Rudy awakening: as president, Giuliani would grab even more executive power than Bush and Cheney. his mayoralty tells the story

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2007 by Rachel Morris

Many Giuliani watchers already understand that Rudy is a hothead and a grandstander, even a bit of a dictator at times. These qualities have dominated the story of his mayoralty that most people know. As that drama was unfolding, however, so was a quieter story, driven by Giuliani's instinct and capacity for manipulating the levers of government. His methods, like those of the current White House, included appointments of yes-men, aggressive tests of legal limits, strategic lawbreaking, resistance to oversight, and obsessive secrecy. As was also the case with the White House, the events of 9/11 solidified the mindset underlying his worst tendencies. Embedded in his operating style is a belief that rules don't apply to him, and a ruthless gift for exploiting the intrinsic weaknesses in the system of checks and balances. That's why, of all the presidential candidates, Giuliani is most likely to take the expansions of the executive branch made by the Bush administration and push them further still. The blueprint can be found in the often-overlooked corners of his mayoralty.

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK: BRINGING ON THE YES-MEN

Rudolph W. Giuliani was inaugurated on the steps of City Hall on January 2, 1994. As he pledged to end the fear that had infected the city, his seven-year-old son scampered around the dais, mouthing passages in unison with his father. The public advocate, Mark Green, was sworn in next, and delivered a typically florid address. "We need to hear more from the symphony of New York," Green intoned, "a glorious city in which each of us may rehearse and practice our parts alone, but the music is sweetest only when we come and play together into a more harmonic whole." Soon afterward, Green got a call from Giuliani's childhood friend Peter Powers, who had just started work as a deputy mayor. "The mayor didn't like your speech," Powers informed Green. "He thought it was too mayoral." That was Green's introduction to the Yesrudys.

In his prosecutor days, Giuliani had insulated himself within a circle of close male associates. They were smart and dedicated and accompanied him with a certain swagger, and they could always be depended on not to outshine their boss. Others in the office derisively referred to them as the "Yesrudys" (according to the journalist James Stewart, the term was correctly pronounced with a southern slave accent). When Giuilani arrived at City Hall, he brought some of the original Yesrudys with him, including Randy Mastro (his chief of staff), Denny Young (his counsel), and Randy Levine (his labor commissioner). These men were competent, but they also owed their careers in public life to Giuliani and enforced his will unstintingly.

From the first days of his term, Giuliani demanded a centralized operation that had no room for dissenters. He entrusted Tony Carbonetti, a former manager of a Boston bar in his twenties, with the task of installing loyalists not just in top positions but throughout the layers of the municipal government. The new recruits were quickly reminded that fidelity to Giuliani was their most important qualification; everyone knew the price of displeasing the mayor. "When Rudy read The Godfather," a former deputy mayor remarked approvingly to one of Giuliani's biographers, "he studied it from the point of view of how to communicate effectively down to the lowest ranks of an organization, so that every foot soldier understood his marching orders."