Rudy Giuliani, president (of Phi Rho Pi)

How America's mayor scrapped his way to the top of the least popular fraternity on his college campus, and other tales from his early political life.

Editor's note: The following selection is excerpted from the revised edition of "America's Mayor, America's President? The Strange Career of Rudy Giuliani," edited by Robert Polner.

By Paul Schwartzman

Read more: Rudy Giuliani, Politics, New York City, News, 2008 election

May 15, 2007 | The pudgy college kid liked to sit his girlfriend down and perform a one-man ode to his dream. Slowly and somberly, he invoked his own name, as if he were standing on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and taking the oath to become leader of the free world. "Rudolph ... William ... Louis ... Giuliani ... The Third ... The first Italian-Catholic President of the United States ..." he'd intone as if addressing a vast throng and not just one very patient female admirer.

Kathy Livermore knew plenty of ambitious young men from Manhattan College in the early 1960's, men who dreamed of becoming lawyers and bankers and business executives. But even the fiercest did not possess the furnace-like heat that radiated from within her boyfriend, Rudy Giuliani.

He knew what he wanted, and where he was going, and no amount of ridicule from his friends could upend his very sober and certain view of the world and his place in it.

"We'd joke about it -- 'Oh there's Rudolph William Louis Giuliani 3rd, the first Italian-Catholic President of the United States,'" Livermore recalled years later, chuckling. "He said it enough that it was part of him. He didn't say things lightly."

Envisioning what Rudolph Giuliani would be like as America's president is a near-impossible task, if only because it's hard to imagine him importing to the nation's capital that same upside-your-head leadership style he displayed as New York City's mayor. City Hall, with all its parochial political quirks, is not the Oval Office. And New York, a virtual country unto itself, is not the United States.

But it's possible to glean the kind of sensibility Giuliani would bring to the White House, based on what shaped him during that most formative period of his life, the years before he became a public figure, when he was developing his personality, values, tastes, and an ambition that would catapult him to national prominence.

In those early years Giuliani acquired a healthy respect for the rigid rules set down by teachers at the Catholic schools he attended. By adolescence, he learned how to manipulate the rules in his own favor, and to bend them to get what he wanted. He encountered his share of adversaries, whether it was the Dodger-happy fans in his Brooklyn neighborhood who denigrated his loyalty to the Yankees, or the fraternity brothers who challenged his iron-fisted command, or the college classmate who beat him in the student elections.

But Giuliani thrived on conflict. His enemies gave him a purpose, a way to define himself, a reason to stand apart, a trait that flourished years later when he became known as a mob-busting prosecutor and the mayor who tamed the famously ungovernable New York. When they graduated from high school, Giuliani's friends asked for cars. Rudy asked for a big desk and a high-backed leather chair. Everything he said and did seemed to aim him for bigger things.

As a baby, Giuliani was restless and prone to staying awake for 48 hours at a time. His parents endured his unrelenting energy as they did everything about him, with bottomless devotion. Harold and Helen Giuliani had tried for six years to have a baby before their one and only child was born May 28, 1944, nine days before D-day. "He was unexpected and they worshipped the ground he walked on," his aunt, Anna D'Avanzo, who married his mother's brother, once said. "Anything he wanted, he got."

He was named for his paternal grandfather, Rodolfo Giuliani, a tailor, who raised his family in East Harlem after immigrating to America in the early 1900's from Tuscany. Giuliani's grandparents on his mother's side settled in Brooklyn after emigrating from Naples. Until Giuliani was 15, his mother, Helen, a quiet and measured woman, stayed home full-time to dote on him and help with his school work. His father, Harold, taught his son lessons not found in most books. He encouraged young Rudy to resort to fisticuffs with anyone who picked a fight with him.

Harold Giuliani was an odd mix of bravado and frailty. He drank milk because of an ulcer and a bad heart even as he worked as a bartender in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where he subjected his patrons to an unceasing flow of opinions on everything from the Yankees to presidential politics. He kept a baseball bat behind the bar, and was known to use it to collect outstanding tabs. The darkest details of Harold Giuliani's past did not fully emerge until 2000 when investigative reporter Wayne Barrett unearthed that he had been arrested in 1934 -- ten years before his son's birth -- for robbing a milkman of $128.82 at gunpoint. Under the alias "Joseph Starrett," Harold Giuliani pled guilty and spent 16 months at Sing-Sing.

Rudy had four uncles who were police officers and a fifth who was a firefighter. But Harold Giuliani was not the only family member who had ended up on the wrong side of the law. A cousin ran a stolen car ring. And Harold's brother-in-law Leo D'Avanzo was a Brooklyn loan shark. Harold worked as Leo's muscle, collecting as much as $15,000 a week. When customers didn't pay up, according to Barrett, Harold was prone to reaching for the bat and breaking bones. Rudy Giuliani has never talked at length about how his familial ties to crime may have affected him as a youngster. But he has said that his father constantly pushed him to behave properly and that he may have moved him and his mother from Brooklyn to Long Island when he was a kid to help ensure that he'd avoid unsavory influences.

Young Rudy didn't find any budding gangsters at St. Anne's parochial school, where he prepared for his Holy Communion by studying the Baltimore Catechism. In those years before Vatican II, the Catechism taught that there was a wrong way and a right way -- and that the Catholic way was right. It was a world of black-and-white rules, with few gray shades, a style of thought that Giuliani internalized and would adopt as his own. Giuliani's immersion in Catholicism continued at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, which was run by a French order of Christian Brothers, who ran things with a firm hand. The school forbade students from indulging in the usual adolescent practices of the day -- no ducktail haircuts, no loud ties, no smoking, no running up the stairs, no taking off sports jackets, no lateness, and no excuses. In a school of 1,825 students, virtually all of them white, Giuliani still managed to make an impression, and not only because he was the first to start an opera club. "He looked like a little man, not a student, like he was dressed to go to IBM," one classmate, Thomas McVann, recalled.

Giuliani became friendly with two youngsters with whom he'd form long-lasting ties. One was Peter Powers, who would become his deputy mayor years later. The other was Alan Placa, who would become a monsignor and one day help him get his first marriage annulled. Placa recognized almost immediately that his new friend was unique. "He didn't carry around a notebook like the other kids," Placa said. "He took notes on unlined, blank paper, loose sheets. Then he'd put the sheets in file folders. He might take them out, move them around, add more notes. The notebooks gave you an order for your notes. In his system, Rudy was imposing his own order."

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