Old Habits

How the Giuliani method may defeat him.

by Elizabeth Kolbert
January 7, 2008

In a normal season, losing all the early contests would almost certainly end a candidacy.


Though he is not especially funny, Rudy Giuliani likes to begin with a joke. “Did you know that I’m running for President of the United States?” he asked at a recent house party in Windham, New Hampshire. “Did I tell you that?” His hosts, Al and Patti Letizio, and their friends cheered. “I’m running because I believe that the country needs strong leadership for the future.”

Giuliani advised the Letizios and their neighbors to look at what he calls his Twelve Commitments. In June, also in New Hampshire, he had laid out these commitments, which range from “I will keep America on offense in the Terrorists’ War on Us” (No. 1) to “I will expand America’s involvement in the global economy and strengthen our reputation around the world” (No. 12). Giuliani carries the list on a laminated card the size of a driver’s license; he says that he will keep the card on his desk in the Oval Office.

“The goals that we have, they’re big goals,” he said. “They’re very difficult things to do. They’re very difficult things to accomplish. And they’re things, quite frankly, that America in the past hasn’t been able to accomplish.

“There are some people who believe that this country is declining,” he went on. “There are some people who believe that we’re going in the wrong direction. Well, you know something? They’re wrong! And we can make them wrong, by making the right choices. By making the right choices about our leadership. Because this is about leadership.”

After a while, it was time for questions. The first came from a man in a Patriots sweatshirt, which led Giuliani to muse about his own favorite team, the Giants, which in turn led the man to rib him about the Yankees. The second came from a woman who wanted to know more about Commitment No. 6, which deals with energy. How, she asked, did Giuliani plan to make the country “energy independent”?

“This is where we really need a leader,” he told her. “We need somebody who can do the impossible. Now, I say that because I did this a lot in New York.”

Depending on whether you count his abortive race for the U.S. Senate in 2000, this is either Giuliani’s fourth or his fifth political campaign. In the earlier races, his goal was to persuade New Yorkers to vote for a Republican; this time around, it’s to persuade Republicans to vote for a New Yorker. Gone are the “Godfather” imitations, the snapping at the press, and the praise for immigration (“the single most important reason for American greatness”). The candidate who stopped by the Letizios’, and before that had coffee at Suzie’s Diner, in Hudson, and before that went on a holiday stroll in Nashua, where he waited in line to buy a Christmas ornament of a moose, is a less ethnic, less impatient, and more conservative candidate than voters in Brooklyn and the Bronx ever knew. This Giuliani invokes Ronald Reagan, smiles—or tries to—at children, and pledges to “secure our borders and identify every non-citizen in the nation.”

And yet the logic of his new campaign is—mutatis mutandis—the same as that of the old. Once again, Giuliani is in the awkward situation of wanting to represent a group of people whose views he does not actually represent. Once again, appeals based on “values” or personal history are closed to him. (Fourteen years ago—before he had appeared in drag, or ditched his second wife on TV, or met his third wife at a cigar bar—a “vulnerability study” commissioned by his staff noted that Giuliani’s “personal life raises questions about a ‘weirdness factor.’ ”) And so, once again, Giuliani is left to campaign on the basis of a single, strongly held idea: a great-leader theory of history, in which the great leader happens to be himself.

Mayors of New York have often seen themselves as singularly suited for higher office. “It’s the second-toughest job in America!” according to John Lindsay’s famous slogan. Giuliani likes to say that having run the city “is about as good a preparation for being President as exists”—an assessment that, not surprisingly, is much the same as the one offered by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has flirted with running as an Independent. (In 2000, when Bill Clinton was rumored to be thinking of entering the New York mayoral race, his press secretary inverted Lindsay’s formula, observing that the President “already has the second-toughest job in American politics—why would he want the toughest?”)

