The Rise and Tragic Fall of America's Mayor- Andrew Kirtzman

I got this book because I don’t get what happened. This was a guy celebrated in the 1980s. He broke the mob. He was a crime fighter. His coronation to mayor seemed like a natural. (I was in my teens and early 20s years of age.)

There were detractors and disagreements,  no politician is perfect. His presidential run was half hearted and it was Ok. The guy was a national hero. The media loved him.

What happened to that guy? I hoped this book would tell me.

It tells me what Rudy was going through, not some outside thing like illness. Things that lead to him being a joke are things he brought on himself.

Who was to blame for what we see in Giuliani? He said he broke the mob, but there were agents and lawyers that worked for years on that. Rudy was the camera hog taking credit, but the media let him do it. The people that did the work were ok with him doing it.

When 9-11-2001 happened, he was a hero. There were reports that he cut budgets that lead to lost communications between police and fire. He mostly escaped the criticism. He was a hero.

The media stands around asking what happened to him when they helped build him up.

It just doesn’t work for people. How and why were we told for decades that Rudy was a hero? He used New York tax dollars to hide his mistress and the trysts. No one reported that for decades, when they knew. Why are we told this now? Why are we told that he really wasn’t a hero all those years, when it’s those same people that just told he was a hero. People around him knew better.

It is something that the average person can’t square. He was always abrasive and a camera hog, but he was a hero?

Today we are shown that Rudy talks garbled and incoherent when he explains voter law. He made millions of dollars defending corrupt government officials around the world. He claimed to uphold the law, but now works for dictators? How? If he is so bad at discussing law, why does he have million dollar clients?

Who fooled us? Rudy? The press that built him up?

Years later we don’t know who to believe about Rudy. We just can’t figure out what happened.