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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. Now part three of our six-part series, The Year of Bill and Rudy - How 1993 Helped Set Up The World of 2023. Bill Clinton became president in 1993 and Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. Why did America move left and the city move right and how did those choices help give us the world and the issues we're living with today?

For today's installment, we asked very simply, why was Rudy Giuliani elected mayor as a Republican in blue New York City, the first Republican in 28 years at the time, defeating the city's first Black mayor, Democrat David Dinkins, who had just made history four years earlier. Funny thing is if you think of Giuliani today as the central figure in the MAGA versus everyone else culture wars, he was and he wasn't a culture war figure in 1993.

The first historical sound bite that will play is of a man named George Marlin. Now, Marlin was running for mayor on the Conservative Party line that year running to Dinkins and Giuliani's right. In a televised debate that Giuliani skipped, Marlin was invited to ask Giuliani a question as if he were in the room and he asked this.

George Marlin: Why are you going out to Queens County and the outlying boroughs pretending you're a conservative? What you have to explain to the people in the outlying boroughs is why do you support the financing of abortion? Why do you support the homosexual agenda? Why do you support domestic partnership? Why did you support luxury rent control? Why did you support condom distribution? Why were you silent in the rainbow curriculum?

Why have you flip flop on job quotas and why did you come out for homosexuals marching in the St. Patrick's Day parade marching under their own banners? He has to explain that to the outlying boroughs, not just to the Manhattan crowd where he comes out of these liberal things. Why don't you just admit that you're just another liberal trying to con the conservatives in the city, the Reagan Democrats and Republicans? That's what I want to know, Mr. Giuliani.

Brian: Do you recognize the word that Giuliani described there by Conservative Party candidate George Marlin on WNBC TV at the time, and Marlin didn't just make that stuff up about Giuliani? Here's Giuliani in a campaign interview himself on CNN that year. The questioner is CNN Anchor Bernard Shaw.

Bernard Shaw: Looking at your plan affecting schools, you say you are for condom distribution with parental consent, what about abortions for pregnant teenagers?

Rudy Giuliani: They have to be made available and a woman's right of choice has to be protected and it has to be protected completely including for poor women who don't have enough money to afford abortions.

Brian: Giuliani was for condoms in schools and government-subsidized abortions for low-income women and teens. Not the first things you probably associate with him, but in other ways, Giuliani was a culture warrior to be sure. In September of 1992, building his base for the 93 campaign, Giuliani riled up a crowd of police officers who were protesting a proposed creation at that time of the civilian complaint review board. Later in the rally, rowdy officers engaged in what came to be known as the New York City Police riot. Along with everything else they heard that day, they heard Rudy Giuliani say this.

Giuliani: The reason the morale of the police department of the city of New York is so low is one reason and one reason alone, David Dinkins.

Brian: That's archive audio from New York One News, Giuliani before the so-called police riot in 1992. That's one reason people were not surprised when Rudy said this, at the infamous January 6th Trump rally before the Capitol Riot in 2021.

Giuliani: Let's have trial by combat.

Brian: They cheered. We'll hear more archive audio as we go. With us now to help remember and take your oral history calls, a rare treat for those of you who watched the New York One politics show Inside City Hall and have for a long time. Andrew Kirtzman, the host of Inside City Hall from back in the day, and Errol Louis, the host of Inside City Hall today.

Errol was also a columnist for New York Magazine. Andrew has also written two books about Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City, which came out in the year 2000, and Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America's Mayor, which just came out last September. Errol and Andrew, always great to have both of you and a treat to have you on together. Welcome back to WNYC.

Andrew Kirtzman: Good morning, Brian.

Brian: Let me just give each of you a little open mic to say what you might have been thinking about 1993 or Rudy Giuliani listening to those clips from that time. Before I ask you some specific history questions and how they set up the city of today, anything top of mind about any of that? Andrew, you want to start?

Andrew: Sure. Thanks for having me, Brian. I had a great vantage point in '93. I was both a New Yorker trying to get to work in the morning and I was also a city hall reporter for the New York Daily News. I experienced the conditions in the streets that I think led to Giuliani's rise. Then I also watched on a daily basis as David Dinkins tried to get a grip on the daily chaos that New Yorkers were experiencing and his failure to do so. I'm happy to talk about it in detail, but there was a reason that Giuliani was elected and it wasn't cultural issues.

