An Army on One
Tucker, William
Books in Review - "An Army on One" calling Leninists "leftists," he him-self, when the quote marks end, doggedly calls the same Leninists "conservatives"! In this sleight of hand, Kuhn is not...
...Jiang, like Brezhnev, presided over a Communist Party running out of steam, intellectual honesty, public trust, and faith in Communism...
...He had no party (there were only three Republicans on the City Council), he had no unions, and he had no organized constituency...
...Read this book for gems here and there but not for themes and answers...
...Beneath the radar, Giuliani was taking on each and every one of the city's vast, overwhelming battalions of interest groups and public-spending beneficiaries, telling them that the old days were over...
...A screening committee chose banal questions from a huge number submitted...
...Who knew that Rudy was Churchill...
...You certainly can't call mistaken folk leftist...
...said Giuliani, brushing her aside...
...If William Tucker is a writer living in Brooklyn...
...When Giuliani decided to break the Genovese family's stranglehold on the Fulton Fish Market, his commissioner of business services, Rudy Washington, and deputy chief of police, Wilbur Chapman—protected by 60 young cops—ended up literally backed against a wall by angry union members wielding fish hooks...
...He gloss-es over Leninism (except for verbal gymnastics over which it is charitable to draw a veil) as if it were an awkward piece of Jiang's baggage...
...The police were demonstrating every day outside City Hall in response to Giuliani's budget cuts...
...The U.S...
...We often have a tough time getting out of here," remarked one player...
...Kuhn's engaging personal stories about Jiang ultimately fall short...
...And this all happened before September 11th...
...There turned out to be only about 60 of them...
...Behind the scenes, Giuliani was even more impressive: By noon, the mayor, assuming the role of a wartime leader, had gathered not only the police and fire commissioners, but also representatives of all of the city's emergency agencies, at the Police Academy on 20th Street, which served as makeshift command center...
...Absolutely nothing...
...In one era and out the other," quipped a bystander...
...It was magnificent really...
...Or, perhaps more appropriately, "Capitalism: Damned If You Do, Giuliani returns from a weary day of battling interest groups all over the city, only to find the inimitable Bella Abzug standing on the steps of City Hall waiting to tender her resignation...
...Kuhn's account of Jiang's speech at Harvard in 1997, which I attended, does not inspire confidence in his account of more elusive incidents behind the Beijing government's vermilion walls...
...his years spent in immersing himself in the details of local government—and a fountainhead of ideas coming from conservative scholars at the Manhattan Institute, which played a largely unheralded role in the Giuliani-led Renaissance...
...Murders had topped 2,000 per year, drug dealing was a public activity, squeegee men assaulted drivers coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel, Mayor David Dinkins had allowed an antiSemitic riot to "vent" in Crown Heights for two days before his police commissioner finally seized the initiative and put a stop to it—and that wasn't the half of it...
...It is hard to remember how low New York's for-tunes had sunk in 1992 and how rapidly they were going from bad to worse...
...It was a "gutsy decision" for Jiang to go to Harvard, says Kuhn...
...In those days, open drug dealing and mini-riots in public parks were a normal part of life...
...As the players disembarked from the bus, the camera panned around, catching sight of heroin addicts shooting up and drug dealers casually closing deals on park benches...
...Then, just as predicted, the re-establishment of public order drove crime off the streets and gave public spaces back to law-abiding citizens...
...Why don't you send it in...
...By now everyone knows the story of how Giuliani adopted James Q. Wilson and George Kelling's "Broken Windows" theory, undoing 30 years of liberal damage to the justice system and rolling the clock all the way back to 1965 when murders numbered only 600 a year...
...Private enterprise was headed for the exits...
...J N THE MIDST OF NEW YORK'S perpetual political theater, Giuliani held daily afternoon press conferences, trying to convey his message to the public over the heads of a hostile press...
...Key quotes are sourced with the meaningless phrase, "Author's communication, Beijing...
...Whether his liberal views on abortion and gay marriage can clear the hurdle of conservative primary voters remains to be seen...
...And that didn't count the one in six residents (1.2 million people) on welfare...
...Interestingly, this saccharine biography comes not from a leftist but a scientist-businessman...
...Don't underestimate Chinese civilization's capacity to spring a surprise...
...That Kuhn, who is an advisor on economics and media to the Chinese government, does not see this skewing his picture of Jiang betrays Kuhn's innocence of the systemic problem in writing about Chinese politics...
...you drop Marxism but retain Leninism, as Deng and Jiang did, you postpone a reckoning with a vacuum of values in society, tension between economics and politics, and a schizophrenic foreign policy...
...His demeanor—calm, frank, patient, tender, egoless, competent—was, as carried to the city and the world through the intimacy of television, profoundly reassuring...
...Giuliani now runs Giuliani Partners, a highly successful consulting firm, amassing money and experience for an obvious run at the presidency in 2008...
...The squeegee men were gone in a week...
...He had read the biographies and long admired Britain's savior...
...Sidewalk traffic increased, businesses flourished...
...better to denigrate them as conservative...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W conservatism) calling Leninists "leftists," he him-self, when the quote marks end, doggedly calls the same Leninists "conservatives...
...This news clip had been made about ten years ago, before Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York...
...Kuhn is correct to say that "electronic messages zip-ping around China exemplify an increasingly dynamic and unafraid populace," but he makes no assessment of how China's old politics will eventually be changed by its new society and economy...
