Transcript*

May 17, 1989: At his alma mater, Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, Rudy Giuliani declares his candidacy for mayor of New York City.

As the most famous law enforcement figure in America since J. Edger Hoover, Giuliani had attained an almost mythical status through his work as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

In 1985, he successfully prosecuted the Five Families: the notorious Italian mafia syndicate with mob bosses like “Fat Tony” Salerno, and “Big Paul” Castellano. He prosecuted Wall Street crooks including the billionaire Michael Milken, and Ivan Boesky: the real-life inspiration for Gordon Gekko. From corrupt party bosses to socialites, Giuliani went after them all. As he announced his candidacy, he seemed like the only incorruptible figure who could save crime-ravaged New York.

When asked after his announcement why he wanted to move from the U.S. Attorney’s office to City Hall, he cited his desire to be a champion of the poor. He said that even as a prosecutor, he “[could] not ease crushing poverty, or end homelessness, or treat drug addicts, or help people with AIDS.” (Barret, p.191)

Afterward, Rudy made one of his first campaign stops at a homeless shelter that predominantly housed black and brown New Yorkers. He later attacked the incumbent mayor Ed Koch for “dramatically exaggerating the number of homeless who are criminals or mentally disturbed.”

And when the Regan administration was completely ignoring the AIDS issue, Giuliani addressed the crisis with a nine-page program, which was more detailed than the four candidates running in the Democratic primary. (Barret, p.190)

Given the decidedly humanitarian bent to Giuliani’s platform, one might assume that he chose to announce his first run for mayor at Bishop Loughlin in order to showcase his values as a Christian who deeply cared about the poor and needy. His record prosecuting white-collar criminals, would have made it all seem sincere to many working-class voters, as he was certainly no friend of the elites.

Giuliani’s progressive-sounding rhetoric contrasted with that of the incumbent Democrat Ed Koch: the combative mayor who liked to pick fights with the media. Koch was ideologically centrist and riddled with corruption by his third term. Republicans hated him. And liberal Democrats had finally become frustrated with him as well.

In his run for mayor, Giuliani was aiming to break historical precedent.

No mayor in the twentieth century who had served at least one full four-year term had ever lost re-election. And Rudy was running as a Republican in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans five to one.

Still, there was an opening for a political outsider like Rudy to win with a campaign to “clean up” City Hall. The last time a Republican had won a mayoral election was John Lindsay in 1965. Lindsay was arguably one of the most left-wing mayors in the history of New York. If Giuliani could take a page from Lindsay’s playbook and build a coalition with left-wing voters disillusioned with the Democratic incumbent he might have a path to victory.

Alas for Giuliani, his embrace of progressive policies on AIDS, homelessness, and poverty did not serve him well in his first election. His plan to unite Republicans and left-wing Democrats would collapse after a surprise upset in the Democratic primary, when Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins defeated Ed Koch from the Left.

Giuliani would lose in 1989, and Dinkins would become the first black mayor in the city’s history.

Four years later, Rudy would try again. But this time, he would ditch his original plan of trying to win over both Republicans and Left-wing Democrats. Instead, in his rematch against Dinkins in the 1993 mayoral election, Giuliani would capitalize on a wave of racial backlash. And this time, he would win. Rather than drawing over disillusioned left-wing Democratic voters with promises to address poverty or to straighten out the tangled social safety net, Giuliani got New Yorkers to vote for him by stoking their racial prejudices. In a liberal city that has a majority of people of color, Giuliani would narrowly cinch his victory by winning more than 70 percent of the white vote.

Rudy would govern in his first term, not as the empathetic unifier he ran as in 1989, but as the tough law and order, crime-busting mayor who would “clean up” the streets of New York.

He would subsequently be re-elected in 1997 with the endorsements of unions, liberal newspapers, and gay-rights groups not in spite of, but because of his unrelenting vilification of poor black and brown New Yorkers.

He would not only serve two terms. In his last few months, when New York suffered its greatest tragedy, <

Rudy Giuliani would become the most popular mayor in the city’s history.

Part 1: Ideology

In a recent mini-documentary series: “Giuliani: What happened to America’s Mayor?” CNN repeats a familiar misconception when it comes to the political career of Rudy Giuliani. Looking at his downfall, it has become commonplace to say that Rudy has “evolved” and is somehow no longer his former self.

John Avlon, who went from working for Giuliani to now defending his reputation as a CNN analyst, says Rudy “got caught in a right-wing echo chamber ecosystem,” and that “he’s changed.” Ken Frydman, also featured in the CNN report, maintains that “the man I worked for in 1993 is not the man who now lies for Donald Trump.” To hear them tell it, there was no way to predict that the beloved man known as “America’s Mayor,” would become the villain whispering in Trump’s ear.

