MixedThe Times (UK)How did a man of unusual legal and political talents end up a beached whale of a lawyer-politician touting for lucrative business in all sorts of murky places and shilling for a discredited president seemingly bent on upending the constitution?...It’s the essential question about Giuliani, but not one that Andrew Kirtzman attempts to answer in this biography. Instead, he in essence frames him as a dangerous extremist nutjob all along...Such a characterisation is hardly fair ... In his criticism of the former mayor, Kirtzman focuses on the sometimes legitimate civil liberties concerns that Giuliani’s tough policing raised...However, you would have to be a partisan hack — or a New York City reporter — not to at least acknowledge that, in dealing with a city on the verge of social breakdown, there might be a trade-off between tough enforcement and the freedoms of its citizens ... He dwells on Giuliani’s spectacularly messy personal life: his cohabitation with another woman while still married to his wife, and other dalliances. Kirtzman does grudgingly acknowledge that the mayor did a good public relations job in the days and weeks after 9/11. Yet he spends as much time assailing him for his supposed responsibility in failing to provide the New York City Fire Department with adequate communications equipment before 9/11, darkly suggesting that the mayor’s failure was actually responsible for a good number of the deaths of more than 340 firefighters that day ... As a New York journalist in the 1980s, Kirtzman has at times been regarded by some fellow media types as too close to Giuliani. Perhaps this book is an act of self-exoneration ... It is ironic indeed that he ended up on the side of the moronic and the corrupt. But that shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the man’s many achievements.
