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Rudolph William Louis "Rudy" Giuliani is an American lawyer, businessman, and politician from the state of New York. A Democrat and Independent in the 1970s, and a Republican from the 1980s onward, Giuliani served in the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, eventually becoming U.S. Attorney. Giuliani later served two terms as Mayor of New York City (1994–2001). He was credited by some with initiating improvements in the city's quality of life and with a reduction in crime. Giuliani gained national attention during and after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. His high media profile in the days following the attacks led supporters to nickname him "America's Mayor." Rudolph Giuliani was born in Brooklyn, New York, the only child of working-class parents Harold Angel Giuliani and Helen C. D'Avanzo, both children of Italian immigrants The family was Roman Catholic and its extended members included police officers and firefighters. In 1951, when Giuliani was seven, his family moved from Brooklyn to Garden City South on Long Island. There he attended a local Catholic school, St. Anne's. Later, he commuted back to Brooklyn to attend Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, graduating in 1961. Giuliani went on to Manhattan College in Riverdale, Bronx, where he majored in political science with a minor in philosophy; there he considered becoming a Catholic priest. He was elected president of his class in his sophomore year, but lost the same election in his junior year. He joined the Phi Rho Pi fraternity, and was active in shaping its direction. He graduated in 1965. Giuliani eventually decided to forego the priesthood, instead attending New York University School of Law in Manhattan, where he made law review and graduated cum laude with a Juris Doctor in 1968. Upon graduation from NYU Law in 1968, he was classified as 1-A, available for military service. He applied for a deferment but was rejected. In 1969, MacMahon wrote a letter to Giuliani's draft board, asking that he be reclassified as 2-A, civilian occupation deferment, because Giuliani, who was a law clerk for MacMahon, was an essential employee. The deferment was granted. In 1970, Giuliani joined the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. In 1973, he was named Chief of the Narcotics Unit and was eventually appointed United States Attorney. In 1975, Giuliani was recruited to Washington, D.C. during the Ford administration, where he was named Associate Deputy Attorney General and chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Harold "Ace" Tyler. His first high-profile prosecution was of U.S. Representative Bertram L. Podell (NY-13), who was convicted of corruption. From 1977 to 1981, during the Carter Administration, Giuliani practiced law at the Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler law firm, as chief of staff to his previous DC boss, Ace Tyler. In 1981, Giuliani was named Associate Attorney General in the Reagan administration, the third-highest position in the Department of Justice. As Associate Attorney General, Giuliani supervised the U.S. Attorney Offices' federal law enforcement agencies, the Department of Corrections, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the United States Marshals Service. In a well-publicized 1982 case, Giuliani testified in defense of the federal government's "detention posture" regarding the internment of over 2,000 Haitian asylum-seekers who had entered the country illegally. The U.S. government disputed the assertion that most of the detainees had fled their country due to political persecution, alleging instead that they were "economic migrants." In defense of the government's position, Giuliani stated at one point that political repression under President Jean-Claude Duvalier (the infamous "Baby Doc") no longer existed. After meeting personally with Duvalier, Giuliani testified that "political repression, at least in general, does not exist" in Haiti under Duvalier's regime. In 1983, Giuliani was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. It was in this position that he first gained national prominence by prosecuting numerous high-profile cases, resulting in the convictions of Wall Street figures Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken for insider trading. He also spearheaded the effort to jail drug dealers, combat organized crime, break the web of corruption in government, and prosecute white-collar criminals. He amassed a record of 4,152 convictions and 25 reversals. As a federal prosecutor, Giuliani was credited with bringing the "perp walk," parading of suspects in front of the previously alerted media, into common use as a prosecutorial tool. After Giuliani "patented the perp walk", the tool was used by increasing numbers of prosecutors nationwide. It was in 1983 that Giuliani indicted financiers Marc Rich and Pincus Green on charges of tax evasion and making illegal oil deals with Iran during the hostage crisis, in one of the first cases in which the RICO Act was employed in a non-organized crime case. In the Mafia Commission Trial (February 25, 1985–November 19, 1986), Giuliani indicted eleven organized crime figures, including the heads of New York's so-called "Five Families", under the RICO Act on charges including extortion, labor racketeering, and murder for hire. Time magazine called this "Case of Cases" possibly "the most significant assault on the infrastructure of organized crime since the high command of the Chicago Mafia was swept away in 1943", and quoted Giuliani's stated intention: "Our approach...is to wipe out the five families." The initial defendants included: Paul "Big Paul" Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family, Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, convicted as head of the Genovese crime family, Carmine "Junior" Persico, head of the Colombo