Private lives and public tolerance

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s first inauguration as mayor here was a family affair. His 7-year-old son, Andrew, mugged for the cameras as Papa Rudy toasted his television hostess wife, Donna, as “my partner, my inspiration and my lover.” Then daughter Caroline, 4, hid behind her hat as the couple kissed that Jan. 2, 1994.

Thirteen years later, that familial unit is nowhere to be seen in the Giuliani presidential campaign. The once rambunctious Andrew, now a burly Duke sophomore, has indicated that he has no plans to stump for his father -- he’s too busy working on his golf game. Neither he nor Caroline, now poised to enter Harvard, are even mentioned on the campaign’s website, JoinRudy2008.com.

And the woman shown now with Giuliani is not their mother, but wife No. 3, nurse-by-training Judith Nathan Giuliani, who recently volunteered to New York tabloids that this was her third marriage as well.

“I don’t think any of us have perfect lives,” Giuliani himself said soon after, when both faced TV’s Barbara Walters.

“Judge me by my public performance,” he added.

Supporters of Giuliani, the GOP front-runner in polls, are counting on voters to do just that during a campaign that may test whether the electorate really cares any longer, in the post-Clinton era, about a candidate’s personal life.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a chief rival for the party nomination, has been through his own unflattering divorce. Former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who is being urged to run, had a divorce, then a vigorous single life -- and now has a much younger wife. And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who may throw his hat in, was having an extramarital affair with a congressional aide -- now his third wife -- while he was lambasting President Clinton during the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal.

Of course, that infamous time also shadows Democratic poll-leader Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who still must endure the leering monologue jokes about her husband.

But the spotlight on private histories has shined brightest on the Republican side since February, when TheSmoking Gun.com posted excerpts from a “vulnerability study” commissioned by Giuliani’s 1993 mayoral campaign, which warned of perceptions of a “weirdness factor” due to his first marriage, to his second cousin. And that was written before the disintegration of Giuliani’s second marriage, which saw him inform wife Donna Hanover via news conference of his intent to split, and which spawned such headlines as “Donna Makes the Creep Pay.”

Even before negative campaigning begins in earnest, other candidates have found ways to rattle the domestic skeletons. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has trumpeted his 38-year marriage; and longshot Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, has argued that at least one group must judge candidates by personal conduct.

“It would be a complete loss of credibility,” Huckabee said, “for Christian evangelical leaders to suddenly say, ‘With Republicans, we’re going to have a new set of rules. It applied to Bill Clinton, but won’t apply to anyone else.’ ”

The pre-Clinton era

For nearly 200 years, even one failed marriage was considered a death knell for would-be presidents. Candidates were expected to lead sensible lives with stay-at-home wives and stable families, or at least project that image.

Stuart Spencer recalls the 1964 presidential campaign he ran for New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, who divorced messily in 1962 and married a former staffer in 1963.

For months, the campaign kept the focus on Rockefeller’s rival for the Republican nomination, Barry Goldwater, and whether it was safe to put Goldwater “near the button” in the nuclear age.

Then Rockefeller’s new wife, Happy, gave birth, an event that normally would boost a candidacy -- except in this case, Spencer recalled, Goldwater ran ads featuring his wife of 30 years and four children, which “said everything that had to be said: this nice family against this womanizer.”

In 1980, Spencer helped Ronald Reagan win election as the first divorced president. Reagan’s 1948 split from actress Jane Wyman was old news by then, and he’d been remarried for 28 years. Even so, the campaign worried “his ex-spouse could go public with some hairy tales,” Spencer said.

“It’s a lot different now,” he added. “I don’t think we have a lot of old-fashioned families left.”

Benjamin Ginsberg, director of the Center for the Study of American Government at Johns Hopkins University, thinks that Giuliani, for one, could not have been a contender a decade ago.

Giuliani and the other Republicans have the last Democratic president to thank, Ginsberg says, for the fact that even infidelities in office today are “not disqualifying.”

“We’re in the post-Clinton era. People have become more tolerant of personal foibles,” he said. “The only way a candidate can be really hurt by revelations now is to deny. Then they get killed by the lies and deceptions.”

By that measure, the Giuliani campaign was prudent to have his current wife volunteer, a year before the primaries, that she had a previously unrevealed first marriage. Ginsberg says a mea culpa can be so effective -- “Yes, it happened, but now I’m a better person” -- that rivals may feel cheated.

“If you’re Ozzie and Harriet, you don’t [necessarily] win,” he noted. “For some voters, the contrast between a Mitt Romney, who seems to be squeaky-clean, and Giuliani, who’s just squeaky, does not make a difference.”

Onetime would-be priest

As a youngster, Giuliani “was going to become a priest,” recalled Raphael Jacobelli, 76, a neighbor on Long Island.

Giuliani has said that his interest in the opposite sex while he was at Manhattan College prompted him to abandon such thoughts. Fraternity brothers attest that he had one of the best-looking girlfriends, a blond more interested in dancing than the opera, his passion even then. When Giuliani finished New York University law school, though, he married someone more quiet and intellectual: Regina Peruggi, the daughter of his father’s first cousin.

