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The Alexander Hamilton Award was created to celebrate
New York and honor those individuals helping to foster the revitalization
of our nation’s cities. We chose to name the award after Hamilton
because, like the Manhattan Institute, he was a fervent proponent
of commerce and civic life, and he believed the health of the nation
hinged upon vibrant cities. He was also the quintessential New Yorker.
Hamilton went to university, joined the army, and practiced law
in New York. His last home stands in Harlem; his grave is at the
crown of Wall Street across from the bank he started; the newspaper
he founded is still shaking things up. New York’s style—passionate,
entrepreneurial, ambitious, inclusive—reflected his vision
of America and shaped his politics.
ALEXANDER
HAMILTON 2006 AWARD DINNER
Tuesday, April 25th
HONOREES:
Rudolph W. Giuliani
107th Mayor of the City of New York
Introduction By: Mortimer B. Zuckerman
&
Tom Wolfe
Author, The Bonfire of the Vanities
Introduction By: David Brooks
Dinner
Chairman
Maurice R. Greenberg
Transcript
MR. LAWRENCE MONE: Good evening. If I could have your attention,
please. We'll get started as soon as we can quiet down. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Good Evening. I am Larry Mone; President of
the Manhattan Institute. Thank you all for coming tonight, it promises
to be a wonderful evening.
While preparing my introduction for our Dinner Chairman, Hank Greenberg,
I was struck by how many parallels exist between him and Alexander
Hamilton. Hamilton enlisted in the Continental Army when he was
21; was a battlefield hero in the Revolutionary War; and served
as an Aides-de-Camp to General George Washington. Hank joined the
Army at the age of 17; participated in the Normandy invasion; and
helped liberate the Dachau Concentration Camp. He later served in
the Korean War raising to the rank of Captain and earning the Bronze
Star.
Hamilton, to quote Ron Chernow, his biographer, was the prophet
of the capitalist revolution in America. He believed that the country's
future lie in international trade and commerce, stocks and bonds
and the solid financial institutions such as the Bank of New York,
which he founded.
Hank Greenberg took a relatively minor insurance company and one
of the greatest corporate success stories of all time built it into
the global giant AIG. In the process, he created $170 billion in
shareholder value and tens of thousands of jobs most of them here
in New York helping the city to retain its title as the capital
of capitalism. In addition, through his work with the business roundtable,
numerous international business committees, and as a formal and
informal advisor to several Presidents, Hank has served as a passionate
advocate for Hamilton's vision of a global economy.
In addition, Hamilton single-handedly created the nation's financial
system as the country's first Treasury Secretary. His extraordinary
efforts put the troubled finances of the fledgling United States
on a sound course. Greenberg helped to preserve and enhance Hamilton's
system as Chairman, Deputy Chairman and Directory of the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York.
And finally, Hamilton loved New York and was very active in the
civic life of the city. Hank is one of this city's greatest philanthropists
and serves as Director on many of the city's most prominent academic,
medical and cultural institutions. The Star Foundation, of which
he is Chairman, recently gave away its one billionth dollar.
Hank has also been a longtime trustee of the Manhattan Institute
and we are proud to have him on our Board; I know how deeply he
cares about this city and this country and how like Hamilton he
understands the importance of ideas. Patriot, capitalist, leader,
visionary; those words apply to both gentlemen. I believe Hamilton
would be very pleased by Hank's presence at this dinner tonight
and in my opinion there is no higher compliment so please join me
in welcoming our Dinner Chairman, Hank Greenberg.
MR. HANK GREENBERG: Larry, thank you very much and I want
to thank everyone for coming tonight and making this the most successful
Hamilton Award Dinner ever--raised $1.4 million.
MR. GREENBERG: We can contribute the success of this dinner
to the quality of the honorees and all of you for really participating.
I became involved in the Manhattan Institute very early on through
my friend, Bill Casey, who was one of the founders of the Institute.
Bill, as you know, was also one of the prime figures in the Reagan
administration. He went to Washington with two books under his arm,
each written by a key thinker from the Manhattan Institute; one
was George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty, which became the backbone
of supply-side economics, the other was Charles Murray's Losing
Ground, which became the doctrine of welfare reform. These books
continued to be influential years later in helping to lay the philosophical
groundwork for the great success of another administration, that
of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is one of tonight's awardees.
MR. GREENBERG: In fact, the ideas that have flowed from
the Institute over the years have helped shape the thinking of a
long line of political leaders from President Reagan to Mayors Giuliani
and Bloomberg to Governor Pataki and to President Bush. At the same
time, those ideas helped change the way the public thinks about
public policy and the roll of government in their lives--from the
broken windows theory that sparked the revolution in law enforcement
to privatization, which has helped produce a better return for our
tax dollars. That shows you the power of ideas especially when those
good ideas are carried forward by good people.
The power of good ideas, in fact, is a common thread that connects
the Manhattan Institute to Alexander Hamilton and to all of us who
are here tonight and Hamilton had a lot of good ideas. As Larry
said, more than anyone else Alexander Hamilton molded America's
system of finance and capitalism and those systems not only had
a huge impact on the development of our national economy, but also
on the emergence of New York as the world's financial capital, but
it requires constant vigilance to preserve Hamilton's ideas of free
markets and free enterprise.
Last week saw a very eventful visit from Chinese President Hu Jintao.
As expected, President Hu's visit generated a great deal of discussion
in Washington on economic issues, the trade deficit, and the value
of the RMB and no doubt, there are significant steps the Chinese
should take to improve our trading relationship. However, it's a
mistake not to recognize that much of the problems rest here with
us. You can't blame America's lack of competitiveness on China.