Family, Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo, head of the Lucchese crime family, Philip "Rusty" Rastelli, head of the Bonanno family, and six subordinates. Eight defendants were found guilty on all counts and subsequently sentenced on January 13, 1987 to hundreds of years of prison time. Giuliani was U.S. Attorney until January 1989, resigning as the Reagan administration ended. Giuliani started his political life as a Democrat, admiring the Kennedy family, working as a party committee person on Long Island in the mid-1960s, volunteering for Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1968, and voting for George McGovern for president in 1972. In 1975 he switched his party registration from Democratic to Independent. On December 8, 1980, one month after the election of Ronald Reagan brought Republicans back to power in Washington, he switched his party affiliation from Independent to Republican. Giuliani later said the switches were because he found Democratic policies "naïve", and that "by the time I moved to Washington, the Republicans had come to make more sense to me." Giuliani's mother maintained in 1988 that, "He only became a Republican after he began to get all these jobs from them. He's definitely not a conservative Republican. He thinks he is, but he isn't. He still feels very sorry for the poor." Giuliani first ran for New York City Mayor in 1989, attempting to unseat three-term incumbent Ed Koch. He won the September 1989 Republican Party primary election against business magnate Ronald Lauder, in a campaign marked by claims that Giuliani was not a true Republican. In the general election, Giuliani ran as the fusion candidate of both the Republican and New York Liberal Party. Koch, meanwhile, had been upset in the Democratic primary by Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins. The Conservative Party of New York, which had often co-lined the Republican party candidate, withheld support from Giuliani and ran Lauder instead. During two televised debates, Giuliani framed himself as an agent of change, saying that "I'm the reformer," that "If we keep going merrily along, this city's going down," and that electing Dinkins would represent "more of the same, more of the rotten politics that have been dragging us down." In the end, Giuliani lost to Dinkins by 47,080 votes out of 1,899,845 votes cast, in the closest election in city history. In 1993, Giuliani again ran for mayor and again ran on the Liberal Party line but not the Conservative Party line, which ran activist George Marlin. The principal issues of the election of 1993 were crime and taxes. Giuliani also campaigned on what he perceived to be the unchecked expansion of the city's budget and the lack of managerial competence of incumbent David Dinkins, focusing on what he described as a breakdown of social and political order that Dinkins had been either unwilling or unable to address effectively. In addition, the city was suffering from a spike in unemployment associated with the nationwide recession. Giuliani promised to focus the police department on shutting down petty crimes and nuisances as a way of restoring the quality of life: "It's the street tax paid to drunk and drug-ridden panhandlers. It's the squeegee men shaking down the motorist waiting at a light. It's the trash storms, the swirling mass of garbage left by peddlers and panhandlers, and open-air drug bazaars on unclean streets." In the end Giuliani won by a margin of 53,367 votes, with 49.25% of the electorate to the incumbent's 46.42%. He became the first Republican elected Mayor of New York City since John Lindsay in 1965. In his first term as mayor, Giuliani, in conjunction with New York City Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton, adopted an aggressive enforcement-deterrent strategy involving crackdowns on relatively minor offenses such as graffiti, turnstile jumping, and aggressive "squeegeemen," on the theory that this would send a message that order would be maintained. Giuliani and Bratton also instituted CompStat, a comparative statistical approach to mapping crime geographically and in terms of emerging criminal patterns, as well as charting officer performance by quantifying criminal apprehensions. Critics of the system assert that it creates an environment in which police officials are encouraged to underreport or otherwise manipulate crime data. The CompStat initiative won the 1996 Innovations in Government Award from the Kennedy School of Government. Giuliani's opponent in 1997 was Democratic Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, who had beaten Al Sharpton in the September 9, 1997 Democratic primary. In the general election, once again Giuliani also had the Liberal Party but not Conservative Party listing. Giulani ran an aggressive campaign, parlaying his image as a tough leader who had cleaned up the city. Giuliani's popularity was at its highest point to date, with a late October 1997 Quinnipiac University poll showing him as having a 68% approval rating; 70% of New Yorkers were satisfied with life in the city and 64% said things were better in the city compared to four years previously. In the end, Giuliani won 59% of the vote to Messinger's 41%, and became the first Republican to win a second term as mayor since Fiorello H. LaGuardia in 1941. Voter turnout was the lowest in 12 years, with only 38% of registered voters casting ballots. The analysis of the vote showed that Giuliani made modest gains in his share of the African American vote (20% compared to 5% in 1993) and Hispanic vote (43% from 37%) while maintaining his solid base of white and Jewish voters from 1993. In his acceptance speech, Giuliani acknowledged the image of divisiveness he had acquired during his first term and vowed to correct it: "Whether you voted for me or against me, whether you voted or didn't vote, I'm your Mayor, this is your administration. We have to do a better