Growing Up Giuliani

At Bishop Loughlin, Giuliani was a catechist, a student who instructed younger children in Catholic doctrine. Giuliani was not remarkably pious, but like many dutiful boys of his time and background, he seriously considered the priesthood. (He would later joke to friends that he gave up his priestly ambitions because "celibacy ain't for me.") But Giuliani wound up applying for a college scholarship "to study law or medicine," the classic roads of upward mobility for the sons of immigrant families.

O'Leary, who had grown close to the Giulianis and often dined with them, recalls that Giuliani gave up the seminary for another, more personal, reason. Near the end of Giuliani's senior year, his father had a nervous breakdown. At a state park on Long Island, a policeman walked into a men's bathroom to find Harold Giuliani, with his pants down around his ankles, doing deep knee bends. Harold was arrested for loitering. It was all an embarrassing mix-up. He had been constipated and he was trying to expedite a bowel movement. Harold also stopped showing up at his job as a school custodian. O'Leary says Giuliani felt he could not leave his family for the enforced isolation of the seminary.

Always, the Manhattan skyline shimmered. After high school, Giuliani joined the flood of Long Island commuters into Gotham, to Penn Station, where he transferred to the uptown subway to the distant Bronx. There he was enrolled at Manhattan College, another strict and demanding institution for strivers run by the Christian Brothers. Of the 744 students in his class, three were black and four were Hispanic. Blackballed by the fraternity favored by jocks and campus "big men," Giuliani joined a smaller frat he helped revive. It soon had 30 members. He honed his political skills (this time he had campaign buttons made) and was elected class president.

Under the Christian Brothers' tutelage, Giuliani was exposed to the Christian Aristotelianism of Saint Thomas Aquinas. As writer John Judis recently noted in The New Republic, "Catholic thinkers do not see liberty as an end in itself, but as a means—a 'natural endowment'—by which to achieve the common good." Many years later, at a forum on crime, Giuliani said, "Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do." Asked to explain what he meant, Giuliani replied, "Authority protects freedom. Freedom can become anarchy." Judis notes that Norm Siegel, then executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said afterward that he was "floored" by Giuliani's definition of liberty and authority. "But anyone who studied philosophy at a Catholic college would not have been surprised by Giuliani's words," writes Judis.

Giuliani's politics in the 1960s were fairly liberal. He was influenced by Robert Kennedy, but perhaps more by RFK's law-and-order side and penchant for power than his leanings on civil rights. Though Giuliani was in college and law school during the tumultuous student revolutions of the '60s, he was untouched by flower children, and he avoided antiwar rallies. He didn't want to get arrested and jeopardize his emerging ambition: to become a prosecutor.

It's unlikely that the young Giuliani wanted to become an Inspector Javert, the sort of I-am-the-law type of prosecutor who righteously condemns wrongdoers. Giuliani was sophisticated enough to have read Victor Hugo, and his colleagues say he was fair-minded, if zealous and extremely hardworking as a young lawyer. But it is a sure bet that Giuliani wanted the thrill of standing up for the "people" in court or signing his name on a legal brief "for the United States of America."