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Giuliani's Defiant Streak Showed Up As A Toddler. It's Still There

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By Nancy Benac / The Associated Press

Published: December 29, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) - Rudy Giuliani minces no words and suffers no fools. He eats peanuts with the shells still on.

"I don't wink and nod," he says. "I am a very direct person."

It is a statement of the obvious — an understatement, really — to any New Yorker who lived through Giuliani's years as mayor, and one the rest of the nation still is coming to understand.

The boy from Brooklyn who got his first boxing gloves as a toddler and developed a passion for opera at age 6 is a man of contradictions.

He is the leader whose steadiness and compassion helped bring calm after 9/11, and whose volcanic eruptions of pique have come to be known as the "full Rudy."

He is the law-and-order archetype who loves "The Godfather" and doing Mafioso impersonations.

He is the man of a thousand insults who imposed a civility campaign on in-your-face New Yorkers.

He is the man who dreamed of becoming a priest and has worked his way up to three marriages.

There is an operatic quality to Giuliani's story, with its twisting plot lines, heroes and villains, optimism and despair. And, there is plenty of passion and conflict.

Giuliani, it seems, wakes up every morning looking to pick a fight that he can win, a welcome quality when the bad guys are clear-cut but less admirable when they're not.

Targets have ranged from the windshield squeegee men who intimidated New York motorists to the police chief who helped to tame the city's crime problem (and got too much of the credit, in Giuliani's view).

Now, Giuliani is in his biggest fight ever — the race for the presidency — and at age 63, a new scene is unfolding.

The story so far: An only child is born to doting yet demanding parents. The boy is smart and hardworking, and thrives in the moral exactitude of a Catholic education. The JFK Democrat restyles himself as a Reagan Republican. His pursuit of the law is a natural fit. His career in politics, a more hard-fought endeavor that brings him both acclaim and contempt.

All this is largely forgotten when the Twin Towers fall.

Asked to predict the death toll, Giuliani answers with his heart rather than his head:

"The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear ultimately."

In those dark moments, Giuliani draws on the best that is in him.

But that is to leap ahead in the story.

———

The '40s:

Rudolph William Louis Giuliani's first memories involve combat, of sorts. He was born May 28, 1944, in Brooklyn, within earshot of Ebbets Field, undisputedly Dodgers territory. Rudy's father, Harold, dressed him in a Yankees uniform, a dangerous anomaly in that part of town. "That experience has something to do with my character and personality," Giuliani said years later. "I had to physically defend myself from neighborhood kids."

Giuliani's father, a plumber turned bartender, gave his son boxing gloves; his mother's gift, no less challenging, was her high expectations.

"If you came home with a 90, she'd say, 'How come it's not 95?'" Giuliani recalled. "If you got 100, 'How come you didn't get all 100s?'"

Giuliani still recalls how his father drilled into him the importance of doing right. He didn't learn until decades later that before his father preached rectitude, he had served time in Sing-Sing in the 1930s for robbing a milkman.

———

The '50s:

Jack O'Leary may be one of the few people who slapped Rudy Giuliani around and lived to tell.

O'Leary, then known as Brother Kevin, was Giuliani's home room teacher during his sophomore year at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn, an all-scholarship school that took only the best from New York's parishes.

O'Leary remembers Giuliani as a good and happy kid who on occasion would talk out of turn. One day, that got him the kind of discipline that was typical in a Catholic secondary school.

"I slapped Rudy across the face," O'Leary, 73, remembers with chagrin. "A quick slap on both sides of his face."

A year later, Giuliani's parents sought out Brother Kevin at a school open house and couldn't thank him enough for getting their son back in line. They invited him out to Long Island for dinner, where Rudy and Brother Kevin discovered their shared love of opera.

Soon Bishop Loughlin, famous for its athletes, had its own Opera Society, founded by Giuliani. "Once he left, it died," says Brother Peter Benventre, 79, who was assistant principal then. "How many kids that age love opera, let's face it."

———

The '60s:

Giuliani graduated from Bishop Loughlin in the spring of 1961, voted "class politician" by schoolmates. He signed up to become a priest, but decided he liked girls more than piety. He enrolled in premed, but decided he liked ideas more than biology.

