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Early life and educationRudolph Giuliani was born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, the only child of working-class parents Harold Angelo Giuliani, and Helen C. D'Avanzo, both children of Italian immigrants. The family was Roman Catholic and its extended members included police officers and firefighters. Harold Giuliani had trouble holding a job and had been convicted of felony assault and robbery and served time in Sing Sing; after his release he served as a Mafia enforcer for his brother-in-law Leo D'Avanzo, who ran an organized crime operation involved in loan sharking and gambling at a restaurant in Brooklyn.
In 1951, when Rudy Giuliani was seven, his family moved from Brooklyn to Garden City South on Long Island. There he attended a local Catholic school, St.
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The number of people that put their lives at risk, just totally overwhelmed the evil of the act.
When asked to estimate the number of casualties on September 11: More than we can bear.
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Early life and educationRudolph Giuliani was born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, the only child of working-class parents Harold Angelo Giuliani, and Helen C. D'Avanzo, both children of Italian immigrants. The family was Roman Catholic and its extended members included police officers and firefighters. Harold Giuliani had trouble holding a job and had been convicted of felony assault and robbery and served time in Sing Sing; after his release he served as a Mafia enforcer for his brother-in-law Leo D'Avanzo, who ran an organized crime operation involved in loan sharking and gambling at a restaurant in Brooklyn.
In 1951, when Rudy Giuliani was seven, his family moved from Brooklyn to Garden City South on Long Island. There he attended a local Catholic school, St. Anne's. Later, he commuted back to Brooklyn to attend Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, graduating in 1961 with an 85 percent average.
Giuliani went on to Manhattan College in Riverdale, Bronx, where he majored in political science with a minor in philosophy. There he considered becoming a priest. Giuliani has stated that this was due in part to having studied theology for four years in college, though nine credits (three semesters) of religious studies courses is the minimum graduation requirement at Manhattan College, which is affiliated with the Roman Catholic church.
He was elected president of his class in his sophomore year, but was not re-elected in his junior year. He joined the Phi Rho Pi fraternity, and was active in shaping its direction. He graduated in 1965.
Giuliani eventually decided to forego the priesthood, instead attending New York University School of Law in Manhattan, where he made law review and graduated cum laude with a Juris Doctor in 1968.
Giuliani started his political life as a Democrat. He has said that he admired the Kennedy family, and volunteered for Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1968. He also worked as a Democratic party committeeman on Long Island in the mid-1960s, and voted for George McGovern for president in 1972.
Legal careerUpon graduation, Giuliani clerked for Judge Lloyd MacMahon, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York.
Giuliani did not serve in the military during the Vietnam War. He received a student deferment while at Manhattan College and another while at NYU Law. Upon graduation from NYU Law in 1968, he was classified as 1-A, available for military service. He applied for a deferment but was rejected. In 1969, MacMahon wrote a letter to Giuliani's draft board, asking that he be reclassified as 2-A, civilian occupation deferment, because Giuliani, who was a law clerk for MacMahon, was an essential employee. The deferment was granted. In 1970, Giuliani received a high draft lottery number; he was not called up for service although by then he had been reclassified 1-A.
In 1970, Giuliani joined the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.
In 1973, he was named Chief of the Narcotics Unit and was eventually appointed United States Attorney. In 1975, Giuliani switched his party registration from Democratic to Independent as he was recruited to Washington, D.C. during the Ford administration, where he was named Associate Deputy Attorney General and chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Harold "Ace" Tyler. His first high-profile prosecution was of U.S. Representative Bertram L. Podell, who was convicted of corruption.
From 1977 to 1981, during the Carter Administration, Giuliani practiced law at the Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler law firm, as chief of staff to his previous DC boss, Ace Tyler. Tyler later became critical of Giuliani's turn as a prosecutor, calling his tactics "overkill".
On December 8, 1980, one month after the election of Ronald Reagan brought Republicans back to power in Washington, he switched his party affiliation from Independent to Republican. Giuliani later said the switches were because he found Democratic policies "naïve", and that "by the time I moved to Washington, the Republicans had come to make more sense to me." Others suggested that the switches were made in order to get positions in the Justice Department. Giuliani's mother maintained in 1988 that, "He only became a Republican after he began to get all these jobs from them. He's definitely not a conservative Republican. He thinks he is, but he isn't. He still feels very sorry for the poor."
