Giuliani resigned from his prosecutor position in January and began campaigning for mayor of New York City. This marked the first time a Republican had been elected to the office since He would go on to easily win reelection in During his eight years in office, violent crime was cut roughly in half and murders went down an astounding 67 percent.
Moreover, he implemented a computer-based crime measurement system called CompStat that was later replicated by police departments nationwide. He supported gay rights, gun control and abortion rights while mayor. Critics, meanwhile, accused the mayor of aggravating race relations, of valuing loyalty over competence in his subordinates, of self-promotion and of supporting questionable policing tactics. Tensions particularly heated up after four white plainclothes detectives gunned down unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo in March Giuliani also stirred up controversy by dismantling an affirmative action program for minority and women contractors, trimming hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers from the welfare rolls and trying to defund the Brooklyn Museum because of an exhibit he considered anti-Catholic.
In , Giuliani ran for the U. Senate against first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. He withdrew that May, however, after being diagnosed with prostate cancer and after reports surfaced that he was having an extramarital affair with drug company executive Judith Nathan.
He wed Nathan in —it was the third marriage for both—following an acrimonious divorce from his second wife, with whom he had two children, Caroline and Andrew Giuliani. Giuliani immediately took charge of rescue and recovery efforts, acting decisively and with poise under pressure to calm the city. Barred by term limits from running for a third term, Giuliani actively sought an unprecedented extension of at least three months. State and city legislators refused to consider his request, however, and on January 1, , billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg replaced him as mayor.
In February of , Giuliani announced that he was campaigning for the Republican nomination for president in the election against Mitt Romney and John McCain. He came in third in the Florida primaries, a death knell for his campaign.
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. 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 presidential campaign that ran into the sands. Then he disappeared into the private sector, where he made gobs of money. 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 clear—in May, Time revealed Giuliani worked with an accused Russian agent in a plot against the U. Even if we set aside the scenes of self-abasement—now butt dialing reporters, now possibly emitting COVID-infected fecal aerosols into a crowded Michigan courtroom—this is territory unlike any other in modern times.
He got nothing out of this relationship. He threw away his reputation for free. This is the tragic collapse of a great public man. My grandfather came here. He had a hell of a tough time. If somebody had taken the time to listen, life would perhaps have been easier for him.
If I have the time to spend a few extra minutes listening to this guy finishing his thought, you do too. 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. That is when we see people unlike ourselves, and when our ability to see in the experience of another a shade of our own—empathy, in a word—is truly tested.
The future mayor had until then actively courted the Black vote, speaking with emotion of homeless shelters and crack babies. Confronted with losing to a Black man, his goodwill disappeared. 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 , on the issue of law and order, he could not let his animosity go. Nor did he seem to want to. The fashion today is to say that crime was falling anyway, that the crack epidemic was burning itself out, and that Giuliani was merely the beneficiary of conditions beyond his control.
Homicides in the city of 2, murders a year went down by 90 percent and continued, save for one year, to drop every year through that decade. That these same policies later had terrible excesses is another story. They no longer traveled in graffiti-covered trains, in which homeless men slept across the seats and peddlers hawked ragged copies of Street News. It did not. In August , he had a roughly 50 percent approval rating in a city that was six-to-one Democrat. As the city grew safer, cleaner, and more prosperous, its mayor had grown increasingly erratic and unstable.
There was the separation from his wife, Donna, which Giuliani sadistically announced at a press conference. There was the very public affair with Judith Nathan, his next wife who would become his ex-wife. Two terms on, fatigue had set in.
The magazine sued and won. Two decades later, Giuliani is in free fall. The past few years on the national stage have left his reputation in tatters, marked in history for his role in the Ukraine extortion scandal that got a president impeached. He has seemed, at times, unstable and incoherent, contradicting both himself and the president in wild appearances on cable news, while spinning a web of conspiracy theories with Joe Biden at the center.
A bit older at 76 as of May 28th , sure, but still the same brash maverick he always was, and anybody who says otherwise has an ax to grind. But others, even those with a deep affinity for Rudy, have been stunned as a man they barely recognize pokes at his iPad in Fox News interviews or drools through a boozy lunch with a reporter. Now, the U. How did this successful former prosecutor, New York City mayor, and national hero land so far on the wrong side of public opinion, history, and possibly the law?
How did he become so completely beholden to Donald Trump , a man Giuliani once refused to let buy him breakfast? And why is he still pursuing a Ukraine investigation that has been both discredited and damaging for Rudy and his boss? He loved the fame. He loved it when he walked in and everybody takes pictures. Giuliani declined numerous opportunities to comment for this story. Lev has been caught in so many lies no objective journalist would use him as a source.
And yet, time and again, he has been undone by his all-too-human failings. Almost 20 years ago , while President George W. He remained a calm and unwavering presence, even as he knew that close friends lay buried in the rubble of the World Trade Center.
He was extraordinary. Long before September 11th, Giuliani made a name for himself as a rising young star in the U. Justice Department. He still loves to tell the story of the trial of Rep. Bertram Podell, when he delivered a cross-examination so withering that Podell broke down on the stand and changed his plea to guilty. In , during the Reagan administration, Giuliani became the youngest person ever to hold the Number Three job in the Justice Department.
Often using bare-knuckle tactics, Giuliani took down symbols of Eighties excess on Wall Street like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, and he spearheaded prosecution of the Mafia.
After his first campaign for mayor, in , failed, he won four years later with more vitriol. But harnessing outer-borough anger at Manhattan liberals was a key to victory that, in retrospect, was an ominous preview of the resentments that Trump would later stoke on a national scale.
After early successes as a crime-busting mayor, Giuliani became deeply unpopular during a disastrous second term, as his successes were overshadowed by outrage over police brutality and racism.
By , his personal life was in shambles, too. He saw his new status as a springboard for national power, including the White House. First, however, he set to the task of getting very, very rich.
As a prosecutor and then as a mayor, Giuliani had been a frugal man who walked around on hole-ridden shoes. He brought takeout for City Hall secretaries and ate with them. With the new wife came a new jet-set lifestyle and, critically, new people around him. Giuliani once described his greatest skill as his ability to surround himself with the right people. It was a lifestyle in search of an income, and there was no shortage of businesses and foreign governments willing to throw money at Giuliani and his new consultancy, Giuliani Partners.
Another client was Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, which paid Giuliani and his firm millions to convince the government that the company did nothing wrong when it aggressively marketed the pain pills that have claimed countless lives during the opioid crisis. Giuliani also returned to the practice of law.
Giuliani as a young U. According to published reports, Giuliani failed to attend a single meeting. By then, Rudy was running for president. His biggest point of pride became a punchline for satirists, late-night comedians, and Joe Biden. Per multiple sources, Giuliani has never forgotten the remark.
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