...Good as Gould J F SOME ENTERPRISING PROFESSOR were to teach a business class with two recent biographies as the core curriculum—Mitchell Zuckoff's Ponzi's Scheme and Edward J. Renehan's Dark Genius of Wall Street—the course catalogue could contain the following simple yet snazzy title: "Why Bother Doing the Right Thing...
...One of every five New Yorkers worked directly for the New York City government and another one in five worked for the non-profits and social services industries that survive on government handouts...
...In every toe-to-toe battle with mob-controlled unions, in every spit-fight with rapacious public employees, in every harrowing confrontation with racial arsonists, Fred Siegel has recounted the story's grim and gory details...
...Was this the New York we knew...
...The biggest renaissance was on Harlem's 125th Street, where a commercial strip that didn't have a single grocery store or movie theater in 1994 now boasts Disney, Sony, Magic Johnson Theaters, Pathmark, The Gap, Cineplex Odeon, Barnes & Noble—and the offices of Bill Clinton...
...Under Dinkins and former Governor Mario Cuomo, New York had tried to tax its way out of the 1991 recession, losing 330,000 jobs in the process—one out of every four job losses in the country...
...Rick Hertzberg of The New Yorker described Giuliani as "exactly the leader the city needed...
...Not so, given that Harvard agreed to most of Jiang's anti-free speech conditions for the appearance...
...Gangs have attacked the bus with rocks...
...In this sleight of hand, Kuhn is not to blame...
...With three times the population, New York now has fewer murders than Chicago...
...Kuhn, an investment banker with a Ph.D...
...In one memorable vignette drawn by Siegel, Giuliani returns from a weary day of battling interest groups all over the city, only to find the inimitable Bella Abzug standing on the steps of City Hall waiting to tender her resignation from the Women's Commission of something-or-other...
...Still, it does not seem inappropriate to say that, whatever the future may hold for Giuliani and the country, he will probably never face a more daunting task than he did in 1994 when he took over a morally and financially bankrupt New York City...
...That was just the part that made national head-lines...
...SEPTEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73...
...Of course, Chinese critical of Jiang would not have talked to Kuhn for attribution, but there are ways for an objective biographer who can read and speak Chinese—neither point applies to Kuhn—to mitigate this major handicap...
...In some subway stations, almost half the riders weren't paying...
...But this book does not shake my feeling that the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on political power has only a decade or two to run...
...Unemployment was at 11 percent...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W ranged protester setting a fire that killed eight people, Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel blamed the whole thing on Giuliani because he had criticized Sharpton...
...Vast personal differences mark off Jiang Zemin from Leonid Brezhnev, but these shrink before the shared structural traps unwittingly laid bare in Kuhn's volume...
...Then he added a few steps later, "I have the feeling when I get it I'll accept it...
...All he had was his own 72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2005 remarkable executive skills honed in his years as a federal prosecutor, his stubborn independence, his inexhaustible capacity for work (he regularly prowled the city until 4 A.M...
...Army recently credited his policing techniques as helping in the capture of Saddam Hussein...
...When Al Sharpton's anti-Semitic protest against a Harlem clothing storeowner led to a deBy now everyone knows the story of how Giuliani adopted James Q. Wilson and George Kelling's "Broken Windows" theory, undoing 30 years of liberal damage to the justice system and rolling the clock all the way back to 1965 when murders numbered only 600 a year...
...asked New York magazine...
...He merely follows liberal American Sinologists who feel you can't possibly call enlightened people rightists...
...meetings...
...Washington and Chapman had to draw their guns to fend off disaster...
...Late 21st-century readers are unlikely to read biographies of either Jiang or Brezhnev...
...Quoting journalist Andrew Kirtzman, Siegel portrays the scene: "Thousands of pro-testers, union members, politicians were fighting one man, who stood alone each day at the podium inside City Hall's Blue Room, a solitary figure facing a sea of skeptical reporters...
...He was an army of one...
...Congressman Jerrold Nadler, usually a critic, "was amazed at the efficiency of the meeting...
...An Army of One A FEW YEARS AGO my son played football at Stuyvesant High School in New York City...
...Turnstile-hopping was halted...
...Prince of the City is Fred Siegel's finely detailed, nearly reverent account of how one man—and one man alone—turned around The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life by Fred Siegel (ENCOUNTER BOOKS, 320 PAGES, $26.95) Reviewed by William Tucker SEPTEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71 B O O K S I N R E V I E W the greatest city in the world and proved that American cities could once again be habitable...
...in anatomy/brain research, understands the absurdity of a "planned economy," but he whitewashes Jiang's failure to dismantle the hopeless state-owned factories...
...What did Giuliani have going for him when voters desperately turned to him by a thin 52-48 per-cent majority in 1993...
...When Time ran a 1990 cover story, "The Rotting of the Big Apple," no one put up a fuss...
...Wait, what was happening...
...Internal evidence suggests the director general of the government Information Office has funneled material to the author...
...Then I realized what was going on...
...There, Giuliani replicated the crisp tenor of his [daily] 8 A.M...
...Both engineers danced (Jiang maybe with a lighter step) on the deck of a sinking ship...
...Well, Giuliani, for one...
...He remains wildly popular throughout the country, an electrifying speaker, and—in the words of Oprah Winfrey—"America's Mayor...
...On orientation night they showed parents a TV news clip of how the team had to travel each day to an East River park for practice...
...For the first three days after that historic attack, Siegel notes, Giuliani was essentially "the de facto spokesman for a grateful nation...
Vol. 38 • September 2005 • No. 7