In 1981, Giuliani was named Associate Attorney General in the Reagan administration, the third-highest position in the Department of Justice. As Associate Attorney General, Giuliani supervised the U.S. Attorney Offices' federal law enforcement agencies, the Department of Corrections, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the United States Marshals Service.
In a well-publicized 1982 case, Giuliani testified in defense of the federal government's "detention posture" regarding the internment of over 2,000 Haitian asylum seekers who had entered the country illegally. The U.S. government disputed the assertion that most of the detainees had fled their country due to political persecution, alleging instead that they were "economic migrants." In defense of the government's position, Giuliani stated at one point that political repression under President Jean-Claude Duvalier (the infamous "Baby Doc") no longer existed. After meeting personally with Duvalier, Giuliani testified that "political repression, at least in general, does not exist" in Haiti under Duvalier's regime.
In 1983, Giuliani was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. It was in this position that he first gained national prominence by prosecuting numerous high-profile cases, resulting in the convictions of Wall Street figures Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken for insider trading. He also focused on prosecuting drug dealers, organized crime, and corruption in government. He amassed a record of 4,152 convictions and 25 reversals. As a federal prosecutor, Giuliani was credited with bringing the "perp walk," parading of suspects in front of the previously alerted media, into common use as a prosecutorial tool. After Giuliani "patented the perp walk", the tool was used by increasing numbers of prosecutors nationwide.
Critics of Giuliani claim he arranged public arrests of people, then dropped charges for lack of evidence on high-profile cases rather than going to trial. In a few cases, his public arrests of alleged white-collar criminals at their workplaces, with charges later dropped or lessened, irreparably damaged their reputations. He claimed that veteran stock trader Richard Wigton, of Kidder, Peabody & Co. was guilty of insider trading; in February 1987 he had officers handcuff Wigton and march him through the company's trading floor, with Wigton in tears. Giuliani had his agents arrest Tim Tabor, a young arbitrageur and former colleague of Wigton, so late that he had to stay overnight in jail before posting bond. However, in three months, charges were dropped against both Wigton and Tabor; Giuliani said, "We're not going to go to trial. We're just the tip of the iceberg," but no further charges were forthcoming and the investigation did not end until Giuliani's successor was in place.
Giuliani's high-profile raid of the Princeton/Newport firm ended with the defendants having their cases overturned on appeal on the grounds that what they had been convicted of were not crimes.
Mafia Commission trial In the Mafia Commission Trial, Giuliani indicted eleven organized crime figures, including the heads of New York's so-called "Five Families", under the RICO Act on charges including extortion, labor racketeering, and murder for hire. Time magazine called this "Case of Cases" possibly "the most significant assault on the infrastructure of organized crime since the high command of the Chicago Mafia was swept away in 1943", and quoted Giuliani's stated intention: "Our approach...is to wipe out the five families." Eight defendants were found guilty on all counts and subsequently sentenced on January 13, 1987 to hundreds of years of prison time.
Boesky, Milken trials Ivan Boesky was a Wall Street arbitrageur who had amassed a fortune of about US $200 million by betting on corporate takeovers. He was investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for making investments based on tips received from corporate insiders. These stock acquisitions were sometimes brazen, with massive purchases occurring only a few days before a corporation announced a takeover.
Although insider trading of this kind was illegal, laws prohibiting it were rarely enforced until Boesky was prosecuted. Boesky cooperated with the SEC and informed on several of his insiders, including junk bond trader Michael Milken:"Boesky admitted to numerous offenses and then turned state's evidence, primarily against Milken. He received a 3 1/2 year prison sentence and $100 million fine after admitting to the charges and reached a plea bargain with Rudy Giuliani...[who would] draw criticism because Ivan was allowed to unload his holdings before his indictment was officially announced, realizing profits from it before being convicted. Others considered the sentence and fine as being too light. But Giuliani and company was [sic] after a much bigger fish, namely Milken."
In 1989, Giuliani charged Milken under the RICO Act with 98 counts of racketeering and fraud. In a highly-publicized case, Milken was indicted by a federal grand jury, and after a plea bargain, pled guilty to six lesser securities and reporting violations. He paid a total of $900 million in fines and settlements relating primarily to civil lawsuits and was banned for life from the securities industry.