Yet what seems self-evident to New York mayors has rarely seemed that way to voters. The last mayor to make it even as far as Albany was John T. Hoffman, who, with the help of Boss Tweed, became governor in 1869. (Briefly, Mayor William J. Gaynor seemed headed for state or national office, but he died in 1913, before his prospects could be tested.) During Lindsay’s Presidential run, in 1972, he thought that the support of retired New Yorkers living in Florida would help him win that state’s primary, and thus the Democratic nomination; instead, he finished fifth out of seven, and dropped out of the race shortly thereafter. Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, reportedly turned the mayoralty-is-the-second-toughest-job slogan against Lindsay, saying, “It probably is, the way he does it.”

Giuliani filed his “statement of candidacy” with the Federal Election Commission on February 5, 2007, and nine days later told Larry King, “Yes, I’m running.” (He never delivered a formal announcement speech.) The field he entered was a jumble. John McCain, thanks to his moderate stand on immigration, had alienated much of the Republican Party’s base. Mitt Romney hadn’t figured out how, as a Mormon, to appeal to evangelical Christians. Mike Huckabee had figured out how to appeal to evangelical Christians, but (or perhaps because) he didn’t believe in evolution. (“If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, that’s fine,” Huckabee said after an early debate. “I’ll accept that. I just don’t happen to think that I did.”)

Giuliani’s campaign got off to a bumpy start; a lengthy internal campaign memo, citing potentially “insurmountable” personal and political vulnerabilities, was leaked to the News. The campaign righted itself—Giuliani led the Republican field in second- and third-quarter fund-raising—only to run into trouble again. In November came the indictment of his former police commissioner Bernard Kerik, on sixteen counts of fraud, tax evasion, and making false statements. That was followed by the revelation that Giuliani’s consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, had done business with, among others, the son of a Macao gambling tycoon reputed to have ties to Chinese organized crime, and the news that some of the security expenses for his then-mistress-now-wife, Judith Nathan, were initially billed to obscure New York City agencies, like the Office for People with Disabilities. (Giuliani has said that the billing was done this way to speed up payments, a claim that several current and former city officials told me they found implausible.) In recent weeks, Giuliani’s numbers in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have been sinking, and his once comfortable lead in the national polls has vanished. It now seems possible that he will emerge from the first three major contests with three third-place finishes, or worse.

In a normal primary season—if such a thing can be said to exist—losing all the early contests would almost certainly end a candidacy. It is the Giuliani camp’s stated belief that this will not be a normal season. California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey have moved up their primaries to February 5th, or “super-duper Tuesday,” as it has become known. Florida has moved up its primary even farther, to January 29th. Until a few weeks ago, Giuliani enjoyed a wide lead in the polls in Florida, and while all the other candidates have been camped out in Sioux City and Manchester he has been spending an unusual amount of time in places like Tampa. “Our strategy from the beginning has been an eight-, nine-inning game,” Giuliani recently told reporters. “I call it a proportionate strategy.” A presentation prepared for Giuliani volunteers, which was obtained by the Washington Post, declares, “Florida is the firewall,” and offers a list of “key coalitions” for the former mayor in the state; these include Italian-Americans, first responders, and—shades of John Lindsay—transplanted Northeasterners.

In January of 2001, Giuliani signed, for a reported $2.7 million, a two-book deal with Talk Miramax Books. The first book, according to Publishers Weekly, was to be a memoir that would “deal frankly” with Giuliani’s family background, his career, and “his struggles between wife and lover.” One can only imagine what such a memoir would have related, because so far the only book to appear, “Leadership,” is the one that was supposed to come second.

“Leadership” is written in the style of a self-help guide for those with superior judgment. “Accept that maybe you really do know better and can see a little further down the road than others,” Giuliani writes. Like most books by politicians, it is self-protective and, precisely because of that, self-revealing. Its chapters are headed by organizational maxims, like “Prepare Relentlessly” and “Be Your Own Man,” and mix truisms (“Leaders must find a balance between speed and deliberation”) with anecdotes that illustrate how Giuliani put the principle into practice. In the chapter titled “Reflect, Then Decide,” Giuliani relates at length how he chose a course of treatment for his prostate cancer—he opted for radiation seed implants and external radiation—and also how he chose the physician to implant the seeds. (The doctor’s method reminded him of innovations in crime-fighting.) In the chapter titled “First Things First,” he tells how he got rid of the squeegee men. (It turned out that many of them had outstanding warrants.) And in “Surround Yourself with Great People” Giuliani describes the process by which, in August, 2000, he picked Kerik to be the city’s fortieth police commissioner.

