By the end of the summer of 2001, Rudolph Giuliani was getting on New York’s nerves. By the end of the year, the mayor was Time magazine’s Person of the Year and stood higher in public esteem than any other elected official, with the possible exception of President Bush.
In nearly eight controlling years as mayor, Giuliani had slashed crime and burst the city’s bloated welfare rolls. Once described as ungovernable, New York had become a showplace of America’s urban renaissance.
But Giuliani’s easily riled temper had led to brawls with nearly every other politician in the city, especially in the black and Hispanic communities. And the tabloids feasted on his rancorous divorce from television personality Donna Hanover, who persuaded a judge to enjoin the mayor from inviting his girlfriend, Judith Nathan, over to Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence.
The city’s term-limits statute prohibited him from running for a third consecutive term. That was fine with New Yorkers.
And then — transformation.
On Sept. 11, Giuliani and his top advisers were forced to take shelter in the basement of an office building to escape the collapsing steel and concrete of the World Trade Center. Speaking at a hastily arranged news conference that morning, the gaunt, shaken mayor first demonstrated the qualities that turned a lame duck into an eagle.
His strength and resolution as a leader reassured shell-shocked New Yorkers, but he also exposed a compassionate side that few had ever seen. And he was as vulnerable as the next person, frequently breaking down at the scores of firefighters’ funerals he attended that fall.
The press and public dubbed him “Rudy the Rock.” Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II dubbed him Sir Rudolph.
A last-minute attempt to extend his term by three months was practically the only sour note of the fall, and he quickly abandoned that effort.
Since leaving office, Giuliani, 58, has set up a consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, and travels the country campaigning for Republicans. After years of public-servant pay, he now commands $100,000 per speech, and he has a two-book contract worth $2.7 million, with the first book, “Leadership,” due in October. The money will come in handy: In July, he agreed to an out-of-court divorce settlement that gives his ex-wife $6.8 million.
Although he is out of politics now, he has left little doubt that he’d like to run again. A higher office has beckoned once before. In 2000, he briefly ran for Senate in a race that matched him against eventual winner Hillary Rodham Clinton, but his campaign fizzled when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and revealed his affair with Nathan.
But the office he probably wants above all others is the one he left in January. And, under the city’s term-limits statute, he would be eligible to run for mayor again in 2005.