Mayoral campaigns, 1989, 1993, 1997 Giuliani was U.S. Attorney until January 1989, resigning as the Reagan administration ended. He garnered criticism until he left office for his handling of cases, and was accused of prosecuting cases to further his political ambitions. He joined the law firm White & Case in New York City as a partner. He remained with White & Case until May 1990, when he joined the law firm Anderson Kill Olick & Oshinsky, also in New York City.
1989 campaign and defeatGiuliani first ran for New York City Mayor in 1989, attempting to unseat three-term incumbent Ed Koch. He won the September 1989 Republican Party primary election against business magnate Ronald Lauder, in a campaign marked by claims that Giuliani was not a true Republican and by an acrimonious debate. In the Democratic primary, Koch was upset by Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins.
In the general election, Giuliani ran as the fusion candidate of both the Republican and Liberal Parties. The Conservative Party, which had often co-lined the Republican party candidate, withheld support from Giuliani and ran Lauder instead. Conservative Party leaders were unhappy with Giuliani on ideological grounds. They cited the Liberal Party's endorsement statement that Giuliani "agreed with the Liberal Party's views on affirmative action, gay rights, gun control, school prayer and tuition tax credits."
During two televised debates, Giuliani framed himself as an agent of change, saying that "I'm the reformer," that "If we keep going merrily along, this city's going down," and that electing Dinkins would represent "more of the same, more of the rotten politics that have been dragging us down." Giuliani also accused Dinkins of not having paid his taxes for many years and of several other ethical missteps, in particular a stock transfer to his son. Dinkins said the tax matter had been fully paid off, denied other wrongdoing, and said that "what we need is a mayor, not a prosecutor," and that Giuliani refused to say "the R-word - he doesn't like to admit he's a Republican." Dinkins won the endorsements of three of the four daily New York newspapers, while Giuliani won approval from the New York Post.
In the end, Giuliani lost to Dinkins by 47,080 votes out of 1,899,845 votes cast, in the closest election in city history.
1993 campaign and electionIn 1993, Giuliani again ran for mayor. Once again, Giuliani also ran on the Liberal Party line but not the Conservative Party line, which ran activist George Marlin. The principal issues of the election of 1993 were crime and taxes. Giuliani also declared that expansion of the city's budget was going unchecked, and that incumbent David Dinkins was incompetent.
In addition, the city was suffering from a spike in unemployment associated with the nationwide recession, with local unemployment rates going from 6.7 percent in 1989 to 11.1 percent in 1992. There was also a public perception that crime was increasing, although in fact the crime rate in most categories had decreased during the Dinkins administration; for example, the per capita murder rate had peaked and then begun to decline under Dinkins, and rapes decreased in each year of his term.
Giuliani promised to focus the police department on shutting down petty crimes and nuisances as a way of restoring the quality of life: "It's the street tax paid to drunk and drug-ridden panhandlers. It's the squeegee men shaking down the motorist waiting at a light. It's the trash storms, the swirling mass of garbage left by peddlers and panhandlers, and open-air drug bazaars on unclean streets."
Dinkins and Giuliani never debated during the campaign, because they were never able to agree on how to approach a debate. Dinkins was endorsed by The New York Times and Newsday, while Giuliani was endorsed by the New York Post and, in a key switch from 1989, the New York Daily News.
In the end Giuliani won by a margin of 53,367 votes, with 49.25 percent of the electorate to the incumbent's 46.42 percent. He became the first Republican elected Mayor of New York City since John Lindsay in 1965.
1997 campaign and re-electionGiuliani's opponent in 1997 was Democratic Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, who had beaten Al Sharpton in the September 9, 1997 Democratic primary. In the general election, Giuliani once again had the Liberal Party and not the Conservative Party listing. Giuliani ran an aggressive campaign, parlaying his image as a tough leader who had cleaned up the city. Giuliani's popularity was at its highest point to date, with a late October 1997 Quinnipiac University poll showing him as having a 68 percent approval rating; 70 percent of New Yorkers were satisfied with life in the city and 64 percent said things were better in the city compared to four years previously.
Throughout the campaign he was well ahead in the polls and had a strong fund-raising advantage over Messinger. On her part, Messinger lost the support of several usually Democratic constituencies, including gay organizations and large labor unions. All four daily New York newspapers—The New York Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, and Newsday—endorsed Giuliani over Messinger.
