Giuliani Defines ‘Leadership’ For New Era

He had visited the smoldering World Trade Center 30 times in the last 36 hours and was in a state of shock. Rudy Giuliani badly needed sleep, but when President Bush flew to New York three days after the terrorist attacks and asked what he could do for him, the mayor crisply answered: “If you catch this guy, Bin Laden, I would like to be the one to execute him.”

More than a year later, Giuliani remains emphatic. “I still mean it,” he said in his office 24 stories above Times Square. “I think I’m the logical person to do it, as a representative” of all New Yorkers.

During eight years at City Hall, the Big Apple knew Giuliani as a mayor firmly in control, a tough politician who never minced words and thrived on confrontation. That image has been softened somewhat in the former mayor’s just-published “Leadership,” a 400-page guide for political and private leaders based on his life in politics and as a former U.S. attorney.

He’s looking more relaxed, his prostate cancer is under control and Giuliani says “there’s a good chance, a really good chance” that he and girlfriend Judith Nathan may soon make a wedding announcement. Nowadays, he runs an international consulting firm specializing in corporate security, makes speeches at $100,000 each and is happily embarked on a new life.

But the old Rudy still shines through: In an interview Friday, he said he expects to reenter politics and refused to rule out runs for the presidency, the U.S. Senate or New York governor. He no longer entertains plans to seek his old post, however, because his mayoral successor, media mogul Michael R. Bloomberg, is doing “a very good job.”

“I’ve learned that you don’t cut off options, and I have no idea of what the future will bring,” the former mayor said, acknowledging the political buzz that has him either poised to step in for Vice President Dick Cheney if needed in 2004, or running against U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in either a New York senatorial or U.S. presidential contest down the road.

“Right now I’m in the private phase of my life, [but] I think I’ll want to go back to government again. Maybe it will be appointed office,” he said with a wry smile, fueling already rampant speculation that Giuliani might be a candidate for the proposed post of Homeland Security czar.

Wherever he goes, people ask Giuliani about America’s readiness to combat terrorism, and he has a tough message for them: At a time when millions may be lapsing into complacency, Giuliani said the nation should brace itself for suicide bombings. They are easier to pull off than the highly coordinated Sept. 11 attacks, he noted, and preventing them in big cities is difficult.

“Just because [bombings] passed us by in the first wave doesn’t mean we can dismiss them in the second,” Giuliani noted. “And New York is in many ways easier to patrol than Los Angeles. L.A. is a very big, sprawling place, with numerous downtown areas. You have to do the best you can.”

In the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, Giuliani said he and his staff wrestled with one question more than any other: Would the terrorists strike again at New York City, or stage another attack somewhere else, to show their versatility and keep American security forces off balance?

“I don’t know,” he said with a frown, looking over Times Square, “but as a former prosecutor I was taught to put myself into the head of my enemy. And I became certain that they [Al Qaeda terrorists] are going to wait awhile, and then they’re going to do something that’s not anticipated.”

Despite the strain and trauma he went through after the terrorist attacks, Giuliani insists that he has not fundamentally changed as a person. But the circumstances of his life have been radically altered. On the morning of the World Trade Center disaster, he was a lame-duck official who was undergoing a messy divorce. Within days, he was suddenly transformed into “America’s mayor,” a politician who led New York through an emotionally wrenching period and became Time’s Man of the Year.

Looking to the future, he said Americans will need a higher level of leadership, given the twin legacies of the terrorist attacks and burgeoning corporate scandals. Political and business leaders, he noted, should be putting a much greater premium on candor.

“What people expect now is direct communication [from leaders], as opposed to the scripted, spun and orchestrated interventions that take place,” he said. “One thing that happens if you’re not scripted is that you make more mistakes. But then people can be more realistic about leaders. They don’t have to pretend to be perfect, and I think that’s going to be equally true of a president, a mayor, a governor or a corporate CEO.”

Giuliani’s book is full of tough talk about the battles he fought. It tells the story of a Republican law-and-order candidate who unseated David Dinkins, a Democratic, African American mayor, in a town where Democrats outnumber Republicans 4 to 1. Giuliani was elected without the support of some of the city’s most powerful political groups, including labor unions, and this gave him a free hand to enact sweeping reforms at City Hall.

New York led all big cities with a stunning 70% drop in major crimes during his administration, and the welfare rolls also were slashed. “Leadership” offers a vivid guide to how Giuliani made this happen.

But some may be surprised--astonished, even--by his omissions.

The mayor, a die-hard Yankee fan, makes numerous references to his favorite team, all intended to illustrate lessons about leadership. He also imparts some practical “wisdom” for would-be leaders in scenes from “The Godfather” and takes credit for a host of political triumphs.

But there is not one mention of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African peddler who was killed in a hail of 41 police bullets while Giuliani was in office. That case brought racial tensions in New York to a boiling point.

Nor is there a reference to Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who was brutalized in a Brooklyn police precinct, and whose case set off a citywide furor over police brutality. In a book that recounts the high points of his administration and the crises he faced, the mayor doesn’t note that many in the black community were infuriated by his policing policies.

A gracious, thoughtful man in private, Giuliani could often be rude and unforgiving with his opponents in public.

At one point in the book, he describes his smashing 1997 reelection victory, but fails to mention the name of his Democratic foe, New York City Council President Ruth Messinger, referring to her only as “my Jewish, female opponent.”

None of this will surprise longtime Giuliani friends. The former mayor has long insisted that his anti-crime policies benefited minority communities more than any other segment of New York, and that politics is a rough business.

“You can’t possibly be mayor of New York for eight years and not have things you wish you would get to do again or do over again,” Giuliani said, shrugging off the past. “But you don’t get that chance.”