What Happened to America’s Mayor?
Rudy Giuliani was once a national hero who refused to let Donald Trump buy him breakfast.
How did he become who he is today?
WHERE'S RUDY?
WHO WANTS TO KNOW?!
HE DISAPPEARED RIGHT AROUND THE IMPEACHMENT
WHO WANTS TO KNOW?!
HE DISAPPEARED RIGHT AROUND THE IMPEACHMENT
NOBODY I KNOW MENTIONED NO CEMENT SHOES
By SETH HETTENA
Spencer Heyfron/Redux
This story appears in the June 2020 print edition of Rolling Stone.
Not long ago, Rudy Giuliani was traveling in a car across New York City with Jon Sale, his longtime friend, when some construction workers saw the former mayor and approached the vehicle. Giuliani lowered the window. “One of them,” Sale recalls, “said, ‘Mr. Mayor, I would like to shake your hand and thank you for what you did for New York. I wish you were still mayor.’ ”
This happens a lot to Rudy Giuliani, and it reflects what he once represented to most Americans: a man whose steady response to the attacks of September 11th, 2001, transcended partisan politics and transformed him into a national hero. Christened “America’s Mayor,” Giuliani for years was an immensely popular figure who appeared destined for a lucrative, decorated career at the spires of American business and government.
Two decades later, Giuliani is in free fall. The past few years on the national stage have left his reputation in tatters, marked in history for his role in the Ukraine extortion scandal that got a president impeached. He has seemed, at times, unstable and incoherent, contradicting both himself and the president in wild appearances on cable news, while spinning a web of conspiracy theories with Joe Biden at the center.
Giuliani’s ever-dwindling circle of friends — “I got about five friends left,” he was overheard telling someone near a reporter for the New York Daily News in one of his frequent phone mishaps — maintains that Rudy is still Rudy. A bit older at 76 (as of May 28th), sure, but still the same brash maverick he always was, and anybody who says otherwise has an ax to grind.
But others, even those with a deep affinity for Rudy, have been stunned as a man they barely recognize pokes at his iPad in Fox News interviews or drools through a boozy lunch with a reporter. Raoul Felder, his divorce lawyer, tells Rolling Stone “the Rudy Giuliani that I knew was a very careful, brilliant lawyer. . . . It’s hard to comport what I see and the way he was.”
Rick Wilson, the GOP political consultant who credits Giuliani with making his career, says he will defend to his dying breath the Giuliani of 9/11, but he adds, “It’s a cliché that if you live long enough, you’ll see your heroes become villains.”
As Giuliani’s friends have slipped away over the years, some have been replaced by people who the Rudy of 35 years ago would have put in prison. Now, the U.S. attorney’s office he once ran is taking a hard look at his Ukraine activities, while many in the White House view Giuliani as toxic and blame him for the president’s impeachment.
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