To Current Biography

Rudolph Giuliani

“Him?” So read the cover text of New York magazine's March 5, 2007 issue, which featured a photograph of Rudolph Giuliani. The cover expressed surprise that Giuliani--the notoriously combative former New York mayor who succeeded in “cleaning up” the city but was accused by some of trampling civil liberties in doing so, the Republican known to have supported gay rights, abortion rights, and gun control--had emerged as the front-runner for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. (In mid-December 2007, less than a month before the January 3, 2008 Iowa caucuses--the nation's first statewide vote in the process of nominating the candidates who will run for president in 2008--Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, led Giuliani in some opinion polls.) Giuliani first gained fame as a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a post in which he secured indictments and convictions of prominent figures from both the Mafia and Wall Street. After failing in his first bid for the mayoralty, in 1989, he served in that office for two four-year terms beginning in 1994. He occupied the international spotlight on September 11, 2001, the day of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.; the efficiency and compassion he demonstrated in the wake of the tragedy brought him a reputation for competence in the face of crisis, a quality apparently attractive to many in an age defined by fears of terrorism. In 2006 he launched his campaign for the presidency, running on a platform that emphasizes national security.

An only child, Rudolph William Louis Giuliani was born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn on May 28, 1944 and grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island, New York. His parents, Harold Giuliani and Helen (D’Avanzo) Giuliani, were both children of Italian immigrants. His father, a former amateur boxer and onetime felon, was working as a plumber’s assistant in the Brooklyn Navy Yard at the time of his son’s birth; his mother, a former spelling champion, was a bookkeeper. Helen Giuliani impressed upon her son the importance of education, reading biographies and history books to him when he was very young. In 1948, with jobs scarce, Harold Giuliani went to work for his wife’s younger brother, who owned a bar—the site of a number of illegal operations, such as gambling and loan-sharking. In addition to working behind the bar, Harold acted as a collector and enforcer. He kept that aspect of his life a secret from his son, instead inspiring him with tales of the courage and goodness of Helen’s other brothers, some of them firefighters and policemen. Politics was also a frequent topic of conversation in the Giuliani household. (Harold Giuliani was a Democrat, Helen a Republican.)

In 1951 Harold Giuliani moved the family to Garden City South, Long Island, in part to keep his young son away from the occasional violence that his work at the bar entailed. (Later they moved again, to the small Long Island town of Bellmore.) Harold, who had dropped out of school at 15, wanted Rudy to keep up his studies so that he could succeed in an honest profession. Giuliani attended Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn. The student body, Catholic and all male, was largely working-class, but most of its members went on to college. After graduating from high school, in 1961, Giuliani considered attending a seminary but enrolled instead at Manhattan College, in the New York City borough of the Bronx, a Catholic school that was then for men only. Though Giuliani majored in political science (with a minor in philosophy), at the time he did not foresee a career in politics, giving more thought to pursuing journalism, medicine, or the priesthood. He did, however, gain experience in politics while serving as class president during his sophomore year and as president of his fraternity, Phi Rho Pi, which became his main extracurricular interest. A registered Democrat at the time, Giuliani worked on Long Island on Robert F. Kennedy’s senatorial campaign. He earned an A.B. degree in 1965.

Ultimately choosing to pursue a law degree, Giuliani entered New York University, where he found his coursework highly stimulating; he graduated magna cum laude with a J.D. degree in 1968. He had been mentored in law school by Irving Younger, a former U.S. attorney, who persuaded him to become a prosecutor. Instead, Giuliani took a clerkship with a federal judge, Lloyd MacMahon, of the Southern District of New York. Also in 1968 Giuliani wedded Regina Peruggi, his second cousin; the two had dated sporadically since high school. During that time Giuliani was able to avoid military service in the Vietnam War through student deferments in 1963, 1967, and 1968 as well as through a rare occupational deferment that he received with the help of MacMahon.