Our regulatory environment has reached a point where companies are
avoiding risks they would otherwise take in order to stay out of
the crosshairs of government regulators; just look at how companies
are opting out of America's public capital marketplaces. Of the
25 largest IPO's last year, 24 went to London and Hong Kong, only
1 went to New York. What would Alexander Hamilton say about that?
The sudden growth in private equity markets is yet another telltale
sign that companies want to avoid going public at least in the United
States. In today's environment, one could describe the prevailing
sentiment as follows: Private is beautiful.
While regulation, of course, is necessary it must be enlightened
regulation not strangulation. Our economy will suffer if our regulatory
system becomes so excessive that it stifles free enterprise, innovation
and good ideas. Again, it all comes back to good ideas, which is
why we are all here tonight, to honor our awardees and to honor
this productive factory of good ideas, the Manhattan Institute.
Thank you, enjoy your dinner.
MR. BYRON WIEN: Okay, can we all settle down, please? Let's
try to quiet down because we're about to begin the program and if
you don't quiet down we'll be here a long time. Thank you.
I'm Byron Wien; I'm the Vice Chairman of the Manhattan Institute
and my roll tonight is to introduce one of the introducers, David
Brooks.
Although he's only an acquaintance, I feel I know David as if he
were a college roommate. I have read his Op-Ed essays regularly
since he joined The New York Times in 2003 after nine years at The
Wall Street Journal. He was hired, I believe, to represent the conservative
point of view in what is generally thought of as a liberal pair
of editorial pages at The Times, but he is a conservative in the
Manhattan Institute sense of the word; he thinks through every issue
carefully. He is more interested in truth than in ideology and as
a result, his conclusions and arguments are almost always on the
mark. Perhaps it has been this way forever but I believe we are
living through a time of enormous uncertainty. The economy seems
to be doing well but our external debt grows inexorably; you have
to wonder whether our standard of living is being financed by the
kindness of strangers. The price of oil continues to rise as demand
from Asia strains our productive resources, but inflation still
remains tame. The war in Iraq continues to erode the President's
approval ratings but American leadership has never been more important.
We are facing the challenges of pandemics, global warming and further
acts of terrorism. David has consistently provided his informed
reflections and insights on these and other issues. In my opinion,
his thinking is consistently in the right place at the right time
and tonight so is his body--David Brooks.
MR. DAVID BROOKS: It's an honor to be here again at the
Hamilton Awards. As you know, every year the Manhattan Institute
gives out awards to two people who have been idiotically criticized
by The New York Times.
And it's fitting, therefore, that there should be a representative
of The Times here at the event even if it is The Times' in-house
conservative; a job I liken to being Chief Rabbi at Mecca.
Nonetheless, I do again bring a telegram from the editorial board
at The Times and our many readers to this audience and particularly
to our two honorees. And telegram reads, Go to hell you right-wing
Fascists.
I've been asked to introduce Tom Wolfe and when I was asked I was
reminded of something Rick Brookhiser once said which I'll paraphrase,
I don't want to introduce Tom Wolfe I want to be Tom Wolfe, but
like Oedipus and Don Rumsfeld we have to understand our own limitations
and so I will just merely tell you a few things you know about Tom
Wolfe.
Many of you have probably observed that history has a pattern of
imitating Tom Wolfe novels. There was Bonfire of the Vanities and
then came Al Sharpton; there was I am Charlotte Simmons then came
the Duke Lacrosse scandal--Tom Wolfe is so good that God is plagiarizing
him.
The second thing you should know about Wolfe and that you already
do is that he's hipper than anyone else in this room, not that that's
saying much. He's a better writer than anyone else in this room;
he's a sharper observer than anyone else in this room; but I want
to tell you one more thing which is galling, which is that he's
a better political theorist than anyone else in this room. He wrote
one of the most brilliant political essays of the 20th century;
it was sent to me by a young man who works at Commentary named Davi
Bernstein and it was in response to a symposium that Commentary
was holding in 1976 and I've forgotten which symposium but I think
it was something like Leisure Suits and the Jews, a Failure of Will?
Or something like that.
Wolfe's essay opens with an episode from a Manhattan dinner party
so we know we're in Wolfe territory. Then he goes on to quote Nietzsche
and Freud, but then he gets to the core of his argument which is
about why people are where they are politically and it is the theory
of adolescent opposites. His argument is that political views are
not based on reason but on instinct and they're formed while we're
very young and that every teenager, everybody in high school, has
an acute sense of who his natural enemy is. If a teenager is bohemian
and cerebral he knows his natural enemy is the jock and the cheerleader
and that person grows up to be liberal. He may get rich but he'll
still hate his natural enemies, the Republicans, and that's why
on the Upper East Side you see so many people driving Audis, Saabs
and Volvos because up there it's socially acceptable to have a luxury
car so long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy.
And they're rich but they want to be rich in a way that differentiates
themselves from their natural opposites. On the other hand, there
are the people you see in high school who are athletic and who were
actually happy during their teen years and they know instinctively
that their natural enemy is the brooding poet who will go on to
become an English Major and those people will grow up to Republicans.
And the jocks may work in a factory and not earn much money but
they will still hate the geeks who became Democrats and that's why
they buy these 942 square inch barbeque grills which are big enough
to roast a bison on because they want to spend money in ways that
will offend the guilt-ridden Democrats.
And this theory of adolescent opposites explains about 80% of politics.
The one group it doesn't explain, actually, is the Manhattan Institute,
which is conservative intellectuals, but you can extrapolate, obviously
enough, and you find that conservative intellectuals are geeks who
are so horrified by their fellow geeks they don't want them running
anything at any time. And so conservative intellectuals are self-hating
geeks who have aligned themselves with the jock class and learned
to speak slowly so the jocks can understand them…and they've
learned actually that the problem with the jock class is not that
they hate ideas but once one finally penetrates their brain they
go gaga over it and you can't sort of slow them down.
