Posted on 10/06/2002 12:43:36 PM PDT by harpu
A brush with death braced the mayor to manage a disaster
Rudy Giuliani was a pretty busy fellow before Sept. 11.
While supervising a New York City renaissance, Mr. Giuliani entered and then left a Senate race against a sitting first lady. He had a highly publicized divorce and a highly publicized affair. He developed prostate cancer.
By the time September of 2001 rolled around, the man whom enemies had dubbed "Mussolini on the Hudson" seemed a spent force, preparing a post-mayoral career that included a book project.Now that tome, the newly published Leadership, is headed toward the bestseller list as the testament of a man who led his city through unprecedented catastrophe.
"I've grown – I've changed," Mr. Giuliani said during a book-tour phone interview. "Anything that challenges you in life changes you."
But the man celebrated as "mayor of the world" rejected the notion that he became a totally different person after Sept. 11. Mr. Giuliani said the destruction of the World Trade Center enabled him to apply lessons he learned throughout his life.
"At the core, you can only build on what your mother and father taught you, what you learned in school and what you've taught yourself," he said. "It's the basic foundation you have that you're building on."
That applies to his fellow New Yorkers, to the firefighters, police officers and rescue workers who gave their lives and the survivors who are rebuilding their city.
Their spirit "is exactly what I saw for the preceding seven and three-quarters years as mayor," Mr. Giuliani said. "This came from fundamentally who and what they are. In one day, you can't transform yourself into a different person."
The examples provided by the people of New York offer the best Sept. 11 lessons, he said.
"They were about the tremendous courage and strengths of people who live in freedom," Mr. Giuliani said. "No one had thought there would be an attack like that."
While the terrorists wanted to kill as many people as they could, they also had another objective – one at which they failed, the former mayor said.
"That demonstration of spontaneous courage and patriotism is the thing that defeated the terrorists' ultimate objective of trying to break our spirit," Mr. Giuliani said.
Memoir and primer
Mr. Giuliani fused his personal experiences into Leadership, which is part memoir and part management primer.
"It is a feeling of completion," Mr. Giuliani said of the book released last week. "We'd gotten about 80 percent of it written before Sept. 11 ... In many ways, the lessons of it are pre-Sept. 11."
The book begins and ends with chapters on his actions during and after the terrorist attacks. In between are fourteen chapters devoted to various management maxims: "Prepare Relentlessly," "Surround Yourself With Great People," "Underpromise and Overdeliver," and "Organize Around A Purpose."
"I was prepared to handle Sept. 11 precisely because I was the same person who had been doing his best to take on challenges my whole career," wrote the former U.S. Attorney and Justice Department official.
Mr. Giuliani may basically be the same person, but his image has undergone a massive makeover. Before the attack, he seemed destined to go down as one of New York's most controversial mayors.
Crime went down and business went up during the Giuliani administration. The city got cleaner, and tourists flocked back to the Big Apple.
But the combative Mr. Giuliani tangled with any number of New Yorkers, including African-American leaders who protested a spate of police beatings and shootings. The man whose blunt, take-charge manner played well in the wake of terrorism had been denounced as a bully and even a fascist. One of his predecessors, Ed Koch, entitled a collection of his newspaper columns, "Giuliani: Nasty Man."
While disclosure of prostate cancer brought him sympathy, Mr. Giuliani became the source of ridicule over his romance with Judith Nathan and divorce from Donna Hanover, especially when Ms. Hanover appeared in the play, The Vagina Monologues.
The soap opera aspects of Mr. Giuliani's life are not part of his book, except to state that "the dissolution of my marriage ... had nothing to do with my public performance and never affected it in any way. While it certainly generated attention, I don't believe the public was as interested in it as the media."
Cancer, however, helped him deal with the challenges ahead.
"Facing that, having to deal with it, taught me a lot of things about myself that I needed to know," Mr. Giuliani said. "Particularly how to deal with death, how to deal with fear, how to remain optimistic.
"It was having to deal with the same thing that killed my father."
Mr. Giuliani said he is well, and fortunate that he began his cancer treatment in 2000. Otherwise, he might not have been strong enough to meet the demands of 2001.
Asked how the attacks changed his understanding of leadership, Mr. Giuliani said: "It illustrated for me things that I already know."
For example, morning organizing meetings remained the most important of the day, though after Sept. 11 they featured more people at a bigger table, the ex-mayor said. Delegating tasks remained important, but a crisis requires especially clear directions.
"It helps the people who have to carry out the decisions understand what the rationale for the decision is," Mr. Giuliani said.
As New York began to recover, Mr. Giuliani said he applied organizational ideas he first used while working in the Justice Department under President Ronald Reagan – one of his models of Leadership. The fellow Republican said Mr. Reagan drew his leadership strength from standing up for his views.
"You could agree with him or disagree with him, but you never had any kind of re-invention," Mr. Giuliani said.
He also had words of praise for President George W. Bush, especially in response to the challenges of terrorism. Mr. Giuliani praised Mr. Bush's confrontation with Iraq over development of weapons of mass destruction, recalling the president's speech to Congress just nine days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
"He talked about how we had to end global terror and end the regimes that support global terror – to which I immediately read into, without any question, Iraq," Mr. Giuliani said.
What makes a good leader, in the Giuliani view? It's "all very different."
"You define leadership as a person who other people follow," he said, "and will follow for good reasons and sometimes for bad."
Still the warrior
While many observers see a mellower Giuliani, the former mayor said he's not afraid to be combative, especially when matters of principle are at stake. His book takes a fair share of shots at former adversaries, including former Mayor Koch (1978-1989) and members of the press.
Mr. Giuliani also reports that, when Mr. Bush visited New York three days after the attack, he told the president: "If you catch this guy, bin Laden, I would like to be the one to execute him."
Still, when it comes to crises either public or private, Mr. Giuliani said that "then you try to find principles to unify people."
"You have to rely on different parts of your personality, depending on what situation you're in," Mr. Giuliani said.
Over the years, Mr. Giuliani has served as federal prosecutor, Justice Department official, and U.S. Attorney, winning headlines for going after mob figures and Wall Street miscreants. He lost his first run for mayor in 1989 to David Dinkins, but rallied four years later to defeat him. He now runs his own consulting firm.
While Mr. Giuliani is making millions in the private sector, many people expect him to re-enter public service. His name has popped up in connection with the Office of Homeland Security and even the presidency itself.
If Mr. Giuliani has future plans, he's not revealing them.
"Here's something I did learn in dealing with cancer and in dealing with Sept. 11," Mr. Giuliani said. "You do not plan the future too much. You do not over-plan or over-manage the future. It sort of takes care of itself."
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