oblivion. Not for Rudy. He's writing a book that's all but guaranteed to be a best seller. He's the main man in Giuliani Partners, a consulting group designed to do for failing companies what he did for New York. The Daily News tells us he's creating his very own think tank and library. And Republican candidates from coast to coast are clamoring for him to drop by and sprinkle some of his magic on their ambitions.
Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. Every now and then I glance skyward, half expecting his name to be emblazoned across the heavens. Before Sept. 11 his political standing was mixed, at best. Now he's a saint.
I wish him well. But I also hope that as we get further away from the horror of last summer, a more balanced view of Mr. Giuliani's eight years as mayor emerges.
He had big strengths and terrible weaknesses. No one can seriously question his leadership in the aftermath of the terrorist attack. He took immediate command and displayed an unwavering sense of resolve. And somehow, astonishingly, he adopted exactly the right tone to lead the shaken city through weeks of almost unbearable agony.
Where he found that tone, I don't know. But I do know how much the city needed it. His post-Sept. 11 performance will go into the history books unchallenged.
Mr. Giuliani's other major claim to greatness is based on the extraordinary decline in crime that New York experienced during his terms in office. The year before he became mayor, the number of murders in the city was just shy of 2,000. Last year the total (excluding the carnage at the World Trade Center) was 642. You can argue over how the credit should be allotted, but he gets a great deal of it.
Mr. Giuliani is also given credit for demonstrating that a large, ungainly city like New York is, in fact, governable. For many, that question was up in the air when he took office.
But there were other important areas in which Mr. Giuliani did not do well. He went out of his way to show what I think can fairly be described as his contempt for black people, refusing for the most part to even meet with black elected officials.
He permitted, if not encouraged, police officers to wage a long campaign of humiliation against black men and boys, stopping them and frisking them on the ground, or against walls, or over the hoods of cars ‹ tens of thousands of men and boys who had done nothing wrong.
Andrew Kirtzman, in his book, "Rudy Giuliani ‹ Emperor of the City," tells the sorrowful tale of Mr. Giuliani's lone black deputy mayor, Rudy Washington, who was given a special police identification badge after he described how he had been pulled over a couple of times (for no good reason) and insulted by police officers.
The depth of the hurt and the extent of the bitterness generated by such relentless hostility was never adequately conveyed by the media.
There were other problems. Mr. Giuliani took pride in reducing the city's welfare rolls, but that was accomplished in part by making it extremely difficult for poor people ‹ including thousands upon thousands of children ‹ to get benefits that they desperately needed, and for which they were fully qualified.
The former mayor was all but obsessed with building stadiums for wealthy sports teams, but he did little to spur the building of affordable housing, even as the homeless population was rising toward record levels.
The public school system, shamefully inadequate, got a steady stream of invective from Mr. Giuliani, but none of the laser-like attention that he devoted to projects and initiatives that appealed to him.
The lasting memory of Rudolph Giuliani for most New Yorkers will be his magnificent performance in the worst of times. But there was more to his tenure than that, and he summed it up well in an end-of-term interview with reporters:
"I'm a human being. I have my limitations."
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The police aren't here to create disorder, they are here to preserve disorder.
Mayor Richard Daley
NEURONAUTIC INSTITUTE on-line: http://home.earthlink.net/~thew