I found this essay to explain just about everything I write about
when I write about politics and it is a brilliant essay which I
invite you to go back and find. And the lesson overall is that not
only is Tom Wolfe our Balzac and our Dickens, which is obvious and
which you all know, he's also the Karl Rove of the Upper East Side--Tom
Wolfe.
MR. TOM WOLFE: Well, David, I can't thank you enough but
in a moment I'm going to try to, I really am. I want to thank everyone
here and I want to, above all, thank the Manhattan Institute. This
is the greatest vote of confidence I've ever had in my life. David
DesRosiers just told me that since I'm warming up this lectern for
America's Mayor that makes me America's Writer. I thought that over
a little bit and I didn't say "No." It was too good to
be true but, you know, it's got to be-- David is a very straight
shooter.
Getting back to David Brooks, David, although his current commitment
seems to keep him from writing for our City Journal--they wouldn't
let you do that would they, David? Is on precisely the same wavelength
as the Manhattan Journal, I mean, the City Journal, what am I saying?
And the key there and it's the thing that makes both become called
conservative is that they really do care about the truth above all
else. I mean, I just can't imagine how sorry it would be to simply
concentrate all of your talents in behalf of some political entity
which is--I think that is called being a liberal. Starting with
the essay that brought the first great notice to David Brooks, which
was the Liberal Gentry, which became a great, great book, Bobos
in Paradise, David has been a conceptual thinker which makes him
absolutely alone on the editorial pages of the--it really means
it, take a look--it makes him absolutely unique and also, he loves
to go out and see things for himself and that, incidentally, is
the Manhattan Institute; I wish Bill Hammett were here tonight.
Bill Hammett did something so unbelievable he established an institute
and told the fellows, as the key scholars and writers are known,
that he demanded accuracy, he demanded things that were apolitical
in that they were never to be screens, they were never to be attacks,
they were simply to bring the news of what is going on in our metropolises
and in terms of creating policy. And when you think of what Manhattan
Institute scholars have done simply by reading the documents, that
was Charles Murray in Losing Ground; he would read these documents
that came out of the poverty program under Lyndon Johnson, studies of how the program was doing and they always had an abstract, it
was the only thing that people ever read, and the abstract was always
rather hazy but optimistic. Charles Murray had the ability to go
through all the statistics in these long rather formidable documents
and he realized that in fact none of the programs was working, they
were all driving the poor deeper and deeper into poverty and that
became the basis of Bill Clinton's reforms of the--and Bill Clinton,
this was Bill Clinton that took over, that paid attention to Charles
Murray because in the final analysis what the Manhattan Institute
does is to lock in facts so tightly that there is no more argument.
I think also of Elizabeth McCoy, what an amazing performance; she
actually read the 1,481 pages of Hillary Clinton's health plan for
America and discovered that every single American would be obliged
to enroll in this single HMO, in effect, run by--I can't find a
bureau of government low enough to describe what that would've been
like--it immediately shot down--that one article in New Republic
shot down the entire blimp, that was the end of it and Elizabeth
McCoy became one of the great Cinderella's of the 20th century.
Immediately she was courted, wooed and won by one of the richest
men in the United States and she became the Lieutenant Governor
of New York; that's the Manhattan Institute way.
And of course, the marvelous, marvelous story of the broken windows
concept. What is so marvelous about that particular saga is that
the great penetrating article by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson
appeared in 1982 in The Atlantic Monthly and it was not in an obscure
publication, but Larry Mone, the current Executive Director of this
great organization came across it and realized the tremendous potential
that it had and then in the Manhattan Institute way drummed home
the point until nobody could miss it and the Manhattan Institute
way is to publish or have published because Bill Hammett wanted
to make sure that everything written for the Manhattan Institute
would be commercially publishable somewhere else and usually by
major publishers, the Manhattan Institute way was to publish the
article, then you hold at the Harvard Club a lunch in which you
hold up the magazine and you say, there's a major article in here
and then after you've pointed out to everybody there's a major article
then you have a forum--remember that major article we told you about
we're going to have a discussion about it now and by the time the
process is done these lessons hit home and if we're really fortunate
we have a Mayor of the quality and insight of Rudy Giuliani to recognize
what he has seen…the use of the broken windows concept to absolutely
revolutionize the approach to crime in our great cities was the
first great accomplishment of America's Mayor. There, of course,
has been another great, great accomplishment and I, perhaps speaking
only for myself but I doubt it, hope that there will be a platform
from which many, many more great accomplishments can come from Rudy
Giuliani.
I would gladly continue but I want to stop before I ruin any possible
chance of my being thought of as America's Writer. Ladies and gentlemen,
I thank you so much and thank you, the Manhattan Institute.
MR. DIETRICH WEISMANN: Good evening. I'm Dietrich Weismann;
Chairman of the Manhattan Institute's Board of Trustees. Thank you
for coming and for making the Hamilton Dinner, this particular Hamilton
Dinner our most successful ever in terms of people and the other
thing. Thank you, thank you.
Please be aware that I'm somewhat humbled by having to follow David
Brooks and Tom Wolfe, that's not easy. Anyway, it's a great pleasure
for me to introduce Mort Zuckerman, who in a short order will be
introducing Rudy, that's Rudy Giuliani in case you weren't sure.
Mort is another man who can accurately be described as a Hamiltonian.
His history, like Hamilton's, is very much a New York story. Mort
is an immigrant from an exotic and some would even say enigmatic
foreign land, Canada. He came to America from Canada, graduated
from Wharton Business and Harvard Law, taught at Harvard Business,
built a real estate empire, then a publishing empire, and by the
way, became a billionaire while he was at it.