In 1970, at the urging of MacMahon, Giuliani became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. The ambitious young man lobbied strenuously to work on the most prestigious cases. He earned a reputation as a brilliant, and sometimes shockingly ferocious, prosecutor with a particular hatred for municipal corruption. A defining moment in his career as a prosecutor came in 1974, during a bribery trial in which he cross-examined Bertram Podell, a Democratic congressman from Brooklyn. Giuliani’s questioning was so intense that Podell asked for a courtroom recess before submitting a guilty plea. Giuliani’s personal life, meanwhile, suffered from his ambition, and by the mid-1970s his marriage was deteriorating.

In 1975, during the administration of President Gerald R. Ford, Giuliani took a position in the Department of Justice as an assistant to Judge Harold Tyler, the deputy attorney general. When Jimmy Carter became president, in 1977, Giuliani followed Tyler to New York to work for the law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, eventually becoming a partner.

In 1980 Giuliani changed his political affiliation to Republican and returned to Washington to assume the position of associate attorney general—the number-three position in the Department of Justice—under Attorney General William French Smith in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who entered the White House in 1981. In his two years in that post, in addition to supervising all 94 U.S. district attorneys, Giuliani helped steer the focus of the Department of Justice from white-collar crime to illegal sales and use of narcotics, immigration, organized crime, and prison reform. While working for the Department of Justice, Giuliani began dating Donna Hanover, a Miami, Florida–based newscaster. In 1982, having had his first marriage annulled, he married Hanover in a Roman Catholic ceremony.

In 1983, at Giuliani’s request, Reagan appointed him to the top spot in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York for a four-year term. Giuliani brought to the position key political contacts in the Department of Justice, which enabled him to win assignments on high-profile cases. As a U.S. attorney Giuliani was determined to overhaul a legal system that, to his mind, had come to value the rights of the accused over those of the victim. “During the ’50s and ’60s,” he said to Richard Stengel for Time (February 10, 1986, on-line), “we socialized the responsibility for crime. We broke down the line between explanation and excuses, and explanations became excuses. . . . For purposes of ethics and law, we elevate human beings by holding them responsible. Ultimately, you diminish human individuality and importance when you say, ‘Oh, well, you’re not really responsible for what you did. Your parents are responsible for it, or your neighborhood is responsible for it, or society is responsible for it.’ In fact, if you harm another human being, you’re responsible for that.” His goal, he continued, was “to make the justice system a reality for the criminal.”

Giuliani quickly earned a reputation as a zealous and innovative prosecutor. While continuing to target organized crime and narcotics, he oversaw a stream of white-collar arrests. According to Biography Magazine (January 2002), Giuliani was extremely effective, recording 4,152 convictions with only 25 reversals. One of his earliest successes involved a crackdown on drug-dealing in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Although the ultimate effect of those arrests, in many cases, was simply the relocation of drug peddlers to other boroughs of New York City, Giuliani’s actions showed his commitment to focus on street-level crime and gained him the appreciation of government officials and the public.

Giuliani’s relentless pursuit of organized crime led to his highest-profile cases. Using the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to attack Mafia leadership, Giuliani presided over three sensational organized-crime cases that had national implications: the “Colombo Case,” the “Pizza Connection Trial,” and “The Commission of La Cosa Nostra.” In the Colombo case, whose outcome Giuliani has referred to as one of his 10-best indictments, Giuliani’s office secured convictions of Carmine Persico and eight other members of the Colombo crime family on charges of racketeering in the restaurant and construction industries. In the “Pizza Connection Trial,” Giuliani’s office charged New York’s Bonanno crime family with conspiring with the Sicilian Mafia to distribute billions of dollars' worth of heroin and cocaine through pizzerias in the U.S., from the East Coast to the Midwest; 17 of 21 defendants were convicted. “The Commission of La Cosa Nostra” became Giuliani’s signature Mafia case. (Time magazine dubbed it the “Case of Cases.”) Although the names of many of the defendants were already in the FBI's files, legal scholars noted the unusual focus of Giuliani’s organization of the case, as it challenged the Mafia at the highest, or “commission,” level. Giuliani’s office took advantage of over a decade’s worth of FBI surveillance to build the preliminary case, which was so promising that Attorney General Smith and the FBI director, William H. Webster, both longtime Giuliani allies, allowed him to expand his investigation and employ agents in 14 U.S. cities to help map the nationwide pattern of Mafia activity. The final indictment that Giuliani’s office handed down alleged that the “Commission” directed Mafia activity throughout the United States and backed crimes ranging from extortion to murder. The men accused of being part of the Commission were Persico; Anthony Salerno, the alleged head of the Genovese crime family; Antonio Corallo, said to be the head of the Luchese family; Gennaro Langella, another Colombo family leader; and Phillip Rastelli, a Bonanno family boss. Paul Castellano, the Gambino family head, was indicted along with the five other men but was murdered in 1985, before the trial.