The obvious candidate for the job was the Police Department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, Joe Dunne. In Giuliani’s words, Dunne was a “cop’s cop,” and he was being recommended by the outgoing commissioner, Howard Safir, and by many of the Mayor’s other advisers. But Giuliani was torn. During the 1993 mayoral campaign, Kerik, a detective, had volunteered to drive him around the city on weekends, and Giuliani had subsequently made him commissioner of the Corrections Department. Although Kerik lacked some obvious credentials for the position of police commissioner—among them a college degree—Giuliani decided that he would be the better choice. “The reasons I picked Bernie are complicated, and boil down to factors of chemistry and feel,” he writes. “As I told Joe, if I had known him as long as I’d known Bernie, it could easily have been him.” (A few days before Kerik was indicted, Giuliani told the Associated Press, “There were mistakes made,” but he suggested that these, too, should be counted in his favor: “Anybody running for President that hasn’t made their share of mistakes is probably not ready to be President.”)

Many, perhaps most, politicians probably value competence and probity somewhat less than devotion. What’s unusual about Giuliani is how little effort he makes to disguise this. Take, for example, the story of his Taxi and Limousine commissioner Christopher Lynn, which Giuliani invokes in the chapter titled “Loyalty: The Vital Virtue.” One day, Lynn, because his boyfriend had complained to him about a cabdriver’s behavior, personally suspended the driver’s taxi license. His action—and his subsequent insistence that he had not violated the commission’s rules when evidently he had—became a running story in the News, prompting several aides to advise Giuliani to get rid of Lynn. Instead, the Mayor promoted him to transportation commissioner: “I wasn’t going to let any newspaper choose my administration.” (In his new job, Lynn made more news, for a variety of additional scandalettes, and in 2000 he was forced to withdraw his name from consideration as the District of Columbia’s taxicab chief.) In the same chapter, Giuliani explains how he picked Robert Harding to be the city’s budget director. Harding’s father, Raymond, the longtime chairman of the New York State Liberal Party, had secured for Giuliani the Liberal Party ballot line, which he ran on three times. Giuliani writes that he “knew there’d be heat” for what could appear to be a patronage hire. But, he goes on, “I wasn’t going to choose a lesser candidate simply to quiet critics.” This self-praise is particularly noteworthy, since Giuliani also appointed a second Harding son, Russell, to lead the New York City Housing Development Corporation. Russell, a college dropout with no experience in the housing field, embezzled more than four hundred thousand dollars from the agency, and was eventually sentenced to five years in federal prison.

Meanwhile, some of the most talented people Giuliani brought to New York get scant mention in “Leadership,” perhaps because by the time he wrote the book he was no longer speaking to them. In 1995, Giuliani forced out the city’s schools chancellor, Ramon Cortines, after first subjecting him to a series of humiliations. The next schools chancellor, Rudy Crew, became a close friend of the Mayor’s, smoking cigars and going to Yankees games with him. But Crew, too, ran afoul of Giuliani—he refused to endorse school vouchers, a measure that Giuliani, after years of opposing, had suddenly decided to support—and he, too, was hounded out. (“It’s tragic how wounded this man really is,” Crew later said of Giuliani. “And wounded people inevitably wound other people.”) Giuliani briefly alludes to the falling out he had with his first and most innovative police commissioner, William Bratton, only to argue that “had there been no change atop the Police Department, we would not have achieved the reductions in crime that we did.” (Bratton, who is now the Los Angeles police chief, told me he found that “a very strange assertion,” since at the time of his departure the decline in the crime rate was accelerating.)

During Giuliani’s early years in office, his achievements were impressive. Between 1993 and 1996, the city’s murder rate fell by forty-four per cent, the number of people on welfare dropped by nearly twenty per cent—the first significant decrease in the city’s history—and the Mayor succeeded in closing a $2.3-billion budget gap with a series of nearly no-growth spending plans. (As his tenure wore on, he became more freehanded, and ultimately he left Bloomberg a gap of nearly five billion dollars.)

