Leadership

Giuliani, Rudolph W. & Kurson, Ken

BULLY IN THE PULPIT Leadership Rudolph W. Giuliani with Ken Kurson Talk Miramax Books, $25.95, 407 pp. Paul Noses Two months after the World Trade Center was destroyed, Rudolph Giuliani found...

...It offers valid, if obvious, principles for leadership ("surround yourself with great people") and goes on to show how Giuliani achieved each goal with flying colors...
...His account of the World Trade Center attack is moving, not only because of the circumstances, but because of the detail he provides...
...and the Associated Press...
...It would be hard to examine Giuliani as a leader without considering the fear factor...
...Where other New York City mayors used such forums to discuss both accomplishments and failures, Giuliani said his role was to point out only his success...
...Did it deter critics or build resentment...
...It is not, to be sure, the Catholicism at home with the "compassion industry," his term for advocates of the poor...
...Charles Hirsch, on the afternoon of September 11...
...Giuliani lashed back at the firefighters' union leaders, calling their complaints "really, really sinful...
...Giuliani is one of the most prominent Catholics in American civic life these days, and that exchange captured for me how steeped he is in a certain strain of Catholicism...
...attorney in Manhattan, the late Murray Kempton caricatured him as a contemporary Savonarola...
...attorney, he developed the idea of using the federal racketeering law to convict organized-crime figures as members of a crime family rather than for individual crimes...
...Even though he mentions his faith first in outlining one of his key precepts for leadership-"develop strong beliefs"-Giuliani doesn't follow through on the theme...
...Given his vigorous use of the bully pulpit that comes with the New York City mayoralty, it amuses many Giuliani observers that one of his principles of leadership is "stand up to bullies...
...His attack rhetoric had the pop of a Roger Clemens fastball...
...I wonder, too, if he was aware that some of the people he brought into high-level city jobs were afraid to speak freely with him because of his famous temper...
...I wonder, though, if Giuliani ever gave serious thought to his inability to attract more than a very few talented African Americans into his administration in a city that is one-quarter black...
...Part of the reason for his success, he often said, was that he was pragmatic and not ideological or partisan...
...Polls showed that while New Yorkers thought he did a good job, they were dissatisfied with Giuliani's leadership style before September 11, 2001...
...Many would-be critics were simply afraid of his hardball tactics...
...Still the bulk of the book reminded me of being at one of his year-end press conferences or his release of the semi-annual "Mayor's Management Report...
...Giuliani's book doesn't consider whether the tone produced by such tactics worked to his advantage as a leader...
...He gives a perceptive account of how New York Yankees manager Joe Torre and owner George Stein-brenner led the team to a series of championships...
...Although he is twice divorced and an advocate of abortion rights, it is a more judgmental strain that seems to fuse with his propensity toward righteous indignation...
...He replied on occasion that his style worked for him...
...In the days when Giuliani was an avenging, crusading U.S...
...But will it work for others...
...He writes of his interest, until he turned eighteen, in joining the Mont-fort Fathers and serving the poor...
...It reminds me of the title of the television show that spoofs New York's City Hall: Spin City...
...Giuliani goes on to describe how Hirsch warned him there would be no survivors in the towers' rubble because of the 2,000-degree heat from burning jet fuel...
...Free of the burden of promoting his own accomplishments, Giuliani is a more effective instructor on the principles of leadership...
...He covered Rudolph Giuliani as a reporter for Newsday and the Associated Press...
...His book stresses the importance of ideology...
...Similarly, his book often lacks introspection...
...He describes, for example, encountering the city's chief medical examiner, Dr...
...I get the sense that in Leadership Giuliani is still on the campaign trail...
...Pitching himself to a national audience rather than to his fellow New Yorkers, he comes across as more politically partisan, more ideologically conservative, and more anti-union than I remember in impressions formed in covering hundreds of his news conferences between 1983 and 1997...
...His sense of humor (which isn't widely known) comes to play in his look at the leadership styles of John Gotti and Don Corleone...
...He often attacked the integrity of judges who ruled against him, a troubling practice...
...He contends, for example, that when he was U.S...
...He added: "And I mean that in a moral sense...
...He "noticed Frankenstein-looking stitches all over the back of his hand" and found out that to avoid diverting another doctor, Hirsch had stitched his own hand after being cut by falling debris...
...It's a weakness that afflicts much of the book, with the exception of compelling accounts of his response to the World Trade Center attack and his fight against prostate cancer...
...I would like to think that Catholicism imbued Giuliani with something more than a thirst to punish evildoers, jaywalkers, and museums that exhibit offensive art-that it also gave him the faith, hope, and love he showed as he led New Yorkers back from the September 11 terrorist attack...
...Still his account of his own many achievements is often skewed by omission and sometimes, exaggeration...
...He released sealed information about the unarmed victim of a police shooting...
...Some of the best passages in the book come when Giuliani analyzes others' leadership styles...
...Giuliani has a great zeal for self-promotion, and he would indulge it fully on those occasions...
...He skates on the surface...
...In fact, that tactic had already been adopted...
...In the book, as in his mayoralty, Giuliani is at his best in moments of crisis...
...He used his access to the media to belittle other public officials, activists, and people who called in to his radio show...
...When he writes about a crisis, Giuliani seems to look right in the reader's eye, person to person...
...Paul Noses Two months after the World Trade Center was destroyed, Rudolph Giuliani found himself assailed by New York City firefighters who charged that their mayor had cut back on rescue operations at the disaster site...
...Paul Moses is an associate professor of journalism at Brooklyn College/CUNY...
...In his best-selling book Leadership, Giuliani hints at this, saying his parents passed down to him "the church's message of experiencing grace by giving it to others...
...it was used a year before Giuliani took office to convict members of the Bonanno crime family...

Vol. 129 • December 2002 • No. 22


 
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