Giuliani: a Pugilist From Birth

By NANCY BENAC – 23 hours ago

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 that 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 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, 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 is 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.

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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.

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.

In 1961, Giuliani graduated from Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, an all-scholarship school that took only the brightest from New York's parishes. 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.

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. He distinguished himself as demanding but fair.

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.

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.

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Giuliani landed as the No. 3 man at the Justice Department when Ronald Reagan took office, then headed back to New York to become U.S. attorney. His mother saw it as a demotion. Giuliani turned it into the launching pad for a run at the mayor's job.

On his second try, 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."

His achievements are the stuff of lore — crime down 56 percent, welfare rolls slashed nearly 60 percent, taxes cut 23 times. So are his domineering style and petulance.

Things were getting done, but vexations grew. Giuliani's relations with minorities, strained at the beginning, only 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.

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.

"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.

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By 2000, his second mayoral term was running out of gas. Giuliani set his sights on the U.S. Senate but then was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

In an only-in-New York news conference, 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 second wife via news conference that their marriage was over.

Giuliani pulled out of the Senate race and tackled his 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.

On Sept. 11, 2001, when first word came that a plane had struck the World Trade Center, Giuliani sped to the scene.

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, the righteous certainty that had grated on New Yorkers in earlier days was exactly what they now 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.

Gradually, though, questions grew about Giuliani's leadership, related to events before and after 9/11:

Had he done enough to equip firefighters for such a crisis? Why didn't he do more to protect the health of workers at Ground Zero? Should he have known better than to put the city's command center in the World Trade Center complex?

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