job of serving all of you. We have to reach out to all of you. And if we haven't, I apologize. I'm sorry and it is my personal commitment that we will try, endlessly and tirelessly, to bring all of you into the kind of success and optimism we have in this room." Giuliani served as mayor of New York City from 1994 through 2001. During his mayoralty, gays and lesbians in New York asked for domestic-partnership rights. Giuliani in turn pushed the New York City Council to then pass legislation providing broad protection for same-sex partners. In 1998, he codified local law by granting all city employees equal benefits for their domestic partners. The 9/11 attack occurred soon after voting began in the primaries to select the Democratic and Republican candidates to succeed Giuliani. The primary was rescheduled to September 25. During this period, Giuliani sought an unprecedented three-month emergency extension of his term, from its scheduled expiration on January 1 to April 1. He asked the candidates to agree to extend his term, and said that, otherwise, he would ask the State Legislature to extend the starting date for the new mayor's term to April 1, or to overturn term limits so that he could run again for a full term. Although the New York State Constitution (Article 3 Section 25) provides for emergency extensions, in the end leaders in the State Assembly and Senate indicated that they did not believe the extension was necessary. The election proceeded as scheduled, and the winning candiate, the Giuliani-endorsed Republican Michael Bloomberg, took office on January 1, 2002 per normal custom. Giuliani was prominent in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. He made frequent appearances on radio and television on September 11 and afterwards — for example, to indicate that tunnels would be closed as a precautionary measure, and that there was no reason to believe that the dispersion of chemical or biological weaponry into the air was a factor in the attack. In the wake of the attacks, Giuliani was hailed by many for his leadership during the crisis. When polled just six weeks after the attack Giuliani received a 79% approval rating among New York City voters, a dramatic increase over the 36% rating he had received a year earlier — 7 years into his administration. Giuliani married Judith Nathan, a sales manager for a pharmaceutical company, on May 24, 2003. It was Giuliani's third marriage, and was also Nathan's third marriage after two prior divorces. Since leaving office as Mayor, Giuliani has remained politically active by campaigning for Republican candidates for political offices at all levels. He was one of the keynote speakers at the 2004 Republican National Convention, where he endorsed George W. Bush for re-election by recalling that immediately after the World Trade Center towers fell, "Without really thinking, based on just emotion, spontaneous, I grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and I said to him, 'Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president.'" After campaigning on behalf of George W. Bush in the 2004 election, he was reportedly the top choice for Secretary of Homeland Security after the resignation of Tom Ridge, but he declined the offer. Giuliani was described by Newsweek magazine in January of 2007 as "one of the most consistent cheerleaders for the president’s handling of the war in Iraq" and as of June of 2007 remained one of the few candidates for president to unequivocally support both the basis for the invasion and the execution of the war. (See http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/2007/05/from_foods_to_m.html.) |
(See http://www.joinrudy2008.com/index.php?section=2.)
(See http://www.issues2000.org.) RUDY GIULIANI QUOTES "All
spending is discretionary. Read the Constitution. Congress has to
appropriate it; the President has to sign it. All spending is
discretionary and it has to be looked at from the point of view of, can we
afford it now? Is it appropriate to pass it on to the next generation?
This is what I did in "Justice is serious business. Judges should judge. Making laws is the responsibility of an elected legislature. And amending the Constitution is the responsibility of the American people. Under my watch, it will stay that way." "I will restore fiscal discipline and cut wasteful Washington spending." "The great challenge of our generation is to win the Terrorists’ War on Us. We need to stay on offense and address all the immediate threats we face. Our government and international institutions must transform themselves to fight the terrorists. To ensure our victory is permanent we need to work on changing the environment that allows terrorists to prosper. We will work closely with our allies to spread good government, global prosperity and defeat common enemies." "Real immigration reform must put security first because border security and homeland security are inseparable in the Terrorists' War on Us. The first responsibility of the federal government is to protect our citizens by controlling America's borders, while ending illegal immigration and identifying every non-citizen in our nation. We must restore integrity, accountability and the rule of law to our immigration system to regain the faith of the American people." "America is at a crossroads when it comes to our health care. All Americans want to increase the quality, affordability and portability of health care. Most Republicans believe in free-market solutions to the challenges we face. I believe we can reduce costs and improve the quality of care by increasing competition. We can do it through tax cuts, not tax hikes. We can do it by empowering patients and their doctors, not government bureaucrats. That's the American way to reform health care." (See http://www.joinrudy2008.com.) We thank the following resources: Rudy Giuliani Official Website |
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