His provocative behavior seemed to bear little resemblance to well-considered strategy and quite a bit to impulses that were not particularly attractive when rendered in headlines. In the fine print, they read downright ugly.
Yet most of this dizzying series of incarnations may well end up forgotten behind the astounding revival of New York during his time. His pledge to fight crime was executed to stunning ends by his first set of police managers. Every crime was weighed on the same scale. A mugging in Bushwick was just as bad as one in Carnegie Hill. There were no excuses for criminals or, perhaps more important, for police commanders.
When he took what were, by New York terms, novel or extreme stands, he said he was acting tactically, to stir movement in an intellectually stagnant political culture dominated by the Democratic Party. For example, this approach, he said, was behind his proposals to finance scholarships at private schools to give poor children an exit from failing public schools.
The results were mixed. Reforms were won in the management of the school districts, and in the principals’ contract, which traded raises for an end to lifetime job security that was virtually guaranteed without regard to performance. His key demand—direct mayoral control of the schools—never got very far. The notion of turning over the schools to this particular mayor won few advocates in Albany, where the final decision rested.
For Giuliani, Ground Zero as Linchpin And Thorn
By RUSS BUETTNER | August 17, 2007
AS RUDOLPH W. GIULIANI CAMPAIGNS FOR the Republican presidential nomination, highlighting his stewardship of New York City after the Sept. 11 attacks, he is widely hailed for bringing order to a traumatized city.
But he has also raised the hackles of rescue and recovery workers by likening his experience to theirs. In one appearance he declared that he had been in the ruins “as often, if not more” than the cleanup workers who logged hundreds of hours in the smoldering pile.
A complete record of Mr. Giuliani’s exposure to the site is not available for the chaotic six days after the attack, when he was a frequent visitor. But an exhaustively detailed account from his mayoral archive does exist for the period of Sept. 17 to Dec. 16, 2001. It shows he was there for a total of 29 hours in those three months, often for short periods or to visit locations adjacent to the rubble. In that same period, many rescue and recovery workers put in daily 12-hour shifts.
A Man Who Became More Than a Mayor
By DAN BARRY | December 31, 2001
Former mayor Giuliani shown here in his office towards the end of his term.
SO BLURRED HAS THE MAN BECOME WITH the office that it may take a while to remember who owns what. The large portrait of Fiorello H. La Guardia behind his desk stays; it belongs to the city. But that small portrait of Theodore Roosevelt? His.
“It’s a great job. It’s a great job,” he said. And then the present tense became the past. “This was an absolutely great job.” There was the palpable sense that eight years—of tumult and change, of political wars won and lost, of loud baseball celebrations and quiet personal crises—had passed in, well, a New York minute.
Four months ago he was a lame duck. He was remaining conspicuously silent while his divorce lawyer said nasty things about his estranged wife. He was openly dating another woman, to the chagrin of old friends. He was sleeping in a spare bedroom at a friend’s apartment, and no longer living in Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence.
All in all, there was the whiff of irrelevance about him. Then, on Sept. 11, a mayor whose signal achievement had been to reduce crime in his city witnessed the worst crime ever committed on American soil: a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center that killed almost 3,000 people.
For weeks afterward, Mr. Giuliani was more than just a mayor. Day after day, his calm explanation of complicated, awful news helped to reassure a traumatized city that it would pull through, and that someone was in charge. The man who had seemed so finished just a few weeks earlier was now being greeted with cheers wherever he went: Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!
Now, preparing to step aside, Mr. Giuliani could not resist delivering one more summa-tion of the city’s 8 million people in that familiar, father-knows-best tone of his. “They really don’t know how badly they were attacked,” he said, adding: “Two of our largest buildings get destroyed, thousands of people dead, more than that injured. And here they are, back on track with their lives—enthusiastic, exceedingly patriotic, more united, defiant.”
“And I just reflected that,” the departing mayor said. “People ask me how I do it. I just reflect the way they are.”
Rich as Mayor Is, New Yorkers Feel He Cares
By SAM ROBERTS | August 7, 2008
SEVEN YEARS AGO, MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG brashly introduced himself to New Yorkers as a billionaire candidate for mayor. Since then, he has periodically upbraided them for expecting government to solve every problem. At times, he seemed to suggest that constituents bedeviled by adversity just get over it. Meanwhile, he graduated from a mere garden-variety billionaire to possibly the richest person in New York.
But a funny thing has happened: A growing number of Mr. Bloomberg’s constituents, regardless of their own income, say he cares about people like them. The gain is most pronounced among New Yorkers earning under $75,000 a year.
Early in his first term, only about 1 in 20 New Yorkers making less than $30,000 said he empathized a lot with their needs and problems. Now, according to a comparison of New York Times polls, about 1 in 4 do—nearly the same proportion as among people who make more than $75,000.
Put another way, five years ago 44 percent of those in the lower income group said the mayor cared “not at all” about their needs. Now, only 12 percent say so.
And this is a man who has been known to appear out of touch, insensitive and more likely to imply “suck it up” than “I feel your pain.” He girded for a transit strike in 2002 by buying a $600 24-speed mountain bike (he later donated it for Christmas to a 16-year-old diabetic from Brooklyn). Two summers ago, he did the unthinkable and congratulated Con Edison for its expertise in sparing customers beyond western Queens from a devastating blackout.
