A New Calling for the Brash Mayor of N.Y.

On a freezing night in the Bronx, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is basking in the warmth of a town hall meeting that sounds more like a campaign rally. “Thanks for cutting crime!” booms an elderly man. “Good luck in your Senate race against Hillary Clinton!” shouts a young woman.

People cheer, but the mood at Fordham Prep School grows chilly when a student asks a pointed question: How can the mayor, a devout Catholic, reconcile the morality of his attack on a dung-covered picture of the Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Art Museum with the way he treats the homeless?

Giuliani rips into the teenager with disdain. “You don’t know my moral principles,” he says, ridiculing the question as arrogant and naive. Taut with indignation, the mayor says his attack on the “Sensation” exhibit was a matter of decency and argues that his homeless policies--including the removal from shelters of people who refuse to work--are compassionate. The crowd gives him an ovation. The student looks shellshocked.

It’s a vintage Giuliani moment, encapsulating the best and worst of New York’s tireless, tough-talking and sometimes exasperating mayor.

As he prepares to do battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton for a U.S. Senate seat--the first lady formally announced her candidacy last week--Giuliani can point to a remarkable comeback in the nation’s largest city, with crime down 50%, the economy booming, welfare rolls shrinking and civic pride bursting. Even his worst enemies give him credit for a take-no-prisoners style that has tamed a town once thought to be ungovernable.

Yet the mayor’s thin-skinned and abrasive persona has sparked widespread criticism among African Americans and other groups, who believe he has been grossly insensitive to them. Indeed, former Mayor Edward I. Koch has written a book called “Giuliani: Nasty Man,” and his demeanor is a key issue for Mrs. Clinton, who questions whether his temperament is suited to the collegial style of the Senate.

“If people don’t like my personality, I really don’t care,” says Giuliani, 55, who thrives on crisis--whether it’s a crippling snowstorm or a looming subway strike--the way Bill Clinton thrives on crowds. And while it is fashionable to belittle the mayor’s style, others say it took nothing less to implement sweeping change in the Big Apple.

“You have to be a sonofabitch to get things done in this town,” said Fred Siegel, a Cooper Union political science professor who has studied urban rebirth in New York, Los Angeles and other cities. “And it is precisely Giuliani’s strong personality that let him achieve as much as he has in this community.”

So how did a Republican outsider like Giuliani--a fabled federal prosecutor who brought down Michael Milken and Leona Helmsley--bring New York City to heel? Where did all this belligerence come from? And how will he channel it in the bruising campaign ahead?

“If you want to know who this guy is, the first thing you need to know is that he grew up as a Yankee fan in Brooklyn, he got beat up a lot as a kid and he learned how to fight for his position, no matter how unpopular,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic consultant. “He never backs down. Never.”

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William Bratton learned this the hard way. The former New York police commissioner, an urbane Bostonian, got the bum’s rush in 1996 when the mayor made it clear he had no intention of sharing the credit for slashing crime with his popular appointee.

Today, Bratton gives his former boss high marks for a tough new approach to law enforcement. Under the so-called Broken Windows program, police crack down on all crimes, big and small, believing unchecked minor offenses create a climate in which larger crimes fester. New York developed a state-of-the-art computer system for monitoring the rate of crime from one block to the next--and made precinct leaders accountable for controlling it.

“The mayor deserves credit,” Bratton said, “because if the crime rate had gone up, he’d be taking the heat.” Yet he remains critical of Giuliani, saying that the police in New York failed to convert their “wartime” gains into a “peacetime dividend” by helping reduce racial tensions. Moreover, he believes the mayor’s personal style exacerbates tensions and divides people.

“The problem with his personality is excess,” Bratton said. “He kicks you while you’re down. And it’s worked by and large because he’s intimidated the hell out of this town.”

When then-New York Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines (now interim superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District) ran afoul of Giuliani in 1995, the mayor helped force his ouster, mocking him as a whiner. When his successor, Rudy Crew, dared oppose the mayor’s school voucher program, he too was kicked out.