Like Hamilton, Mort figured that if you want to influence public
opinion it helps to own a newspaper, an idea by the way, that has
not escaped several trustees of the Manhattan Institute--they can
stand if they wish. Today, Mort publishes the U.S. News & World
Report, the New York Daily News; he also serves and Editor-in-Chief
of the U.S. News and writes a weekly column that I always enjoy
reading for the broad view it offers of society and the challenges
that we face. I also like watching Mort argue with Eleanor Clift
on Sunday mornings as an occasional pundit on the McLaughlin Group.
Mort is a pragmatic nuance thinker; a defender of the sensible
center. I, and some of my fellow Manhattan Institute trustees, might
be a few ticks to the right of Mort, but only by degree not in substance.
As the Chairman of the Conference of Presidents, Mort has served
as a strong voice in support of Israel. If I mention all the other
charities, companies, and public policy groups Mort is affiliated
with we would be here all night. In short, Mort juggles a tremendous
volume of work and does so not only with an incisive mind but with
an open mind and a pure heart. The energy and intellect Mort brings
to his work was never more apparent than in the days after 9-11
when he used the pages of the Daily News to bolster New York's spirit
and make sure the city received the support it needed from Washington.
Like Hamilton, Mort Zuckerman is a New Yorker; a fighter and a defender
of freedom. We are honored to have him here with us tonight. Thank
you.
MR. MORT ZUCKERMAN: Good evening. In a phrase I've used
before, I feel like a 92-year-old man who was sued in a paternity
suit. He said he was so proud he pleaded guilty. I was asked to
introduce Rudy Giuliani in the following way--I was asked if I believed
in the First Amendment I said, of course; he said, do you believe
in free speech I said, yes; he said, good you're going to give one.
But I'm here also remembering what Mark Twain once said about Napoleon--he
said, he once shot at a newspaper editor and missed him and killed
the publisher. But, said Twain, I remember with charity that his
intentions were good.
Those of us from New York knew Rudy Giuliani long before he emerged
from the tragedy and destruction of the World Trade Center and 9-11
which transformed him into a national hero and America's Mayor.
Prior to that moment, he had already taken a giant step in transforming
New York City. In the first place, he was something quite rare in
New York's political history, a Republican Mayor in a city which
was five to one Democratic. You remember when Teddy Roosevelt had
an exchange with a heckler who after listening to Roosevelt declared,
I am a Democrat to which TR said, well, may I ask why are you Democrat?
The heckler said, well, my father was a Democrat and my grandfather
was a Democrat and I am a Democrat to which TR responded, well,
suppose your grandfather had been a jack ass and your father was
a jack ass what would you be? He said, well, I'd be a Republican.
So it was kind of unusual to find a Republican had emerged as the
Mayor of New York, but this Republican Mayor of New York was not
a Republican so much as he was a Mayor. He transformed the city,
which was at that time perhaps the crime capital of America, into
the safest large city in America drastically reducing the crime
rate.
We were averaging over 2,000 murders a year not to speak of similar
numbers in other violent crimes, a crime rate which made everyone--residents,
businesses and visitors alike feel uneasy and uncomfortable. As
David Letterman put it in those days, New York led the world's great
cities in the number of people around whom you couldn't make a sudden
move. Indeed, in New York City, traffic signals were just rough
guidelines. We may forget but we shouldn't when 10,000 police marched
against City Hall raising the concern that the city seemed to be
out of control. Just think, in 1993 before Rudy Giuliani became
Mayor, in a poll roughly 60% of New Yorkers believed that things
had gotten so bad in the city that they would leave the next day
if they could. Giuliani correctly believed that public safety is
the most fundamental civil right of all. Yes, when he became Mayor
he began to hone in on longstanding problems, but he made his reputation
on his extraordinary progress against the whole culture of crime.
He supported Clinton's Crime Bill which included a ban on assault
weapons. He agreed with Republican demands for tougher sentencing.
He used the additional funding from the Crime Bill to increase the
number of policemen to the highest ever and most famously, he led
the development of the new comprehensive program known as Comstat
for computerized statistics, which identified crime by location
in real time making it possible for the police to send in specially
trained teams whenever and wherever crime began to surge, not several
weeks too late but based on the statistics of the preceding evening's
crimes where the particulars were now available, broken down by neighborhood and street corner by the next morning. The police became
a proactive rather than a reactive force; crime rates began to fall
precipitously; and by the end of his term, murders had dropped by
over 60% with an almost equivalent drop in all violent crimes. This
was but a part of the quality of life revolution that Rudy Giuliani
accomplished captured in the Daily News profile entitled, Quality
of Life: The Mayor Who Understood. I assume you expected at least
a minor commercial from me.
The theoretical background to all of this was first described as
Tom Wolfe pointed out in The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine with which
I was then associated; that theory proposed that small things mattered
and establishing a lawful environment for a civil society. The example
that they used was a building on a busy street where the first window
was broken and not repaired quickly. Soon they said all the windows
of the building would be shattered for this would send an unmistakable
signal that unlawful behavior was tolerated resulting in other quality
of life crimes such as prostitution, graffiti, aggressive panhandling
and public urination, in turn, attracting criminals to the neighborhood
and forcing out law-abiding citizens inevitably leading to even
more serious crimes.
So, for example, the Giuliani administration put on a drive to
eliminate the squeegee men from the city streets. A relatively small
number of people, the squeegees had a broad destructive effect on
the quality of life and when gone illustrated how achieving a limited
goal could adjust the perceptions of hundreds of thousands of motorists
every month.
He also reduced welfare rolls when nobody thought that could be
done; reforming welfare ahead of the federal legislation by both
verifying the qualifications of those who apply for welfare and
requiring long-term, longtime recipients to work in return for public
assistance. Welfare offices were turned into job centers and the
welfare agencies shifted as the cliché went, from a handout
to a hand up. Success was judged not by how many people were put
on the rolls but by how many people were placed in jobs. By the
end of his term, over 400,000 people had moved off of the welfare
rolls from a high of 1.1 million.
