Here’s a book that will never be written: “Rudy, We Hardly Knew Ye.”
In eight high-profile years, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has almost never been out of the national spotlight, baring every facet of one of the most complex political personalities of recent times, from tough crime fighter and savior of New York to obsessive bully and unfaithful husband.
Like former President Bill Clinton, he became a politician whose psychological tics America knew almost too well. But that was before Sept. 11, which exposed yet another side of Giuliani, the courageous leader who was also compassionate enough to cry with his city as it mourned the thousands who died in the attack on the World Trade Center.
And now he is leaving.
On Thursday, Giuliani, whose term ends Monday, said farewell, calling for the site of the collapsed towers to be turned into a “soaring, beautiful memorial” to the victims of the attack. Speaking a block from ground zero, the mayor said the area was too important to be just a site for economic development.
“This place has to be sanctified,” he said near the end of a 55-minute speech, delivered in St. Paul’s Chapel, where George Washington prayed when he became America’s first president. “It has to become a place, when anybody comes, that they immediately feel the power, strength and emotion of what it means to become an American.”
The end of Giuliani’s tenure as mayor has prompted a wave of assessments of the mayor’s successes, notably making New York safer and more livable again, and his failures, such as alienating many of the city’s minority residents.
A swooning accolade came this week from Time magazine, which named him Person of the Year and hailed him as “Mayor of the World.”
“Giuliani’s performance ensures that he will be remembered as the greatest mayor in the city’s history,” the magazine said. “Giuliani’s eloquence under fire has made him a global symbol of healing and defiance.”
Some see mixed record
Others are not so sure. While couching their comments in respectful language that pays tribute to his heroic performance following the collapse of the trade center towers, several New York political observers note that in the seven-plus years of his mayoralty before Sept. 11, he had compiled a mixed record.
“He did a great job on Sept. 11 and afterward,” said John Mollenkopf, a political science professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. “I think it saved his reputation. A year ago, people were talking about the fact that he wasn’t living with his wife and children.”
Even his performance as one of the leaders who steadied not just a terrified city but a shaken nation after the terrorist attacks receives only grudging approval from one of his predecessors, Ed Koch.
“He did what a mayor is supposed to do,” said Koch, who led the city out of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. “I don’t think anybody would have done better, but others would have done as well. He showed a sensitivity he hadn’t shown in seven years and nine months in office up to then.”
Yet critics and supporters agree Giuliani transformed New York. When he narrowly defeated incumbent David Dinkins in 1993, the city was reeling from more than two decades of decline. Manufacturing jobs had dried up. Crack cocaine had inundated the city, setting off waves of murder and armed robbery.
Residents were afraid to walk the streets at night. Tourists were scared to visit. Times Square was a brutal urban jungle of pornography, drugs and crime. New York, according to conventional wisdom, was ungovernable.
Safety first
Giuliani, a Republican who had made his name as a tough federal prosecutor, set out to disprove the conventional wisdom by first making the city safer.
The mayor noted his strategy during his speech Thursday, saying: “It seemed to me that I had to do something different than other mayors. It seemed I had to totally change the direction and course of New York City.”
Among other things, he created paramilitary street-crimes units to go after gangs and instituted a new statistical technique for tracking crime in city neighborhoods, allowing police precinct commanders to devote more officers to troubled areas.
In his first two years in office, crime fell 30 percent, and it has continued to fall despite a nationwide uptick in crime recently. According to the New York Police Department’s most recent statistics, violent crime is down 62 percent since 1993, its lowest level in three decades. The city ranks 23rd in crime among the nation’s 25 largest cities.
“He understood that in order to have a civic culture that operated, you needed to have a safe culture,” said Stanley Renshon, a psychoanalyst and political science professor at City University of New York. “There’s no doubt from every survey that almost everybody feels safer and more able to go about the ordinary business of their lives, and that’s a ground-floor accomplishment.”
Targeting welfare
As the federal government tackled welfare reform, Giuliani also took on the city’s bloated welfare system, historically one of the most generous in the nation. Between 1995 and the end of 2000, the number of city welfare recipients plummeted from 1.1 million to 538,000, a drop of 51 percent.
With crime down and city government no longer seen as a soft touch, New York blossomed into America’s greatest urban success story in the 1990s. Times Square was reborn as a neon-lit center of family entertainment. New and old businesses created thousands of jobs. Property values and incomes across the city surged. Tourism boomed.
“He is a very smart, very insightful, very combative man, and those qualities were important in what he accomplished,” said Renshon. “He not only changed people’s comfort in the city but he also changed the paradigm of whether New York was governable. And the answer is yes, it is governable.”
But along the way, Giuliani has shown a prickly side, reacting harshly when critics have accused the police of using heavy-handed tactics or charged Giuliani with being more interested in cutting welfare rolls than in helping people escape poverty.
Furor over police tactics
Relations between City Hall and the city’s minority communities have been strained in recent years, especially following a gruesome police brutality case and the killing of an unarmed man who was shot 19 times by police in a fusillade of 41 bullets. In those and other cases, critics say Giuliani was slow to sympathize with the victims or acknowledge that police had acted improperly.
“It’s been a really callous eight years for people who needed government,” said Andrew White, director of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School University, referring to Giuliani’s relations with minorities and low-income residents. “As a manager, he’s an autocrat. He’s tried to do a lot of things from the center, and he’s instilled a lot of fear.”