But, even as Giuliani was coasting to a second term, the circle around him was growing narrower, and the few dissenting voices fewer. Bratton recalled that after a while he couldn’t even make a promotion without consulting City Hall. “A leader like Giuliani will end up having around him people who are comfortable being micromanaged,” he told me. Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, who served as commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration under Giuliani, has described the dynamic among the Mayor’s top aides—the so-called “yes-Rudy’s”—this way: “If Rudy would say, ‘Let’s kill twelve-year-olds,’ there would be a deep silence in the room and then somebody would say, ‘That’s brilliant! ’ And then somebody else would say, ‘Have you thought of thirteen-year-olds, too?’ ” Dissent from outside the administration was tolerated little better; elected officials judged to be less than fully supportive of the Mayor found themselves unable to get the most basic information from City Hall. In 1997, for instance, Giuliani decided to deny the state comptroller, H. Carl McCall, access to the city’s books. McCall took Giuliani to court, and won. Giuliani appealed, and McCall won again. The case went to the state’s highest court, and McCall won a third time. “The bottom line is we had to spend two years and millions of dollars in taxpayer money just to do our jobs,” McCall told me.

Giuliani fought similar, losing battles with the Independent Budget Office, the city’s campaign-finance board, and New York’s major newspapers. He tried to change the rules of mayoral succession to bypass the public advocate, Mark Green, whom he particularly loathed. He lost that battle, too. After Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean immigrant, was killed by plainclothes policemen, in February, 1999, some of New York’s top-ranking black officials, including McCall, asked to meet with Giuliani. Giuliani refused. The following month, former mayor Ed Koch was briefly hospitalized. Koch, who had crossed party lines to endorse Giuliani over David Dinkins, recently recalled the day that Giuliani came to visit him.

“I sat up in bed, and asked him, ‘Why won’t you meet with them?’ ” Koch told me. “And he said, ‘I don’t agree with them.’ And I said, “Rudy, you only meet with people you agree with? That’s crazy!’ ” Koch went on, “Rudy was a good mayor in the sense of delivering services. I have always said that. He was not a great mayor, because he didn’t respect people.”

When news got out that Giuliani was building a new emergency command center at 7 World Trade Center, the City Council speaker, Peter Vallone, joked that if the Mayor needed space only for those people he trusted he could put the center in “a phone booth.”

Around the time that Giuliani travelled to New Hampshire to make his case to the Letizios and their neighbors, members of the 9/11 Firefighters and Families travelled to New Hampshire to try to undermine it. The group, which consists of relatives of some of the people who died in the World Trade Center attack, rented a basement room at Dartmouth College, and sent out invitations to the local press. A half dozen reporters showed up, along with some firefighters from nearby companies and a few curious members of the Dartmouth staff. The first person to speak was Sally Regenhard, who carried a photograph of her son, Christian, a probationary firefighter who had been on the job for just six months at the time of the disaster.

“He was a person who loved life,” Regenhard said, her voice breaking. “He loved his country. On 9/11, his dreams, and our dreams for him, ended. After 9/11, we started to find out about why my son and other firefighters met a brutal and needless death. We started to find out about things like the radios and the lack of unified command structure. We were shocked. We were heartbroken. But we were very determined that our children, our loved ones, had to have a legacy. And that had to be a legacy of truth.

“Our group does not endorse any political candidate,” she went on. “Our group represents registered Conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, Liberals, and Right to Life Party members. We’re here because we need to point out the mistakes that occurred in New York City on 9/11, because we want people to know the truth about Rudy Giuliani running for President on a false hero issue.”

September 11th is obviously at the heart of Giuliani’s candidacy, so much so that his campaign would hardly be conceivable without it. Tens of millions—probably hundreds of millions—of Americans saw the images of him walking through clouds of dust that morning, and heard him reassuring the city, “New York is going to be here tomorrow morning, and it’s going to be here forever.” His handling of the disaster turned him from a not terribly popular lame duck into, in Oprah’s famous formula, “America’s Mayor.”

