What in the world happened to Rudy Giuliani? How did the man whose bravery and resilience reassured a nation during the 2001 terrorist attacks become a bellowing, cheek-stained geyser of nonsense?
Andrew Kirtzman sets out to answer that question in “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor.” Kirtzman is well-suited to the task; as a New York-based reporter he covered Giuliani for years and was alongside the mayor on 9/11 as he sought to rally a devastated country.
Giuliani’s image as a national hero was set in stone that day, but the former mayor, prosecutor and presidential candidate has spent the years since chipping away at the pedestal on which he stands, largely through truth-twisting diatribes in defense of Donald Trump. Kirtzman’s biography attempts to explain how a man who nobly defended the country in one of its darkest moments then devoted his twilight years to sabotaging it.
It’s a measure of how much Giuliani’s place in history has changed that this is Kirtzman’s second biography of him. The author argues that it’s not so much that Giuliani changed as age, alcohol and a thirst for attention gradually led his worst impulses to dominate his life. Giuliani’s self-confidence, Kirtzman writes, “drove his greatest crusades, from his mission to eradicate the mob, to his determination to clean up New York City. . . . But the almost fanatical sense of righteousness that propelled his rise also presaged his catastrophic fall.”
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