Welfare reform legislation then was another federal program that
he supported even as it was preceded, as I mentioned, in New York,
yet the congressional bill cut off all benefits even to legal immigrants,
a provision that Giuliani then attacked as unconstitutional and
un-American given our great tradition as a country energized by
immigrants, and a year later, the Clinton administration worked
to rescind the program depriving legal immigrants of benefits.
Now given the unsettled atmosphere in the city, New York lost 330,000
jobs between 1990 and 1993, but the economy under his leadership
began to turn around as the city settled down. As the fiscal side
of the city was brought under control through the reduction of taxes
and good budget management and clear leadership brought confidence
in business back to the city, the result was that over 250,000 jobs
were created and the number of visitors increased from 26.7 million
to 36 million in his term.
Not only did Giuliani present himself as a nonpartisan, especially
a right-wing partisan, he shunned the right-wing zealots of America.
On abortion, he was a persistent defender of women's rights to choose;
he supported gay rights arguing that individuals and not governments
should dictate these personal choices. The net result of it was
that the people of the City of New York once again came to believe
in political leadership; that the steering wheel of government could
be connected once again to the engine. They were impressed by his
ability to get results after decades of politicians basically had
shrugged their shoulders as if helpless in the face of rising crime,
rising welfare rolls, and social decay and New Yorkers were ready
for it. As the Buddhist saying goes, when the student is ready the
guru appears--Rudy Giuliani was that guru.
Now of course, I've left for the end his extraordinary leadership
after the unmitigated disaster of 9-11; a disaster both for the
country and for New York City. Within two hours he demonstrated
an attitude of resolve and indignation. He worked 16 hours a day
appearing everywhere in the city, especially at the funerals and
with the families of those who had lost their lives and particularly
those in the uniformed services. He articulated his compassion for
the many thousands of lives that had been lost in this terrible
tragedy but he balanced it with words of caution not to blame members
of one ethnic group or another; it was truly grace under pressure.
New Yorkers realized what it took to be the Mayor of this great
city for he captured and personified the unity of the city in the
face of this tragedy exuding candor, clear-eyed compassion, and
a basic optimism about the capacity of the city to recover and to
renew itself, there was to be no retreat into bitterness and despair.
This was a leadership recognized by the entire country ultimately
expressed as it was by Time Magazine when he was made Man of the
Year not only for what he did to reassure the citizens of New York,
but for the comfort that he gave to the entire nation. Edmund Burke
once said, it is necessarily only for the good man to do nothing
for evil to triumph--well, this good man did something; he did something
as the Mayor of New York that became an inspiration for the entire
nation and helped the country heal the wounds of 9-11.
I am sure that he made mistakes in office but tonight I feel that
I can be astute enough to have forgotten what they were. Tonight
is a night to recognize how grateful this city is to Rudy Giuliani,
both for his service as Mayor and his service especially during
a time of tragedy. I am privileged to be able to introduce him.
Thank you.
MR. RUDY GIULIANI: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very
much, Mort. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.
Thanks. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank
you very, very much, Mort, that was a very, very wonderful and kind
introduction and I'm really here--you expressed your gratitude to
me for the changes in the city, which I owe to many people, and
the Manhattan Institute more than most because they gave us a lot
of the ideas and a lot of the direction and a lot of the change
in thinking that was necessary to do that.
But I do remember in 1993, about four days before the election,
I was trying to get every last vote that I could find because I
knew it was going to be a very close election and I was campaigning
in Brooklyn and I was shaking hands with people and I grabbed the
hand of this man, he had a big hand, he held my hand very tightly,
he had a big smile on his face and he said to me, it'll be until
hell freezes over before there's a Republican Mayor of my city,
damn it. I said, thank you because I couldn't think of what else
to say and I was exhausted. I moved onto the next person and the
next person. Four days later I was elected, forgot about the man
for a while, I got inaugurated, I became the Mayor, first month
went by--February 1st of 1994, I was getting up I had Winds [phonetic]
on, reporter on Winds said something like this, Mayor Giuliani has
been in office for one month and he's already set a record. Well,
I was kind of happy what record had I set? Reporter said, he set
a record for the most snowfall in the month of January and it looks
like February is going to be no better. So now I started having
nightmares about this man. Republican Mayor, hell freezing over,
the whole thing and then I--the last couple of years I was Mayor
there was hardly any snow--maybe Republican programs work even for
snow I'm not sure.
When David Brooks was talking about The New York Times, I remembered
my basic training regarding The New York Times; it came from being
in Reagan administration. I was the Associate Attorney General;
I worked for Attorney General William French Smith, who was a very
close friend of Ronald Reagan's, his lawyer for 17 years, and in
addition to being a Cabinet Member, someone who knew him really
well. And for the first year that Bill Smith was in office, it was
an unrelenting series of New York Times editorials attacking him
for his position on affirmative action or on civil rights or whatever,
anti-trust, it was just one difficult, critical editorial after
another and the Justice Department staff was working on getting
a good editorial--might've been on immigration. And we finally one
morning The New York Times wrote a very favorable editorial about
the Attorney General and we were all waiting for him to come in,
all very happy, big smiles on our faces, very proud of the fact
that we had gotten this good editorial. The Attorney General walked
in, he had already read it, he had a very galm [phonetic] expression
and we said to him Bill, you know, we really worked hard on this
editorial. He said, yeah, I know but President's going to kill me.