But many of those who are most knowledgeable about what happened on September 11th, or at least had the most at stake, are actively opposing Giuliani’s bid. The head of the city’s largest police union recently declared that his organization “could never support Rudy Giuliani for any elected office,” and the head of the city’s largest firefighters’ union has similarly made it known that his union, which three years ago endorsed George Bush, will not be endorsing Giuliani. “Rudy Giuliani is not the individual he portrays himself to be,” John McDonnell, the head of the city’s fire officers’ union, which is also working against the former mayor, told me. The 9/11 Commission has five Republican members, only one of whom is supporting Giuliani. (Three have declared for John McCain and the fifth has remained neutral.) Meanwhile, the man who set up the city’s Office of Emergency Management for Giuliani, Jerome Hauer, is supporting Hillary Clinton.

“From my perspective, Rudy would be a very dangerous President,” Hauer told me. “And I think people need to be very frightened of him. When you look at the way he picked battles unnecessarily as mayor, imagine if he’s got nuclear weapons at his disposal.

“He’s certainly got one of the weakest homeland-security advisory groups you can imagine,” Hauer continued. Among the group’s members are Thomas Von Essen, Giuliani’s former fire commissioner, and Richard Sheirer, Hauer’s successor as head of the Office of Emergency Management; both men have been faulted for failing to establish clear lines of command on September 11th, and both now work for Giuliani Partners. “If that’s who he’s going to depend on to keep this country secure, this country’s in very serious trouble.” (The Giuliani campaign’s spokeswoman, Maria Comella, pointed out that the advisory group also includes Louis Freeh, the former F.B.I. director, and said, “Anything from Mr. Hauer on this is nothing more than sour grapes.”)

As Giuliani often observes, September 11th was not the first time that terrorists struck at America. The World Trade Center bombing of February 26, 1993, which killed six and forced the evacuation of twenty-five thousand others, demonstrated the city’s vulnerability. As mayor, Giuliani made preparedness a priority, hiring Hauer to head the Office of Emergency Management and building a state-of-the-art command center for use during crises (albeit in a known terrorist target).

And yet critics argue that, in crucial respects, the city had made little progress by the time of the second World Trade Center attack. The so-called “handie-talkies” that firefighters relied on to communicate with one another proved so inadequate on the day of the 1993 bombing that firefighters had to resort to using foot messengers. It was not until 1997 that the Fire Department started the process of procuring new radios, and it was not until early 2001 that the radios were issued. Within days, the new radios were recalled. (An investigation by the City Council subsequently revealed that the department, in its testing of the radios, had violated its own protocols.) As a result, firefighters who rushed to the World Trade Center on September 11th were carrying the same handie-talkies that had failed them eight years earlier.

It is impossible to say how many firefighters’ deaths might have been prevented had they had better communications. Still, the numbers are suggestive. The Fire Department is believed to have lost at least a hundred and twenty men in the collapse of the second building—the North Tower—even though the command for them to evacuate had been issued half an hour earlier. The Police Department, which had a different and, under the circumstances, far more effective radio system, is believed to have lost no members in the North Tower. The 9/11 Commission concluded that most fire companies in the North Tower had received the message to get out, either over their handie-talkies or by word of mouth. (One fire chief in the building, who was carrying a bullhorn, went from floor to floor yelling, “All F.D.N.Y., get the fuck out!”) But the Times, which successfully sued the city to obtain transcripts of interviews that the Fire Department conducted with survivors, reached a grimmer conclusion: it found that, of fifty-eight firefighters who made it out of the North Tower, only three had heard radio warnings that the tower was in danger of collapse. Particularly galling to many families is that Giuliani has yet to acknowledge that there were failures that might have been avoided. Testifying before the 9/11 Commission, in May, 2004, he praised firefighters for electing “to stand their ground and not retreat,” implying that they had heard the evacuation order but chose to ignore it.

“It’s like a knife in our hearts,” Sally Regenhard told me. “As if we didn’t have enough already.”