Despite all that, Mr. Bloomberg has managed to project himself as just one of the guys, and whatever the underlying reason, his cultivated “Mayor Mike” persona seems to be sticking. So what if he is worth a lot more today than when he became mayor?
“His money is his,” she said Hilary Marmon, 73, a former teacher who lives in Queens on an income she said is less than $30,000. “He doesn’t have to give it to me.”
Streetscapes: A Residence With A View, Even Without The Mayor
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | May 26, 2002
Bloomberg is running for a third term in 2009.
PERHAPS IT IS NOT SURPRISING THAT MAYOR Michael R. Bloomberg has decided not to live in Gracie Mansion at 89th Street and East End Avenue, preferring his limestone town house on East 79th Street off Fifth Avenue. For many years, the bank of the East River, with Gracie Mansion, was considered a peculiar backwater.
The mansion was built in the 1790s by Archibald Gracie, a Scottish trader who lived far downtown; presumably this was his family’s country house. Gracie was a leading figure in Federal-era New York. He was a friend of Alexander Hamilton and a founder of The New York Post.
Originally it faced southeast toward what is now Queens, but in 1804 Gracie built an addition to the northwest and made the main entrance face the mesmerizing waters of Hell Gate, where currents, and often ships, collided. Gracie suffered financial troubles and sold the house in 1823. Eventually it became a part of East End Park, now Carl Schurz Park.
According to Mary Black, author of “New York City’s Gracie Mansion: A History of the Mayor’s House,” it was Robert Moses, the longtime parks commissioner, who had the idea for Gracie Mansion as an official residence for the mayor, an idea resisted by Fiorello H. La Guardia. But La Guardia gave in, moving from his modest apartment at 109th Street and Fifth Avenue in 1942.
The house retains some unusual elements from earlier tenants—Mr. Giuliani’s daughter, Caroline, etched her name on a windowpane in the library in 2001, as did Mayor John V. Lindsay’s daughter, Margie, in 1965.
Bloomberg’s Gift to the People: Moi
By CLYDE HABERMAN | October 7, 2008
AN E-MAIL PEN PAL OF MINE IN ALASKA (no, not Gov. Sarah Palin, someone else) wrote the other day mentioning Marshal Philippe Pétain. This was in the context of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s backroom campaign to keep himself in office beyond the limit of two terms that New York voters have quite clearly said are plenty.
For those unfamiliar with the name, Pétain led the wartime Vichy regime in France, which collaborated with Nazi Germany. In no way is this meant to compare Mr. Bloomberg to him. But a Pétain quotation from 1940 leapt to mind for my Alaskan pal. As he assumed leadership of the government under Nazi occupation, Pétain said loftily, “I make a gift of myself to France to lessen her misfortune.”
Which is essentially what the multibil-lionaire businessman turned $1-a-year politician is saying: “I make a gift of myself to New York to lessen its misfortune.”
“I make a gift of myself to New York to lessen its misfortune.”
These are tough times, and it is a present that many in the city would happily accept. But there’s this pesky thing standing in the way. It is called the expressed will of the people. Twice in the 1990s, New York voters approved referendums limiting the mayor and other officeholders to two terms.
There is no reason that Mr. Bloomberg could not have gone back to the voters to ask if they’d had a change of heart and would bend the system to give him a third term. Instead, he worked behind the scenes to have the City Council change the rules all on its own.
A term-limits referendum could have easily been arranged for next month, with a high voter turnout assured thanks to the presidential election. But Mr. Bloomberg teased New Yorkers about his political intentions for so many months that time ran out on that option.
O.K., some officials said, why not hold a special election on term limits early next year? “A couple of hundred thousand people voting is better than 51 council members,” said Betsy Gotbaum, the public advocate.
Those several hundred thousand won’t get the chance if Mr. Bloomberg gets his way. He seems to have a preferred French quotation of his own, a variation on a line attributed to Louis XV: “Après moi, moi.”
SCANDALS AND CORRUPTION
Spitzer Unpopular on the Street He Made Into His Beat
By JONATHAN P. HICKS | March 20, 2003
FRESH FROM A STRING OF APPEARANCES ON magazine covers and a statewide race in which he was re-elected state attorney general with a commanding two-thirds of the vote, Eliot Spitzer is widely considered to be a politician with a future.
His favorability ratings are high, according to the polls. But a poll of people on Wall Street would probably show different results. Reeling from a contracting economy and a loss of faith in the stock markets, many in the securities industry say he pursued his investigations for his own political gains. And they are angry.
Some said their feelings were evident this week, for example, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Gov. George E. Pataki and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor, were among the political notables invited to the gala 70th birthday party for Sanford I. Weill, the chairman of Citigroup—and Mr. Spitzer was not.
