How Rudy Giuliani Went From 9/11s Hallowed Mayor to 2021s Haunted Ghoul – Vanity Fair
And so, yes: Of course Rudy Giuliani is important.
But lets go back for a moment to that September morning when, in our vulnerability and fear, we clung to Rudy. The memory of that embrace, from which we have been trying to extricate ourselves ever since, may have faded, but the need that inspired it is still intact. Its funny that you call it a Cuomo-like moment, Andrew Kirtzman, Giulianis biographer, said to me on Zoom, because I thought Cuomo was having a Giuliani-like moment. What Kirtzman found especially comparable about the two situations is how quickly people forget the circumstances behind the rise of these heroic figures. Those circumstances are an atmosphere of totalizing fear combined with a leadership void. Enter a flawed but vigorous leader, seemingly all facts and no bullshita man born, as his friend Peter Powers said of Giuliani, without a fear gene.
Kirtzman had been with Giuliani on 9/11. A young reporter at NY1, he was awakened by his mother, who told him to turn on the television. He called his newsroom, who instructed him to find the mayor. He went downtown in a cab. The driver, as soon as they entered the deserted streets surrounding the World Trade Center, slammed the brakes and threw him out. A frantic woman got in, urging Kirtzman to go back uptown with her. A cop yelled at him to get off the street. Kirtzman waved a press pass and held his ground. Im looking for Giuliani, he said. Oh, Giuliani, the cop replied. Hes over there. The mayor, covered in dust and ash, was emerging from a building on Barclay Street where he had taken cover after the first tower fell. On seeing Kirtzman, he said, Come on, Andrew, lets go! They began to walk up Church Street on what is now Giulianis iconic march north. As they walked, the second tower fell behind them. An implosion of rubble and debris. Everyone ran for cover.
Talk about a terrifying moment, Kirtzman said, helping me to re-enter the unbelievable experience of that day, its magnitude, the emotions it inspired. Zeroing in on what he saw as the source of the mayors appeal, Kirtzman said, He was the only one who was not absolutely immobilized by fear. Afterward Giuliani held a press conference where, when asked how many would die, he gave that unspeakably moving reply: The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear, ultimately.
Kirtzman is at work on a second Giuliani biography (to be published next year by Simon & Schuster), and its not hard to see why: His subjecta child of New Yorks white ethnic enclaves, with all their tribal hatreds and a cult of loyalty as fierce as that found in the honor-and-shame societies of Afghanistans frontier regionswas fascinating even as a young man. Born to a family of Italian immigrants, he grew upfirst in Brooklyn, later in Garden Cityin a world where crime and law enforcement were two sides of the same coin. He had four uncles in uniform; a fifth was a fireman. His father, Harold, was a petty criminal who, in 1934, at age 24, had been convicted of robbing a milkman at gunpoint in a Manhattan building. Later, Harold worked as a bartender at Uncle Leos loan-sharking operation. When people couldnt pay up, Harold was the guy who showed up with a baseball bat. Much of this information, including a cousin who was a junkie and another who died as a cop in the line of duty, came to light through the tremendous work of Wayne Barrett, Giulianis late biographer. These were dichotomies typical of second-generation immigrant families in the city, and it is hard to be sure how much Giuliani himself knew of the equal measures of light and shade contained within him. Certainly now, as law enforcement wraps its arms around himas this story went to press, a New York Court suspended Giulianis law license, having determined that he made false and misleading statements in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 electionthere is a special poignancy to Harold imploring the young Rudy to steer clear of a life of crime. He would say over and over, Giuliani told Time in 2001, You cant take anything thats not yours. You cant steal. Never lie, never steal. As a child and even as a young adult, I thought, What does he keep doing this for? Im not going to steal anything.
Rudy is the EPITOME of what has happened to our PUBLIC LIFE, says Joe Klein. And ITS SCARY.
