NY Times hatchet job on Mrs Giuliani-they must be getting worried about Rudy's competitive polls with Hillary:
August 5, 2007
Drawing Fire, Judith Giuliani Gives Her Side
By ERIC KONIGSBERG, The New York Times
It has not been an easy few months for Judith Giuliani. Her rollout to the public received rocky reviews from the political class, Republicans included. A series of negative articles about her shopping habits, marital past and supposedly testy relations with campaign staff followed. Her appearances alongside her husband, Rudolph W. Giuliani, grew suddenly scarce — and some analysts suggested that she keep it that way.
So it was perhaps no surprise that at a recent lunch in downtown Manhattan, Mrs. Giuliani offered this self-assessment: “When it comes to politics, I’m new to this.”
Over the course of a two-hour interview, Mrs. Giuliani, 53, talked for the first time about how she met Mr. Giuliani and about their first date. (He asked her out, she said.) But she returned again and again to her inexperience as a political wife, saying, “It’s a learning curve for me.”
“I’m sure that’s something that can get one into, you know — ” She did not finish the thought, but allowed her hands to flutter cautiously before going on. “But I try to remain me. And again, part of that is not doing anything more than I have to in terms of making myself in any way a distraction from what my husband is trying to do for America.”
Not becoming a distraction to her husband, a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, appears to be an elusive goal. A daughter of small-town Pennsylvania, a former nurse and working mother who struggled to raise a child on her own, she cuts a figure that Mr. Giuliani’s aides say will appeal to Republican voters. Husband and wife agree that Laura Bush is a model for Mrs. Giuliani.
But Judith carries some distinctly un-Laura baggage. Like her husband, she has been married twice before.
Recently, a sharply critical article in Vanity Fair made unflattering remarks while describing their perception of her shopping habits.
Now, with his wife’s public role scaled back, at least temporarily, strategists are asking dueling questions: Can he win over socially conservative voters if his wife is not by his side? Can he win them over if she is?
To Mrs. Giuliani’s husband and friends, the scrutiny and criticism have been quite unfair. And largely in response to the spate of bad press, both Mr. Giuliani and his wife made themselves available in recent weeks to present their side of her story. In coordinated but separate interviews, the couple talked in detail for the first time in months about their relationship and the complications it poses for his campaign.
In one of his interviews, Mr. Giuliani acknowledged that his wife was a political neophyte whose background has “not been every day having a press conference.” But he described her as an effective fund-raiser and trusted sounding board for his policies, particularly on health care, because she holds a nursing degree and once sold pharmaceuticals. He praised her mastery of “the way a surgical procedure is done and the way in which you seal a Level 1 trauma center off for a biological agent.”
He also said that she has good relations with people inside his campaign, and he rejected descriptions of his wife as high-handed or high society. “Judith loves to go out and loves to be with people,” he said. “But she is not one of those people that constantly has to socialize.”
When asked how visible he expects his wife to be on the campaign trail, Mr. Giuliani hesitated, then managed a noncommittal reply.
“I’d say reasonably visible?” he said.
Judith Nathan became a part of Mr. Giuliani’s life in 1999, not long before his prostate cancer was diagnosed. The circumstances of their meeting have been the subject of much contention, with some critics suggesting that she aggressively pursued him at a time when he was New York City’s mayor and still living in Gracie Mansion with Ms. Hanover and their children.
Until now, the Giulianis have declined to discuss the matter, calling it “a romantic secret.” But in the interviews, the couple provided their version of their introduction, saying that they met at Club Macanudo on East 63rd Street, in May 1999. They said they were introduced by Dr. Burt Meyers, a specialist in infectious diseases at Mount Sinai Hospital who was there with Mrs. Nathan and had met Mr. Giuliani when his mother was a patient there.
After chatting for an hour, mostly about her work in the pharmaceutical industry, Mr. Giuliani asked for her phone number, they said. “She gave me a piece of paper to write it on,” he recalled. “One of our other romantic little secrets is I’ve kept it all these years in my wallet.”
When asked about their personal lives, Mr. Giuliani said: “I don’t discuss that in detail except to say that, you know, we love each other very much, and we have both found the person that we adore and can live with the rest of our lives. It didn’t happen for either of us young in life.”
Through her spokeswoman, Ms. Hanover, Mr. Giuliani’s ex-wife, declined to comment for this article.
Mrs. Giuliani, whose original name was Judi Stish, grew up in Hazleton, Pa., a coal-mining town, the second of three children. Her father, whose forebears came from Italy — the family’s name had been Sticia — was a circulation manager for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
After she graduated from St. Luke’s School of Nursing in Bethlehem, Pa., she worked for several months as a hospital nurse, then took a sales job for U.S. Surgical, a medical equipment company, where her first husband, Jeffrey Ross, also worked.
Mrs. Giuliani’s second husband, Bruce Nathan, was a wallpaper salesman from Long Island. They adopted a girl, Whitney, lived in Atlanta, Manhattan and Southern California, and split in 1992. She returned with their daughter to Manhattan, took computer and business classes at night at New York University,
Sometimes, when she could not find a baby sitter, she took her daughter to class. The experience, she said, helped her understand the struggles of working women and single mothers. From 1993 until 2001, she worked her way up in the hospital sales division of Bristol-Myers Squibb.
The Giulianis were married by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in May 2003, on the lawn of Gracie Mansion. Among their 400 guests were Henry A. Kissinger, Yogi Berra, Vera Wang, and Joseph Volpe, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera.
Mrs. Giuliani’s initial period of involvement in her husband’s campaign — she called it “being rolled out publicly”— began with a couple of gentle, staged events in the spring. She was profiled in the March issue of Harper’s Bazaar and photographed wearing a Ralph Lauren Collection jacket, a Celine dress and Graff diamonds. (A caption read, “Judith Giuliani epitomizes laid-back elegance.”)
In late March, she and Mr. Giuliani clasped hands and kissed throughout their interview with Ms. Walters, in which the former mayor said that “to the extent she wants to be,” his wife could sit in on cabinet meetings.
His comment drew derision from those who said she lacked the expertise to attend high-level policy meetings, and the remark overshadowed the rest of the interview. The rollout rolled downhill from there.
A March 14 clip of Mrs. Giuliani going on at length about her own credentials as she introduced her husband at a fund-raiser began circulating on YouTube.
Although Mrs. Giuliani’s friends say the coverage has been painful, the Giulianis tried to brush off the difficulties. “I don’t want to sit in on cabinet meetings,” Mrs. Giuliani said. “He offered me that because he loves me. You know, he says he respects my intelligence.”
But she remains uncomfortable talking about his campaign. In the interview, she grew most animated when talking about golfing with Mr. Giuliani — she plays, on average, about a stroke below him — and medical subjects. “I’m really happy to talk to you about staphylococcus and streptococcus,” she said.
Mr. Giuliani called her the “rookie of the year” as a candidate spouse. But he candidly acknowledged that his, and her, complicated marital résumés might be liabilities among some Republican voters.
“Any candidate that’s lived a long life is going to have made a certain number of mistakes,” he said. “For some people, this’ll make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to vote for me.”< |