Giuliani was also successful in the area of white-collar crime. He steered to completion a tax-fraud case that had been in progress when he was appointed U.S. attorney—that against the commodities trader Marc Rich. Giuliani obtained a guilty plea and a fine of $200 million from companies owned by Rich, who fled to Switzerland to avoid prosecution before receiving a presidential pardon from Bill Clinton in 2001. In 1985 Giuliani’s office secured a guilty plea from Edward A. Markowitz in one of the largest tax-fraud cases in U.S. history; Markowitz had been behind an income-tax deduction scheme for celebrities that created nearly $450 million in false deductions. Also during that period Giuliani’s office handed down indictments of several Wall Street executives accused of insider trading—using privileged information about the mergers and acquisitions of companies before that information is available to the public in order to guarantee the profitability of their stock-market transactions. Those prosecuted included such well-known figures as Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken.

Although Giuliani compiled an extensive record of convictions, many criticized his techniques and accused him of overzealousness and of grandstanding to promote his career. (While many of Giuliani’s predecessors had avoided the limelight, Giuliani enjoyed engaging with the media and was often seen on television.) Giuliani’s wide-ranging investigations into organized crime included an increased use of wiretaps and surveillance, which some lawmakers saw as setting dangerous precedents that threatened civil rights. Giuliani, in response, accused his detractors of being jealous of his success or of being overly liberal and ready to fault any aggressive prosecutor, particularly a Reagan appointee. “If I don’t tip in favor of law enforcement, who will?” Giuliani asked rhetorically in a conversation with Michael Winerip for the New York Times (June 9, 1985). “The civil libertarians won’t. The defense lawyers won’t. The liberal editorial writers won’t.” Giuliani’s detractors took particular issue with his eagerness in using the media to drum up publicity by calling news conferences to announce indictments and making the so-called “perp walk”—or public arrest in which the suspect is escorted in handcuffs past a pre-assembled cadre of press reporters—a standard procedure. In fact, in some instances, Giuliani’s zest for publicity had decidedly negative consequences, as was the case with the Wall Street executives Richard Wigton, Robert Freeman, and Timothy Tabor, who were arrested at work and paraded through a throng of press that had been alerted by Giuliani’s office. The charges against all three men were later dropped, but their professional reputations had been ruined, and many blamed Giuliani’s tactics. “Rudy was a person for whom the world was only black-and-white,” another lawyer who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office told Peter J. Boyer for the New Yorker (August 20, 2007). “There were no gray shadings.” For his part, Giuliani—according to Winerip—said, “My view is: The way you end corruption, you scare the daylights out of people.” Giuliani left the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the end of his term, in 1989, and went to work in private practice for White & Case in New York City. In 1990 he joined the law firm Anderson, Kill, Olick & Oshinsky, also in New York.