A few weeks ago, Giuliani held a town hall meeting at V.F.W. Post 1670, in Laconia, New Hampshire. The meeting took place in a large wood-panelled room with placards listing rules for bingo, among them Rule No. 5: “Special cards for the handicapped are not available.” Giuliani once again began by recommending that everyone in the audience read his Twelve Commitments. Then he launched into a riff on leadership which turned into a discussion of foreign policy.

“Leadership is about hope,” he said. “It’s about people believing they’re going to have a better future. And if they believe they’re going to have a better future they get it done.” When he became mayor, he said, “The conclusion was that things were going to get worse. And, by the time I left, the overwhelming conclusion was that things were going to get better, because all these problems had been solved that other people thought couldn’t be solved.

“It’s the same thing now—people think that the war on terror is going to go on forever,” Giuliani continued. “The reality is when we get the right leadership, when we deal with it from the point of view of being on offense, we can reduce that terrorists’ war against us to the minimum amount of time, and the minimum amount of casualties. But we do it through strength, not weakness.” He added, “I’d be happy to talk to you about it, because it’s an area in which I’ve done a great deal of study and an area in which—safety and security—I think of all the people running I have the most experience.”

There are several candidates in the Republican field who are short on foreign-policy experience, including Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. Giuliani is the only one of them who is running as a foreign-policy expert. When, in October, Giuliani was accused by Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, of knowing “virtually nothing” about foreign affairs, he shot back that it was actually Biden, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, whose background was thin. (“Has he ever been in the State Department?” the former mayor asked. “Has he ever been an executive?”) What, exactly, Giuliani sees as the basis of his expertise is unclear. He declined a chance to serve on the congressionally appointed Iraq Study Group, citing “previous time commitments.” As of this writing, he has never visited Iraq. Sometimes he suggests that he is drawing on years of careful study; just as often, on his tenure as mayor. A few months ago, in response to a question about elections in Gaza, he observed that he knew firsthand how tough it can be to introduce democracy.

“I learned this in New York City when I became the mayor,” he said. “People were afraid to go out at night, because crime was so rampant. I mean, we had all kinds of civil rights, but nobody could exercise them, because they were too darn afraid to go out, too darn afraid to go to the movies or go buy groceries at the grocery store.” Giuliani has taken the point further: the principles that he applied successfully in Bed-Stuy can be applied just as successfully in Baghdad. “I know from personal experience that when security is reliably established in a troubled part of a city, normal life rapidly reestablishes itself,” he wrote recently in Foreign Affairs. He went on:




Shops open, people move back in, children start playing ball on the sidewalks again, and soon a decent and law-abiding community returns to life. The same is true in world affairs. Disorder in the world’s bad neighborhoods tends to spread. Tolerating bad behavior breeds more bad behavior.



In his first mayoral campaign, Giuliani said that crime in New York was not going to be solved by “talking unity” and “singing songs.” He now says, “You don’t achieve peace by singing songs about peace.”

“You know what our goal should be in Iraq?” he asks. “How about this as a goal? How about victory for the United States?”

Presidential candidates are, of course, full of bluster, and a rational voter might well dismiss Giuliani’s more exaggerated claims—about himself, about New York, and about the world at large—as so much posturing. But that would probably be unfair. For all the reasons that he mentions—the fall in crime, the drop in the welfare rolls, the general change of mood in the city—Giuliani was an unusually accomplished mayor. What made him remarkable was that he didn’t settle for these achievements. In addition to muggers and drug dealers, he eventually went after cabdrivers, jaywalkers, hot-dog venders, street artists, museum curators, strippers, and people who were just insufficiently civil—in short, practically everyone in New York. The same mayor who urged calm on September 11th two weeks later sought—unsuccessfully—to declare a sort of municipal state of emergency in order to extend his term in office.

Among the distinctive characteristics of Giuliani’s political life has always been his scorn for conventional thinking. He may genuinely believe that before he took office New Yorkers were too terrified to exercise their civil rights. He may also believe that eight years in City Hall constitute foreign-policy experience. He may even believe that he can eliminate global disorder, in the same way that he got rid of the squeegee guys. And that may be, in the end, what makes him a leader. ♦

ILLUSTRATION: JOHN CUNEO