What Happened?

Thomas Dyja, in New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation (Simon and Schuster, 2021), called Rudy Giuliani "New York's version of Eliot Ness," with a "Jesuitical view of the world." He also said of him that he "had built his career on the belief that everyone was a sinner somehow - you just had to catch them at it." Giuliani's "Catholic righteousness," as Dyja characterized it, "made him look above politics. Which," he added, "was a very good thing when you wanted to enter politics."

The Giuliani myth went through several stages - the mob-fighting, anti-Wall Street U.S. Attorney, the anti-crime two-term mayor, and then the star of 9/11. Since then, of course, that myth has taken a different turn, as Giuliani and his image have cascaded downward in a dramatic decline. That is the topic and theme of CNN's new four-part series, Giuliani: What Happened to America's Mayor? which premiered yesterday and will conclude next Sunday.

Full disclosure, I have never been a fan of the Giuliani myth. I never fell for him any of the three times he ran for mayor. On the morning tragedy struck New York City on 9/11, I had just voted in a party primary for one of those competing to be his successor and, like many New Yorkers, was looking forward to the imminent advent of a new mayoral administration. By then, to quote Dyja again, "Rudy has united the city - everyone was eager to move past him." While the Mayor performed creditably on 9/11 (and benefited in the short-term from the many accolades that fell to him as a result), my turn-of-the-millennium perception of New York on the eve of 9/11 was of a racially divided and politically polarized city, whose mayor's over-sized combative personality's usefulness had long ago run its course. Indeed, had 9/11 not happened, the end of Giuliani's mayoral reign would likely have been remembered most for his marital soap-opera, which caused an acquaintance of mine at the time to ask (just one month before 9/11), "Why does anyone bother to write fiction?"

Mayor Giuliani's prominence in the 9/11 story, however, gave him a new lease on political life. How he failed to translate that into serious success and instead now finds himself in such a discredited situation today will, presumably, be the ultimate focus of the CNN series. While I think no one would have predicted in the aftermath of 9/11 the full depth of Giuliani's fall (just as no one would have then predicted Trump's presidency), there were perhaps some warning signs. For example, until one of the mayoral candidates courageously called his bluff, Giuliani tried to finagle a 90-day extension of his term and even appeared to be angling for a third term (something his successor eventually succeeded at getting for himself, albeit through proper channels). As the former Mayor, Ed Koch, already saw at the time, "He'd be a danger to the country if he were president."

The first episode traces Giuliani's 1980s rise as an outer-borough guy, resentful of Manhattan elites. (What other outer-borough guy resentful of Manhattan elites who also rose to prominence in New York in the 1980s does that sound like?) As a righteous, mob-fighting, Wall-Street fighting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, Giuliani was both a personal and professional success and an embryonic populist hero. His first mayoral campaign came in 1989 (the year of the Central Park Five and Yusef Hawkins). He originally expected to run against incumbent Ed Koch, but ended up running against - and losing to - New York's first Black Mayor David Dinkins. The second episode focuses on his two terms as mayor (1994-2001) and the deepening racial division and polarization which increasingly characterized his regime. With the benefit of hindsight, the program highlights Trump-like characteristics Giuliani displayed.

Is Giuliani a "tragic" figure in a classical sense? If so, then he must be both accomplished a flawed. As U.S. Attorney for the Southern District and then as Mayor, he was both. The first two episodes do a good job of highlighting how talented and accomplished he was, but how his need to win would get the better of him.

Presumably, the disastrous denouement will come in the third and fourth episodes, set to air next Sunday.