NYT
Rudy Giuliani has been having a bad week. Or, as he might put it, suffering persecutions never seen upon this planet since Mel Gibson was tortured on the rack, castrated, disemboweled and beheaded in “Braveheart.”
As Michael Cooper reported in The Times, New York’s ex-mayor is prone to exaggeration on the campaign trail, stretching facts or replacing them with more dramatic, more interesting, more untrue ones. Still, nobody would deny the last several days have been a downer.
First, Rudy looked bad in that debate in Florida. The protégé he promoted for homeland security secretary, Bernard Kerik, kept showing up on TV in news clips captioned 16-COUNT FEDERAL INDICTMENT. Then Ben Smith reported on Politico.com about the peculiar accounting practices the Giuliani administration had used for security details that guarded Rudy when he was out of town pursuing nonmayoral ventures such as golf and adultery. The bills were stashed away under the budgets of obscure city agencies like the Loft Board and — oh, dear — the Office for People With Disabilities.
Rudy said the story sounded like a “hit job” to him, aimed at reminding primary voters about his divorce-studded private life. Actually, LoftBoardgate is a reminder not of what Rudy does behind closed doors, but of his inability to keep them shut. When he was mayor, his sex life spilled into weird press conferences and court fights over who got custody of Gracie Mansion. Lately, he’s contented himself with interrupting his speeches to accept strange cellphone calls from the latest wife.
It’s fitting that Giuliani’s first big campaign crisis wound up being about his special subject: security. When he was mayor, he got a whole lot of it. The city was at one point paying for police guards to protect and transport not only Rudy, his children and his elderly mother, but also both his wife and his mistress. Really, they were thisclose to assigning a detail to the family retriever and a springer spaniel he was courting down the block.
The Giuliani presidential campaign is based on the idea that he understands that the world is a dangerous place and knows the steps that need to be taken to protect us. But his real conviction has always seemed to be that the world was a dangerous place for him. After American embassies were bombed in East Africa, his administration responded by blocking off the driveways to City Hall, barring protesters and politicians from their traditional press conference site on the building steps, and banishing tourists. Meanwhile, behind the barricades, the mayor was planning to put the city’s emergency command center inside the best-known terrorist target in America.
Does this sound like a good plan, people? Do you want the next president putting a nuclear missile at Camp David while he moves the Situation Room to the Louisiana flood plain?
The conflation of the safety of Rudy with the safety of New York reached its peak on 9/11, when the entire public security leadership of the city left ground zero in order to protect the mayor in his walk uptown. And then there was the aftermath, when he tried to postpone the mayoral election under the theory that the factor most critical to our survival was his continued presence at the helm.
If the vision of city police officers cooling their heels outside his mistress’s home in the Hamptons is troubling, it’s not because of the moral implications. It’s a reminder that Rudy is one of those people who doesn’t handle power well. The more important he becomes, the more impossible he becomes.
Let’s look back at what he was like in 1994 when he was first sworn in as mayor. The rest of the world noted the inauguration mainly because Giuliani’s 7-year-old son, Andrew, stood at the lectern while his father read his speech, declaiming right along with him. When Giuliani told his predecessor, “Mayor Dinkins, I salute your accomplishments,” Andrew yelled out, “me, too!”
Nobody could really focus on the speech; they were just watching the gesticulating child. But Giuliani cheerfully plowed on along, like millions of other parents who had learned through long experience that if you require hushed silence to say your piece, you will be waiting a very long time. He called his wife, Donna, “my lover” and thanked his family for teaching him about love. His mother, Helen, who was a charming character, sat proudly on the dais. “Children can be very thickheaded,” she told me once, describing the way Rudy had preferred the dirty city to the Long Island suburbia where she and her husband had tried to transplant him.
He seemed like a guy whose life required him to consider the emotional needs of people other than himself. That had to be a promising sign.
And now here we all are. Giuliani’s mother is dead. His wife discovered that her husband wanted a divorce when he called a press conference to announce it, and she is now married to someone else. The son has grown into what appears to be a fine young man who doesn’t really speak to his father. But at least they all got security.
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