So we thought he was kidding. Within about 15 minutes the Attorney
General is interrupted the President's on the phone and you could
hear Attorney General Smith saying, well Mr. President, I didn't
ask for this editorial, I mean, I didn't--and then he hung up the
phone and he said, you don't understand how Ronald Reagan uses The
New York Times he's very happy when they disagree with us and when
they don't he's pretty sure we're off agenda so now I'm in trouble.
That stayed with me while I was Mayor of New York City and it proved
to be correct.
I want to thank Hank Greenberg, the Dinner Chairman, Hank, as you
know, is one of our city's most generous philanthropic leaders in
health care and so many other areas. I think you also know that
he's someone who has served his country with great distinction in
the Second World War and in the Korean War and I think you may know,
but I certainly know, that he's one of the people who has stood
with the city when we were going through our most difficult times.
I mean, he's someone who kept his company here, kept them in lower
Manhattan, kept them there sometimes against strong, strong arguments
to move somewhere else or move significant parts of the business
somewhere else, so he's really one of our city's greatest citizens
and one of our greatest boosters.
And I have to tell you that I, you know, I told him that if Las
Vegas gave odds on lawsuits, I know they do on everything else I'm
not sure they do it on lawsuits, I think I'd bet on Hank.
I'm also very honored to be honored at the same time as Tom Wolfe,
who has described the social forces that affect us in New York and
Atlanta and in our universities in ways that not only as David Brooks
pointed out are prophetic or appear to be prophetic, but also in
ways that really explain to us what the impetus for reform is and
the things that maybe we're doing wrong that we can correct and
there's so much more that comes out of his social commentary. I
think he's kind of like the--I remember reading his books and thinking
he's sort of like the Dickens of our modern age; he sort of describes
our social situation with an insight that nobody else has so it's
a great honor to be here with him and he's another really great
New Yorker.
For me, it's more than an honor to receive the Alexander Hamilton
Award from the Manhattan Institute, it's like coming home. My administration,
my city and I owe so much to the groundbreaking and the past-setting
[phonetic] that the Manhattan Institute has done over the years.
In fact, if there was kind of like a charge of plagiarism for political
programs I'd probably be in a lot of trouble because I think we
plagiarized most of them, if not all of them, from the pages of
the City Journal and from the thinking and analysis of the Manhattan
Institute.
I brought with me a copy of the City Journal, it's one of the many
issues of the City Journal that Richard Schwartz will remember we
analyzed and looked at and read and underline and this one goes
back to the spring of 1992, that's a long time ago, and here were
the articles--I'll just read you the titles of them. This is by
George Kelling, Measuring What Matters-A New Way of Thinking about
Crime and Public Order, kind of pointed out a lot of the broken
windows theory, even some of the concepts of Comstat about how to
measure crime. Reclaiming our Public Spaces by Fred Siegel, Strategies
to Restore Civility to our Streets and Parks, certainly borrowed
a great deal of that, right John? See John Dyson and Paul Keroti
[phonetic] and so many other people here, Howard Wilson. Putting
Schools First, Changing the Board of Ed's Priorities. If we're ever
to have better schools the Board of Education must get out of the
way. Well, you can't achieve all of your objectives. Correcting
New York's Housing Mistakes--the city needs policies that widen
the housing choices of all New Yorkers by Peter Salins, something
that would be--Judith and I just came back from two days in New
Orleans, this would be something that would be very useful there
now, the concepts discussed in this article. Congestion by Default,
New York's Haphazard Transit System by Dick Netzer. Planning with
Vision, New York Planners Need to Think More about the Quality of
Life by Nathan Glazer. And then The Competitiveness Debate by Thierry
Noyelle, which really describes the high tax rates or really anti-competitive
tax rates in New York and, you could go on Heather McDonald's articles
about City College and the low standards in City College. So one
article after another challenging the rigidity of thinking in New
York.
One of the things that is the strangest thing, I don't explain
this much outside of New York because, you know, it's like your
family you hate to ever run it down, but the rigidity of thinking
in New York is amazing to me. Here we are America's largest city
by a lot, very intellectual, very intelligent, very accomplished
in so many fields and there's a parochialism about our thinking
that is almost like you can't think a new idea. I mean, before you
even think the new idea there's going to be a big chorus that says
well, we don't do it that way and we've never done it that way and
what the Manhattan Institute has done for New York is to crack through
that; it's made it possible for us to think about how to solve problems
in different ways whether it's crime or welfare or taxes or ideas
that maybe were considered ideas that you couldn't look at or think
about. I remember when we started welfare reform we figured out
that you could put people to work; you could require people to work
in exchange for their welfare. The limitation, I think, was 18 hours
a week, you couldn't require more than that, but you could require
an able-bodied person to work in exchange for welfare and it took
three or four or five years to be able to really communicate that
message--three or four or five years of being accused of being mean,
being heartless, not caring about people, when in fact, to me, it
seemed that you cared about people more if you took the effort to
try to find them a job then if you just gave them a handout check
and sort of regulated them…
The thing that I think the Manhattan Institute helped to contribute
greatly is something--I keep this in my office and I used it once
in a State of the City speech and I look at it all the time, it's
the two covers of Time Magazine; one was in 1990 and the title of
the Time Magazine front cover was the Rotting of the Big Apple and
on the front cover are people being mugged and people being beaten
and people running out of the city and businesses flaying all these
caricatures; the other cover is January 1st, 2000, and it's the
millennium celebration on Times Square, beautiful, beautiful picture
of the millennium and the article inside is about New York City
as the best example of urban renaissance and a discussion of the
change in crime and the change in jobs and the change from deficit
to surplus. And that would not have happened, that big change would
not have happened if the Manhattan Institute hadn't laid the intellectual
groundwork and made it acceptable to say some of the things that
I used to say, not all of the things I used to say, and it made
it acceptable to think some of the things that we were talking about
and discussing.
