Master of Disaster

Within two years, Giuliani had earned the trust of Reagan administration officials and was offered the job he really wanted: U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He logged long hours and brought a string of high-profile cases against mobsters, corrupt public officials and Wall Street inside traders. And he developed an addiction to media attention. To make a point about the city's rampant drug problem, he and New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato donned black leather jackets and dark shades and cruised the streets of an uptown neighborhood to make undercover crack buys.

By then, Giuliani had come to rely on an influential adviser: his wife. On a trip to Miami in 1982, Giuliani was introduced to an attractive local anchorwoman named Donna Hanover. Hooked, he pursued her intently and proposed within six weeks. Together in New York, Hanover helped Giuliani navigate the tricky tabloid culture. This was no idle exercise; Giuliani had long viewed the Southern District as a jumping-off point for elected office in New York. In 1989, he ran as the Republican candidate for mayor against David Dinkins. He lost by three points.

Bitter about his defeat, Giuliani was convinced he would have to intensify his efforts to survive the bedlam of New York politics. Targeting Dinkins in a 1993 rematch, he brought in a steady stream of outside experts to run a series of seminars on city government. "He didn't want Dinkins to know something he didn't," says Henry Stern, a New York City parks commissioner under Giuliani. One snowy morning in 1991, while Stern was out walking his dog, he ran into Giuliani and his young son, Andrew, in a park on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "When are we going to get a dog, Daddy?" Andrew asked his father. "When we live in Gracie Mansion, we'll have a dog," Giuliani replied. The seminars paid off: in 1993, Giuliani defeated Dinkins by 2.9 points.

The crisis facing New York when Giuliani took over city hall was vast. With a $2 billion deficit, the city was struggling to provide basic services, and the persistence of violent crime had forced many urban professionals to move their families to the suburbs. The problems were so vast, some observers wondered if Giuliani, or any mayor, could do much to solve them. Dismissing the doubters, Giuliani seemed to revel in the challenge, casting it as historical drama. "Winston Churchill," he said in a December 1993 speech, "didn't walk out in the middle of the Battle of Britain and say, 'You know, those bombs may really win out in the long run and we may lose to the Nazis'."

Giuliani wouldn't rest until New York was safe. He ordered the NYPD to scale back its feel-good community-liaison projects and simply patrol the streets. As his police commissioner he recruited William Bratton, a media-friendly Boston police commissioner who subscribed to the "broken windows" approach to enforcement. The theory held that areas that tolerated small-time crime would eventually become havens for more-serious offenses. (A single broken window would lead to more broken windows, which would lead to squatters' breaking into a building.) Graffiti artists, loiterers and prostitutes became the targets of the swift hand of the law. Bratton introduced CompStat—a system for mapping real-time crime statistics to allocate policing resources more precisely and keep track of officers' performance. Questions persisted about whether pursuing squeegee men—panhandlers who washed the windows of cars waiting in traffic—was the best use of the mayor's and his police force's time. But the strategies seemed to work: by the end of Giuliani's first year, homicides in the city were down 18 percent.

New York was emerging from adversity and Giuliani wanted the credit. It was widely reported that he was enraged when Bratton appeared on the cover of a January 1996 Time magazine under the headline FINALLY, WE'RE WINNING THE WAR AGAINST CRIME. Bratton stepped down from the NYPD within months. (Giuliani denied publicity was the issue; "Bratton didn't understand that he had a boss," says Giuliani friend Powers. "It's not a question of credit.") By this time, New Yorkers had grown accustomed to a mayor who loved combat—with allies and adversaries alike. "For Rudy, governing New York was conquering New York," says Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University. "He thrived on confrontation." As long as Rudy got results, the public didn't particularly care how he did it, or how many fights he picked. The squeegee men were gone, as were turnstile jumpers and the more notorious pornographic emporiums. In terms of quality of life, he delivered. The rest was just drama—drama that exhausted those involved, yes, but what mattered was New York was livable again. Suburban parents no longer automatically vetoed children's trips into the city. By the end of his first term, Giuliani had cut 20,000 workers from the city's payrolls, was dramatically reducing the welfare rolls and had violent crime approaching a 30-year low. The public rewarded him with 55 percent of the vote when he ran for re-election in 1997.