Meanwhile, Giuliani had set his sights on becoming New York's mayor. After winning the 1989 Republican nomination in the mostly Democratic city but losing to David Dinkins, an African-American, in that year's general election, Giuliani returned to challenge Dinkins in 1993. Although Dinkins trumpeted a two-year decline in crime rates, improvements in city services, and a balanced budget, voters remained concerned about crime as well as the issues of jobs, affordable housing, and the quality of public schools. Many thought he had done a poor job of responding to the 1991 riots in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, and Giuliani’s advertisements sought to take advantage of that perception, portraying Dinkins as weak and ineffective. Giuliani, having lost in 1989, “did not stop running until the next election was over,” as Michael Powell wrote for the New York Times (July 22, 2007). “His political task seemed clear. He could not count on peeling black votes away from a black mayor. So he cultivated Jews, ethnic whites and the Hispanic middle class.” Giuliani promised to crack down on crime, privatize government services, and lower taxes as well as promote “quality of life.” Dinkins criticized Giuliani’s plan to limit stays in homeless shelters to 90 days, calling it an example of his lack of compassion, and otherwise characterized Giuliani as mean-spirited. One of Giuliani’s greatest political mishaps, highlighting what many saw as his racial insensitivity, occurred in September 1992. Speaking outside City Hall at a rally of thousands of police officers who were protesting Dinkins’s proposal for a civilian board to review police misconduct, Giuliani offered a speech disparaging the mayor’s proposals to increase police accountability. Many of the off-duty officers in attendance were drinking alcohol, and some held racist signs directed at Dinkins and shouted racial epithets at elected officials entering City Hall. Giuliani’s involvement in the event, which culminated in a near-riot as the protesters blocked the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, likely gained him few votes and sparked animosity and division among the city’s residents. Giuliani offended African-Americans throughout his campaign as he spoke bluntly about what he perceived to be the failure of the city’s black leadership in recent years. On Election Day Giuliani swept white ethnic neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island; kept his hold on the Republican vote; drew small support from crossover Democrats; and won over only 10 percent of African-American voters. The result was a 2 percent margin of victory over Dinkins. Giuliani became the 107th mayor of New York City and the first Republican to hold the office since John V. Lindsay, in 1965.

When Giuliani took office, in early 1994, New York City had 2,000 murders a year, a shrinking tax base, and a dearth of private-sector jobs; in addition, one in six citizens received public assistance. Giuliani introduced innovative strategies for reducing crime, limiting public assistance, encouraging economic growth, and generally improving “quality of life.” He boosted tourism by eliminating the commercial-rent tax in most areas of the city and reducing the hotel-occupancy tax. He also eliminated the unincorporated-business tax, helped to create private-sector jobs, reduced the number of city employees, and ushered in a population boom in the city. Early on Giuliani displayed the political heterodoxy that would define him later in his career. In his first year in office, for example, he broke with the Republican Party to endorse the incumbent Democrat Mario Cuomo for governor rather than his ultimately successful Republican challenger, George Pataki. Giuliani leaned to the political left on some issues, such as gay rights, gun control, and abortion, but drew sharp criticism from liberals over his welfare policies, inattention to education and social services, and aggressive police force.

Giuliani made crime reduction the signature feature of his tenure as mayor. He hired more officers, increased their prominence on the streets, and held New York Police Department (NYPD) commanders accountable for their actions. In alliance with the NYPD commissioner William Bratton, Giuliani embraced George Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s now-famous “broken windows” theory, according to which the discouragement of minor offenses sends the message that more serious crimes will not be tolerated. Accordingly, the police under Giuliani targeted such low-level crimes as creating graffiti and jumping turnstiles in the subway as well as “lifestyle” offenses such as public drunkenness. Giuliani’s policies had an immediate effect: in his first term crime rates, particularly rates of violent crime, plummeted—murders and robberies fell to their lowest points in 25 years. Giuliani also used city ordinances to replace shady businesses in Manhattan's Times Square with more reputable commercial centers, such as Music Television and the Virgin Megastore.

