'Giuliani Time' Recalls Ex-Mayor's Less Heroic Deeds

As mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani defended city police against accusations of brutality. "Giuliani Time" looks at his record before 9/11. (Crosswalks Television)

St. Rudy, hear your doppelganger roar.

As documentaries go, "Giuliani Time" is not high art. It's more like a beware-a-gram for 280 million Americans who may be tempted to make the former New York mayor their next president.

Today's Rudy Giuliani is the sanctified hero of Sept. 11, 2001. Nearly buried in the rubble of the World Trade Center (in part because Hizzoner ignored really stupid critics and placed his emergency command center next door to the nation's biggest terror target, but whatever . . .), he emerged to lead a city. And he gave eloquent voice to loss. "The number of casualties," he told New Yorkers, "will be more than any of us can bear."

This Rudy is touted as a Republican presidential candidate, a man of wit, wisdom and affection.

Fortunately, "Giuliani Time" concentrates on the Other Rudy , the lip-curled, chalk-white fellow who stood astride New York for a decade. There's not much pretense of fairness to this long-winded documentary, but Rudy didn't waste time on fairness, either. He stomped into the municipal barn intent on gelding any who opposed him. He fired, he mimicked, he besmirched and he intimidated. He was the most operatic mayor New York had seen or heard since Fiorello LaGuardia in the 1930s.

He wrested concessions from unions, he halved the welfare rolls, he persuaded publishers to remove reporters who displeased him.

"Giuliani Time" nods too briefly at the historical context in which Hizzoner took office. New York, like other American cities, was beset by a crack and homicide epidemic. Murders stood at about 2,000 a year. Civic life was withering, and the black, Latino and white poor suffered the most.

Giuliani's genius -- and his nerve -- lay in proclaiming that this did not need to be so. He would apply modern policing techniques and pursue telltale signs of urban decay -- the graffiti-painted wall, the broken windows -- and bring crime to heel. It was a seductive message in 1993. As Myron Magnet, the intellectual custodian of the conservative Manhattan Institute and a fellow with Edwardian sideburns and matching jowls, says in the movie, "We realized we don't have to live this way."

True enough.

But what's remarkable about Giuliani, and a point underlined in this flick, is how little sympathy he spared for those he ruled. He couldn't abide complaints from the poor and he was antagonistic to public schools. As Giuliani notes in the film: "My father used to threaten to put me in public school . . . and that was a really frightening thought."

Rudy couldn't even get along with Rudy -- in this case, his African American schools chancellor, Rudy Crew. In the documentary's most startling footage, Crew describes his efforts to befriend Giuliani, in hopes of persuading him to support reform of the public schools. They share yucks and cigars, but when the mayor pushed for school vouchers, it's safe to say the relationship didn't pan out.

"I find his policies to be so racist and class-biased," Crew says now. "I don't even know how I lasted three years. . . . He was barren, completely emotionally barren, on the issue of race."