GOP DUO A STAIN ON OUR CITY
Hard to explain 2 sons of our ‘enlightened’ city
New York’s claim to fame is that it is considered a wellspring of tremendous creativity, sophistication and tolerance. How then to explain Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani?
It may take a generation for us to live down the humiliation of having hatched these two wayward sons of Gotham. One is the world’s most powerful leader; the other an ex-mayor-turned-high-powered attorney. Today, they work most diligently at keeping the story of a porn actress’ affair at legal bay. Allegedly working in tandem, one talks and ties himself in knots trying to explain away the problem; the other says that’s all wrong, but we’ll get you the facts soon. They are the first political tag team in history to knock each other out cold.
To see them together is to wonder what it is about our city that provides a launching pad for such wretchedness.
Long before he hit the White House, any one of Trump’s many offenses should have automatically disqualified him from elected office. Here is a man who proudly defended discriminating against blacks trying to rent apartments in his buildings; a man who took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for young men who turned out to be innocent, who demolished landmarks without apology. All of this was well-reported. But we in the media still gloried in the hype and helped promote him as a tabloid idol. It was good for business. A national TV show took him the rest of the way.
Giuliani at least had a résumé of accomplishment. He had been a rackets-busting prosecutor, then a mayor who helped quell crime in a frightened city. But here he was this weekend screeching to an audience calling for regime change — the political euphemism for military invasion — in Iran. The man who was a runnerup for secretary of state in the Trump administration then pretended his notes were the Iran nuclear deal, and mimed ripping them up and spitting on them.
His words and antics are a reminder of how these two New Yorkers are a matched pair. It is not just their city roots, or their three wives apiece, that they have in common. Both, for instance, talk boldly about using military might to solve global problems. Yet, as young men, both dodged the draft that was sending thousands of New Yorkers to Vietnam. There is no record that either of them ever expressed opposition to that terrible war. But once Trump was out of college and classified as 1A, he displayed the heel spurs on his feet to his draft board. This disqualified him from potential combat, though never disturbed his hours on the golf course. In Giuliani’s case, an influential judge generously wrote a letter to his draft board saying he was far too valuable on the home front.
There was a time when Giuliani’s opinion was of great urgency and importance here. Journalists and reformers sought him out. In 1986, Wayne Barrett and Jack Newfield, twin pillars of Village Voice muckraking, came back from meeting with the then-Manhattan U.S. attorney fired up with awe and excitement. Rudy was going after all the rogues they had been writing about for years. He eagerly listened to what they had to tell him and happily shared his own investigative secrets. They wrote a book about it called “City for Sale,” a fascinating account of how corrupt political hacks had managed to turn a pliant City Hall into their personal instrument of plunder. The hero of the book was Rudy Giuliani.
A few years later, Giuliani became mayor and both men learned better.
By way of apology, each wrote books to set the record straight. Barrett was first with an investigative biography (“Rudy!”). Newfield followed with his own book, the title of which hinted strongly at his changed opinion: “The Full Rudy: The Man, the Myth, the Mania.”
Both detailed how the onetime reform champion had turned into his opposite. In City Hall, the former corruption fighter insisted that the head of the city’s investigations department meet each morning to tell the other commissioners what he was up to. This was a little like putting the FBI director on speakerphone with his investigative targets to update them on how things are going.
His own patronage system was much more direct than the political bosses he prosecuted. At least four Giuliani cousins went on the city payroll. His political mentor, an old-school party boss named Ray Harding, earned huge lobbying fees from those needing mayoral favors. Two of Harding’s sons also were hired; one of them later went to prison for having siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars from the housing agency he was named to head.
Having defeated the city’s first African-American mayor, Giuliani might have been expected to reach out to the city’s black residents. Instead, he lectured them on the proper way to address their grievances. When a 26-year-old black man was shot to death by an undercover detective on a Midtown street, the mayor justified the shooting by putting the victim’s long-sealed juvenile records before the public. Since he was dead, the mayor insisted, he had no further right to privacy.
This weekend. I took down from a shelf a copy of Giuliani’s own book, “Leadership,” to see how his instructions might apply to his current practice of that skill.
“Leaders have to control their emotions under pressure,” he wrote. His words prompted a memory of the then-mayoral candidate standing on a flatbed truck near City Hall as off-duty police raged in the streets screaming racial epithets about a black mayor who wanted a civilian police review board. “Bulls--t!” Giuliani was seen on camera screaming to the crowd. “Bulls--t!”
Donald Trump must have been watching appreciatively.
Robbins is investigative journalist in residence at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and a former columnist and staff writer at the Daily News and Village Voice.