And, after his overwhelming re-election in 1997, he sometimes took on targets that seemed to offend only him, such as jaywalkers and street vendors, whose proliferating presence in some heavily trafficked areas detracted from the clean, tidy image he wanted the city to present.
One of Giuliani’s most publicized disputes involved the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which twice ran afoul of him by displaying works that depicted the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ in ways that he found not just offensive but “sick.”
Giuliani threatened to yank the museum’s city funding, but federal courts sided with the museum.
The mayor’s displays of bad temper and his sometimes quixotic choices of bogeymen are an outgrowth of the same qualities that have made him an effective city leader in other areas.
“The same heat that melts the butter fries the egg,” Renshon said. “His ordinary stance is combative. That was a good stance to have when you were trying to change the political culture, but once you had succeeded, another leader who had other capacities could relax a little, but not Rudy. Rudy never had the feeling that he could relax.”
And his personal life has given him little chance for relaxation. In the midst of an eagerly anticipated run for the U.S. Senate last year against Hillary Rodham Clinton, Giuliani pulled out of the race, explaining that he had prostate cancer, for which he has since been successfully treated.
He also revealed that he was romantically involved with Judith Nathan, a pharmaceutical sales manager, setting off a made-for-the-tabloids divorce battle with his wife, television personality Donna Hanover.
This year, he moved out of Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence. Giuliani now lives with an old friend, Howard Koeppel, Koeppel’s domestic partner, and the couple’s dog. A local newspaper columnist described this unlikely arrangement as “Two guys, a mayor, and a Shih Tzu.”
Post-City Hall plans
Barred by term limits from seeking a third term as mayor, Giuliani is planning to establish a consulting business with some of his top aides, although the specifics remain undetermined.
He has ruled out another run for office, at least for now. But given his near-universal approval ratings in the polls, a future in politics seems possible. For that matter, under New York’s term-limits statute, he could run for mayor again in four years if his successor, media billionaire and fellow Republican Michael Bloomberg, falls short.
“He’s etched in stone already,” said Mitchell Moss, head of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University. “I think he’ll be a formidable presence in American politics.”
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Giuliani: The mayoral years
New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who rose to national prominence as a tough U.S. attorney, ends his tenure as mayor Monday. A look at Giuliani’s eight years in ofM-^ce:
JAN. 2, 1994: Sworn in as New York City’s 107th mayor. Son Andrew, 7, standing alongside Giuliani during inaugural address, mimics his dad’s repeated punch line: “It should be so, and it will be so.”
SEPT. 11: Proposes restricting porn shops to manufacturing districts and phasing out existing sex shops.
OCT. 24: Crosses party lines to endorse Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo. Cuomo loses.
JAN. 3, 1995: Giuliani’s highly touted workfare program goes into effect, with about 100,000 able-bodied Home Relief recipients required to work cleaning parks, streets and buildings.
MARCH 26, 1996: Police Commissioner William Bratton resigns under pressure from Giuliani and is replaced by Howard SaM-^r in April.
AUG. 9, 1997: Haitian immigrant Abner Louima is tortured and beaten in a bathroom at Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct station house. Four ofM-^cers later are convicted or plead guilty in connection with the beating.
NOV. 4: Giuliani cruises to second 4-year term, easily defeating Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger.
JAN. 1, 1998: Saying “the best days are yet to come,” Giuliani is sworn in for second term. He pledges to improve city schools and hire 1,600 cops.
FEB. 4, 1999: Police gun down West African immigrant Amadou Diallo in the doorway of his Bronx apartment building. Four ofM-^cers charged with murder later are cleared of all counts.
APRIL 22: Saying “the whole system should be blown up,” Giuliani proposes abolishing the Board of Education. The mayor pulls billions of dollars in school construction funds from his proposed budget.
SEPT. 22: Denouncing an art exhibit that includes a portrait of the Virgin Mary splattered with elephant dung, Giuliani suspends city funding of Brooklyn Museum of Art. A federal judge later overturns Giuliani’s decision.
MARCH 16, 2000: Security guard Patrick Dorismond is killed by an undercover police ofM-^cer outside a Hell’s Kitchen bar. Saying he would give police the “beneM-^t of the doubt,” Giuliani releases Dorismond’s criminal record.
APRIL 27: Giuliani’s political future is cast in doubt when he reveals he has prostate cancer.
MAY 10: Giuliani acknowledges pharmaceutical company sales manager Judith Nathan is his “very good friend” and declares his marriage to Donna Hanover is over. Later that day, Hanover accuses her husband of having an earlier affair with former communications director Cristyne Lategano.
MAY 19: Citing his fight against cancer, Giuliani drops out of U.S. Senate race against Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton.
OCT. 1: After 16 years of marriage, Giuliani sues for divorce from Hanover.
FEB. 15, 2001: Giuliani announces formation of decency committee after complaining about another Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibit, this one including a photograph called “Yo Mama’s Last Supper” that shows a nude female Jesus.
MAY 21: A judge orders Nathan to stay out of Gracie Mansion.
SEPT. 11: The World Trade Center collapses after attack by terrorists in two hijacked jets.
SEPT. 26-27: Giuliani, in bid for 90-day term extension, summons mayoral candidates Michael Bloomberg, Mark Green and Fernando Ferrer to ask for support. Bloomberg and Green say yes; Ferrer says no. Giuliani later abandons idea.
NOV. 6: Bloomberg, heavily endorsed by Giuliani in M-^nal weeks of campaign, is elected New York City’s 108th mayor.
Source: Newsday, AP photos
Chicago Tribune
