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The Runner Stumbles
Rain was falling on the campaign van as it wound through the streets of Manhattan toward the Metropolitan Republican Club. The trip to the Giuliani-for-Mayor kickoff ceremony should have been a joyous occasion. But as the candidate traveled through midtown traffic this dreary May morning in 1989, there was more desperation in the air than anything else.
Ray Harding had worried about the Giuliani crew from the beginning. "Smart guys, no experience," the Liberal Party chief had said. "How do I know this isn't Amateur Night at the Bijou?" The question hovered over Rudy Giuliani as he mapped strategy to contain the disaster of the day, a front-page story in the morning's Daily News disclosing that his law firm was registered as a foreign agent for Panama, as the U.S. government was charging General Manuel Noriega with cocaine trafficking. Giuliani wasn't the dictator's lawyer, but the distinction was lost on its way to the front page.
Harding was back at Liberal Party headquarters wondering how it could all be going so wrong. The candidate's huge lead in the polls was disintegrating. The campaign was running out of cash. Giuliani's strategists were lumping from crisis to crisis, while the candidate flailed about on the campaign trail.
When his moment came, Giuliani walked into the tiny space in whichFiorello LaGuardia had announced his run for mayor fifty-six years earlier. Dozens of sweat-soaked reporters were already there, squeezed against banks of television cameras. Giuliani introduced his wife, Donna, and held his three-year-old son, Andrew, aloft for the cameras. Then he launched into a tirade against the forces thathad overtaken New York.
"Now is the time to take back our city from the violent criminals on our streets and the white-collar criminals in their office suites," he said, "from the drug dealers in abandoned buildings and the crooked politicians who have abandoned their oath of office.
"It is time to restore the reputation of New York, so that once again our city will be known for its libraries, its universities, its culture, its industry, and its spirit -- not as it is known today for crime, crack, and corruption."
It was time, he said, "to take our streets, parks, and subways back from the criminals."
"No deals for jobs, no deals for contributors," he pledged. "What you see is what you get."
When he finished his speech, the candidate stuck to the game plan and took no questions. It was a strategy that made Harding furious: How could Giuliani ignore the New York City press corps on the day he launched his campaign? It was insanity. Sure enough, reporters shouted their questions to him as he made his way out of the room: Did he know about the Noriega connection? What would he do about it? Would he quit his law firm?
Within forty-eight hours, a commercial was running on television attacking him. "Rudy Giuliani is being paid almost one million dollars by the law firm that represents Panama's drug dictator Noriega," an announcer intoned as a picture of the general appeared next to Giuliani's. It was paid for by Giuliani's opponent in the Republican primary, Ronald Lauder, a multi-millionaire propped up by Senator Al D'Amato.
Soon afterward Mayor Ed Koch, the Democratic incumbent, jumped into the fray, accusing Giuliani of taking "drug money."
"My is it unfair, if Noriega would be arrested by some foreign marshal, to talk about the fact that he might call Rudy on the phone?" Koch asked reporters. Twisting the knife a little further, he questioned why Giuliani's firm, White & Case, had no black or Hispanic partners.
Giuliani fell into his trap. "Koch is intelligent enough to know he's lying" about his having taken drug money, he told reporters the next day. "I expect him to lie. With Lauder, who knows?" Lauder, he said, was "an incompetent" who "never had to work for a living." The front page of the next day's Newsday read "RUDY SNARLS."
Sensing weakness, D'Amato went in for the kill, appearing on CNBC to pronounce the Noriega question perfectly fair. "I don't believe you join a law firm like White and Case and get one million dollars and don't even know who your clients are," he said, almost doubling the size of Giuliani's salary. "Are they buying access to City Hall? That's a tough question, a fair question -- they pay you one million dollars to run for mayor?"
It was a classic New York feeding frenzy, sparked by an issue that was completely meaningless. Giuliani was getting banged around by politicians far more seasoned at this kind of game than he. The rookie candidate had kept a non-story alive and revived questions about his temperament in the process. Finally, on June 5 -- nineteen days after he announced his candidacy for mayor -- Giuliani put the Noriega story out of its misery and took a leave of absence from White & Case.
The candidate took a breath, then set out on another mission, which was to understand why his run for mayor, which had started out with so much promise, was unraveling.
0n January 11, 1989, the front page of the New York Post featured a huge photo of New York's best-known prosecutor holding an automatic pistol with a long black silencer. "GOOD NEWS FOR BAD GUYS," the headline roared. "Crimebuster Giuliani steps down."
America's most celebrated U.S. attorney had gathered his closest aides together and announced to a room full of reporters that he was resigning. "I hope the legacy we leave," he said solemnly, "is the continued emphasis on the need to reform the way in which we do business and practice politics..."
Rudy Giuliani. Copyright © by Andrew Kirtzman. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
