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Shorter New Yorker Giuliani Profile

by Ryan Sager
Mon, 20 Aug 2007 at 12:16 AM
updated Mon, 20 Aug 2007 at 12:16 AM

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Shorter New Yorker Giuliani profile: .

For an awfully long profile, there's not an awful lot that's new. If you know a decent amount about Rudy Giuliani's past and have been paying vague attention to the current campaign, the profile probably represents a couple hours of your life you'd be better off hanging onto. If you want a primer, a sort of Rudy 101, sit down for a spell. Some highlights below the fold:

* On the reception Rudy's getting outside of New York: When Giuliani left Columbia, he travelled to Charleston, where a group of prosperous-looking potential donors and political insiders were waiting to see him. A closed-door meeting, in a private room at a restaurant called Magnolia's, was scheduled for 1 P.M. But at that moment Giuliani's caravan, including the candidate, in a black S.U.V., and his security team and campaign staff, was creeping through traffic in the busy Market Center of the old city, several blocks away. It was a warm, bright day, and the streets were jammed. Giuliani asked his driver to stop. He got out and started walking toward the restaurant. He was immediately mobbed. "Give her a run for her money, Mayor!" one woman screamed, feeling no need to mention Hillary Clinton by name. A tourist carriage rolled by, and the driver shouted, "Hey, Mayor! I've got three votes for you right here!" Giuliani—wearing his signature dark suit, white dress shirt, and tie—signed autographs, posed for pictures, and even knelt on the sidewalk to be photographed with a dog. "That's our next President, right there," said Chris Workman, a Myrtle Beach firefighter and former McCain supporter, who had chatted with Giuliani with a dip of snuff bulging from his lip.

* On why Rudy's appeal goes much deeper than 9/11: But to many in the heartland Giuliani was heroic for what he did in New York before September 11th: his policy prescriptions and, mostly, his taming of the city's liberal political culture—his famous crackdown on squeegee-men panhandlers, his workfare program, his attacks on controversial museum exhibits ("The idea of . . . so-called works of art in which people are throwing elephant dung at a picture of the Virgin Mary is sick!"), and the like. Speaking before the Alabama legislature this spring, he received a standing ovation, and Governor Bob Riley told him, "One of these days, you have to tell me how you really cleaned up New York." To conservatives, pre-Giuliani New York was a study in failed liberalism, a city that had surrendered to moral and physical decay, crime, racial hucksterism, and ruinous economic pathologies. Perhaps the most common words that Giuliani heard when he travelled around the country this spring were epithets aimed at his city ("a crime-infested cesspool," one Southern politician declared), offered without fear of giving offense. Giuliani cheerfully agreed.

* On Rudy's early life as a Yankee fan: Over the years, Giuliani has often spoken of his childhood in Brooklyn, giving special place to a story about the discordance of growing up a Yankees fan in the shadow of Ebbets Field. His father, Harold, a Yankees partisan from East Harlem, once dressed young Rudy in Yankee pinstripes and sent him out to play in the Dodger-mad streets of Brooklyn. Too young to have any say in the matter, Rudy was set upon by the neighborhood toughs, Dodger fans all. A gang of boys seized him, placed a noose around his neck, and threatened to lynch him. (His grandmother intervened.) In one recounting, to John Tierney, of the Times, a dozen years ago, Giuliani said that the incident was his proudest moment, because he refused to renounce his team. "I kept telling them: ‘I am a Yankee fan. I am a Yankee fan. I'm gonna stay a Yankee fan,' " he recounted. "To me it was like being a martyr: I'm not gonna give up my religion. You're not gonna change me."