As the crime rate dropped, however, charges of police misconduct rose. Between 1993 and 1997 payments by the city to victims of police brutality rose 38 percent, to $27.5 million. Giuliani’s “quality of life” campaigns against street vendors, the homeless, jaywalkers, squeegeemen (people who, uninvited, cleaned the windshields of cars stopped at red lights, in hopes of earning tips), and publicly funded art projects were seen by some as infringing on citizens' civil rights. Andrew Kirtzman, a New York journalist and the author of Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of New York, told reporters for an undated article on the Web site of CNN, “To combat the sense of lawlessness on the street, Giuliani used his police force as an army. And in a very short time, New York started to look a lot better. On the other hand, the tactics they were using started to antagonize people, especially minority communities.” Giuliani’s desire to decrease public-assistance benefits and privatize social services were met with similar resistance from New Yorkers who saw his policies as going against a long tradition in New York of helping the needy. Jack Newfield, writing for the Nation (June 17, 2002) in the wake of Giuliani's tenure as mayor, remarked: “Giuliani was a mayor of excess, with some big accomplishments and some spectacular lapses into cruelty and fanaticism.” Giuliani suggested that negative reactions to his policies stemmed from his commitment to disrupting the status quo. “People didn’t elect me to be a conciliator. If they wanted a nice guy, they would have stayed with Dinkins,” he told Eric Pooley for Time (December 31, 2001–January 7, 2002, on-line). “They wanted someone who was going to change this place. How do you expect me to change it if I don’t fight with somebody? You don’t change ingrained human behavior without confrontation, turmoil, anger.” Members of his inner circle described some of Giuliani’s actions as being driven by stubbornness rather than racism or lack of compassion. “I never thought Rudy Giuliani was a racist,” Fran Reiter, one of Giuliani’s deputy mayors, said to Michael Powell. “But he was obsessed with the notion there were certain groups he couldn’t win over. And he wasn’t even going to try.” Near the end of Giuliani’s first term, former New York mayor Edward I. Koch told Barry Bearak and Ian Fisher for the New York Times (October 19, 1997): “He is a good mayor, but he’ll never be a great one. . . . He can’t accept disagreement. When it occurs, he wants to destroy you.” Despite his controversial style, in 1997 Giuliani won reelection in a landslide victory over Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger.

Giuliani’s second term as mayor is largely associated with three highly publicized incidents involving violence on the part of the police. In July 1997 officers arrested Abner Louima, a Haitian-born security guard, in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and sexually assaulted him at a precinct house. Louima was hospitalized for two months following the assault and was later awarded $8.75 million in the largest police-brutality settlement in the city’s history. (Louima initially testified that two of policemen involved, Justin Volpe and Charles Schwartz, had yelled “It’s Giuliani time” during the attacks. Although Louima later recanted that part of his testimony, the phrase echoed in public discussions and the media.) In February 1999 Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, was shot and killed by policemen outside his home, which led to citywide demonstrations; some protesters carried placards on which were written such phrases as “Stop Giuliani’s Reign of Terror.” The four officers involved in the shooting—Edward McMellon, Sean Carrol, Kenneth Boss, and Richard Murphy—were acquitted of misconduct, which infuriated many. A year later Patrick Dorismond, an off-duty security guard, was approached by an undercover policeman who asked Dorismond if he knew where he could buy drugs. Dorismond took offense at the request, and a physical altercation ensued; a second undercover officer fatally shot Dorismond during the fight. At that time, in the aftermath of the Diallo murder and subsequent police acquittals, racial tensions were already running high. Giuliani asked New Yorkers to withhold judgment about the Dorismond incident until the facts were in, but the following day he publicly came to the defense of the NYPD, authorized the release of Dorismond’s juvenile-arrest record, and characterized the victim as being “no altar boy,” which some interpreted as a rationalization, or even justification, for the shooting. Giuliani immediately came under siege for his comments and actions with regard to the incident; his unconditional support of the police department led many New Yorkers to feel that the cost of Giuliani’s crime-reduction strategies was too great.

In 2000 Giuliani briefly considered a run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He withdrew from the race, however, in the face of health problems and public-relations troubles having to do with his personal life. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer that year, and his affair with Judith Nathan, which had become tabloid fodder, accelerated the proceedings of a bitter public divorce from his second wife, Donna Hanover. Barred by law from seeking a third term as mayor and mired in low approval ratings, Giuliani seemed to have passed the peak of his political career.

