Newfield reminds us that in April 1999 Giuliani had only a 40 percent approval rating. A year later his divorce lawyer was savagely attacking his wife, Donna Hanover, while the mayor was flaunting his mistress in public. As a result, Giuliani’s popularity plummeted again in the spring of 2000. He was almost a laughingstock when he withdrew from his Senate campaign against Hillary Clinton. He looked like a control freak who had lost control of himself. Then came 9/11, and Giuliani re-emerged as an international celebrity. He took charge when the towers fell, and he displayed leadership when others were dumbstruck. He was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” the avatar of the stricken city. He did a victory lap around the country, raising money for Republican candidates and giving speeches for $100,000 a pop; he may rake in $10 million over the next year. Yet even as he became a part of pop iconography, celebrated as “America’s Mayor,” Giuliani was still loathed in some black neighborhoods in the city. People in Brownsville, Texas, might have thought of him as their mayor, but blacks in Brownsville, Brooklyn, did not. In The Full Rudy Newfield gives the devil his due, conceding that New York City did become a better place to live during Giuliani’s two terms. He was skilled at solving problems that lent themselves to the application of a military-style strategy but he was a mayor of excess, a mayor of missed opportunities, political opportunism, and stunning harshness. Photographs and cartoons add to this Emmy award-winning journalist's myth-busting portrait. “In a time when American journalism is getting its share of slings and arrows ... Newfield stands out as a national treasure.”—Peter Maas “He writes with the sharp eye of the trained observer and the engaged heart of a humanist.”—Budd Schulberg “ He is the loudest liberal voice in a time of timid whispers. Newfield’s hands ... pull out the truth.”—Jimmy Breslin “Newfield has made it his life’s mission to uncover and share significant truths about important people and events.”—Mario Cuomo
A short but hard-hitting assessment of Mayor Giuliani's tenure at the head of New York gives him low marks for performance but high marks for creating a winning public persona. Original.Veteran New York journalist Newfield (Somebody's Gotta Tell It, etc.) gets right to the point, his lead sentence declaring Rudy Giuliani "a C-plus mayor... who has become an A-plus myth" since September 11. Rather than defining the mayor by his last few months in City Hall, Newfield insists "we should see him the way he was on September 10" and expands on an article published in the Nation in 2001 to depict the underside of Giuliani's eight years in power. Readers outside New York City may recall the more notorious incidents recounted here, such as Giuliani's attempt to shut down the Brooklyn Museum of Art over an allegedly sacrilegious exhibit, but they'll also see Giuliani portrayed as a political opportunist who changed party affiliations twice before becoming mayor, slashed the city's education budget by $2 billion in his first term and blew through budget surpluses to leave the city $15 billion in debt. Newfield emphasizes the former mayor's apparent condescension toward political opposition, such as what some heard as thinly veiled homophobic jabs at schools chancellor Ramon Cortines. Newfield also believes a "worm of rancor" characterized Giuliani's record on race relations, including his near-blanket refusal to meet with elected officials from minority communities. Although the book is somewhat repetitive despite its brevity and occasionally lapses into an excessively antimessianic fervor, it illustrates facets of Giuliani that many New Yorkers may have forgotten and the rest of America might want to know about. Illus. (Feb.) Forecast: It's not likely Americans want their Giuliani bubble burst and will probably prefer Leadership to this, but lots of New Yorkers will welcome Newfield's portrait. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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