It would be the law, then. And even if Giuliani didn't know it yet, his father surely knew he was a young man going places.

At Manhattan College, Giuliani ran for president of his fraternity. Sal Scarpato, Giuliani's rival, remembers Harold Giuliani calling to ask him to drop out.

"He said that Rudy was going to go further than I was, and it was going to look better on his resume," says Scarpato, who speculates Rudy wouldn't have approved of his father's call. Scarpato didn't drop out; Rudy won anyway.

One summer, Giuliani interned at a New York law firm. He rode the train in from Long Island each day with fellow intern Peter King, now a Republican congressman from New York and a friend. They talked politics — argued, really — on the way. Giuliani was still a Kennedy Democrat.

"You couldn't talk politics with Rudy without arguing," King remembers. "He was just an argumentative guy."

———

The 70s:

Giuliani landed as an assistant in the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, a premier office for a young prosecutor. Michael Mukasey, a fellow assistant attorney, hadn't been there long when Mukasey's father died.

"I remember looking up at the funeral and seeing a bunch of assistants and others from the office who he had rounded up and brought," says Mukasey, who recently became the nation's attorney general. "I was just incredibly moved by it. He hardly knew me."

Giuliani distinguished himself with his quick legal mind, and as a demanding but fair prosecutor, "open to creativity, willing to think anew about a topic," in the recollections of Kenneth Feinberg, who worked under him. Feinberg and Giuliani hummed arias, trying to stump one another in an ongoing opera trivia competition.

Bob Leuci, a detective who spent years helping the prosecutors to uncover police corruption, developed a friendship with Giuliani but saw a "hardening" set in. Rudy, husky as a boy, had slimmed down, become more popular, and more fearsome.

Nuances gave way to black and white. Giuliani was so sure of himself he seemed to listen with one ear shut, Leuci recalls.

"As time went on, he had less patience for people who made mistakes in their lives," said Leuci. "If you were wrong, you were wrong. Period."

Leuci, who eventually admitted to his own comparatively small misdeeds as a cop, remembers Giuliani's devastating courtroom interrogation of a corrupt detective.

"He just ate him up," says Leuci, recalling how Giuliani flashed him a smile in the courtroom. "He liked to pound people."

Giuliani voted for George McGovern in 1972, but says he knew in his heart he was no longer a Democrat. He reregistered as an independent, then a few years later signed up as a Republican, in time to vote for Gerald Ford.

———

The '80s:

Giuliani turned up as the No. 3 man at the Justice Department in 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office. Ted Olson, the future solicitor general, was a few steps below Giuliani in the pecking order, and remembers him as dynamic, likable — "the kind of person you'd not only want to work with but the kind of person you'd want to go out with for a pizza at night."

Others saw glimpses of "the Full Rudy." Michael Lubin, a young prosecutor in the department's criminal fraud section, dared to send Giuliani an accusatory letter questioning his decision to meet with a corporate lawyer whose company was under investigation. Giuliani called in Lubin and a colleague for what Lubin remembers 25 years later as the rants of a "madman" that went on for 20 minutes.

"He just went off on a tirade," Lubin remembers. "It was just yelling, screaming, not allowing us to talk."

"He's tough in a way that you can respect him," says Lubin, "but he's also a street-fighter who goes off the deep end."

Giuliani, who oversaw the replacement of U.S. attorneys around the country, got the idea to fill the U.S. attorney's slot in New York himself.

His mother dismissed the move as a demotion, but Giuliani turned it into the ticket to stardom.

His prosecutions of the mob, white collar criminals and public corruption made him front-page material, and his PR machine milked every opportunity for what it was worth — sometimes more.

Giuliani once pulled on a Hell's Angels leather vest and sunglasses to make a cocaine buy in Manhattan with Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, also dressed for undercover work. The stunt drew ridicule.

———

The '90s:

A Republican running New York City? In a city where Democrats outnumbered Republicans five-to-one, Giuliani himself had once regarded Republicans as "morally inferior."

On his second run for mayor, Giuliani convinced New Yorkers he was the cure for a city so sick that Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had described it as "defining deviancy down."