This is either a rewriting of history or a complete misunderstanding of the man they claimed to have known. While his party loyalties may have shifted, and his rhetoric can still swing from compassionate to bombastic, Giuliani's core beliefs have remained consistent throughout his entire life. For CNN or any other liberal news outlet to say that he “changed” or “evolved” is an inaccuracy that needs to be corrected.

So in Part 1 of this series on Rudy Giuliani, I want to set the record straight about his core ideology.

To be fair, Giuliani’s career does seem like that of a man undergoing dramatic swings in politics. And it is not uncommon for politicians to switch their party allegiances as well as their philosophy.

There are notable political figures throughout recent American history who have gone through an ideological evolution: from Hillary Clinton supporting the conservative icon Barry Goldwater as a teenager to Ronald Regan worshiping Franklin Roosevelt in his youth. So perhaps Rudy Giuliani can be lumped together with these and other politicians who have swung from one side of the ideological spectrum to the other.

This impression is borne out by a look at Giuliani’s early life.

When Rudy was sixteen years old, he was a fanatic supporter of John F. Kennedy’s candidacy for president. By the time he reached voting age during the Presidential Election of 1964, Rudy wrote an op-ed for his student newspaper at Manhattan College, lavishing praise on President Johnson and attacking his Republican opponent Barry Goldwater as an “incompetent, confused, and idiotic man.” (Barrett, p. 51)

Another four years later, Rudy volunteered for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and praised the Democrat for having “the support of the minority community.” (Barrett, p.55)

Admittedly, on the surface level, these earlier political leanings seem to support CNN’s thesis that Giuliani “evolved.” But we must reassess them in light of some important historical context.

First of all, Rudy’s party loyalties may have shifted over time, but so did the parties themselves. The image of the Democrats as a center-left party and the Republicans as a solidly right-wing one is actually a more recent development.

For one thing, the Democratic Party of the 1960s may have been the party of the New Deal, but away from these social democratic economic policies, it was, on social issues, the party of White Supremacy with its core base in the South.

In the same era on the Republican side, we find figures like mayor John Lindsay, who was a strong voice for the civil rights cause in the North.

So Rudy’s embrace of Democratic candidates in the 60s should not really be equated with support for socially liberal policies that characterize the Democratic party of our current era. Giuliani was a loyal Democrat during the time JFK carried the conservative southern states. He transitioned to an independent in the mid-1970s. He finally registered as a Republican in 1980, just as the political divide between the Blue Coastal North and the Red Heartland South was becoming a reality. In other words, Giuliani’s shift from Democrat to Republican coincided with the last great realignment in American history: a far-reaching change that started with Nixon’s Southern Strategy and culminated in Jimmy Carter’s loss with the New Deal Coalition.

It can be argued, moreover, that Rudy’s endorsement of Robert Kennedy was based not on the candidate’s actual support for minorities but on having the support of minority communities. Giuliani understood that to win in the 1968 presidential election, the Democratic Party needed to nominate someone with “the ability to communicate with the white middle class.” RFK was the most viable candidate because he could form a winning coalition. In Rudy’s own words: “there was no one else with a foot in both camps.” (Barret, p.55)

The hint of political opportunism in Giuliani’s support for Robert F. Kennedy is further evinced by his even earlier infatuation with John F. Kennedy.

One could try to make the case that Giuliani was responding to certain conservative aspects of elder Kennedy’s platform -- JFK was, after all, running to the right of Richard Nixon, with calls for increased military spending and cutting Eisenhower’s taxes on the wealthiest Americans. But it doesn’t seem likely that a sixteen-year-old Rudy would have been familiar with such policy details.

A simpler explanation is that Giuliani cheered for JFK because he was in a position to become the first Roman Catholic President of the United States.

The teenage thrill of seeing and even shaking hands with his hero John F. Kennedy in October of 1960 at a parade in Manhattan must only have solidified this religious affinity. He was so starstruck from meeting JFK that Rudy would tell multiple girlfriends during his high school years that his dream was to follow in his footsteps and become the “first Italian Catholic president.” (Kirtzman, p.12, p.23)

More than party loyalty, it was Giuliani's ironclad allegiance to the church that has remained consistent throughout his life.

And his particular perspective on Catholicism became the basis for his commitment to “Law and Order” - whether as a successful prosecutor or a crime-busting mayor.