In the end, Giuliani won 59 percent of the vote to Messinger's 41 percent, and became the first Republican to win a second term as mayor since Fiorello H. La Guardia in 1941. Voter turnout was the lowest in 12 years, with 38 percent of registered voters casting ballots. The margin of victory included gains in his share of the African American vote (20 percent compared to 5 percent in 1993) and the Hispanic vote (43 percent from 37 percent) while maintaining his base of white and Jewish voters from 1993.
MayoraltyGiuliani served as mayor of New York City from 1994 through 2001.
Law enforcementIn his first term as mayor, Giuliani, in conjunction with New York City Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton, adopted an aggressive enforcement-deterrent strategy based on James Q. Wilson's "Broken Windows" approach. This involved crackdowns on relatively minor offenses such as graffiti, turnstile jumping, and aggressive "squeegeemen", on the theory that this would send a message that order would be maintained. Giuliani and Bratton also instituted CompStat, a comparative statistical approach to mapping crime geographically and in terms of emerging criminal patterns, as well as charting officer performance by quantifying criminal apprehensions. Critics of the system assert that it creates an environment in which police officials are encouraged to underreport or otherwise manipulate crime data. The CompStat initiative won the 1996 Innovations in Government Award from the Kennedy School of Government.
During Giuliani's administration, crime rates dropped in New York City, which Giuliani's presidential campaign website has credited to his leadership. The extent to which his policies deserve the credit is disputed, however. A small nationwide drop in crime preceded Giuliani's election, and critics say that he may have been the beneficiary of a trend already in progress. Additional contributing factors to the overall decline in crime during the 1990s were federal funding of an additional 7,000 police officers and an overall improvement in the national economy. Changing demographics were a key factor contributing to crime rate reductions, which were similar across the country during this time. Because the crime index is based on that of the FBI, which is self-reported by police departments, some have alleged that crimes were shifted into categories that the FBI doesn't collect.
Giuliani's supporters cite studies concluding that New York's drop in crime rate in the '90s and '00s exceeds all national figures and therefore should be linked with a local dynamic that was not present as such anywhere else in the country: what University of California sociologist Frank Zimring calls "the most focused form of policing in history". In his book The Great American Crime Decline, Zimring claims that "up to half of New York’s crime drop in the 1990s, and virtually 100 percent of its continuing crime decline since 2000, has resulted from policing."
Bratton was featured on the cover of Time in 1996. Giuliani forced Bratton out of his position after two years, in what was generally seen as a battle of two large egos in which Giuliani was not tolerant of Bratton's celebrity.
Giuliani's term also saw allegations of civil rights abuses and other police misconduct. There were police shootings of unarmed suspects, and the scandals surrounding the sexual torture of Abner Louima and the killings of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond. Giuliani supported the New York Police Department, for example by releasing what he called Dorismond's "extensive criminal record" to the public, including a sealed juvenile file.
City servicesThe Giuliani administration advocated the privatization of failing public schools and increasing school choice through a voucher-based system.
Giuliani supported protection for illegal immigrants. He continued a policy of preventing city employees from contacting the Immigration and Naturalization Service about immigration violations, on the grounds that illegal aliens should be able to take actions such as sending their children to school or reporting crimes to the police without fear of deportation.
During his mayoralty, gay and lesbian New Yorkers received domestic partnership rights. Giuliani induced the city's Democratic-controlled New York City Council, which had avoided the issue for years, to pass legislation providing broad protection for same-sex partners. In 1998, he codified local law by granting all city employees equal benefits for their domestic partners.
Appointees as defendantsSeveral of Giuliani's appointees to head City agencies became defendants in criminal proceedings.
In 2000, Giuliani appointed 34-year-old Russell Harding, the son of Liberal Party of New York leader and longtime Giuliani mentor Raymond Harding, to head the New York City Housing Development Corporation, although Harding had neither a college degree nor relevant experience. In 2005, Harding pleaded guilty to defrauding the Housing Development Corporation and to possession of child pornography. He was sentenced to five years in prison. In a related matter, Richard Roberts, appointed by Giuliani as Housing Commissioner and as chairman of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, pleaded guilty to perjury after lying to a grand jury about a car that Harding bought for him with City funds.
