THE BOTTOM LINE HERE IS THAT UNLIKE JFK, WHO WE HARDLY KNEW, THOSE OF US WHO ARE NEW YORKERS KNOW RUDY GIULIANI ALL TOO WELL!
Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, is making no bones about his aspirations to become President. His performance following the tragedy of September 11, 2001 made him America’s most popular politician for a while, everywhere but in New York. By the time the mayoral elections of 2001 came around, most New Yorkers were damned glad that we had term limits and that Giuliani would become a distant memory.
Giuliani possesses a colossal ego. Whether he had it before he became the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York is a matter of speculation, because most folks hadn’t heard of him before he got that position. However, as the result of his flair for personal P.R. and his ability to prosecute a myriad of high profile underworld figures, many of whom were acquitted (just for the record), Rudolph Giuliani took center stage in The Big Apple. He ran for mayor for the first time in 1989 against then Manhattan Borough President, David Dinkins. Dinkins won in a tight election and became the city’s first, and thus far only, African American mayor.
Four years later, the situation had changed. The city had developed a chasm over what started as a horrible accident and ended up as a racial horror show. During the funeral procession for a Chasidic Rabbi in Brooklyn, a young Black boy was hit by a car and died. This started days of rioting by Black residents of the area who claimed that the driver of the car had received special treatment from the police simply because he was Chasidic. During the rioting, a Chasidic rabbinical student from Australia was killed.
Eventually, the rioting calmed down, but the wounds were not easily healed. The racial divide in the city was about as wide as it could get. Crime was up, Property values were plummeting. In short, The Dinkins Administration was proving to be a failure. Giuliani ran against Dinkins again, and, this time, he won.
Rudy Giuliani took office with the claim that he would clean up New York, and that he did. Crime went down, and businesses started to return to the city. In the beginning it all seemed pretty good. However, by the end of Giuliani’s second term, folks began realizing that the mayor had made these changes at the expense of some people’s liberties. Reports of police brutality grew rampant. The cases of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African street vendor who was shot 41 times and killed when opening the door to his apartment in a police raid that turned out to be at the wrong address, and Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who was arrested falsely and then sodomized with a broom stick in a police precinct, made national headlines.
In the meantime, Giuliani was going through a very sloppy and very public divorce. He was already involved with the woman who was to become his second wife and was rumored to have had several affairs during his term as mayor. His wife, Donna Hanover, was both a known news anchor in New York and a sometime actress. Given his flagging popularity, the divorce was not going to sit well during a potential reelection bid. Giuliani was probably lucky that we have term limits here. If you hope to move on to bigger and better elected positions, it doesn’t look good on your resume to have lost a bid for reelection.
The Democratic primary in the 2001 mayoral race was scheduled for September 11, 2001. As fate would have it, the day would become far better known for the attacks of that day, and, as a result, the primary was rescheduled.
Giuliani rushed to the scene of the disaster and became the public face of New York City for the world, and boy did that help his tarnished image. For a while, even New Yorkers started liking him again, but that didn’t last all that long. A few days after the election of Michael Bloomberg to replace Giuliani, the incumbent mayor suggested that he should remain in office past the normal January 1 inauguration to help the city remain stable following the attacks.
A battle began brewing over the outrageous nature of Giuliani’s comments, and. when push came to shove, Rudy Giuliani left office at the appointed time.
Then things started coming out about the city’s preparation for an attack as large as the 9/11 debacle and it was discovered that the city’s first responders had been horribly under funded in the areas most needed to respond to a major disaster. Their radios often failed, and when they did work, they only could communicate with other radios belonging to their own service. That meant that fire fighters could only talk to other fire fighters and not the police. It was the same going back in the other direction. Additionally, the police disaster command center for the city was located in The Twin Towers, an area that had already been attacked by terrorists in 1993, also during Giuliani’s watch. When the planes hit the towers, the command center became inoperative.
Giuliani was gone but not forgotten. While he managed to have created a Disneyland atmosphere in and around Times Square, in the end, it turned out that he had failed miserably in the areas that mattered most to the city and its residents, most notably in assuring that the security of the city was functioning in an efficient manner.
On top of all of this, Giuliani’s most trusted aid, Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who later became the former mayor’s business partner, turned out to be a really bad apple. After his stint in the Giuliani administration ended, Kerik was nominated to become Homeland Security Secretary. It turned out that during his nomination hearings, Kerik was discovered to have been employing an illegal immigrant as his nanny, like his boss had extramarital affairs during his term as Police Commissioner and had numerous conflicts of interest, including renting a pied a terre in the city, at an extremely favorable price, from someone doing business with the police department, as a home for his mistress. Eventually, Kerik withdrew from consideration for Bush’s cabinet and gave up his position as a partner in Giuliani’s firm. We haven’t heard much from him recently, but his aroma continues to circulate around Rudy Giuliani.
This past week, Giuliani surfaced at the death penalty hearings for WTC plotter, Zacharias Mousssaoui. Giuliani testified about his angst during and following the attacks, stating that he needed to find closure and his testimony would help him in his quest. Many of the relatives of the victims of the attacks openly wondered just why Rudy Giuliani needed closure when they considered many of the deaths among the first responders to have been a result of his inappropriate equipping New York’s Finest and Bravest.
That takes me back to the issue of Amadou Diallo, the unarmed victim of 41 rounds during that police raid during Giuliani’s tenure as mayor. In part, Diallo’s death was caused by the over arming of inexperienced police officers. When Giuliani became mayor, he mandated that new officers would no longer be issued 38 caliber pistols that fired one bullet each time the trigger was pulled. Instead, the cops received 9mm Glock automatic weapons which ejected up to 12 bullets when the trigger was pulled. Additionally, guns fired on automatic tend to move up and down while being fired, making them difficult to accurately aim and spraying bullets over a wider area. The resulting tragedy may, in fact, have been caused by 4 cops each pulling the trigger once. Some may blame the lack of experience by the officers. I blame a mayor who provided weaponry for war to be used in an urban setting.
The bottom line here is that unlike JFK, who we hardly knew, those of us who are New Yorkers know Rudy Giuliani all too well, and you can make book on the fact that if he were to run for president, he would lose the election in the city he once served by a landslide.
HENRY A. HONIG – “The Pundit”