I remember the first year that I was in office we had to cut a
budget and we had to eliminate about $2 or $3 billion in spending
because we had a deficit that was about 4 or 5 times what the prior
administration had told us it was and we found out about it as we
were coming into office. So we cut dramatically. We cut everything
but the police department and the fire department. And we used to
have a demonstration a day for about four months and Peter Powers
will remember this--one day there was a group demonstrating and
this happened to be one of the few groups that we didn't cut their
funding, in fact, we had given them a little bit more money for
some reason and Peter noticed that in the budget and he decided
that he was going to produce, like, a good news story for us when
we desperately needed one. So he went out and he talked to the guy
in charge of the demonstration and he told them, you know, I don't
know why you're demonstrating your budget was increased and the
guy said, that can't be. So Peter took out the budget and he showed
them the line item that there had been an increase in his budget.
The guy said, that's wonderful, that's absolutely terrific, I never
realized that and Peter said, you'll be thankful to the Mayor for
this--of course we will, this is a wonderful thing to do in a time
of cutting we got more money, it recognizes our program, it's terrific
and Peter said, well then, I guess, you know, you'll go over to
the camera and, you know, explain that and say something nice about
the Mayor and stop the demonstration. The guy kind of walks away
to go toward the camera and he turns back to Peter and he says,
well, you know, we're all here now and we're demonstrating so we're
just going to go on with it. That sort of set my whole thinking
about demonstrations and…but you have created many, many changes
and I think many challenges remain and I believe that the Manhattan
Institute has an enormously important role to play both in the future
of this city and in the future of cities because cities are so important
to America to how we're looked at, the way we are.
And in honoring Alexander Hamilton, there is one issue that I'd
like to talk about briefly because Alexander Hamilton was not only
a Founding Father, a great economist really, a brilliant business
man, not a particularly good shot but…I'm not going to say
the next part. But he was one of our first great immigrant success
stories. He's a man that was born outside of the United States,
came here, poor family, very poor and he had to build a better life
for himself and for his family and he did that in a way that made
it a better life for us in many, many ways. And I think that, you
know, we're going through a very serious debate on immigration and
I think that I look at it from the point of view of how do we create
more security for the United States? How do we, in an era of a war
on terrorism, which is going to continue for the indefinable future,
and then some of the other problems that we have, how do we create
more security? And I think that either extreme is not the right
answer.
One extreme is what I would call the punitive approach, which is
reflected in the House legislation that was passed, which is to
make it a crime to be an illegal or undocumented immigrant; it is
illegal now but it's not a crime and I believe, if I recall correctly,
that it would make it a five-year felony and there are 11 million
illegal immigrants in the United States. It would become a law that
was honored in the breach and it could not possibly be enforced.
To give you the dimensions that I remember, at least when I was
the Mayor, it's estimated that there are about 400,000 people in
that category in New York, it could be more now but it used to be
about 400,000. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, I believe,
deports about 1,500 to 2,000 people a year so I pretty quickly figured
out that I was going to have 398,000 illegal immigrants no matter
what the federal government did and I had to do something sensible
about it rather than something stupid and kind of make it work in
the society in which we exist. Well, that's really the picture for
the whole country and to deal with it in a punitive way is actually
going to make us considerably less secure than we already are because
the problem is that we have such a huge underground that we can't
really keep account of who's here, who they are, identify them,
and kind of separate the ones that are here for benign or neutral
purposes, which we can argue about the competitiveness and the economy
and everything else, but they're not really doing damage to our
society, might even be making vast contributions to it, and then
focus on the people that we have to focus on who are the people
that might come here to carry out terrorist acts or to sell drugs
or to commit crimes and the reason we can't do that well is that
we have a system already that's unenforceable, that's unrealistic
given the numbers of people that want to come here, the size of
our borders, the number of resources that we could conceivably have
to apply to it. So the right answer is to do the things that have
to be done to secure our borders, introduce new technology, require
more of people in describing who they are, identify them effectively,
fingerprint them or finger image them if you have to, photograph
them, come up with cards for them, use the modern methods that we
presently have for identifying people but don't try to legislate
against the inevitable forces of, you know, social movement and
the economy because it isn't going to work. So we have to find a
way and I think that the compromise the Senate was looking at something
along those lines makes sense. Give people a way to earn citizenship,
give them a way to earn citizenship in which they have to demonstrate
facility with English and they have jobs and they're paying taxes
and they've put themselves in an entirely legal status, recognize
the economic forces that are realistic ones that require people
to come into the United States or require people to have people
come into the United States, and you identify them and you have
them pay taxes and you find out who they are and then you concentrate
on the people who are avoiding that and you'll be capable of doing
that because it'll be a problem the dimensions of which you can
touch and feel and measure and see and it'll be much harder for
terrorists to hide in a situation like that. And I think that the
Manhattan Institute, which sort of turns on trying to figure out
the logical and sensible answer to a problem, can play a big role
in getting us to think about immigration in a way that it is sensible
and it gets us to a resolution that makes us more secure because
I think that going in either extreme is going to hurt us.
