David M. Shribman: Giuliani’s very bad Labor Day weekend

The radio station around here has a popular morning feature called "Talk of the Towns," and in the past week, the talk of the towns, and of New Hampshire more generally, has been Rudolph Giuliani's injury in an automobile accident.

Part of it, of course, is about his recovery. Preliminary reports indicated he suffered a fractured vertebra, was treated in a hospital and was released on Labor Day. Everybody — even his fiercest critics, and in the Giuliani style, his critics all are fierce — was relieved that his prospects for a full recovery are bright.

And though Giuliani is going to be skewered — a process he well understands, having applied the process with skill and gusto himself — in coming paragraphs, I ardently join those good wishes. A country like ours needs figures like Giuliani, though more for his courage at junctures like the 2001 terrorism attacks that took down the Twin Towers in New York than for his comic-opera descent into Trump sycophant. We have more operatics than comics in our national life today.

But in that latter role, the omnipresent Rudy revived a long-dormant (and, to my view, much underappreciated) tradition of colorful bumblers and dissemblers that helps to replace the sting of politics with a farcical, even slapstick element. Personally, I hope the former New York City mayor — he's the gift that keeps on giving — lives forever.

The accident, near Manchester, revived memories of how Giuliani, made of the sternest stock in New York politics, became a laughingstock admired by almost nobody, including those to whom he (and there is no true polite word for this) sucked up.

Indeed, the distasteful — the word applies to both parties involved in this sordid episode — bromance between Giuliani and his sometime-patron Donald Trump provides us with a 21st-century affirmation of Samuel Johnson's 18th-century definition of a patron: "One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery."

This period in American life provides tons of examples of dissent but no more dramatic example of descent than Giuliani, especially here in New Hampshire.

Exactly 18 years ago this month, Giuliani, a bona fide and even formidable 2008 presidential candidate, drew into a dead heat for the New Hampshire primary with Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts — a remarkable feat because for decades, Granite State voters have delivered primary victories to political figures from neighboring states, including John F. Kennedy, Henry Cabot Lodge, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas and John Kerry of Massachusetts, and Edmund Muskie of Maine.

For almost a year, Giuliani was the nationwide frontrunner for the GOP nomination. A Quinnipiac poll showed him the country's most popular politician. Barack Obama was second. Joe Biden was 11th.

Then, like everything Giuliani, the qualities that made him a hero took him down.

Arrogance. Ambition. Abrasiveness. Besides, his liberal views on abortion, gay rights and gun control were outside the Republican comfort zone. It didn't help that he was ahead of his time in being married three times and being a candidate in a party that had spurned another high-profile New Yorker, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, in 1968 for being married merely twice.

No master of understatement, Giuliani nonetheless concluded, "This thing is not working very well."

This is the point in a column where it's required to celebrate Giuliani's performance in the days following the terrorist attacks 24 years ago this week. It was nothing short of valiant and virtuous, indomitable, inspiring and indispensable. He reacted with swiftness and vision, playing both the pastoral and political roles with near perfection. There are few examples of the virtuosity he displayed at that crowded hour — Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. These are not exaggerations, though Giuliani's moment was brief and Lincoln's and FDR's were lengthy and sustained.

Giuliani is one of those figures whose life is shrouded with mystery.

How could a U.S. attorney become the mayor of the biggest, most complicated city in the country? How could one of the most feared lawyers in American history become disbarred? How did he fall under the sway of Trump rather than the other way around? How did he come to embrace a cockamamie theory about ballot irregularities that led a jury to order him to pay almost $150 million to two Georgia election workers?

And: Why did a longtime Yankees fan travel 250 miles to watch the Double-A New Hampshire Fisher Cats play the Erie SeaWolves in Manchester's Delta Dental stadium?

(We actually know the answer to this one. New Hampshire has become a comforting refuge for Giuliani, who more than most needs comfort and a refuge. Then there is the Maria Ryan effect. Multiple reports suggest that Giuliani is sweet on the woman who has been a nurse practitioner, hospital administrator, New York radio anchor and Giuliani business partner.)

Further details on that are more for a gossip column than for this one. A column like this needs some broader lesson, and in the Giuliani case, one is obvious, coming from Greek mythology — and it applies in two dimensions.

Giuliani is the greatest example of our time of the Icarus syndrome, derived from the Greek myth of the boy with the waxen wings who flew too close to the sun, only to watch those wings melt and fall to his death.

Rudy was perhaps too close to the sun in his ambition. He surely was too close to America's current incarnation of the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, known, perhaps apocryphally but surely instructively, for proclaiming, "L'Etat, c'est moi," or, in English, "I am the state." That view was on display late last month when Trump declared at a Cabinet meeting, "I have the right to do anything I want to do."

The postscript to this tale will surprise no one.

Just after the highway accident, Trump, accomplished in supporting with insolence and being paid by flattery, called Giuliani the "greatest Mayor in the history of New York City, and an equally great American Patriot." He went on to announce he planned to award Rudy the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a designation he offered four years earlier to another onetime titan, Bill Belichick. The coach also had a bad Labor Day weekend, with his North Carolina football team humiliatingly beaten 48-14 by TCU. The coach refused the honor.

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David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.