Rudy!: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani Book

"The book clearly has a point of view," Wayne Barrett admits in the preface to his biography of the famously prickly New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. A point of view, or a very sharp hatchet--readers might well get the two confused. For a representative sample, simply turn to the book's final pages: "The father he celebrated so often was a pathological predator. His extended family harbored a junkie, a crooked cop and a murky mob wing. He dissolved his first marriage with a lie so he could appear Catholic when he remarried. The very personal jewelry his first wife found in her bedroom wasn't hers...." And so on and so on, for a full eight paragraphs. What precedes this litany are some startling revelations about Harold Giuliani's unsavory past, as well as gritty new details about his son's mayoral love life. (We get chapters entitled, respectively, "All in the Family: Crooks, Cops and a Junkie," "Sex in the City," and "More Sex in the City"). But Barrett--a senior editor at the Village Voice--has equally devastating things to say about matters of policy. Though he concedes that the city has become a better place to live under Giuliani, he convincingly argues that the mayor takes credit where credit isn't due. Barrett also points to the price Gotham has paid for its kinder, gentler makeover: deteriorating race relations, escalating tension between New Yorkers and police, and an increasingly difficult life for the city's underclass. As depicted in Rudy! Giuliani is the kind of politician who doctors statistics, backpedals on key issues, and caves to political cronies even while maintaining a façade of scrupulous honesty. As a person--well, it won't surprise anyone to learn that Giuliani is egomaniacal, callous, and obsessed with control. (On a visit to a Haitian baseball factory, for instance, he's far more interested in how the balls are put together than how the workers are treated.) And if the attack sometimes seems a little personal (the mayor's arrogance "is like body odor to Rudy, repellent to others but undetectable to him"), that's because it is. One of Giuliani's defenders during his years as U.S. attorney, Barrett used to be known as a "Rudy man," and his more vituperative descriptions smack not just of disillusionment but of actual betrayal. Hell may have no fury like a journalist scorned, but at least on the basis of the behavior depicted here, Giuliani deserves most of what he's getting. Sharp, withering, and improbably up-to-date--one pictures Barrett scribbling like mad right up to the bitter end--Rudy! is a political biography in the finest muckraking tradition. --Mary Park Read More