Rudy and Bernie: B.F.F.’s
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By GAIL COLLINS
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
November 10, 2007
The past seven years have given us some helpful hints on what we want to avoid in the next president. I’m starting to make a list.
Quality to avoid No. 1: Loyalty.
Whenever you read that a candidate “values loyalty above all else” — run for the hills. Loyalty is a terribly important consideration if you’re choosing a pet, but not a cabinet member.
How about if this time we try for a president who would recruit gifted people who can accomplish great things, as opposed to a room full of dopes who will never write tell-all memoirs?
Loyalty is on our mind today because of the indictment of Bernard Kerik, the really, really loyal former New York City police commissioner. Rudy Giuliani, who was entirely responsible for Kerik’s meteoric rise from mayoral chauffeur, has not seemed to draw any great lessons from his protégé’s spectacular fall. Giuliani did say that he made a “mistake in not clearing him effectively enough,” which sounds as if he is kicking himself for not sending a second squad of detectives out to interview Kerik’s neighbors. In fact, the lapse in the “clearing” procedure involved Giuliani ignoring the city investigations commissioner when he arrived with the news that Kerik was involved with a company suspected of having ties to organized crime.
Giuliani claims not to remember this moment in the vetting process, which seems sort of strange for a guy who made his career prosecuting the mafia and those-who-had-ties. The former mayor does, however, have a bad memory. We know this because he obtained an annulment of his 14-year-long first marriage on the grounds that he had forgotten that his wife was his second cousin.
On the terrible day of Sept. 11, 2001, Kerik was with the mayor as Giuliani left the disaster at ground zero, searching for a telephone to contact the outside world. Also loyally at the mayor’s side were three deputy mayors, the fire commissioner and the head of the Office of Emergency Management. They all walked north, in a little command-clump, intent on the central mission of protecting their main man. You would have thought, really, that the protecting job could have been done by youthful aides while the alleged leaders tended to the fire, emergency and police problems downtown.
But if anybody had stayed behind, focusing on the wider city rather than the man who had plucked them all out of obscurity and given them everything they had, how would he know they were loyal? The ties forged in that clump of commanders catapulted them into extremely well-paying jobs in the firm of Giuliani Partners and convinced the mayor to propose Bernard Kerik as the next chief of the Department of Homeland Security, a position for which he was approximately as well qualified as I am to be quarterback for the New England Patriots.
Giuliani had a great police commissioner, Bill Bratton, during his first term when all the critical crime-fighting apparatus for which the administration became so famous was put into place. But Bratton was not particularly loyal, in the sense that he did his job well, then enjoyed taking credit for it himself. And so he was gone.
There is an entire chapter in Rudy Giuliani’s famous book “Leadership” that is titled “Loyalty, the Vital Virtue.” In it, he pats himself on the back for making a man named Robert Harding the city’s budget director even though he knew the ever-feckless news media would point out that Harding’s father, Ray, was the chairman of the city’s Liberal Party, whose endorsement had done a great deal to get Giuliani elected mayor. “I wasn’t going to choose a lesser candidate simply to quiet the critics,” he said.
For some mysterious reason, the book skips over a much better loyalty lesson involving the very same family. Giuliani demonstrated his loyalty to Ray Harding, giver of the Liberal Party endorsement, not only by giving his qualified son a good job, but also by turning over the New York City Housing Development Corporation to another son, Russell, who wound up embezzling more than $400,000 for vacations, gifts and parties. We will not even go into the pornography part, except to point out in his defense that of the 15,000 sexually explicit images found on his computer, only a few were of children.
The Giuliani version of loyalty, which bears a terrifying resemblance to the George W. Bush brand of loyalty, is entirely about self-protection. An administration safe beneath the loyalty cone does not have to worry much about leaks to the press, or even whistle-blowing.
People can screw up, or fail to achieve their missions, knowing the guy at the top will protect them as long as they put his well-being ahead of anything else. When disaster strikes, the whole world may be falling apart, but they will all be clumped together, walking north. |
