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Posted on 09/29/2002 5:39:28 PM PDT by rickmichaels
If Osama Bin Laden is ever caught alive, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has one wish: He wants to be the one to execute the terrorist.
In his new book, "Leadership," Giuliani revealed how he asked President Bush - three days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks - if he could be the executioner.
"What can I do for you?" Bush had asked.
"I told him, 'If you catch this guy, Bin Laden, I would like to be the one to execute him.'
"I am sure he thought I was just speaking rhetorically," Giuliani wrote. "But I was serious. Bin Laden had attacked my city, and as its mayor I had the strong feeling that I was the most appropriate person to do it."
With "Leadership," Giuliani has attempted to channel all the ups and downs of his storied life, including the horror of Sept. 11, and create a book that he said last week he hoped readers would find useful and informative.
"It was basically for people who want lessons or help on how to lead an organization, or lead themselves through difficult times in life," the former mayor said during a sit-down with the Daily News. "Because I think the same principles apply to both."
The result is a volume that is part management tome, part memoir, part self-help treatise. In many ways, it reads like a series of management speeches - for which Giuliani is now getting $100,000 a pop - with chapter headings that reflect what he calls "the ideas that I leaned on."
These are some of Rudy's rules: "Prepare Relentlessly;" "Weddings Discretionary, Funerals Mandatory;" "Surround Yourself with Great People;" "Underpromise and Overdeliver." And an intriguing capper, at least for a former federal prosecutor, "Bribe Only Those Who Will Stay Bribed."
But scattered amid the management precepts, Giuliani lifts the veil gingerly on parts of his personal life, especially his relationship with Judith Nathan. And he expresses some opinions that he undoubtedly would not have as mayor.
Who could have guessed, for instance, that in addition to his parents, Ronald Reagan and his five firefighter or police officer uncles - all of whom he cites as major influences - Giuliani found something to admire in mobster John Gotti, whom he once prosecuted?
Giuliani writes of seeing a smiling Gotti outside his social club in Little Italy, a day or two after a rival thug had taken a shot at the crime boss.
"He had positioned himself in broad daylight to show everybody that he wasn't afraid," Giuliani wrote of the now dead mobster, whom he added "clearly understood some of the principles of leadership."
New Yorkers, more than the rest of the country, will likely recognize many of the stories in the book, which hits stores Tuesday as part of a two-book, $2.7 million contract with publisher Miramax Books.
His early battle to rid the city of squeegee men, his successes in driving down crime, his efforts at reducing the city's welfare rolls - all are glowingly retold.
The most riveting chapter of "Leadership," which Giuliani said he largely dictated to Money magazine writer Ken Kurson, is the one he devotes to Sept. 11. He was eating breakfast that morning on E. 55th St. when his longtime counsel, Denny Young, said quietly, "There's a fire at the World Trade Center."
They raced downtown, sirens and cell phones blazing. "My first assumption," recalled Giuliani, "was that it was some nut flying a small plane."
Giuliani was actually in a commandeered office at 75 Barclay St., just two blocks north of the Trade Center when the first tower came down. At the time, he was waiting to be patched through to Vice President Cheney. "Within a second or two, the line went dead," wrote Giuliani. "From beneath a desk, [chief of staff] Tony Carbonetti said what we were all thinking: 'What the hell is happening?'"
Later, he reveals that he spent time worrying that Nathan, then in her apartment on the upper East Side, might be the target of a separate terrorist attack. "Our relationship at that point was very public, and she, too, had received threats," Giuliani wrote. "I thought those attacking our city might go after her, and I wanted to make sure she was safe."
Nathan later joined Giuliani at a makeshift command center, where he put the former nurse to work organizing city hospitals for an influx of wounded that never really came.
No Time For Tears
The tough-talking former prosecutor cried only once that day, he reveals - when he was on the phone with Solicitor General Ted Olsen, a good friend whose wife, Barbara, was on the plane that struck the Pentagon.
"The rest of the day, there was not time," he wrote. Last week, Giuliani recalled his conversation with Bush, adding he still thought he was the most appropriate person to execute Bin Laden.
"It really is a reflection of the tremendous anger I had at what he did to us," Giuliani said. There are other personal moments. It becomes clear, for instance, that Giuliani was far sicker than most realized when he was battling prostate cancer.
At one point in 2000, he received 25 radiation treatments - five a week, for five straight weeks. Once, while marching in a Columbus Day Parade, the pain became so searing he was afraid he might fall down. He swallowed half a Vicodin in a men's bathroom and, five minutes later, was marching again.
Like other ex-mayors who have written books, Giuliani can't resist a certain amount of score-settling, and perhaps even a little revisionism.
But for the most part, "Leadership" is everything that Giuliani was as mayor - always straightforward, rarely apologetic, with occasional flashes of deep empathy.
Channeling Anger
He ends the book on a darker note, one of pure, undiluted rage.
It is Jan. 1, 2002, moments after he has left City Hall as mayor. He is alone at the edge of Ground Zero, a private citizen.
"I wanted it to be the last place I visited before I left," wrote Giuliani. "And yet, walking around the site that day, I felt tremendous anger, as raw and intense as when I first saw the smoldering pile."
"The challenge was to put it to work in ways that would make me a stronger, better leader."
So what's his next book going to be about?
"At one time I had thought about writing an autobiography," he said. "Which I still might do."
And not just on the ground in New York.
Lots of us here on FR shed tears over the loss of "our" BKB -- and still do... :-(
TXnMA (No Longer!!!)
Still can't type worth a hoot...
TXnMA (No Longer!!!) :-(
It is probably a little vulgar for him to say this, but I do think that you needn't worry that he is going to be afforded the privilege of chopping bin Laden's head off.
i like that lingering intensity and wish more people still felt this way today (outside of FR and conservative circles)
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