New York is a liberal town. It was a five-to-one Democratic but New Yorkers like their Congress people liberal, they like their Washington elected officials liberal less so with their mayors. Mostly they want their mayors to keep the place under control and I think there was a widespread feeling at the time that Dinkins was unable to do that.

Brian: Errol, anything you want to add or whatever you were thinking during that little tape crawl there?

Errol Louis: Brian, when you talk about 1993 and that pivotal election in the city I thought of it as a continuation of the 1989 campaign. I thought of it as a turning point in what had been a four or arguably five-year campaign, a political battle that was going on that really marked an important transition in the city. Dinkins gets elected in 1989 and Giuliani was planning to run to the left of then incumbent Mayor Ed Koch.

Then changed around once Dinkins became the nominee and really never stopped running from that point so that when he reemerges at the police riot in 1992 and as a candidate and winning by the same narrow margin by which he'd lost four years prior, this was to me a pretty even match between the two candidates and Rudy, as we saw, was willing to say and do and politically migrate the way candidates do.

That's how democracy works, in order to get to 50% plus one. There were a lot of factors. It was close enough that any one factor, whether it's the Crown Heights riot in 1991 or the subsequent report about the Crown Heights riot, which was an opportunely time from David Dinkins's standpoint or that key referendum about closing down the fresh kills garbage dump on Staten Island, which drew out.

Actually, the referendum was about succession which was never a real plausible reality, but it certainly brought out a lot of Staten Island voters and you needed every single vote counted, 26,000 votes during record turnout. Millions of New Yorkers coming out was a very narrow margin by which Rudy won.

Brian: Listeners, anyone out there who voted for Dinkins in 1989, but Giuliani in 1993, little oral history invitation there, recall why for us if there's anybody like that, 212-433-WNYC if you voted for David Dinkins in 1989, but Rudy Giuliani for mayor in 1993, 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer or anyone else on what you think the legacy of Giuliani as mayor is to this day, not the later MAGA Rudy, but the Mayor Rudy, and mostly not about 9/11 either, but more systemic things on how the world of 1993 and Giuliani in particular set up the world of today, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Here's a clip of Giuliani talking about crime as a defining issue for his campaign. This is another clip from his Bernard Shaw campaign interview on CNN that starts with the Bernard Shaw question.

Bernard: Since 1990, there are 3,000 more policemen on New York City streets. The murder rate and the rate of reported crimes have gone down. Is Mayor Dinkins really soft on crime in your judgment? [crosstalk]

Giuliani: Absolutely. No question about it. He refuses to agree with an ending of release of violent criminals to the street early in New York under the parole system that we have. Also, those additional police officers are making far fewer arrests. The arrest of drug dealers is down by over 100,000.

Bernard: What would you do about that at your first day in office?

Giuliani: I would reinstitute the policy of allowing police officers to arrest street-level drug dealers which no longer happens. Entire neighborhoods have been turned over to drug gangs now, the numbers are 100,000 fewer drug arrests in the last three and a half years under Dinkins as compared to Koch. That has had an impact on reported crime. Also, a lot of people aren't reporting crime anymore that they used to report, because arrests are down so far.

Brian: Giuliani on crime as the issue back then. Andrew, the clips that I hear of Giuliani back then, including very much that one, are very careful not to frame anything explicitly in terms of race. You say he wasn't running on culture war issues, but maybe it depends on how you define culture war and if you're looking at that at all through a racial lens. Was the race and class appeal there, but subtly coded?

He talked about the size of government clipping the private sector, talking about the economy, talked about crime, he talked about high taxes making people leave, or making it hard to afford their lives, he talked about NYPD morale, never saying Black people or Black people in power are the problem, but subtext, white grievance [unintelligible 00:11:38] Donald Trump, but today Trump and his people just feel freer to say it out loud.

Andrew: The subtext of Giuliani's campaign was almost overtly race face. The campaign slogan was one standard for one city, which was basically a way of saying that Dinkins was favoring the African American community.

Brian Lehrer: Are there echoes, Errol, in Trump, following our first Black president, that Giuliani followed our first Black mayor in another close election?