* On Rudy's father's criminal associations: Harold had dropped out of school at fifteen, worked briefly as a plumber's helper, and hung out on the streets, where his violent temper earned him the reputation of a brawler. Harold was arrested for burglary and sentenced to probation by the Children's Court, and in 1934, at the height of the Depression, he and an accomplice set upon a Borden's milkman as he was making a morning collection call, robbing him, at gunpoint, of $128.82. The accomplice escaped, but Harold was captured at the scene. He was convicted of third-degree burglary and entered Sing Sing Prison, as inmate No. 89183. Harold Giuliani was paroled after serving nearly sixteen months, and he remained a parolee for the first two years of his marriage. His conviction disqualified him for the draft, and he went to work with his brother-in-law Leo D'Avanzo, who had just bought the tavern on Kingston Avenue. D'Avanzo was a hoodlum with Mob connections, and his establishment was a front for various rackets. Harold, who tended bar, doubled as his enforcer.

* On Rudy's racial legacy in New York: Avoidance of Sharpton may be a defensible posture, but Giuliani seemed to have concluded early on that he would never overcome the black community's antipathy, and he invested little personal capital in the effort. The gulf widened because of aggressive new tactics used by the N.Y.P.D., such as a new emphasis on stop-and-frisk searches, and Giuliani's few allies in the black community found it increasingly difficult to defend him. When controversial police shootings stirred racial unrest, he seemed reflexively eager to leap to the defense of the cops. After an unarmed black security guard, Patrick Dorismond, was shot and killed by undercover narcotics officers, in March of 2000, Giuliani sanctioned the release of Dorismond's juvenile arrest record and suggested that Dorismond wasn't "an altar boy." (Dorismond actually had been an altar boy, and had attended Giuliani's old high school, Bishop Loughlin.) When Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, was arrested and then brutalized by a group of cops, in 1997, he claimed that one of the attackers had menacingly declared, "This is Giuliani time!" Afterward, Louima, who won the largest-ever police-brutality settlement against the city ($8.75 million), said that he had fabricated that part of the story—but its resonance lingered.

* On Rudy's messy personal life: OK, this section is too long to quote here.

* On Rudy and gun control: Yet Giuliani's past gun-control positions suggested the passion of heartfelt advocacy. He not only enforced existing laws; he lobbied for new regulations, and was the first Republican mayor to join other cities in taking gun manufacturers to court in a strategy that mimicked the anti-tobacco lawsuits meant to take down the big tobacco companies. When President Clinton signed the crime bill banning assault weapons, in 1994, Giuliani attended the White House ceremony and sat in the front row. That ban has since expired, and I asked Giuliani if he would support its renewal. "I think assault weapons would fall into the category of things that you could reasonably look at to prohibit," he said. "But I'd really prefer to see that done on a state-by-state basis."

* On Rudy and illegal immigration: Hard-liners on illegal immigration criticized Giuliani for his policies in New York, where he instructed city employees—including cops—not to coöperate with federal I.N.S. agents looking for illegal aliens. Today, Giuliani says that the I.N.S. was wasting resources by chasing after "cooks and gardeners," and that he was worried that illegal immigrants would stop coöperating with police during criminal investigations if they were afraid of being deported, but his heart is plainly on the side of those who have come to this country illegally in order to work, or to build new lives for their families, and he intuitively sympathizes with any immigration plan that would ultimately find such people a place in society. His own immigration-policy plans, framed as a national-security issue, were not different in any meaningful way from the compromise bill that consumed Congress this spring, except that he wanted every illegal resident to come forward for a tamper-proof identity card before getting in line for citizenship. It was, in essence, another form of amnesty, with a few extra requirements—besides getting their I.D.s, the immigrants would have to learn English, and they would have to go to the back of the line. When I asked him if he would support the compromise legislation if it contained a provision for tamper-proof identity cards, he said, "If we could get the I.D., it would make the rest of it work for me."

* Rudy on Bill Bratton [the police commissioner he fired for fear of having to share the spotlight]: "I mean, I don't know if it's the effect of having been the mayor for eight years, of going through prostate cancer, or having a personal life that's much happier, or if it's September 11th—maybe it's a combination of all those things, and just getting older and wiser," he said. "But you sort of look back on some of the things and say, that was an extraordinarily productive relationship. . . . I mean, we took a city that nobody believed could be turned around with regard to crime, and really did turn it around. That's not like a political slogan. We really did it. Now that I look back on it, I really appreciate the relationship."

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