Rudy the Renegade Warrior

This posting is a long one, but it is so very worth the read.
Beleive me - this man's strenght is legendary. He really should be the next president of the United States. Hell, if he were in Canada, he'd get my vote as the next Primeminister hands and feet down!

I've been away, confused, conflicted, excited, depressed, worried, elated, happy, introspective over the past few weeks. I'm hoping that my life will slow down to an even keel, but in the meantime, while I take a break from writing - read this. Very inspirational.


Keep Moving Forward
30/05/2006 12:00:00 AM

Rudy Giuliani dashes through the glass doors of his office reception area and beckons for me to follow him, which I do. It becomes a high-speed chase down the hall. The former New York City mayor has just emerged from the swarming crowds of New York City's St. Patrick's Day parade, but he's not even winded. He's actually energized, as if overdrive is his natural speed. We turn into his private corner office at his security and crisis management firm, Giuliani Partners.

Giuliani slides into a chair at a small round table by a window overlooking the bustle of Times Square. He takes a swig of caffeine-free diet Coke that is sitting on the table.
I glance around at his haphazard office decor. Scattered among the photos of his wife, Judith Nathan, and his two children are the familiar pictures from Ground Zero. There is also a 10-inch white porcelain figure of Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime leader whose words Giuliani has said buoyed him during the first dark days after September 11. Ominously, there's also a bayonet taken from an Al Qaeda soldier in Afghanistan. And on his desk is a laminated sign that reads, "I am responsible."


In the past 4 years, Rudy Giuliani confronted more adversity than most people do in a lifetime: prostate cancer, police scandals, the public unraveling of his marriage, an unfulfilled Senate bid, and the horrendous terrorist attack. I am here in his office, asking the man who, after 9/11, became known as "America's mayor," how he survived it.

Before 9/11, there was little inkling that inside Rudy Giuliani was a deep well of compassion. The only reputation he had was for his toughness. It began early, on the streets of Brooklyn. As a fan of the Bronx-based New York Yankees (and growing up in the shadow of Brooklyn's Ebbets Field, home of the Dodgers), a young Giuliani often had to defend his baseball team with bravado and fisticuffs.

Before 9/11, there was little inkling that inside Rudy Giuliani was a deep well of compassion. The only reputation he had was for his toughness. It began early, on the streets of Brooklyn. As a fan of the Bronx-based New York Yankees (and growing up in the shadow of Brooklyn's Ebbets Field, home of the Dodgers), a young Giuliani often had to defend his baseball team with bravado and fisticuffs.

Later, as a US Attorney, he fought his battles in the courtroom, taking on corrupt Wall Street traders and racketeering mobsters. With each passing year, the Republican Giuliani solidified his hard-nosed reputation. As mayor, he went toe-to-toe with grizzled union negotiators, an aggressive press corps, and vocal Democrats. (One detractor referred to him as the "Mussolini on the Hudson" after the fascist dictator.) His fortitude would soon be tested when he faced his two most challenging crises.

"You Have Cancer"
On April 26, 2000, Dr. Alexander Kirschenbaum of New York's Mount Sinai Hospital called city hall to let Giuliani know his prostate biopsy was positive. The mayor initially thought that "positive" meant he was in the clear. "It took me a second or two (but it seemed like a minute) to translate that into 'Oh my gosh, that's bad news,'" Giuliani says.

Just 3 weeks earlier, during the mayor's annual physical, his doctor took blood to test for prostate-specific antigens (PSA), which can indicate prostate trouble. At first, his physician said the borderline-high PSA results probably weren't much to worry about. But Giuliani's follow-up tests and biopsy confirmed the worst. "The hour before I was told I had prostate cancer, I felt fine," Giuliani recalls. "It's very strange when you're told that you have cancer. You feel like there's this thing inside you, and if you don't figure out exactly the right thing to do about it, it's going to consume you."

Giuliani gathered his children, Andrew, then 14, and Caroline, then 10, early the next morning and broke the news. "I explained to them that I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, that it was early stage and treatable, and that I'd take a little time to figure out exactly the right kind of treatment," he says. "That was probably the hardest, particularly since my father had prostate cancer. He died before they were born, but I remembered having gone through it with him."
At the time, Giuliani was gearing up for an already heated Senate run against former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. He now faced a difficult choice: to stay in the race while undergoing cancer treatment or to withdraw. To make that decision, he sought the advice of many colleagues and friends. Though he often appears to be a maverick, the truth is that Giuliani doesn't make major decisions autocratically. There's a loyal team behind him.