“You talk about Richard Nixon’s enemies list,” said Bratton. “Giuliani could match him page for page.”

In his defense, the mayor, who declined to be interviewed for this article, says he has worked with opponents to pass numerous bills and that his programs have been badly distorted by journalists and political enemies. His daily news conferences are peppered with tart comments about reporters who ask “foolish” questions about his crackdowns on jaywalkers, drunken drivers, rude cabbies, pushy vendors and other miscreants.

The venom can erupt without warning. Giuliani was fielding questions the other day when a reporter suggested that his policy of arresting homeless people in shelters was targeting some people guilty of minor infractions, like urinating in public.

Swelling with incredulity and sarcasm, the mayor walked out from behind his lectern to lecture the crowd. “When someone is urinating on public property, we’ve got a problem,” he said. Giuliani argued that to ignore such an anti-social act recalled the city of 10 years ago, when residents looked the other way.

He made his point like a quintessential New Yorker: quick on his feet and right in your face. Lately, Giuliani has taken a new tack, suggesting his critics display signs of mental illness. When patrons of the Brooklyn Museum fought his efforts to deny them public funds, he said they had “clear psychological problems.”

“Rudy’s strong, but there’s a fine line dividing a fighter for New York and a bully,” said state pollster Lee Miringoff.

‘A Desire to Be in Control’

Acquaintances say, however, that he can be delightfully funny and charming, “someone whose company you enjoy,” according to a longtime friend. “But he’s also driven by strong political passions and a desire to be in control.”

Under Giuliani, City Hall has come to resemble a bunker. Surrounded by police, it is harder for the public to enter the ornate building; critics charge that he also has blocked access to information about city agencies that was routinely available under previous administrations.

From his first days in office, Giuliani has been accused of ignoring minorities and demonizing advocates for the poor. He made it clear that he would never meet with the Rev. Al Sharpton, a black civil rights leader whom he has called demagogic. Critics complain that he has also failed to build bridges to other, less controversial leaders.

“Giuliani has divided people, and this has sent a message of cold contempt to African American voters,” said Manning Marable, director of African American studies at Columbia University. “We can read this when it happens; we know he’s deliberately cut himself off from our community.”

The mayor paid a price for this isolation last year, when an unarmed West African street peddler was killed in a hail of 41 police bullets as he stood in his Bronx apartment lobby. Four white New York police officers, currently on trial for murder, said they mistakenly thought Amadou Diallo was reaching for a gun when they asked him to halt. The attack triggered furious street protests, which the mayor belittled.

“I had Al Sharpton arrested for civil disobedience when I was mayor,” said Koch. “But at least I still talked with him.”

Giuliani has fared better with public perceptions of his workfare program, the nation’s largest. Under his prodding, the welfare rolls declined from a high of 1.1 million in 1994 to 620,000. “We used to be the welfare capital of America, and now we’re the welfare reform capital,” he pointed out in an upbeat State of the City speech last month.

But the mayor had little good to say about the city’s public schools, which have continued to decline, even though he has played a hand in the hiring and firing of school superintendents.

Giuliani also failed to mention that despite good economic times, 34.3% of city children were living in poverty in 1998, compared with 18.9% nationally. The city rate declined from 41% in 1996.

“In this richest of cities, that’s a terribly sad thing,” said Liz Krueger, associate director of the Community Food Resource Center. “We have people being turned away from food kitchens. There are folks who can’t pay rents. And it’s not just federal policies, it’s because of new city policies.”

Giuliani believes the city has a role to play in aiding the poor. Supporters argue that, in trying to instill more personal responsibility, he’s had to revamp some of Gotham’s most basic welfare programs.

Deserving Credit for N.Y.’s Safe Image

“Look at what he’s done: cut crime, bring the budget under control, run the mob out of town,” said Bruce Teitelbaum, Giuliani’s battle-hardened Senate campaign manager and former chief of staff. “None of that is for the faint of heart. And people credit his style for making real change possible in New York . . . whether they agree with him or not.”