The young Rudy, brimming with admiration for John F. Kennedy, was an RFK Democrat. When Hillary Clinton was still a supporter of Barry Goldwater, Giuliani was praising President Lyndon Johnsons War on Poverty and describing the writings of a member of the John Birch Society as the disgusting neurotic fantasy of a mind warped by fear and bigotry. He voted for George McGovern in 1972 but, three years later, was appointed Gerald Fords associate deputy attorney general. In 1981, under Ronald Reagan, he became the youngest associate attorney general ever. He only became a Republican, his mother, Helen, said of him, as Giulianis registration changed from Democrat to Independent to Republican, after he began to get all these jobs from them. As associate attorney general, he had a shameful record of demonizing Haitians fleeing the murderous regime of Jean-Claude Baby Doc Duvalier. By 1983, he was the youngest man ever to lead the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York (only men had led it then). He kept his lynx-eyed gaze fastened on Italian organized crime as well as white-collar crime, prosecuting the likes of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky. His youthful love of opera made him relish the more theatrical aspects of his job. He memorably perp walked Richard Wigton across the trading floor of his company in handcuffs. You dont stop violent crime by being a good fairy, Ed Hayes, who served as the model for the Tommy Killian character in Tom Wolfes The Bonfire of the Vanities, told me. Hayes, who had also grown up hard in an Irish equivalent of Giulianis Italian neighborhood, fought the mayor on behalf of a firefighters widow after 9/11 and came away with a favorable impression. He was a good mayor, Hayes said. I dont give a shit what anyone says. But recently he had run into Giuliani at Scottos, an Italian restaurant in Midtown, and was shocked by what he saw. I remember looking at him, and he didnt look the same. I said to myself, What the fuck is going on here? This is one of the great heroes in the history of New York City.
Giuliani, who almost became a priest until he discovered he had a libido, had an uncompromising sense of right and wrong that served him well as a prosecutor. After two storied terms as mayor, he launched a 2008 presidential campaign that ran into the sands. Then he disappeared into the private sector, where he made gobs of money. (My husband, in fact, was an associate at the esteemed Houston law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani, after the latter name had fallen away.) So far, so standard. We should stop here to stress that, though more colorful than most, these are the lineaments of a perfectly routine career in public life. Had Giuliani at this point vanished into the mahogany woodwork of boardrooms, Kirtzman would have had no greater task ahead of him than detailing messy divorces, the odd shady deal, a late-in-life love affair with scotch, and the diminishing returns that accrue to those who try to extract every drop of financial and political gain from a global celebrity they had only a partial hand in creating.
But now, as Giuliani comes full circle, via the Trump bypass, to be the subject of a criminal investigation led by the very same office he once led, he becomes a study of almost Dostoyevskian proportions. In him, we see some of our most ancient impulses, of power and ethics, fear and greed, dramatized. To be clearin May, Time revealed Giuliani worked with an accused Russian agent in a plot against the 2020 U.S. electionthis is a prosecutor who has come to be a danger to his personal liberty, as well as that of this country. Even if we set aside the scenes of self-abasementnow butt dialing reporters, now possibly emitting COVID-infected fecal aerosols into a crowded Michigan courtroomthis is territory unlike any other in modern times. It is incumbent upon us to try to understand how the arc of this once-impressive individual came to intersect so calamitously with this moment that were living through in America. Because as much as there is nothing mysterious (and certainly nothing tragic) in Trumps trajectory, even the most partisan observers I spoke to could not help but feel a degree of pain, sadness, and frank bewilderment at the question of what happened to Giuliani. Its inexplicable to me, said one. Frontal lobe dementia, said another. A guy with an expiration date, suggested a former associate. Ravitch said, A lot of people think he became a heavy drinker and thats why hes behaving the way he is. A close aide demurred: Its a sadder, more complicated story. Theres something wrong, theres something off. He got nothing out of this relationship. He threw away his reputation for free.
I take great issue, said someone who worked closely with Giuliani in the 1990s (lets call him Jeff), with the people who say that this is just a continuation of who he was. Thats not true. This is the tragic collapse of a great public man.