Errol: Oh yes. It's not even an echo, it's a pattern. You could put these folks together, you could probably write a book about it. Backlash in grievance politics and politicians have done a standard, social movements, including the civil rights movement, give rise to equally potent counter-movements. The Dinkins campaign and the election of the first Black mayor of New York City is followed by a backlash. A man with a grievance, who runs in this case is actually interesting. The one reason it seems coated, Brian is that Rudy Giuliani is a suburban politician.

We know he's born in Brooklyn. We know he comes to Bishop Loughlin, and he's schooled in Catholic school in Brooklyn, but he's commuting in from Long Island, and he's part of a very potent to this day kind of suburban culture. I was raised in it. I'm not making this up. The Suburban culture where there's a great deal of resentment of those people in the city who, "drove us out of the city" and are mismanaging it. That's Rudy's appeal. That's his calling card. These are the decades by the way, where New York is undergoing this tremendous transition.

I think like in the 1950 census, something like 85% of the city is white. Now, that is changing decade by decade, and it's at a tipping point, by the time you get into the 1990s. Here's Rudy basically saying, if you're not happy about this, I'm not happy about this either. Let's change these things around. I believe his first executive order was to undo some of the minority contracting programs that the Dinkins administration had put in place. That's not an accident. That was like a day-one priority for Rudy Giuliani.

[crosstalk]

Brian: Go ahead, Andrew.

Andrew: Sorry, I just want to add that there was a flip side to that in the '93 race, which is, as both sides claimed they had clean hands on racial matters, there was a lot going on in terms of suggesting the opposite. I talked about how Giuliani implied that basically, Dinkins was favoring the Black community, but Dinkins had Bill Clinton come in and basically accuse New Yorkers of being racist if they weren't voting for Dinkins.

There was a sense on both sides that there was an imbalance or an unfairness that was being levied upon their candidate because of the color of their skin. I think the Dinkins administration, sorry, the Dinkins campaign was just as guilty for pressing the racial button to their advantage as Giuliani.

Brian: Errol, you see it that way?

Errol: Not really. Look, the coded messages, the grievance backlash politics was what Giuliani needed to bring to the table. It's very hard to unseat a sitting mayor. He brought that full force. African Americans then as now were a minority in the city, so it was always a peculiar proposition, to say that there was somehow "everything going in the direction of the African American community," which then as now had twice the unemployment rate of the larger community, then as now was an isolated failing schools, then as now was severely underrepresented in the upper reaches of government, even during the Dinkins administration.

The empowerment effort was real, it was needed. When Rudy came along and suggested that all of that was somehow "unfair," I'm not sure what the proper reaction would have been, but Dinkins was a Manhattan liberal and he spoke from his political heart.

Brian: All right, we are getting a number of callers who remember voting for Dinkins in '89, and then Giuliani in '93. Let's take some. Mike in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mike. Thank you for calling in.

Mike: Good morning, Brian. Can you hear me?

Brian: I can hear just fine.

Mike: I voted for Giuliani because crime-- I live in 12th Street district Avenue, and crime had gone through the roof overnight when Dinkins became mayor. Right now I'm looking at the crime statistics from the FBI from those years. Give you one example, Dinkins became mayor, I believe was in '89, 2,200 murders in '89. Three years later, 2,500 murders, almost 2,600.

Brian: Actually, I think that's wrong. I think the peak year for murders was 1990, and then they started coming down when Dinkins started beefing up the police force, went down faster under Giuliani but I think they were coming down by the time Giuliani was elected. We'll fact-check with our guests. Mike, go ahead and finish your thought.

Mike: If you look at '92 to '93, Dinkins's last year, murders went up a little bit, not much, but a little bit, actually went up to 2,420. From 2,397 to 2,420.

Brian: All right, I got you. It was all about crime for you and you didn't feel safe living in the village there. Thank you so much. Jack in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jack. Jack in Manhattan, do we have you?

Errol: For three consecutive terms the crime was spiking all the way through.

Jack: Hello. Can you hear me? Hello?

Brian: Yes, now we have you, Jack, sorry. The beginning of your call got clipped. You can start over, I apologize.

Jack: No problem. I did vote for Dinkins the first time when he ran, and then I voted for Giuliani, but an interesting fact actually was that I absolutely will never vote for Republican, but at the time that Giuliani ran that year, the three parties outside of the Democrats, meaning the Liberals, Conservative and Republican Party all endorsed Giuliani for mayor. I actually had to vote on the liberal ticket because I would not pull a Republican lever. It was just interesting that that year happened to be that-- I'm not 100%--

Brian: For you, it helped that Giuliani had the Liberal Party, capital L liberal, Liberal party endorsement at the time, too, but what was your main issue? Why did you switch from Dinkins to Giuliani?

