What Happened to Rudy Giuliani?
On Oct. 8, 1994, my wife Liz Bruder and I were married in City Hall by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. For 25 years, I carried a wallet-size photo of the three of us from that day.
Liz and I met working on Mr. Giuliani’s 1993 mayoral campaign. She was the campaign’s deputy finance director and I was the spokesman. Our small paid staff and hundreds of volunteers worked tirelessly to elect Rudy after he had narrowly lost to the incumbent, David Dinkins, in 1989.
Rudy told The New Yorker in January that he doesn’t think about his legacy, but is afraid that “Rudy Giuliani: He lied for Trump” will be on his gravestone. “Somehow, I don’t think that will be it,” he said. “But, if it is, so what do I care? I’ll be dead.”
He may not care, but anyone who worked on his winning campaigns in 1993 and 1997 or in City Hall during his two terms as mayor does care about his legacy — and theirs. We were proud to live and work in the clean, safe, prosperous city that Rudy ran and that Mayor Michael Bloomberg inherited from him.
“America’s Mayor,” as Rudy was called after Sept. 11, is today President Trump’s bumbling personal lawyer and henchman, his apologist and defender of the indefensible.
Friends and family constantly ask me, “Has he lost it? Is he crazy? How could you work for a guy like that?” At a recent dinner party, a stranger suggested that I’m not legally married because Rudy, a three-time loser at marriage, officiated our wedding.
He wasn’t always like this.
I was a partner in a successful consulting firm, fed up with living in a dangerous, dirty city when I went to work on Rudy’s nascent 1993 mayoral campaign. On Dec. 10, 1992, I watched Citizen Rudy heroically race into the Church of St. Agnes on East 43rd Street when a fire broke out. He emerged leading the parishioners and carrying the chalice, his suit jacket covered in soot. That was the Rudy I admired.
My work with Rudy peaked on Election Day, 1993, when his two-point victory over Mayor Dinkins reversed a two-point loss in 1989. After celebrating with Rudy, his family, friends and our campaign team, I slept on the floor of his Hilton Hotel suite. The next morning, I accompanied him downstairs to shoot his scene for a “Seinfeld” episode on nonfat yogurt. The following day, I left for a private sector communications job.
Last year, I declared my continuing respect for Rudy in an op-ed essay in The New York Daily News. I argued that his unwavering defense of the president reflected his instinctive hardball personality — and that playing hardball required guts and conviction. “Even if they could, most people wouldn’t change who they are, particularly if their personalities had made them successful in life,” I wrote. “Rudolph William Louis Giuliani is no different.”
But in truth, Rudy had already begun to turn me off.
On Oct. 9, 2016, he appeared as candidate Trump’s lone campaign surrogate on the Sunday morning political programs to enthusiastically defend Mr. Trump’s infantile 2005 Access Hollywood interview as “locker room talk.” He said, “Men at times talk like that.” I said to myself, “No, Rudy, we don’t.”
Fast forward to Rudy’s Ukraine misadventure. This is not Rudy vigorously defending Mr. Trump’s bad behavior. This is Rudy, as a private citizen and personal attorney for the president, lamely acting as a shadow secretary of state and Trump enforcer by attempting to influence the 2020 election in favor of his client.
I’ve remained in regular contact with my campaign colleagues, many of whom served in senior-level positions in the Giuliani administration. We’ve talked about his successes and his failures: reducing crime, improving the quality of life and reforming welfare as mayor; his prostate cancer and aborted Senate run against Hillary Clinton; his failed presidential bid and his widely hailed performance on and after Sept. 11.
Now the Ukraine story has us burning up the phone lines. Even former “Yes Rudys” have begun to question their blind fealty to him.
“If Rudy doesn’t get a lawyer, he’s crazier than I thought,” a 1993 campaign colleague and high-ranking Giuliani administration official said when the Ukraine scandal broke. A former senior adviser called him “crazy.” Those closest to him beg him to stop talking.
Some longtime Giuliani intimates point to the death on July 7, 2016 of his longtime best friend and political adviser, Peter Powers, as the moment that Rudy lost his way. Others cite Rudy’s marriage in 2003 to Judith Nathan, his soon-to-be third ex-wife, as transformational. Rudy was a pizza and Diet Coke guy when I met him in 1992. But he became an Upper East Side and Hamptons socialite and, worse yet, a Palm Beach neighbor of Donald Trump.
After his mayoralty ended in 2002, Rudy went to work for what seemed like every rich bad guy and tinpot dictator who called. (So going to work for Mr. Trump made sense.) He charged $100,000 for self-aggrandizing speeches about his heroic leadership after Sept. 11. He became a multimillionaire.
In perfect political symmetry, Rudy Giuliani now does Donald Trump’s dirty work: Vainly trying to cover up the Ukrainian cover-up and attacking a Democratic presidential front-runner, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter.
Watching and reading Rudy’s ferocious lying for Mr. Trump, whether on Fox or CNN, forced me to re-examine his last 25 years, especially the profiteering from Sept. 11. But Ukraine was the coup de grâce. We who admired him for so long expected much more from Rudy Giuliani and his legacy.
That wedding photograph with Rudy? I took it out of my wallet recently and put it in a drawer, probably forever.