Even Giuliani’s most persistent critic, public advocate Mark Green, has grudgingly offered the mayor words of support. An unreconstructed liberal who would become mayor if Giuliani leaves for the Senate, Green recently told the Daily News: “I admire how Rudy is a leader . . . I admire how he is hands-on, how he focuses on a problem. He made the city safer, and for that he deserves all the credit in the world.”

When he took office in 1994, Giuliani inherited a recession-bound city with a $2-billion budget deficit. He’d won a slim victory over David N. Dinkins, New York’s first black mayor, but the new chief executive had no intention of treading carefully. Like Nixon going to China, he attempted things his predecessors could not.

Dinkins, for example, got support from city workers--yet that freed Giuliani to declare war on spending and in some cases slow the growth of labor contracts.

Shunned by the powerful teachers union, he won an end to principal tenure and social promotion programs.

Naturally, this has stirred up great opposition. “He’s taken on symbols of entrenched power, and these can be tough fights to win. . . . If I were Rudy, I’d be in a state of fury myself,” said Heather MacDonald, a research fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “Among some people, the hatred of Giuliani verges on religious ecstasy.”

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Fighting and winning is something Giuliani got used to at an early age. He recited baseball statistics (and was ready to brawl) when Brooklyn kids challenged him on his Yankee loyalties. He won over skeptical high school pals and got them to join an opera club, a passion that continues to this day. As a college student he campaigned for an earlier carpetbagging liberal Democratic Senate candidate--Robert F. Kennedy, who went on to win.

Giuliani, the son of second-generation immigrants, flirted with the priesthood but got a law degree from New York University. Joining the U.S. attorney’s office, he ran the narcotics unit and won praise for his grueling cross-examinations. He later became associate attorney general under President Reagan, the Justice Department’s third-highest official, but found his ultimate legal calling when he took over the U.S. attorney’s office in New York.

It was the money-mad ‘80s, and the stern prosecutor morphed into a media darling with his pursuit of Milken and other Wall Street big shots. A 1987 Vanity Fair profile judged him to be “the most dazzling prosecutor in 50 years.” A Democrat who switched registration when he joined the Reagan administration, Giuliani ran for mayor and narrowly lost to Dinkins in 1989. Campaigning as a law-and-order candidate, he won a 1993 rematch and was easily reelected four years later. When Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced he would not seek reelection, Giuliani set his sights on the Senate. While the latest polls show him with a slight lead over Mrs. Clinton, some experts believe he enjoys a significant edge.

To date, Giuliani has raised more than $12 million, even though he is still technically undeclared; Clinton has garnered $8 million, and their combined spending is expected to top $50 million, which would make it the most expensive Senate race in history. In the early going, Giuliani has regularly criticized his opponent as a liberal outsider while she has charged that he is temperamentally ill-suited to the Senate.

So far, Giuliani has used the bully pulpit of City Hall, but consultant Susan Estrich said that, at some point, he will have to look for political support outside New York.

“He’s never run among Republicans before because his campaigns have been in the city,” she notes. “Inevitably, he will have to walk and talk like a Republican, and in a heavily Democratic state, that that could be a big opportunity for her.” Faced with the prospect of leaving City Hall next year if he wins, Giuliani has taken to musing about his legacy. He idolizes Fiorello La Guardia, the crime-busting Republican mayor who guided the city through the Great Depression. The similarities--and differences--are telling.

Unlike La Guardia, whose concern for the plight of immigrants and the poor was deeply felt, Giuliani will never be known for personal empathy, said Thomas Kessner, La Guardia’s biographer. “Yet both will be remembered as tough reformers who intimidated people almost by design. Like La Guardia, Giuliani has shown that you can’t be a pussycat to run this town. Fear has got to be one of your weapons.”