Washington Post Publishes Giuliani Expose

Andrew Kirtzman's Revealing the Total Giuliani. Photo featured Giuliani in drag. But after reading the article, I think it made Giuliani look even better. An excerpt:

Saintly? Liberal? The words have almost no relevance to the mayor who once ruled over Gotham. Giuliani is an enormously gifted man, with extraordinary accomplishments to his credit. He's also a highly idiosyncratic figure prone to unusual, sometimes self-destructive acts. As the presidential race moves into a more serious phase, it may be best to put aside the cliches about America's Mayor for a while. If voters are going to elect Rudy Giuliani president, there are a few things they'd better know.

It would be an understatement to say that drama tends to follow Giuliani; it's more like he thrives on it. He has a knack for inserting himself into the center of controversy, as he did when he had Yasser Arafat thrown out of Lincoln Center, sparking an international incident. Or when he waged a culture war by attempting to pull city funding from the Brooklyn Museum of Art over an exhibit he found offensive. It was evident when he endorsed Gov. Mario Cuomo for reelection in 1994 over his fellow Republican George Pataki on live television. To those who had grown accustomed to his love of shocking the public, it wasn't a total surprise when he sang "Happy Birthday, Mister President" in full drag in 1997. But his taste for drama is just one of the many unusual traits that make Giuliani such an unorthodox public figure.

Every crusader needs a good crusade, and Giuliani found his calling when he marched up the steps of New York City Hall in January 1994. A Republican in a town of Democrats, he was determined to smash a status quo that had long accepted billion-dollar deficits, deteriorating services and exploding welfare rolls as the norm. The city by then had grown so filthy, crime-ridden and politically dysfunctional that even liberal Democrats were willing to look the other way for someone who could bang some heads. They found their man in the new mayor.

The public soon learned that Giuliani was driven by an overriding need for control. He immediately stripped decision-making powers from dozens of city agencies and centralized them in his office. The men around him, many of them lawyers once derided in his U.S. attorney days as "Yes-Rudys," became the most powerful figures in city government. In the new regime, every morsel of information had to be vetted by the mayor's media operation at City Hall, down to the water reservoir levels released each day to the New York Times weather page. When Giuliani's famously successful police commissioner, William Bratton, resisted City Hall's tight rein and spoke freely to reporters (often about himself), Giuliani booted him from office. The mayor's press secretary charged, characteristically, that Bratton and his lieutenants, who were decimating crime by historic proportions, were "out of control."

The City Hall steps have historically served as New York's town square, hosting an unending stream of colorful protests and news conferences. But that proved too anarchic for the mayor, who tightened security -- before 9/11 -- to the point that reporters, politicians and interest groups were banned from the steps, rendering the place desolate. Only pressure from the City Council forced him to relent. The boss viewed the world in terms of friends and enemies. New York's top-tier elected black leaders -- all of them Democrats -- were written off as sympathizers of Giuliani's predecessor David N. Dinkins; Giuliani refused to meet with any of them for years. He counseled his aides to stay on the offensive -- and he illustrated the point every day. The mayor's battles with the media were pure theater: He'd storm out of news conferences, demean his questioners, pick fights. Nothing restrained him from turning to a Newsday reporter one day and dressing him down in front of his colleagues. "What the hell is wrong with you?" he demanded.