"The best thing that helps when you're dealing with fear, stress, or things that confuse you is to talk it out with people," says Giuliani. "Talking to and relying on other people-people you respect, people you like, people that share your outlook on life-are enormously helpful."
During that trying period, Giuliani was estranged from his wife, Donna Hanover, so he turned to then-fiancee Judith Nathan, who had past training as a nurse, for emotional support as well as medical research. He visited the city's, and country's, top doctors for counsel. He also talked to friends. New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir was diagnosed 5 days after the mayor, and New York Yankees Manager Joe Torre had also been treated for prostate cancer.
His friends not only warned of the physical symptoms and side effects-severe fatigue and nausea-but also told Giuliani about the emotional toll the disease takes.

Preparing to Recover
Giuliani eventually chose seed implantation (placing radioactive pellets into the gland) with a follow-up of external radiation to kill any remaining cancer cells. "Once you settle on a treatment option," he says, "you'll relax and have much more of a philosophical attitude about it. You start moving in a positive direction, and your feelings and attitudes change."
He then set out to prepare his body for the stress of the procedures. A lover of fried calamari and steak, Giuliani now asked Gracie Mansion chefs to cook up tomato-based dishes rich in the antioxidant lycopene, which has been shown to fight prostate cancer. He worked out on a treadmill in his office, running 2 to 3 miles a day. "I thought: The better shape I'm in, the more I'll be able to absorb the effect on my body," says Giuliani. Midafternoon naps on his office couch carried him through the exhausting radiation. Giuliani has now been cancer-free since January 15, 2001.

Though many people thought that it was 9/11 that softened the old pugilistic Rudy, he admits that it was the cancer that altered his outlook. "It changed my perspective on life," he says. "It gave me much more of a sense of the need to be healthy, of the value of life, and of the importance of people around you."

That compassion was something Giuliani would need in the coming year. On September 11, 2001, downtown New York turned apocalyptic as two airliners, piloted by terrorists, sliced through a clear blue sky and into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The mayor was at a breakfast meeting in midtown Manhattan when a staffer informed him of the first plane crash. At the time, no one knew the extent of the damage or if it had been intentional. As he and his colleagues sped to the scene, the second plane hit, engulfing the south tower in an immense fireball. As Giuliani hopped out of the vehicle, the street was showered with debris. He looked up to see pieces of the tower falling. And he saw something else: There were people jumping. He tracked one man's free fall with his eyes, then quickly averted them, continuing his march on foot to Ground Zero.

With their multimillion-dollar emergency bunker in WTC 7 inaccessible, the mayor and his staff quickly set up a makeshift command area in a nearby Merrill Lynch building. There, they tried to contact the White House. Giuliani and his entourage had only been there for a few minutes when they heard the deafening noise of the south tower imploding. They found themselves trapped, and desperately searched for an escape route. Fumbling around in the darkened basement, they couldn't find an unlocked exit until two maintenance men appeared and showed them the way out, to a daytime turned to night.

Making their way through the ghostly, choking clouds that literally blocked the sun, they set up another command center in a nearby firehouse. In describing the scene, Giuliani goes silent for a moment, his eyes moisten, and I get a glimpse of the sensitive man that I'd seen on television, the man who spoke from the heart that many New Yorkers didn't know he had. "You know, getting notified about people that were missing, dead ... there'd be a sense of shock," he says. "Then I would say to myself, 'I cannot think about this now. And I can't feel this now, because I've got to stay focused on keeping everybody together, keeping the city together, and making the right decisions.'"

In the aftermath, Giuliani's heartbreaking response to a reporter's question about casualties-"When we get the final number, it will be more than we can bear"-was prescient. Almost 3,000 people died, and among them were the mayor's close friends, including NYFD Chief Pete Ganci, First Deputy Commissioner Bill Feehan, Special Operations Chief Ray Downey, and fireman Terry Hatton, husband of his long-time executive assistant, Beth Petrone-Hatton. (Giuliani went to the morgue to identify Hatton's remains so that Petrone-Hatton, pregnant with her first child, wouldn't have to.)

And there was fire department chaplain Father Mychal Judge, who had helped the mayor through many personal difficulties. Giuliani last saw the priest everyone called Father Mike the morning of September 11, when he said to the chaplain, "Father, pray for us." "I always do," the priest replied with a big smile as he headed to the scene. Moments later, after ministering to a fallen fireman, Father Mike was struck by falling debris and killed.

"Father Mike is a great man," says Giuliani, apparently unaware that he is using present tense. "I miss him. There are days-even now-when I would just like to call and ask his advice. He would write me notes, particularly if there was something difficult that was going on. He'd sort of explain it and always have some thought in there about how God loves you."

For months after the attack, the mayor remained chief consoler to the city and to the nation. He urged shaken city dwellers to stay resilient as they faced fears of future attacks and anthrax scares. He attended hundreds of heart-wrenching funerals and wakes, as many as six or seven a day. In the midst of all this overwhelming grief, he says, it was a sense of community and spirituality that helped him through.