Giuliani was a longtime backer of Bernard Kerik, who started out as a NYPD detective driving for Giuliani's campaign. Giuliani appointed him as the Commissioner of the Department of Correction and then as the Police Commissioner. After Giuliani left office, Kerik pleaded guilty to state corruption charges dating from his Corrections days. Kerik is currently awaiting trial on related federal charges of conspiracy, tax fraud and obstruction of justice. Giuliani has not been implicated in any of the Kerik scandals.
Run for United States Senate, 2000Due to term limits, Giuliani could not run in 2001 for a third term as Mayor. In November 1998, long-serving Democratic New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan retired and Giuliani immediately indicated an interest in running in the 2000 election for the now-open seat. Due to his high profile and visibility Giuliani was supported by the state Republican Party, even though he had irritated many by endorsing incumbent Democrat Governor Mario Cuomo over Republican George Pataki in 1994. Giuliani's entrance led Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel and others to recruit then-U.S. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to run for Moynihan's seat, hoping she might combat his star power.
An early, January 1999 poll showed Giuliani trailing Clinton by 10 points. In April 1999, Giuliani formed an exploratory committee in connection with the Senate run. By January 2000, Giuliani had reversed the polls situation, pulling 9 points ahead after taking advantage of several campaign stumbles by Clinton. Nevertheless, the Giuliani campaign was showing some structural weaknesses; so closely identified with New York City, he had somewhat limited appeal to naturally Republican voters in Upstate New York. The New York Police Department's fatal shooting of Patrick Dorismond in March 2000 inflamed Giuliani's already strained relations with the city's minority communities, and Clinton seized on it as a major campaign issue. By April 2000, reports showed Clinton gaining upstate and generally outworking Giuliani, who stated that his duties as mayor prevented him from campaigning more. Clinton was now 8 to 10 points ahead of Giuliani in the polls.
Then followed four tumultuous weeks, in which Giuliani's medical life, romantic life, marital life, and political life all collided at once in a most visible fashion. Giuliani discovered that he had prostate cancer and needed treatment; his extramarital relationship with Judith Nathan became public and the subject of a media frenzy; he announced a separation from his wife Donna Hanover; and, after much indecision, on May 19, 2000 he announced his withdrawal from the senate race.
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacksResponse to attacksGiuliani was prominent in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. He made frequent appearances on radio and television on September 11 and afterwards—for example, to indicate that tunnels would be closed as a precautionary measure, and that there was no reason to believe that the dispersion of chemical or biological weaponry into the air was a factor in the attack. In his public statements, Giuliani said "Tomorrow New York is going to be here. And we're going to rebuild, and we're going to be stronger than we were before...I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, that terrorism can't stop us."
The 9/11 attack occurred on the scheduled date of the mayoral primary to select the Democratic and Republican candidates to succeed Giuliani. The primary was immediately delayed two weeks to September 25. During this period, Giuliani sought an unprecedented three-month emergency extension of his term from January 1 to April 1 under the New York State Constitution (Article 3 Section 25), but the State Assembly and Senate did not approve it. The request was backed by the threat of a run for a third mayoral term as a Conservative Party candidate, requiring a legal challenge to the law imposing term limits on elected New York City officials.
Giuliani claimed to have been at the Ground Zero site "as often, if not more, than most workers.... I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them." Some 9/11 workers have objected to those claims. While his appointment logs were unavailable for the six days immediately following the attacks, after that Giuliani spent a total of 29 hours over three months at the site. This contrasted with recovery workers at the site who spent this much time at the site in two to three days.
When Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal suggested that the attacks were an indication that the United States "should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause", Giuliani asserted, "There is no moral equivalent for this act. There is no justification for it... And one of the reasons I think this happened is because people were engaged in moral equivalency in not understanding the difference between liberal democracies like the United States, like Israel, and terrorist states and those who condone terrorism. So I think not only are those statements wrong, they're part of the problem." Giuliani subsequently rejected the prince's $10 million donation to disaster relief in the aftermath of the attack.