Let’s go back to where Giuliani chose to first declare his candidacy for mayor in 1989. In making his announcement at Bishop Loughlin High School, Giuliani was acknowledging a deeply personal connection to the place where he developed the core basis of his ideology.

Growing up at the time of the Counterculture when women burned bras, black became beautiful, and Viet Cong flags flew outside of the Democratic Convention, Rudy was schooled in the tradition of the Counter-Reformation. He was educated at Bishop Loughlin to reject the liberal enlightenment philosophy that the state’s legitimacy derives from social contracts. Rather, he was taught in accordance with the pre-enlightenment understanding that sovereignty goes back to the divine right of kings. Unlike the liberal philosophy of John Locke or Montesquieu and their argument that revolt is an inherent right of the people, Giuliani came to believe that authority could never be questioned, and disobedience must be faced with persecution.

Indoctrinated into these principles, one of Giuliani’s early career choices was the priesthood. His interest was serious enough for him to visit various seminaries. But, according to Rudy himself, he decided against the priesthood because of his "budding interest in the opposite sex.” (Marks)

Now, one might find something laudable in Rudy’s initial desire to become a priest. But in light of Giuliani’s later career, we can suppose that it was not urge to mercy and forgiveness that prompted Rudy’s interest in the priesthood. It was, more probably, the license to enforce rules and dictate a strict code of conduct that first drew him to the clergy.

But in the career he chose instead, he found an equally tempting role in which to exercise his pre-enlightenment ideas.

Rudy became a prosecutor.

He would get his law degree at Manhattan College and pass the bar exam on November 5th, 1968. Coincidentally (and perhaps auspiciously for Rudy), it was the same day Richard Nixon was elected president on a platform that railed against the counterculture and pledged to bring “Law and Order” for the “Silent Majority.”

While Giuliani soon left the Democratic Party, he was still under the spell of the Kennedys. Inspired by Bobby Kennedy’s accomplishment in becoming U.S. Attorney General at the age of thirty-five, Rudy was determined to make his own mark. He climbed the ranks quickly and, in 1981 under Ronald Reagan, he became the youngest associate attorney general in history. At age thirty-six, it was a year older than RFK when he became Attorney General, but it was still very impressive.

Two years later, Giuliani took a job as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. While this was technically a step down from his previous position working directly for the U.S. Attorney General, the new job offered a very appealing perk – and one that Rudy clearly relished: As the face of the Southern District of New York, Rudy would regularly be on the front pages of newspapers and could play the role of crime-fighting protagonist in the high-profile cases the media liked to cover.

And Rudy clearly knew how to play the media game.

Like J. Edgar Hoover half a century earlier, he understood how compelling cases could help him achieve both professional and personal goals. Hoover shrewdly showcased the hunt for kidnapper of Charles Lindberg’s son to bolster the image of what was then known as the Bureau of Investigation.

Giuliani knew how the press would eat up the story of a young Italian from Brooklyn seeking to – in his own words – “redeem” the image of Italian Americans by going after the Italian mafia.

Normally, a prosecutor who never held an elected position would not be the most viable candidate for mayor of the largest city in America. But through the popular image he cultivated with the help of the press, Rudy Giuliani, by the late-1980s, had made himself a strong contender against the three-termed Ed Koch.

At the onset of his first campaign for mayor in 1989, Giuliani strove to be a more soft-spoken, big-hearted candidate in order to create a contrast to the combative style of the incumbent Ed Koch – the man he first expected to be running against. Channeling RFK once more, Giuliani’s original campaign strategy was to have a “foot in both camps,” to build a wide coalition with “the support of the minority community.”

His loss in 1989 brought Giuliani back to the drawing board.

He would scrap the attempt to appeal to liberals and try, instead, to harness a different current. By exploiting the white backlash against David Dinkins, Giuliani no longer needed to pander to political expedient. He could be true to his core ideology, which now started to become more and more obvious.

As mayor, Giuliani finally had a vehicle in which his authoritarian instincts could be put into action. At last, he had earned the license to act in accordance with his beliefs.

Rising to the highest echelons of power – seated at the top of New York City’s Great Chain of Being – Mayor Giuliani could now exercise his right to be tyrannical.

He clearly articulated this understanding of his job just a few months after he was inaugurated.

In 1994, after a young police officer named Sean McDonald was killed, Giuliani faced criticism for his aggressive policing tactics. At a press conference, he attacked his liberal critics, saying: “We see only the oppressive side of authority [...] What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you can do.” (Kirtzman, (p.61)

Freedom is about authority.