Jack: The previous call said the same thing, it was basically about crime, but the interesting thing is, I just want to add the sound that, according to history or made-up history that Giuliani is the one that actually brought crime down in New York City. I basically don't believe that at all, solely because it was not him that did it. Yes, he was mayor of New York City, but if you look at the overall statistics of the nation, not New York City alone, but the nation, crime went down under Clinton.

Brian: Right, Jack, thank you very much. In fact, tomorrow show in this series is going to be specifically crime nationally with the Clinton Crime Bill and crime in New York, with Giuliani and how much gets attributed to what and to who. Let's take one more call in this set. Lynn now a resident of Clifton, New Jersey, a New Yorker at the time. Hi, Lynn?

Lynn: Hi. I'm in the same situation as the previous caller. I would never vote for Republicans, but Rudy was the liberal nominee. He was on the liberal ticket, and I was able to pull that because I wasn't happy with the way the city was going. I was living on the Upper West Side, and it didn't seem to be going forward, it seemed to be stuck.

Brian: Lynn, thank you very much. Errol, did I hear you trying to get in after the first caller there?

Errol: Yes. He had a couple of things wrong that I just wanted to do a quick fact-check on. David Dinkins takes office on January 1st, 1990. It's convenient, I think the caller's exact words were, overnight crime goes through the roof, which ignores the three consecutive terms of Ed Kotch during which, especially [crosstalk].

Brian: Up and up and up and up and up and up.

Errol: Absolutely. The patrol doctrine was wrong. There were a lot of things that were happening, crack arrived in the mid to late '80s. There were a lot of factors that were going on. I guess that was really the only point. You were exactly right Brian, crime went down, I believe in every quarter starting in the second half of the first year, but for the subsequent, basically 36 months, crime was steadily on the decline under Dinkins. It really took off when the new patrol doctrine came in under Bratton once Giuliani took office, for sure.

Brian: Andrew, part of the premise of this series is that right at that moment, 1992, '93, the country turned away from 12 years of Reagan and Bush to elected Democratic president, and the city turned away from forever liberal rule to elect a Republican mayor. How do those things make sense together? Have you ever thought about that or addressed that in your books?

Andrew: Absolutely. It goes back to what I was saying before, New York was and remains a liberal city, but New Yorkers care about the state of the streets. They care about crime, they care about prosaic things. Basically, New Yorkers looked at one mayor to keep the place under control. It's a totally different framework that they look at than when they consider their congresspeople or their senators. They think about culture issues. Excuse me.

This election was a real kind of threshold moment for the city when it just felt as though the streets were-- I don't want to use the caricature of the place being completely wild west, but New Yorkers were getting used to a level of chaos that was demoralizing the city. I think that totally trumped the whole national trend, and politics aside, even race aside. I guess it bothers me to look at that election purely through a racial lens, although race was a major subtext. The major dynamic there was an erosion of quality of life. I remember [crosstalk].

Brian: Let me jump in on that point and follow up and ask you if you have stats on who flipped from 1989 to 1993. I think we heard one very clear demographic in our little sample of phone calls, people who actually volunteered to show up just now to recall voting for Dinkins in '89 and Giuliani in '93, and it was white people who lived in Manhattan. Then we had the bump in white voters on Staten Island compared to '89, because that secession referendum was on the ballot.

I don't know if Black New York flipped at all in those years to justify saying it wasn't that racial. I don't know. We saw some of that last year with Eric Adams, he got a lot of working-class Black New York based on crime. What do the stats from 1993 tell us if you know?

Andrew: I'm pretty sure that I think 97% of Black New Yorkers stayed with Dinkins in both races. I could be off by a percentage point or so. I think it's a leap to conclude that the driving factor was simply race. Another way of looking at it, Brian, is that Dinkins had been mayor for four years. You would think that he would've been able to expand his popularity, but instead, he stayed pretty much cemented. The reason for that is not just racial. Considering what was going on in the city at the time, I think the reason he was unable to expand his popularity was because a lot of people felt he was doing a lousy job as mayor.

