Andrew Kirtzman - Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of Americas Mayor

The Rise and Tragic Fall of Americas Major

Giuliani

Andrew Kirtzman

For Kyle

The title of researcher only begins to describe the role David Holley played in this project. He worked on it daily for over two years, elevating the quality of this book incalculably. His extraordinary reporting and analytical skills are reflected in every page.

I thank him for his talent, dedication, and friendship. Cant wait to do it again.

Andrew Kirtzman

I first met Rudy Giuliani over breakfast at a midtown Manhattan hotel in the summer of 1992. After serving as a newspaper reporter for more than a decade, I took the risk of my journalistic career and crossed the Rubicon into television, accepting a job as an on-air political reporter for NY1, Time Warners twenty-four-hour news channel.

My arrival there coincided with the start of Giulianis grudge match against the incumbent mayor, David Dinkins, who had beaten him by a slim margin in 1989. At breakfast Giuliani was polite and amiable, spending most of the time laying out his path to victory. The power dynamic was largely in my favor, as he was a losing candidate trying to impress upon me his viability. He was impatient for the rematch to begin.

The station assigned me to cover his campaignI became its Giuliani reporter. I filed a story about him several nights a week for the next nine years.

Giuliani was enormously accessible at first, cultivating reporters just as he had in his United States attorney days, a strategy that helped make him one of the countrys most celebrated crime fighters. He was candid and outspoken, and his campaign organization was still on the improvisational side, with a few close aides running the show, along with a larger-than-life campaign strategist, David Garth, a gruff bulldog of a man who had famously helped elect John Lindsay and Ed Koch and was intent upon electing his third New York mayor.

Garth was working to soften the lawmans sometimes snarling persona from the 1989 race, filming campaign commercials of Giuliani on park benches talking nostalgically about his love of the New York Yankees as a kid growing up in Brooklyn.

As the campaign revved up, something changed. My phone started blowing up each night after my stories aired, a foul-mouthed Garth hollering at me for what he called biased coverage. The antagonism coming from the campaign grew so intense that it began withholding the candidates daily schedule from the station, forcing our assignment desk to rely upon other news organizations to keep up with Giulianis public events. Similar situations were playing out at other news organizations across the city; the campaign decided on a strategic level to keep the citys journalists on the defensive to blunt their perceived bias against a white Republican candidate running to unseat the citys first Black mayor.

I was getting hit by all sides. As I was being targeted by the campaign for being adversarial, I was being eyed by some within the station as being too sympathetic to the candidate. In fact I was growing fascinated by him. The city was in decline and Giuliani was increasingly tapping into the publics anxiety about disorder in the streets and ambivalence about David Dinkins, its often hapless mayor.

Giuliani was severe, brilliant, angry. He had grown as a candidate since his loss four years earlier, immersing himself in issues he had failed to study the first time around, and emerging with innovative proposals. His campaigns attacks on me were annoying on a personal level but intrigued me as a reporter. Dinkins was running a predictable campaign reflecting the career politician he was, with a union endorsement here, a politicians endorsement there. Giuliani was inventing something from scratch.

I was fascinated by his perpetually spinning moral compass. The Catholic school graduate framed policies not as good or bad but rather as right or wrong. He had a dark, Machiavellian streak, yet managed to wrap his problematic acts in a cloak of righteousness. The Giuliani campaign motto was One City, One Standard, a thinly veiled accusation that Dinkins was taking sides on the racial battlefield. He claimed the high ground in that warwhat could be more fair than a single standard?but was stirring up resentment among his base of blue-collar white voters, who were already suspicious that Dinkins was showing favoritism to Black communities.

Giuliani won the rematch, and for the next eight years I covered him with continuing astonishment. The new mayor shed his nice-guy act the moment he walked through the doors of City Hall. His daily press conferences were studies in combat, him hurling daily fusillades of insults at reporters, accusing them of asking stupid questions, distorting facts, or acting jerkyone of his favorite expressions. He was intent on blowing things up to effect change; every initiative became an over-the-top drama.

When I became a host of the stations nightly political show, Inside City Hall, his aides played games to keep us in check. When they approved of our coverage theyd offer up high-level officials as guests. When they perceived a slightwhich was constantlythey denied us access to even the most low-level administration figures. Garth continued to call me nightly after every show, mixing insults with flattery. The manipulations were endless.

The mayor seemed to enjoy his parries with my colleagues and me at his daily press conferences, but otherwise kept most of us at arms length. When I published a book about his mayoralty in 2000, he announced that he wouldnt read it.

The dynamic between us changed on September 11. I experienced that day with him, interviewing him in a sweat as we hurried north on Church Street, away from the destruction. He had narrowly escaped the implosion of the first tower; when the second tower collapsed we ran for our lives.

From that moment on I became part of his 9/11 story. He related his experiences with me in his 9/11 Commission testimony, in his Time Person of the Year interview, and in his book, Leadership. For years following that life-altering day he would break into a smile when we ran into each other, and bring up our experience.

For better or worse, I probably did more to inform the world about Giulianis performance leading the city through the tragedy than any other person, save Giuliani himself. I wrote a new chapter about our experience for my book about him. I relayed the story of his actions in countless interviews for television, newspapers, radio, and documentaries.

Then I picked up the Giuliani story where it left off. He had flamed out as a presidential candidate, and his business ventures were raking in unimaginable amounts of cash, much of it earned from dubious clients. I wrote stories about it for magazines and newspapers, and spoke critically about his profiteering off of his achievements on 9/11. We returned to our original roles in each others lives.

In the fall of 2019, I began writing this biography. Giuliani was working as Donald Trumps attorney, causing enormous trouble with his friend, and watching his own reputation go down in flames.

My colleague David Holley and I conducted hundreds of interviews with people who had been close to Giuliani at different points in his life, including his friends, aides, business associates, Trump White House officials, and others. We read through memos, documents, and public schedules from his mayoral archives, which were not available to the public at the time I wrote my first book. We recorded his daily radio shows and podcasts, and watched countless televised interviews going back to his prosecutor days.