That perception changed dramatically on September 11, 2001, when terrorists flew two passenger jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, causing New York’s two tallest buildings to collapse and killing nearly 3,000 people. Within two hours of the tragedy, Giuliani was on the phone with the news channel CNN, providing updates to newscasters around the world. “You have to remember that for most of the day, [President] George W. Bush was in flight,” Kirtzman told CNN (on-line). “It was really Rudy Giuliani who was on the air most of the day, being very decisive and being very reassuring, telling people that we had weathered this extraordinary catastrophe, but that New York was going to be here today, and it was going to be here tomorrow.” Giuliani was frequently on television and the radio throughout the day of the attacks, informing the public about safety steps the city was taking and reassuring viewers and listeners that no chemical or biological weapons had been used against New York. Giuliani’s longtime executive assistant Beth Petrone-Hatton was inspired by Giuliani to continue working that day despite the death of her husband in the disaster. “He was probably the most ‘on’ I have ever seen him,” she told Pooley. “On the one hand, he was devastated, destroyed. He knew he’d lost a lot of friends [in the attacks]. But he also knew he had to calm the city down. . . . [His performance] was so well orchestrated that you would have thought he had prepared for it forever.”

In the weeks following the disaster, Giuliani kept New Yorkers abreast of the city’s goings-on; overruled advisers who wanted, for security purposes, to severely limit commercial and tourist activity in the city; and pushed the New York Stock Exchange and the city's Major League Baseball teams to continue operating and serve as symbols of endurance following the attacks. Six weeks after the tragedy, Giuliani’s approval rating, which had bottomed out at 36 percent in February 2001, reached 70 percent. On September 23, 2001, at the first major public event in the city after the attacks, Giuliani addressed a crowd of 20,000 gathered at a prayer service at Yankee Stadium. After being introduced by the famed TV personality Oprah Winfrey as “America’s mayor,” Giuliani offered an inspirational message, telling the crowd, as reported by Biography Magazine (January 2002), “To those who say our city will never be the same, I say, you are right. It will be better.” Many of Giuliani’s strongest critics offered their praise of his calm leadership in the weeks following the attacks. “Since the catastrophe, [Giuliani] has exerted the leadership which he’s always had. What was different was that he was sensitive and warm and compassionate and showed nuances with respect to emotion that he never showed before,” Edward Koch told CNN. Giuliani received expressions of support from international leaders including Jacques Chirac, Nelson Mandela, Tony Blair, and Vladimir Putin and was granted an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain. In addition, he was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2001.

Following the attacks Giuliani sought to amend New York’s constitution in order to serve an unprecedented three-month extension of his mayoral term, until April 2002, or even a third term as mayor. While some applauded the idea, others saw it as an act of egotism, one that could dampen the goodwill he had recently built up. Giuliani insisted that he merely wished to provide the city with continuity in a difficult time. (Giuliani’s proposal was turned down by the state assembly.) In recent years Giuliani has begun to receive criticism for his handling of several aspects of the recovery period following the attacks. He has been blamed by some for insisting, before the attacks, against the advice of many experts, that the city's emergency command center be placed at the World Trade Center; for the city’s lack of preparedness on September 11; for the haste of the recovery effort; and for inattention to various safety concerns: for example, though Giuliani declared that the air quality around Ground Zero was safe, it was later discovered that dangerous airborne chemicals including benzene, asbestos, and dioxin surrounded the site, where clean-up crews developed a host of health problems.

Shortly after leaving office Giuliani established a consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, in New York City. According to the company’s Web site, its mission is to help “leaders solve critical strategic issues, accelerate growth, and enhance the reputation and brand of their organizations in the context of strongly held values.” A subsidiary of the partnership, Giuliani Security & Safety LLC (formerly Giuliani-Kerik), focuses on security consulting; other branches include Giuliani Safety & Security Asia and Giuliani Compliance Japan. In March 2005 Giuliani joined the Houston, Texas–based law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani (formerly Bracewell & Patterson), which opened a Manhattan office; he helped develop an informal alliance between Bracewell and Giuliani Partners, which could not merge due to ethical considerations. Meanwhile, he conducted a highly lucrative lecture tour, speaking on topics relating to leadership and the 2001 terrorist attacks. In 2004 Giuliani addressed the Republican National Convention, held that year in New York.

