Growing Up Giuliani

Rudy Giuliani was raised to understand that fine, blurry line between saint and sinner. The making of his moral code.
By Evan Thomas and Suzanne Smalley
NEWSWEEK

On Sept. 16, 1992, the police in New York City held a rally that spun out of control. The cops wanted a new collective-bargaining agreement, and they were angry at Mayor David Dinkins for proposing a civilian review board and for refusing to issue patrolmen 9mm guns. More than a few of them tipsy or drunk, the cops jumped on cars near city hall and blocked traffic near the Brooklyn Bridge. According to some witnesses, they waved placards crudely mocking Mayor Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, on racial grounds, while at the same time chanting "Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!" to welcome Rudy Giuliani, the crime-busting former U.S. attorney who had arrived in their midst to shore up his political base.

It is not clear Giuliani knew exactly what he was getting himself into—he later denied that he did—but video shows him wildly gesticulating and shouting a profanity-laced diatribe against Dinkins. The next day the New York newspapers were sharply critical of Giuliani (a Daily News editorial called his behavior "shameful"), and Dinkins, years later, accused him of trying to stir up "white cops to riot." At the time, Giuliani refused to back down or apologize for his remarks, saying only: "I had four uncles who were cops. So maybe I was more emotional than I usually am." Giuliani's performance that day lost African-American voters, some permanently, but it guaranteed the informal backing of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the policemen's union, which helped him get elected mayor in 1993.

Giuliani has long had a soft spot for cops—even, in some cases, for bad ones. On the one hand, Giuliani has been a crusader against outlaw policemen, as well as mobsters, pornographers, drug dealers, crooked businessmen and politicians and death-dealing jihadists. He now offers himself as the presidential candidate who would deliver us from evil, from terrorism abroad and corruption at home. On the other hand, he was the man who appointed Bernard Kerik, now under indictment for various federal crimes, including tax evasion, to be his police commissioner, and later pushed him to become the nation's secretary of Homeland Security. (Persistently accused of ties to mobbed-up businessmen, Kerik has always protested his innocence of any criminal wrongdoing, but he pleaded guilty in the Bronx last year to ethics violations while serving as Giuliani's corrections commissioner.) Giuliani is a dramatic—and self-dramatizing—moralist. But as an intelligent, sensitive man with a solid Roman Catholic education, he knows there is sometimes a fine or blurry line between saint and sinner. He has been able to reconcile the rigidities of doctrine with the vagaries of human nature. He has long believed in the power of redemption, and he puts great faith in the virtue of loyalty. He does not shy from confrontation, but seems to welcome and even create conflict, especially if there are cameras nearby. His theatricality can be excessive, and not just because he has been known to dress up in drag as a spoof. Kerik has written that when he was welcomed into Giuliani's inner circle—in a clearly staged ceremony, with a kiss on the cheek from each member—he felt like a "made man." Leaving aside Kerik's unfortunate Mafia analogy, there is an intensity and intimacy to Giuliani that can be unsettling. He has an authoritarian streak, as well as a penchant for secrecy and dependence on loyalists, that may remind voters of the current chief executive.

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