He recalls attending one wake in Rockland County: "The whole town showed up. It was very sad. But at the same time, you'd see the whole community there, and you'd see a way through this. The way through it was everybody supporting each other, everybody helping each other. It was a very strange mixture of seeing the horrific part of it and seeing the beautiful part of it. Being attacked and under crisis, people who live in freedom have this tremendous strength."
The mayor also took comfort in the words spoken during the religious services. "Growing up Catholic, I was very familiar with the Mass, and I found a great deal of strength in it," he says. "It left me with a strong belief that God has a plan. We don't understand it now, but we will."


The 16-acre area where the twin towers once stood is no longer a vast emptiness. Plans for rebuilding the trade center, long mired in controversy, are starting to progress. And the 58-year-old Giuliani has moved on as well, since leaving office in 2002. His crisis-consulting firm is thriving. He's newly married. His autobiography, Leadership, is a bestseller, and his calendar is filled with high-profile speaking engagements. Yet it takes very little-just a mention of 9/11-to send him back there, to that time of darkness, at Ground Zero the night after the attacks.
Giuliani takes a breath. "I was just walking around, thinking, 'This is going to be much worse than anybody realizes.' And then there would be these times-they would last for seconds-where you'd say to yourself: 'I wonder if we can get through this? I wonder if the city can ... the country can?' And then I would quickly say, 'We just have to. We just don't have a choice. We've just got to keep moving forward.'

"Very often, I sign the book, 'Keep moving forward,' because it was something I kept saying to myself all the time: 'You've got to just keep moving forward. We'll get through this.'" Giuliani leans toward me, then adds, "And we have-by believing it."

Lessons Learned
Rudy Giuliani has a message for men: When it comes to your health, take a cue from women.
"I don't think men do as good a job of taking care of themselves as women do," says the two-term New York City mayor. "Maybe men feel immortal, or maybe they feel it's a sign of weakness to go to the doctor for checkups."

Being proactive helped Giuliani combat prostate cancer, a disease that claims about 30,000 lives every year, including his father's in 1981. A simple prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test showed that Giuliani was at risk for the disease. His count came back higher than normal, possibly indicating trouble. "If I hadn't taken the PSA test, I wouldn't have found out about the cancer," Giuliani says. "Probably even by now, I wouldn't have found out about it. And it would have just been getting worse; I would have been at risk of being beyond help."

While he didn't have symptoms (which include frequent urination, blood in the urine, or painful ejaculation), the mayor's odds of the disease were greater than most. He clearly had two of the four most common risk factors for prostate cancer: age 55 or older and a family history. Other factors associated with the disease are race (it's more common in African-American men than Caucasians) and a diet high in animal fat. The American Cancer Society recommends PSA blood tests for all men 50 and older, and testing at 45 years old for those in the high-risk group.
Giuliani is now evangelical about early PSA screenings, but he's also a vocal advocate about the importance of overall health as well. "Cancer made me much more aware of the fact that you have to take care of yourself," he says.

When it comes to crisis management, Rudy Giuliani is the go-to guy. Whether you're battling a disease, a personal calamity, or a work-related meltdown, you can learn from his personal experiences.

Keep a cool head:
During the chaos of September 11, Giuliani reverted to past advice from his father: "When you're in a crisis, get calmer. Find a way to be the calmest person in the room as everything around you is getting more excitable, and you'll be able to figure out the answer." Composure enabled Giuliani to prioritize essentials such as finding generators, setting up a family services unit, and preparing for a biological or chemical attack. "I kept reminding myself that there was every reason for everybody to get excited, including me, but it was very important to get calmer," he says. "Calm things down, and just try to focus on what's the right answer and how much you can anticipate of what's going to lie ahead so that you can prepare for it."

Gather information:
Whether it's evidence on top mob bosses or the latest research on prostate cancer, Giuliani constantly seeks facts and figures to overcome the challenges he faces. While a primary source of information is books, he also values face-to-face time, including heated discussions. "I try to encourage people to tell me if they think I'm doing something wrong or tell me their side of an argument," he says. "Debate is part of decision making. I want to hear different opinions."

Surround yourself with a great team:
Giuliani embraces what many eminent generals already know: Strength lies in the support of your troops. While his mayoral staff helped him through many dilemmas, it was after the terrorist attacks that he really leaned on those around him. "A lot of what got me through was knowing I had a very, very strong team," he says. "I could say to myself, 'I've got very good people who've been through emergencies before. People who are experts in these things we're going to have to deal with. Whether it's the police commissioner, the fire commissioner, the head of emergency services, or the head of public health. These people had been through significant numbers of emergencies before.'"

Allow a distraction:
Your mind doesn't constantly have to be on your troubles. During the mayor's radiation treatments, technicians distracted him with a game of "stump the mayor," playing semi-obscure music for the opera buff and seeing if he could guess the works. Even after the terrorist attacks, the mayor took time out to attend his son's freshman football games on Saturday mornings.