On November 10, 2006 Giuliani filed papers to form a presidential exploratory committee. Three days earlier the Republican Party had lost both houses of Congress to the Democrats, largely, it was thought, because of voter dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq. “The general mood of the country,” Giuliani told Boyer, “in some ways, is very similar to the general mood that New York City was in in 1993”—the year he was elected mayor. “It’s a country in which people believe we’re going in the wrong direction. It’s kind of eerie. It’s about the same percentage, it’s about sixty-five, seventy per cent who think we’re going in the wrong direction. People in New York felt the same thing.” Giuliani is an unorthodox Republican candidate, given his past support for abortion rights, gay rights, gun control, and immigration, stances that put him at odds with much of the Republican base. His campaign began inauspiciously, when a confidential 126-page memo in which his office outlined his political vulnerabilities was leaked to the New York Daily News. Even more damaging than the information itself was that Giuliani had allowed it to become public, which was seen as a display of amateurism that did not bode well for a candidate running on a platform of national security. Giuliani stumbled in early Republican debates as well—giving equivocal answers to questions about his views on abortion, for example—leading some to question the seriousness of his intentions. Peggy Noonan, a columnist and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, wrote for the Wall Street Journal about Giuliani's performance in one debate, as reported by Boyer, “There is an embarrassing ad-hoc-ness, a bush-leagueness to this. It’s as if he hasn’t thought it through, as if he’s just deciding everything each day. But by the time you’re running for president you should have decided.”

In recent months, however, as his campaign has focused on his performance on September 11, 2001; emphasized law and order, leadership, and national security; and supported the war in Iraq, Giuliani has emerged as the front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, besting his main rivals—U.S. senator John McCain of Arizona, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee—in many polls. (As of December 13, 2007 Huckabee was leading in some polls regarding the Iowa caucuses.) The former mayor has benefited chiefly from reports about the effectiveness of his response to the terrorist attacks on New York, which suggest to many that he could manage national crises in a capable manner. In a development that was surprising to many and potentially very valuable for the Giuliani campaign, in November 2007 the influential Christian televangelist Pat Robertson endorsed Giuliani's candidacy, despite the former mayor's views on abortion and gay rights. As quoted by CNN (November 7, 2007, on-line), Robertson called Giuliani “a proven leader who is not afraid of what lies ahead and who will cast a hopeful vision for all Americans.” He added, “In all of the crises which confront our nation and the world, we need a leader with a bold vision who is not afraid to tackle the challenges ahead.”

In the view of some, Giuliani’s strength—his actions in the wake of the terrorist attacks—is wearing thin. (As quoted by many sources, the Democratic presidential contender Joseph Biden, a U.S. senator from Delaware, quipped, “There's only three things [Giuliani] mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.”) A Democratic presidential consultant, Bob Shrum, told Stephen Rodrick for New York (March 5, 2007), “There’s a reason Giuliani’s using 9/11 as an asset. It’s his only asset. He’s not even running on his mayoral record. He’s running on a few weeks. September 11 doesn’t change the fact that Rudy has no foreign-policy experience, and his foreign-policy record is limited to having the same position on Iraq as George Bush.” The controversy over Giuliani’s public persona and private life may also create problems for his candidacy. Giuliani said in a speech, as Boyer reported, that he anticipates attacks on those fronts, adding, “But what I ask them to do if they disagree is to take a look at my whole record and see if, in the context of my whole record, I still wouldn’t be the best person to lead the country right now, given the threat we have from terrorism.”

Giuliani is the co-author, with Ken Kurson, of the book Leadership (2002), detailing his turbulent tenure as New York City’s mayor. In September 2007 he received the Margaret Thatcher Medal of Freedom, named for and presented by the former British prime minister. Giuliani married Judith Nathan in 2003; from his marriage to Donna Hanover, he has two children, Andrew and Caroline. He lives in New York.