Once sworn in, he immediately set about picking fights — and winning.

His achievements were the stuff of lore — crime down 56 percent, welfare rolls slashed nearly 60 percent, taxes cut 23 times. So was his domineering style and petulance. He was the mayor-on-steroids who seemingly never slept: 1 a.m. meetings were followed by 7 a.m. TV appearances. Fires, collapsed buildings, plane crashes, it was Rudy to the rescue.

When TWA Flight 800 crashed in the waters off Long Island in July 1996, Giuliani held vigil through the night with family members awaiting word on their loved ones, eventually going person to person to share the names of those who had died.

Until the staggering death toll on 9/11 made it impossible, he attended the funeral of anyone killed in the line of duty in the city.

Longtime friend and former congressman Guy Molinari remembers telling Giuliani at one point: "'Rudy, you can't do this kind of thing where you're into every single detail of what's happening in a city as large as ours.' He didn't really answer me, but that's what he continued to do."

Giuliani sweated the smallest details. When he decided to take up smoking cigars again, Giuliani studied the history of what he calls this "exquisite vice." When he went to a Yankees game, he didn't leave before the last out.

Things were getting done. But as time went on, vexations grew. Giuliani's relations with minorities, strained at the beginning, got worse. He refused even to meet with top black officials; his tight circle of advisers came to be regarded as a super-loyal coterie of "yes-Rudys." His enemies list grew longer by the day.

Peter Vallone, who worked well with Giuliani as the Democratic president of the city council and counts him a friend, says the mayor gradually came to understand that it's easier to work with others than against them. But still he acknowledges Giuliani's "mean streak."

Former Mayor Ed Koch offered this telling reassurance to black leaders in the city: "He is not a racist. He is nasty to everyone."

Giuliani's outbursts against critics — in which he often questioned their mental state — led some to question his own stability. His 1999 radio diatribe against a ferret-rights activist, whom he dismissed as "deranged" and sick, has become something of a cult classic.

Mark Green, a liberal Democrat who served as the city's public advocate when Giuliani was mayor, captures both sides of the Giuliani coin:

"He was unusually hardworking, smart, competent," Green begins, finishing the list with a different tone: "authoritarian, divisive and interpersonally imperialistic."

Giuliani shrugs off criticism of his operating style, pointing to the results.

"If they just wanted a nice guy they would have stayed with Dinkins," he once said, referring to his predecessor, David Dinkins.

The appetite for publicity that Giuliani displayed as a prosecutor only grew when he was mayor.

William Bratton, the police chief who played a huge role in slashing New York's crime rate, was forced out after receiving what Giuliani felt was too much acclaim for New York's turnaround. When Bratton was pictured on the cover of Time wearing a trench coat with an upturned collar against an icy wind off the East River, his fate was sealed.

"Nice trench coat," Giuliani told him.

After that, Bratton wrote in his memoir, "It was death by a thousand cuts: ethics investigations, constant headlines, meddling micromanagement, leaks, delays, disrespect."

Giuliani says changing commissioners took the fight against crime to the next level.

"Life can get rancorous," Giuliani wrote in his book. "This is not always a bad thing."

But even New Yorkers grew tired of Giuliani's schtick.

———

2000:

In a rare case of understatement, Giuliani describes the year 2000 as an "interesting phase" in his life.

Deep into a second mayoral term that was running out of gas, Giuliani was gearing up for a new kind of donnybrook: a Rudy-vs.-Hillary run for the Senate. His second marriage was crumbling. (Marriage No. 1, to his second cousin, had been annulled after 14 years.) And he then he found out he had prostate cancer, the disease that had killed his father at age 73.

It all seemed to collide in an only-in-New York news conference in which Giuliani discussed his cancer diagnosis, spoke publicly of his "very good friend" (and future wife) Judith Nathan and left open the door to pulling out of the Senate race.

And, for good measure, he tossed out the news that he was seeking a legal separation from Donna Hanover — in effect informing his wife via news conference that their marriage was over. The ensuing divorce battle took on a soap opera quality as Giuliani unleashed a pit-bull lawyer who described the mother of his two children as "howling like a stuck pig" and speculated she would have to be pried "screaming, scratching, and kicking" off the chandelier at Gracie Mansion.