Brian: Errol, is the analogy to today almost scarily close? The red wave of the midterm elections never happened nationally, but it did in New York, largely because of crime, add to those stats from '93, if you know them.

Errol: To add to the '93 stats, the turnout in 1989 was insane for David Dinkins. It was history-making, it was off the charts, and it was a coalition that had overperformance, as the statisticians would say of Black voters along with a Black Latino coalition that has not been reproduced since, and liberal whites. All parts of that coalition fell apart in 1993 for David Dinkins. The Black turnout was overwhelmingly for Dinkins, but it wasn't nearly as high as it had been in 1989.

Brian: [unintelligible 00:26:27].

Errol: The liberal whites, including probably some of your callers, had second thoughts and went in a different direction because of the chaos in the city. Then you had some overperformance by some of your outer-borough whites in Staten Island and elsewhere. He was under a lot of pressure, Dinkins was from all sides, and they just didn't pull it out.

Brian: How do you think the legacy of Rudy Giuliani most affects what the city is today, Errol?

Errol: I think, look, there's something complicated that goes on with memory because even now you'll see it on social media, people will say everything went to hell after Rudy was mayor and De Blasio presided over an increase in crime, and the truth is the opposite. I think in the final year of Giuliani's administration, there was something like a little over 600, 625, 626 homicides. At the lowest point in modern city history was under Bill de Blasio, and it was under 400. Giuliani could have only dreamt of those numbers in a larger city, by the way.

Brian: Just before the pandemic and then--

Errol: Just before the pandemic. Look, even with the bump up after the pandemic, we're still nowhere near where we were at the end of the Giuliani years. The whole question I guess gets complicated by living memory. I think the legacy is going to be, he did turn around crime, he did introduce Comstat and a new patrol doctrine. I think he will stand for the proposition, and it's a very important one that the city can be governed, that it doesn't have to spin out of control. There's a subsidiary question of, do you have to be an SOB to make that happen? I think probably most New Yorkers would think you have to be at least a little bit of an SOB to make that happen.

Brian: Andrew, do you have more thoughts on how the Giuliani era set up the New York of today?

Andrew: Yes. I agree with Errol 100% on the notion that someone could make a city seem governable. I think that the condition that led to his rise in popularity was his being able to use the force of his will to turn the city around. What we haven't talked about is the rank immorality that mark Giuliani's tenure. The rampant overzealousness of his police department, the stop and frisk procedures. There's so many aspects that were borderline racist in his efforts to turn the city around.

Obviously, that's a major part of his legacy. As someone who was not just a New Yorker but watched it extremely up close from city hall, both the Dinkins administration and the Giuliani administration, it was just night and day, the feeling of competence, and the fact that he was driving events and not reacting to them on a daily basis as Dinkins unfortunately was.

Brian: We have one minute left. Andrew, I want to give it to you for a kind of addendum, since your new book is Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America's Mayor. I'll note that in listening to many old clips of Giuliani to prepare for this series, he mostly sounded like a normal 1990s Republican at that time, no matter what anybody thinks of his policies, pro or con, not necessarily showing signs of the crazy person that most people think he's turned into. As a student of the arc of Giuliani's life, could we see the seeds of [unintelligible 00:30:25] Rudy back then if we knew what to look for, or did he really, really change? 30 seconds.

Andrew: I think the driving dynamic behind Rudy Giuliani's rise and fall was desperation, a desperation for power. Then after he ran for president and lost so badly, a desperation to hold on to power. The whole marks of his personality, the authoritarianism, the racism. They all were there at the time, but they were amplified as he became increasingly desperate and playing to the Trump base.

Brian: Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America's Mayor is Andrew Kirtzman's new book. Once upon a time, he was a daily news reporter and host of Inside City Hall on NY1. Errol Louis is the host of Inside City Hall on NY1 now, weeknights at seven o'clock, and a New York Magazine columnist. Thank you both so much for coming on and remembering 1993 and that whole period from '89 to '93 with us.

Even you too may be interested to know that when we follow up tomorrow, specifically on Clinton and Giuliani crime policies, from back in that day, we're going to have Al Sharpton and we're going to have William Bratton. That's coming up tomorrow in this series. Meanwhile, Andrew and Errol, thank you so much.

Errol: Thank you.

 

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