Master of Disaster

His city delivered from strife, Giuliani went, in John Quincy Adams's phrase, in search of monsters to destroy. Sometimes the mayor created them when a lot of people didn't think they really existed. Where to begin? First, there was the New York Magazine ad campaign in which the magazine called itself "possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Giuliani banned the ad from city buses, prompting the magazine to sue, successfully, on the ground that the mayor had violated its First Amendment rights. Then there was the risqué Brooklyn Museum exhibit that included a portrait of the Virgin Mary that the artist had stained with a clump of elephant dung. Whatever one might think of the exhibit's artistic merits—and reasonable people could disagree—Giuliani went to war in a way even some of his friends found rhetorically extreme. Outraged, he responded as though the museum was poised to destroy Christendom. "You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating someone else's religion," the mayor said. Some old supporters wondered if he'd lost his sense of proportion. "It was almost as if he became so enamored of his press," says Floyd Flake, a former Democratic congressman from Queens who supported Giuliani in 1993, "that he had to be solving something, even if there wasn't any problem to solve."

The mayor's largely cultural or political skirmishes—bus ads, art exhibits—were particularly irksome to minorities, who believed he was ignoring a real problem: the city's racial divide. To some community activists, Giuliani's police force seemed especially eager to practice its tough new enforcement tactics on black New Yorkers, guilty or not. Tensions boiled over on Feb. 4, 1999, when NYPD officers fired 41 shots at Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean immigrant, in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building. Giuliani expressed regret over the killing but seemed primarily concerned with protecting the police department's image. Ed Koch, the former New York mayor who'd supported Giuliani in the 1993 and '97 campaigns, became an ardent critic. "Blacks and Hispanics ... would say to me, 'He's a racist!'" Koch tells NEWSWEEK. "I said, 'Absolutely not, he's nasty to everybody'."

Giuliani was also embroiled in personal crises. By the late '90s, he and Hanover were leading largely separate lives. In 1999 the mayor met Judi Nathan, an attractive East Side divorcée. He was smitten. Over the next year, Nathan and Giuliani spent time together. When Giuliani was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the spring of 2000, forcing him out of a Senate race against Hillary Clinton, Nathan, a registered nurse, helped him as he underwent treatment. Finally, in May 2000, after the New York Daily News published photos of the couple, Giuliani confirmed that Nathan was his "very good friend."

Then a bizarre sequence unfolded: a week after the photos appeared, Giuliani announced in his daily press briefing that he and Hanover would begin divorce proceedings. But later that day, in a hastily arranged press conference, Hanover had her own announcement: Giuliani's announcement had caught her by surprise.

Giuliani's private life was a shambles—and on full display. Another mayor of another city might have moved swiftly to settle the unseemly matter quietly; Giuliani, however, hired Raoul Felder, a celebrity divorce attorney never known to be shy of publicity. When Hanover's lawyers filed a "paramour access motion" seeking to prevent Nathan from entering Gracie Mansion, where Hanover continued to live, Felder accused Hanover of "howling like a stuck pig." (After a judge banned Nathan from the mansion, Giuliani moved into a suite in the home of his friend Howard Koeppel and his partner Mark Hsiao.) No detail seemed too personal for the papers—even the fact that Giuliani's cancer treatment had rendered him temporarily impotent was used to counter the idea that Nathan was his mistress. ("The mayor can't have a paramour if he can't paraform," the comedian Jackie Mason, a Giuliani friend, explained to the New York Post.) Giuliani and Hanover eventually reached a settlement, but by the summer of 2001, Giuliani, savior of Gotham in his first term, had fallen from his early heroic heights. He was unpopular, even irrelevant, as New Yorkers prepared to elect his successor in the autumn of the first year of the new century.

And then came the cold horror of September 11. In those morning and midday hours Giuliani was transformed into the man of destiny he'd seemed to always believe himself to be. Some New Yorkers will remember that awful day as a sheer struggle for survival, a crazed exodus from lower Manhattan. Others will recall the frantic search for a loved one feared to be in one of the towers or on one of the doomed planes. But when the vast majority of Americans look back on 9/11, they will, for the ages, think of Giuliani walking through ash and soot. He was honest, sad and strong; he was heroic. Alone that night, before going to bed, he read Churchill's May 1940 speech to the House of Commons: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.