We just came back, as I said, from New Orleans and it's a very
devastating experience to travel through New Orleans--not the city
itself, the main part of the city, but the 9th Ward and Lakeview
and St. Bernard Parish, it's incomprehensible to see the amount
of destruction and the amount of harm that's been done. It's very,
very hard for a person, and so many of the people that I work with
are here, that basically is ruled by impatience like I am to understand
what's taking so long in starting to kind of put that all together,
but if there's a place that needs a Manhattan Institute it's New
Orleans. And you have done so much that I am really, really greatly
indebted to you. But, there are so many other things that exist,
so many other fights that have to continue from figuring out that,
you know, cutting taxes--this is the thing that probably disturbs
me the most when I read The New York Times editorials, they've kind
of turned around the whole idea of cutting taxes and they make tax
increases morally courageous. I have no idea what is courageous
about raising taxes. I understand it's courageous to run into a
fire and take somebody out, but I can't figure out what's courageous
about raising taxes and I don't understand why you would think that
in an economy that's essentially a private economy it makes more
sense and is more efficient for the government to confiscate more
of that money, but the thing that astounds me the most is that we've
done three major tax cuts in my lifetime; first one was done by
John Kennedy and it was followed by a significant period of economic
growth, the second one that I remember was the President that I
worked for, Ronald Reagan, and it was followed by a long period
of economic growth and President Bush had to fight very, very hard
to create tax cuts at the beginning of his administration and we're
having economic growth again. Somehow somewhere the orthodoxy of
thinking about just raising money to put more money into government
programs should be challenged by that. I learned that from the Manhattan
Institute. I learned it from reading articles in the Manhattan Institute
and the first tax that we cut was the hotel occupancy tax and it
was only a $36 million cut because that was all we could afford
and Peter actually told me that I set a record for cutting taxes
in New York and I said it's impossible, how could I have set a record
we were only able to afford $36 million and he said because this
is the first time it was ever done.
But there are so many other fights that lie ahead; restoring fiscal
responsibility, remaining consistent to the great change that President
Bush made on September 20th, 2001--I don't know if we really understand
the significance of it completely and I don't know that it's been
given the attention that it deserves but it means a great deal to
me because President Bush invited Governor Pataki and I to sit in
Congress when he gave his address after the attacks of September
11. And on September 20th, 2001, as I sat there I realized what
he was doing and it was the first time that I started to feel some
sense of optimism because I said, you know, he gets it and up to
that point we hadn't gotten it and what he got was that we have
to be and we should've been before that and there are a lot of understandable
reasons why we weren't, but we have to be on offense against terrorism
we cannot go back to where we used to be in the '70s and the '80s
and the '90s and the early part of even this century, which is on
defense against terrorism; that's probably the primary mistake that
we made. We let Europe determine how we would react to terrorists;
the people at the Munich Olympics, the Israeli athletes who were
slaughtered, the people who remained were released by the German
government because the German government was afraid to keep them.
Leon Klinghoffer was killed by terrorists; the Italian government
released the terrorists because they were afraid to keep them. That
happened 60, 70, 80 times in the '70s, the '80s, the '90s. America
sat back, watched that, sometimes we'd react to a terrorist attack,
sometimes like the coal [phonetic] we wouldn't. What President Bush did on September 20th, 2001, is to say we're going to go on offense
against terrorism. We're going to use the methods that are the most
appropriate, military, political, economic, educational to combat
them and to do the best that we can to try to stop them from attacking
us again rather than just sit back and wait for it. That was a tremendous
change in American foreign policy. I believe it has something to
do with the fact that we've been safe since then. It is not an assurance
that we'll be safe in the future, but we've achieved a great deal
already. It is very difficult to keep that policy focused because
it's very hard to be at war whether it's a much more physical type
of war like the Second World War or the Civil War where we had draft
riots in New York and Lincoln almost didn't get re-elected and I
imagine if they had approval ratings in 1863 our greatest President's
approval ratings would be lower than our present President. But,
President Lincoln understood the necessity to keep the Union together
whether a poll agreed with that or didn't. President Bush understands
the necessity to remain on offense against terrorism and we…it
isn't going to happen without setbacks, it isn't going to happen
without mistakes, it isn't going to happen with some bad judgments
being made because we all do that. If you look at the history of
the Civil War there's a whole group of mistakes that were made including
by our greatest President. The greatest intelligence failure of
the United States military might very well have been the Battle
of the Bulge when we didn't predict that Hitler had moved significant
amounts of his army from the Russian front to attack us as we were
trying to enter Germany and then we lost more people in the Battle
of the Bulge than I think in the rest of the European war and it
was a great intelligence failure. But, it was a war that we couldn't
back out of because we had an intelligence failure it was a war
that we finally won because Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman
understood that we had to remain committed and Abraham Lincoln understood
that we had to remain committed and that's why we have Presidents
and the ones who can remain consistent turn out to be the great
ones and the ones that waiver back and forth and are constantly
trying to be popular turn out to be the ones who at best we remember
their names and I think that we're going to be in this struggle
for quite some time and I think we need people like the Manhattan
Institute who can also explain that. So thank you very, very much
for this award and have a wonderful evening.
MR. MONE: I'm here to bid you goodnight but in doing that
I'm going to say first of all, that this to me has been a really
amazing evening. We're in the presence of some pretty outstanding
people here and the last one you heard was certainly one of them.
If I'm not mistaken, I did detect a little hint of presidential
influence there I don't know about you but if that wasn't a presidential
speech I don't know what was.
On behalf of the Manhattan Institute Board of Trustees, I'd like
to thank our awardees, America's Mayor and America's Writer; our
Dinner Chairman, Hank Greenberg; and our introducers, the incomparable
David Brooks and the amazing Mort Zuckerman. And in closing, I'd
like to leave you with a parting thought and a gift. The gift is
an autographed copy of Fred Siegel's, who's with us here tonight
by the way, of Fred Siegel's copy of the print of the book, The
Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American
Life. The book is a kind of Bonfire of the Vanities for policy wonks,
but Fred not only tells how the city went wrong he provides a thorough
and engaging account of the people and the ideas that set it right
again and I, having read it, can tell you that it is an incredibly
fun read, it's exciting, it keeps you on your toes all the time
and it gives you a lot to learn about the city and its past and
present.
The parting thought is no one wants to return to the Bonfire days
but let us remember that Paris is presently burning and for a reason;
bad ideas. Civilization is a fragile thing, the Bonfire remains
a permanent possibility it is the Manhattan…
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