Giuliani Says Wife Would Attend Cabinet Meetings
March 29, 2007
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
nytimes.com
Rudolph W. Giuliani said this week that if he were president, his wife could attend Cabinet meetings and advise him on federal policy, an unusually overt role in government decision-making for a first lady.
Mr. Giuliani made the remarks Tuesday, in an interview he and Judith Giuliani gave to Barbara Walters of the ABC News program “20/20,” for a show to be broadcast on Friday. Today, the network released a partial transcript, in which Mr. Giuliani also said that Mrs. Giuliani, his third wife, was not responsible for the very public break-up of his previous marriage.
Asked by Ms. Walters how much role Mrs. Giuliani will have in the campaign, the transcript shows, Mr. Giuliani said, “as much as she wants.” Asked if she would be involved in policy decisions, he said, “to the extent she wants to be, I couldn’t have a better advisor.”
As for Cabinet meetings, she would sit in “if she wanted to,” Mr. Giuliani said. “If they were relevant to something that she was interested in. I mean that would be something that I’d be very, very comfortable with.”
Mrs. Giuliani, who used to work as a nurse and a pharmaceutical sales representative, said, “if he asks me to,” she would be in White House policy meetings. “And certainly in the areas of health care.”
There have, of course, been first ladies who influenced their husbands privately on matters of state, from Abigail Adams to Eleanor Roosevelt to Nancy Reagan. Edith Galt Wilson secretly wielded enormous power over the government for 18 months, after a stroke incapacitated her husband, Woodrow. Rosalynn Carter, a first lady who advised her husband on policy, attended Cabinet meetings, which some authorities say was a first, but she was largely silent.
Hillary Rodham Clinton played the most public role in government, heading a commission to overhaul health care and producing a plan that Congress rejected in a major political setback for the president. After that, she stuck to the more traditional roles of private counselor and public envoy.
In the interview, Ms. Walters delved into some of the most discomfiting personal subjects Mr. Giuliani has had to address in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, including the messy ending of his previous marriage, to Donna Hanover; his strained relationship with his children from that marriage; and the revelation that the current Mrs. Giuliani was married twice before, not once, as was widely reported.
His marriage to Ms. Hanover was known to have been strained for years before they separated in 2000 — a separation he announced at a news conference without, she has said, first telling her. Mr. Giuliani’s relationship with his current wife became public knowledge around that time.
Ms. Walters asked directly if the current Mrs. Giuliani was responsible for the failure of his previous marriage. “No, she was not,” he said. “I think I should be very, very clear that she was not the cause of the break-up in any way at all.”
The couple would not say how and when they met and when their romance began, a subject they have consistently declined to address over the years. “That’s one thing that I would kind of like to keep private,” Mrs. Giuliani said.
Mr. Giuliani’s son, Andrew, who is 21, who has had little contact with his father in the last two years, recently referred to “a little problem that exists between me and his wife.”
On that subject, Mr. Giuliani told Ms. Walters, “This is my responsibility, not hers.”
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