Emily Hill Emily Hill

A character assassination of Rudy Giuliani

The mayor who cleaned up New York in the 1990s was widely regarded as a hero – but Andrew Kirtzman has nothing but contempt for him

Rudy Giuliani in Boston in July 2004. [Alamy]

Lord help me I love a hatchet job, and you’ll have to too if you want to make it through Giuliani before donating it to Oxfam. This is not just any old biography – it’s a 480-page character assassination.

Born in 1944 to an ex-con who broke kneecaps for a living and a mother who was about as ambitious as Margaret Beaufort, Rudy Giuliani excelled at school, qualified as a lawyer and started making his mark as a prosecutor. Across 12 days in 1986, he won convictions against the heads of four New York crime families (the fifth was murdered before he came to trial), a politician from the Bronx who’d presided over ‘a vast municipal corruption scandal’ and the Wall Street banker Ivan Boesky, ‘an icon of a delirious era in the financial sector’.

In 1994, Giuliani was elected mayor of New York. The only person this failed to impress was his mother. (‘I thought you’d be president by now.’) Andrew Kirtzman exposes him as a bully, with a vendetta against the schools chancellor. Apparently Giuliani had a problem with the fact that half a million children in New York’s largest school district ‘couldn’t read at grade level’ and were educated in schools ‘plagued by violence… Giuliani wasn’t looking for incremental improvements – he wanted to “blow up” the system, in his words’. Call me sympathetic, but Giuliani started sounding appealing.

This isn’t any old biography of Rudy Giuliani. It’s a 480-page character assassination

Next, he set about introducing militant policing measures to try to bring down the spiraling crime rate which, says Kirtzman, proved he ‘was just an absolute, out of control racist’. In 2000, the last year Giuliani was in office, 1,250 fewer New Yorkers were killed than the year before he won election. We are not told how many of the 1993 murder victims were black (which you’d think might be significant in the era of Black Lives Matter) but, regardless of race, that’s 3.4

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