Jeff remembers someone with a steel trap of a mind who could hold briefings of three to four hours without notes, a big reader, a man capable of compassion. Jeff attended one of a series of town halls Giuliani held around the city during his first term in Canarsie, in southern Brooklyn, real Rudy country. There, an older man struggled to get his point across. Shouts of learn English and stop wasting our time rose around the packed school auditorium. Rudy shut that down right away, Jeff said, recalling the mayors words: Let me tell you something: This gentleman is an immigrant trying to ask his mayor a question. My grandfather came here. He didnt speak any English. He had a hell of a tough time. If somebody had taken the time to listen, life would perhaps have been easier for him. Im a busy guy. As busy as you may be, Im busier than you are. If I have the time to spend a few extra minutes listening to this guy finishing his thought, you do too. Giulianis reaction changed the tenor of that room. Applause ensued. Jeff was eager for me to see that, when it came to the old Rudy, there were as many stories of this kind as of the other. There was none of that Trumpian nonsense, Jeff said, adding that he found the present condition of the ex-mayor heartbreaking.
Giuliani had far more trouble being sympathetic to people from other backgrounds, especially New Yorks Black population, which in his day amounted to more than a quarter of the city. His experience with race has a certain metaphorical power too, when one considers that in America the encounter with the other so often begins at the color line. That is when we see people unlike ourselves, and when our ability to see in the experience of another a shade of our ownempathy, in a wordis truly tested. In the case of Giuliani, his racial attitudes were more than casually held prejudices, no mere extension of his upbringing but an actual vendetta, originating in his 1989 electoral loss to the citys first Black mayor, David Dinkins.
When HILLARY CLINTON was still a supporter of BARRY GOLDWATER, Giuliani was praising President Johnsons WAR ON POVERTY.
He couldnt believe he had lost to Dinkins, said Bill Bratton, who served as police commissioner under Giuliani. Bratton, who had been in the room when President Barack Obama mocked Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011an event many believe led Trump to truly set his sights on the presidency with an aim to undo Obamas legacydescribed that moment to me as the mirror image of the rage that the defeat to Dinkins produced in Giuliani. The future mayor had until then actively courted the Black vote, speaking with emotion of homeless shelters and crack babies. But Giulianis concern lasted only as long as he was allowed to play the benefactor. Confronted with losing to a Black man, his goodwill disappeared. At Giulianis party at the Roosevelt Hotel, Barrett evokes a scene that would return to haunt us: The ballroom was filled with frustrated supporters hed closed the campaign invokingwhite, male, and mad. It was also filled with ugly untruths about how Blacks had stolen the election at polls in Harlem and Bed-Stuy, where the dead had supposedly voted by the thousands.
Not only did Giuliani lack the historical imagination or the generosity of spirit needed to see the significance of New York electing its first Black mayor, what is especially revealing (given what he would later become) is that even when he had beaten Dinkins in 1993, on the issue of law and order, he could not let his animosity go. He really prevented us, Bratton said, still frustrated after all these years, from having a free hand to reach out to the Black community. The animus ran so deep that Giuliani, as mayor, didnt once attend the US Open, because that event had come to be associated with Dinkinss mayoralty. This also meant that when the truly hideous incidents of police violence occurred under Giulianithe 1997 rape of Abner Louima in a precinct bathroom by cops with the handle of a cleaning implement; Amadou Diallo, shot at 41 times in 1999 by plainclothes police officers; Patrick Dorismond, killed in 2000 by undercover officers attempting to buy drugs that Dorismond wasnt sellingthe mayor had no one in Black leadership to speak to. Nor did he seem to want to. Instead he released Dorismonds juvenile delinquency record to show that he was no altar boy. In fact he was, at the very same Catholic school that Giuliani had attended. Not surprisingly, a month after Dorismonds funeral Giulianis approval rating fell to 37 percent, with only 6 percent of Black voters approving of the job he was doing.
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How Rudy Giuliani Went From 9/11s Hallowed Mayor to 2021s Haunted Ghoul - Vanity Fair