After 14 up-and-down years, the marriage was annulled with the help of an old frat brother who became a monsignor on Long Island, on grounds that the pair had never gotten dispensation from the Roman Catholic Church for a union among such relatives. Giuliani said he thought they were third cousins, but his 1993 campaign study cautioned that he had given “conflicting answers” about his personal life.

He seems to have maintained civility with Peruggi, who went on to get a doctorate in education and became president of two colleges, currently Kingsborough Community. Indeed, he has appeared at some of the same events she has. Peruggi declines to discuss the marriage.

There was little civility in his second breakup. Giuliani met Donna Hanover in 1982, in Miami, where she was a TV anchorwoman. He was then a Justice Department lawyer in Washington, and traveled to Florida to deal with incoming boatloads of Haitians. He proposed at Disney World. The next year he was named U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Giuliani’s leap into mayoral politics in 1989 was hardly based on a warm-and-fuzzy image -- he was the tough prosecutor who’d taken on the Mafia. But it didn’t hurt to have a professional communicator as a spouse, one who boasted during his successful 1993 campaign, against incumbent David N. Dinkins, that Giuliani was “the most virile man.” From 1995 on, however, Hanover was seen by the public more on TV than with her husband. She was not with him even at his millennium New Year’s party in Times Square -- but another woman was nearby.

Then came what Giuliani, in his book “Leadership,” termed “several extraordinary weeks.” In April 2000, as he was gearing up for a Senate race against Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hanover accepted a role in “The Vagina Monologues,” a play not exactly fitting the image of her husband, who had condemned a local art show as “sick.” Days later, Giuliani had the other woman with him at one of the crucial moments in his life -- when he went to the hospital for a prostate biopsy that found the same form of cancer that had killed his father.

In May, Giuliani held the news conference disclosing to the city -- and his wife -- that he was seeking a separation. A shaken Hanover responded that there was a reason it had become “difficult to participate in Rudy’s public life”: He’d had an earlier affair with his press secretary.

Soon after, Giuliani brazenly walked down 2nd Avenue with the new woman in his life, Judith Nathan. An executive with Bristol-Meyers Squibb, the pharmaceutical giant, she was raising a teenage daughter after her own divorce. The two have never said how they met, other than that it was by “accident.”

Giuliani’s divorce lawyer, Raoul Felder, recalls the period as “a confluence of three things”: the prostate cancer, acrimonious divorce proceedings, “then 9/11.”

The breakup became a spectacle: Giuliani associates pointing out the consequences of radiation treatments on his sexual performance to rebut the notion that he and Nathan were having an affair; Hanover seeking an injunction to keep Nathan away from Gracie Mansion; Giuliani moving out, into the apartment of a Republican fundraiser, a gay Queens car dealer living with his partner.

In 2002, Giuliani agreed to pay Hanover $6.8 million plus legal fees, and the next year each remarried: Giuliani to Nathan, on the lawn at Gracie Mansion, courtesy of the city’s new mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg; and Hanover to a former high school beau, lawyer Edwin Oster of Newport Beach, Calif.

Now co-host of a morning radio show in New York, Hanover too declines to discuss the ex-husband who seeks the presidency.

That’s no doubt a relief to a Giuliani campaign that may have to deal with the quips about the “cad-in-chief,” “the Marrying Man” and “Disgracie Mansion.” But even a prime Giuliani critic sees the turbulent time as having had one positive effect: mellowing the combative ex-mayor.

Fellow former Mayor Edward I. Koch, a Democrat who wrote a book called “Giuliani: Nasty Man,” says that the cancer and the carnage of Sept. 11, in particular, “undoubtedly caused change in the way he treated people ... more cordially.” Koch also argues that voters should not reject Giuliani because of his marital record; they should reject him for his record in New York, Koch says, “the Giuliani myth.”

Huckabee, a Baptist minister before entering politics, argues that personal conduct should matter -- and not only to evangelicals. “If I fail to keep the promises I make to the people closest to me,” he says, “then I’m not sure how reliable I’m going to be in keeping promises to total strangers who vote for me.”

But Spencer, the Republican campaign guru, now 80, says he has grappled for years with whether there’s a correlation between “that type of activity” and being a good leader. “Does Clinton’s philandering affect his governing?” he asks -- and sees no link. “I think the world’s gone beyond that.”

Yet in the era of targeted e-mails and automated “push-poll” calling, he says of the dirt: “Someone will try to get it out.”

So far, with Giuliani, it has been Mitt Romney playing the nudging role. Romney did so again after Judith Giuliani went through “being rolled out,” as she called it, and husband Rudy proudly told Barbara Walters that he might let her sit in on some Cabinet meetings.

Romney promptly made it clear to Fox News that his wife was not going to become another Hillary Clinton.

“That’s not the way it works in our home,” Romney said. He also has repeated a joke about the leading Republicans, how only one has had a single wife: “the Mormon.”

paul.lieberman@latimes.com