This Orwellian understanding of liberty is the core basis of Rudy’s ideology. And contrary to CNN, this has never changed or “evolved.”

Giuliani’s despotic view of how democracy should function remained steadfast even after a re-election that relied on considerable support from the left. It seems the endorsement of unions, gay-rights groups, and even the New York Times did little to change Giuliani’s tone or his thinking.

In 1999, Giuliani was on a radio program and had to field a grievance from a caller whose son had been killed by the police. Before she could finish, Rudy cut her off saying, ''Maybe you should ask yourself some questions about the way he was brought up.” (Kirtzman, p.63)

It was not enough to take away her son – the grieving mother must show contrition for even questioning the mayor’s mandate. He had the highest jurisdiction, and Giuliani was prepared to shut down anyone who dared to question it.

Towards the tail end of his second term, just a year before he was named “Person of the Year” by Time Magazine and knighted by the Queen of England, Giuliani provided yet another revealing demonstration of his uncompromising authoritarianism.

In 2000, when Patrick Dorishmond became the fourth unarmed black man in thirteen months to be killed by the NYPD, Giuliani would express zero condolences to the victim’s family. Instead, he went on the offensive. “Maybe it isn’t an altar boy,” he began, seeming to refer to Dorishmond as “it.”

“It’s some other situation that may justify, more closely, what the police officer did.” (Kirtzman, 110).

Ironically, it turned out that Dorishmond had, in fact, been an altar boy when he was younger. What’s more, he had been one of the few black graduates of Giuliani’s alma mater: Bishop Loughlin.

But the facts behind Patrick Dorishmond were secondary and easily dismissed when they challenged the dogma that justified Giuliani’s dominion over New York City.

It is true that, even during his second term, Giuliani’s harsh, unfeeling responses to victims and critics of police violence could be colored by more humane-sounding rhetoric. As he showed in his first campaign for mayor in 1989, he is quite talented when it comes to bastardizing left-wing language to suit his needs. He did this often, and no doubt justified these deceptions as Noble Lies.

At times, his rhetoric could be remarkable, switching from empathetic to contemptuous on the same day, sometimes within a few sentences.

In an address to the UN General Assembly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when Islamaphobia was surging, Rudy called for tolerance. "I know that we're getting through to God,” he said in his address. “We're using every liturgy that exists, and I know we're getting through to the same God. We may be doing it in slightly different ways. God is known by many different names and many different traditions but identified by one consistent feeling: love -- love for humanity, particularly love for our children. Love does eventually conquer hate.”

But in that same speech at the U.N, he reiterated his pre-enlightenment view of the world: “Moral relativism,” he insisted, “doesn't have a place.”

In the mind of a religious authoritarian, we are either good or evil, and historical or societal forces play little or no part in dictating human behavior. According to Giuliani, “Those who practice terrorism, murdering or victimizing innocent civilians, lose any right to have their cause understood by decent people and lawful nations. On this issue, terrorism, the United Nations must draw a line. The era of moral relativism between those who practice or condone terrorism and those nations who stand up against it must end.”

Here we see again, Giuliani’s tyrannical nature. On the one hand, he has draped himself in the mantle of compassion. But at the same time, he uses the shock and horror of the terrorist attack to elevate a very questionable position: that people who resort to violence should be stripped of “the right to have their cause understood.” He has gone beyond a condemnation of violence to profess an equally violent if more subtle doctrine: that the powerful must not be challenged – whether by the mother of a child killed by police or by the victims of the American Empire.

It is a self-serving, somewhat sadistic ideology. And it has an analog in the teachings of the Papacy, which maintains that, while loving us all, God has the unquestionable right to burn every sinner in an ever-lasting lake of fire.

The inconsistencies that seem to surround Giuliani derive from a religious orthodoxy that also seems to exist in a state of constant contradiction. It is an orthodoxy that can oscillate dizzyingly in its rhetoric. But in the end, it is about claiming and establishing an unassailable authority.

We don’t need to be asking “What happened to America’s Mayor?” The ranting and raving personal attorney for Donald Trump is not some new incarnation. It may have taken on a more grotesque outward appearance, but it still is and always has been America’s mayor.

Freedom is about authority.

Orwellian, yes, but also straight out of Benito Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism where the Italian dictator wrote that “... if liberty is to be the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State.”

We hardly need reminding that Fascism, with its own apparent contradictions in claiming neither “right nor left,” originated right under the nose of the Vatican.

*Please note that inconsistencies between the above transcript and the actual recording are inevitable (though hopefully slight).