The bitter breakup and Giuliani's subsequent marriage to Nathan have left relations between Giuliani and his two children — Andrew, 21, and Caroline, 18 — strained at best. His campaign Web site biography makes no mention of his children.

Giuliani pulled out of the Senate race to focus on fighting the cancer, and tackled the disease with the same outta-here attitude he had used to muscle mobsters and squeegee guys.

He was still mayor, and "having to perform — being needed — got me through," he recalled. He'd moved out of Gracie Mansion by then and taken refuge at the luxury apartment of Howard Koeppel, an openly gay friend, and Koeppel's companion.

Koeppel happily dished out public glimpses of domestic life for the threesome and pet Shi Tzu, Bonnie: Giuliani let Koeppel pick out his ties; Koeppel and his partner sometimes got a peck on the cheek from the mayor as he headed off to work.

———

Sept. 11, 2001

Giuliani was having breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel with an aide and a friend when first word came that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. He sped toward the scene, the gravity of the situation worsening as his Chevy Suburban flew south.

As he rounded a corner and got his first view of the damage, Giuliani saw a man jump from the North Tower, then others following.

The horrors only grew from there, and Giuliani and a contingent of aides found themselves fleeing northward on foot as first one and then the other tower collapsed. Fire Commissioner Tom Von Essen remembers Giuliani, his face caked with dust, advising passers-by to "keep walking north" and coaching them to "take it easy, just keep walking."

In the hours and days that followed, Giuliani drew on advice his father had often given him: In a crisis, "be the calmest person in the room."

Peter King, the New York congressman, remembers running into Giuliani at one of the scores of funerals the mayor attended in those awful days and marveling at how controlled Giuliani had been throughout the ordeal.

"I'm sure if you put a blood pressure machine on him it would've been 120 over 80," says King.

The righteous certainty that had grated on New Yorkers in earlier days was now what they wanted.

Oprah dubbed him America's Mayor. Queen Elizabeth knighted him. Time named him Person of the Year.

Exit stage left, Giuliani the political pariah; enter stage right, Giuliani the stuff of presidential speculation.

"He went from someone widely regarded as a Nixon-like figure on September 10th to a Churchill-like figure on September 12th," says Green.

———

After 9/11

The mayor, whose term was to expire less than four months after the 9/11 attacks, began to think of himself as indispensable. He floated the notion of an emergency three-month extension, but the idea was a nonstarter.

The overreach was quickly forgotten. And once out of office, Giuliani leveraged his 9/11 performance into a lucrative speaking career, a best-selling book called "Leadership" and an expanding network of law and consulting clients.

His appearances on the "Get Motivated!" speaking circuit routinely drew him $100,000 and helped keep his 9/11 credentials burnished. He was a big draw at fundraisers for GOP candidates and a high-wattage speaker at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Asked in 2002 whether he would run for office again himself, Giuliani told one interviewer: "I'm going to let that decision come into focus in the next year or two. The possibilities are far more exciting that way."

Gradually, though, questions grew about Giuliani's leadership related to events before and after 9/11: whether he had done enough to equip firefighters for such a crisis, why he didn't do more to protect the health of workers at Ground Zero and whether he should have known better than to put the city's command center in the World Trade Center complex.

In May 2004, when Giuliani appeared before the bipartisan commission investigating the 9/11 attacks, its members lavished him with praise, but supporters and detractors of the former mayor engaged in a shouting match from the audience.

"The questioning of Mayor Giuliani was a low point in terms of the commission's questioning of witnesses at our public hearings," the commission chairmen, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, later wrote in their book about the investigation. "We did not ask tough questions, nor did we get all of the information we needed to put on the public record."

The questions linger even today, but Giuliani's performance during the ordeal remains the cornerstone of his presidential persona.

Two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Giuliani was in his element — a night at the opera.

His appearance at the Metropolitan Opera's benefit performance for 9/11 victims brought Giuliani a standing ovation that any leading man would welcome. Or, for that matter, any presidential candidate.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.

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