PreparednessGiuliani has been widely criticized for his decision to locate the Office of Emergency Management headquarters on the 23rd floor inside the 7 World Trade Center building. Those opposing the decision perceived the office as a target for a terrorist attack in light of the previous terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in 1993. The office was unable to coordinate efforts between police and firefighters properly while evacuating its headquarters. Large tanks of diesel fuel were placed in 7 World Trade to power the command center, and this fuel was later deemed responsible for the intense fire that caused that building to collapse hours after the Twin Towers. In May 2007, Giuliani put responsibility for selecting the location on Jerome M. Hauer, who had served under Giuliani from 1996 to 2000 before being appointed by him as New York City’s first Director of Emergency Management. Hauer has taken exception to that account in interviews and provided Fox News and New York Magazine with a memo demonstrating that he recommended a location in Brooklyn but was overruled by Giuliani. Television journalist Chris Wallace interviewed Giuliani on May 13, 2007, about his 1997 decision to locate the command center at the World Trade Center. Giuliani laughed during Wallace's questions and said that Hauer recommended the World Trade Center site and claimed that Hauer said that the WTC site was the best location. Wallace presented Giuliani a photocopy of Hauer directive letter. The letter urged Giuliani to locate the command center in Brooklyn, instead of lower Manhattan. The February 1996 memo read, "The [Brooklyn] building is secure and not as visible a target as buildings in Lower Manhattan."
In January 2008, an eight-page memo was revealed which detailed the New York City Police Department's opposition in 1998 to location of the city's emergency command center at the Trade Center site. The Giuliani administration overrode these concerns.
The 9/11 Commission noted in its report that lack of preparedness could have led to the deaths of first responders at the scene of the attacks. The Commission noted that the radios in use by the fire department were the same radios which had been criticized for their ineffectiveness following the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. Family members of 9/11 victims have said that these radios were a complaint of emergency services responders for years. The radios were not working when Fire Department chiefs ordered the 343 firefighters inside the towers to evacuate, and they remained in the towers as the towers collapsed. However, when Giuliani testified before the 9/11 Commission he said that the firefighters ignored the evacuation order out of an effort to save lives. Giuliani testified to the Commission, where some family members of responders who had died in the attacks appeared to protest his statements. A 1994 mayoral office study of the radios indicated that they were faulty. Replacement radios were purchased in a $33 million no-bid contract with Motorola, and implemented in early 2001. However, the radios were recalled in March 2001 after a Probationary Firefighter's calls for help at a house fire could not be picked up by others at the scene, leaving firemen with the old analog radios from 1993. A book later published by Commission members Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, argued that the Commission had not pursued a tough enough line of questioning with Giuliani.
An October 2001 study by the National Institute of Environmental Safety and Health said that cleanup workers lacked adequate protective gear.
Public reactionIn the wake of the attacks, Giuliani was hailed by many for his leadership during the crisis. When polled just six weeks after the attack Giuliani received a 79 percent approval rating among New York City voters, a dramatic increase over the 36 percent rating he had received a year earlier — average at the end of a two-term mayorship. Oprah Winfrey called him "America's Mayor" at a 9/11 memorial service held at Yankee Stadium on September 23, 2001, a term now in common use by his supporters. Other voices denied it was the mayor who had pulled the city together. "You didn't bring us together, our pain brought us together and our decency brought us together. We would have come together if Bozo was the mayor", said civil rights activist Al Sharpton, in a statement largely supported by Fernando Ferrer, one of three main candidates for the mayoralty at the end of 2001. "He was a power-hungry person", Sharpton also said. Many New Yorkers were impressed with Giuliani's response to the attacks, precisely because his calm and soothing demeanor seemed markedly out of character, after seven years in which he had gained a reputation as a divisive mayor.
Time person of the yearOn December 24, 2001, Time magazine named Giuliani its Person of the Year for 2001. Time observed that, prior to 9/11, the public image of Giuliani had been that of a rigid, self-righteous, ambitious politician. After 9/11, and perhaps owing also to his bout with prostate cancer, his public image had been reformed to that of a man who could be counted on to unite a city in the midst of its greatest crisis. Thus historian Vincent J. Cannato concluded in September 2006, "With time, Giuliani's legacy will be based on more than just 9/11. He left a city immeasurably better off — safer, more prosperous, more confident — than the one he had inherited eight years earlier, even with the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center at its heart. Debates about his accomplishments will continue, but the significance of his mayoralty is hard to deny."
Giuliani was praised by some for his close involvement with the rescue and recovery efforts, but others, including some firefighters, police, rescue workers, and families of WTC victims argue that "Giuliani has exaggerated the role he played after the terrorist attacks, casting himself as a hero for political gain." Giuliani has collected $11.4 million from speaking fees in a single year (his demand increasing after the attacks). Before September 11, Giuliani's assets were estimated to be somewhat less than $2 million, but his net worth could now be as high as 30 times that amount.