Whatever the reason, he has certainly left bitter feelings in his wake. “Look I’ve seen this movie before,” said Michael Holland, a former Salomon Brothers partner and a fund manager at Holland & Company. “Spitzer has obviously over-reached. I view all of this as very Rudy Giuliani-like. Both of these guys made their mark the same way, and it turned out that a lot of it was overreaching and overzealousness. Eliot Spitzer is a good politician—he saw his opportunity and he took advantage of it.”
In response, Mr. Spitzer said that his investigations were necessary to clean up practices among Wall Street firms. But will the anger hurt him should he decide to run for governor?
“Maybe we’ll find out,” Mr. Spitzer said.
From White Knight To Client 9
By MICHAEL POWELL and MIKE MCINTIRE | March 11, 2008
HE STANDS CLOSE TO RUIN’S PRECIPICE, THIS tireless crusader and once-charmed politician reduced to a notation on a federal affidavit: Client 9.
The ascent and descent of Eliot Spitzer’s career have been dizzying. He was the brainy kid who graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School and became an avenging state attorney general, hunting down Wall Street malefactors with moralistic fervor. Everywhere he found “betrayals of the public trust” that were “shocking” and “criminal.”
Then he ran for governor in 2006. Reformers chortled at the thought of this young bull with a national reputation stomping about the calcified halls of Albany.
Mr. Spitzer cast himself, self-consciously, as the alpha male, with a belief in the clarifying power of confrontation. Long predawn runs, fierce basketball games: He did nothing at half-speed. “Listen, I’m a steamroller,” he told a State Assembly leader in his first days as governor, adding an unprintable adjective into the mix for emphasis.
Soon enough, his enemies and even admirers and friends came to affix another adjective to his name: reckless. The tawdry nature of his current troubles—to be caught on tape arranging a hotel-room liaison with a high-priced call girl, according to law enforcement officials—shocked even his harshest critics.
He was not the first politician to burn with a moral fervor; but he sometimes failed to recognize that his own footsteps could fall in ethically dodgy territory. In 1994, he denied—and later acknowledged—secretly borrowing millions of dollars from his father to finance an unsuccessful run in the Democratic primary for state attorney general. Mr. Spitzer the prosecutor might have pursued this sort of behavior as possibly illegal. The Republicans complained, yet he sidestepped questions and won election four years later.
As attorney general, Mr. Spitzer cast himself as Wall Street’s new sheriff and took off at full gallop. His office extracted vast civil settlements from defendants eager to avoid criminal indictment. But his style wed toughness to what looked to some like bullying.
John C. Whitehead, the former chairman of Goldman Sachs, wrote in The Wall Street Journal of taking a phone call from Mr. Spitzer. The attorney general, Mr. Whitehead said, had launched into a tirade, threatening him with “war” over his public criticism of a case.
“I was astounded,” Mr. Whitehead wrote. “No one had ever talked to me like that before. It was a little scary.”
Few on Wall Street expressed much sorrow at Mr. Spitzer’s predicament this week. In particular, friends of Richard A. Grasso, the former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange and a favorite Spitzer piñata, recalled that Spitzer aides had circulated allegations, never substantiated, that Mr. Grasso had had an improper relationship with his secretary.
Spitzer Resigns in Sex Scandal
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI and DANNY HAKIM | March 13, 2008
GOV. ELIOT SPITZER, WHOSE RISE TO POLITical power as a fierce enforcer of ethics in public life was undone by revelations of his own involvement with prostitutes, resigned, becoming the first New York governor to leave office amid scandal in nearly a century. Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson, a state legislator for 22 years and the heir to a Harlem political dynasty, will be sworn in as New York’s 55th governor, making him the state’s first black chief executive.
Mr. Spitzer announced he was stepping down at a grim appearance at his Midtown Manhattan office, less than 48 hours after it emerged that he had been intercepted on a federal wiretap confirming plans to meet a call girl from a high-priced prostitution service in Washington, leaving the public stunned and angered and bringing business in the State Capitol to a halt.
With his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, at his side, Mr. Spitzer, a Democrat, said he would leave political life to concentrate on healing himself and his family.
Mr. Spitze
r, 48, spoke in a somber but steady voice, softening his usual barking tone. He took no questions. His wife, in a dark suit and a brightly colored scarf, looked off to the side, occasionally glancing up to reveal deep circles beneath her eyes.
For the last three days, Mr. Spitzer has been consumed with crisis, trying to salvage his marriage and his career and avoid federal charges stemming from the case. Mr. Spitzer did not address the pending criminal investigation, and it remained unclear what legal issues, if any, he will face.
Mr. Paterson issued a brief statement offering condolences to the Spitzers and promising to quickly turn his attention to governing.
“It is now time for Albany to get back to work as the people of this state expect from us,” Mr. Paterson said.
In a Volatile City, a Stern Line On Race and Politics
By MICHAEL POWELL | July 22, 2007
THOSE WERE GRIM DAYS FOR RACE RELAtions in New York City, the early 1990’s. There were nearly 2,000 murders each year, blacks and whites died in high-profile racial killings, and a riot held the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn in thrall for three dangerous nights.
On Jan. 9, 1994, another match landed in this tinderbox: a caller reported a burglary at a Harlem mosque. The police ran in, and Nation of Islam guards threw punches and broke an officer’s nose.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 39