AftermathGiuliani initially downplayed the health effects arising from the September 11, 2001 attacks in the Financial District and lower Manhattan areas in the vicinity of the World Trade Center site. He moved quickly to reopen Wall Street, and it was reopened on September 17. In the first month after the attacks, he said "The air quality is safe and acceptable." However, in the weeks after the attacks, the United States Geological Survey identified hundreds of asbestos hot spots of debris dust that remained on buildings. By the end of the month the USGS reported that the toxicity of the debris was akin to that of drain cleaner. It would eventually be determined that a wide swath of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn had been heavily contaminated by highly caustic and toxic materials. The city's health agencies, such as the Department of Environmental Protection, did not supervise or issue guidelines for the testing and cleanup of private buildings. Instead, the city left this responsibility to building owners.
Giuliani took control away from agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, leaving the "largely unknown" city Department of Design and Construction in charge of recovery and cleanup. Documents indicate that the Giuliani administration never enforced federal requirements requiring the wearing of respirators. Concurrently, the administration threatened companies with dismissal if cleanup work slowed. In June 2007, Christie Todd Whitman, former Republican Governor of New Jersey and director of the Environmental Protection Agency, reportedly stated that the EPA had pushed for workers at the WTC site to wear respirators but that she had been blocked by Giuliani. She stated that she believed that the subsequent lung disease and deaths suffered by WTC responders were a result of these actions. However, former deputy mayor Joe Lhota, now with the Giuliani campaign, replied, "All workers at Ground Zero were instructed repeatedly to wear their respirators." A safety professional who worked at Ground Zero added, "I was absolutely aghast at the refusal of the workers at ground zero to wear the personal protective equipment. All of my efforts to convince these guys to wear the masks was for naught."
Giuliani asked the city's Congressional delegation to limit the city's liability for Ground Zero illnesses be limited to a total of $350 million. Two years after Giuliani finished his term, FEMA appropriated $1 billion to a special insurance fund to protect the city against 9/11 lawsuits.
In February 2007, the International Association of Fire Fighters issued a letter asserting that Giuliani rushed to conclude the recovery effort once gold and silver had been recovered from World Trade Center vaults and thereby prevented the remains of many victims from being recovered: "Mayor Giuliani's actions meant that fire fighters and citizens who perished would either remain buried at Ground Zero forever, with no closure for families, or be removed like garbage and deposited at the Fresh Kills Landfill," it said, adding: "Hundreds remained entombed in Ground Zero when Giuliani gave up on them." Lawyers for the International Association of Fire Fighters seek to interview Giuliani under oath as part of a federal legal action alleging that New York City negligently dumped body parts and other human remains in the Fresh Kills Landfill.
Post-mayoraltyPoliticsSince leaving office as Mayor, Giuliani has remained politically active by campaigning for Republican candidates for political offices at all levels. He was a speaker at the 2004 Republican National Convention, where he endorsed George W. Bush for re-election by recalling that immediately after the World Trade Center towers fell, "Without really thinking, based on just emotion, spontaneous, I grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and I said to him, 'Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president.'"
Similarly, in June 2006, Giuliani started a website called Solutions America to help elect Republicans candidates across the nation.
After campaigning on behalf of President Bush in the 2004 election, he was reportedly the top choice for Secretary of Homeland Security after the resignation of Tom Ridge. When suggestions were made that Giuliani's confirmation hearings would be marred by details of his past affairs and scandals, he turned down the offer and instead recommended his friend and former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik. Kerik in his pre-announcement interviews with the White House failed to disclose facts in his past that were certain to disqualify him. After the formal announcement of Kerik's nomination, information known for years to local reporters, but unreported, became widely known (most notably, that Kerik had ties to organized crime, but also that he had been sued for sexual harassment and had employed an undocumented alien as a domestic servant). The political fallout was damaging to the perception of competence in the White House vetting process and doubts as to Giuliani's ethics and political judgment in recommending Kerik in the first place.
A May 14, 2007 New York Daily News poll indicates that 56 percent of polled New Yorkers believe that Michael Bloomberg has done a better job as mayor, and that 29 percent believed that Giuliani had been a better mayor. 46 percent of those polled also |
