A Man Who Would be King: Director Kevin Keating Talks About Giuliani Time

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4-21-06, 9:02 am



Editor's Note: Kevin Keating is director and co-producer of the recently released Giuliani Time.

PA: When did you first think about doing this film?


KK: I didn’t have the original idea. I was approached by a friend and colleague in 1998, Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Ratner was alarmed at the situation with Giuliani, and had a general idea for a film that examined Giuliani’s rapidly accumulating record of violations of individual and group First Amendment rights. From the repeated New York police refusal of permits for demonstrations, to the sweeping arrests of street artists, Guiliani’s legal position as chief executive (and the lawyers at the corporation counsel defense of these policies), was a radical departure from previous administrations.

We agreed to begin the research and commence shooting with a very limited budget for a film to be completed within six months. It quickly became obvious that First Amendment issues were too narrow a focus. New policing practices then known as “quality of life” policing became prominent and could not be excluded.

One of the first interviews we filmed was with William Bratton, the first police commissioner under Giuliani. He had also headed the then separate transit police under Mayor Dinkins, with great success. Bratton had implemented the initial police “quality of life” strategies predicated on a neoconservative theory of policing known as “broken windows.” He resigned after receiving too much credit for the shift from screaming headlines about crime, to adulation for a sharp drop in crime that had actually begun three years before under David Dinkins. That interview took place in 1999, three days after the police killing of Amadou Diallo. Events of enormous importance occurred with a strange regularity almost weekly from then on: the “Sensation” exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum (and Giuliani’s bizarre attempt to have the museum evicted), the draconian implementation of “workfare,” and the destruction of the World Trade Center and Giuliani’s elevation to a kind of secular sainthood in 2001.

Eventually, it would take over five years to shoot over 300 hours of film, and screen and edit hundreds of hours of network and archival footage driven by the variety and complexity of the issues. In addition the publication of Wayne Barrett’s invaluable investigative biography, Rudy, provided an enormous amount of data along with the revelations of Giuliani’s family criminal history and the startling possibility that he may well have deceived the FBI in the original backround check when first interviewed for work in the criminal division of the Justice Department. A long difficult journey from the limited scope of the original idea.

PA: Why did you select a film on Rudy Giuliani and not Ed Koch, a very controversial mayor; or David Dinkins, the first African American mayor in NYC?

KK: While both Ed Koch and David Dinkins are interesting subjects, and both are in our film, we were surrounded by a barrage of controversies that Giuliani generated from the moment he was elected. One of the components of the film that will be of historical value is that we were present and filming events as they unfolded.

We were able to capture footage so that we could bringing a deeper “social change” documentarian predisposition and emphasis to the approach of the subjects we were rendering on film, for instance, the demonstrations responding to the police killing of Amadou Diallo. Relying on network news footage, particularly at the local level is extremely constricting, as that material is loaded with the ideological biases of the corporate media, and largely limited only to material that was broadcast at the time.

So it was not a matter of choosing among recent mayors, but rather focusing on Giuliani’s dramatic multi faceted controversies and choosing among them. PA: You seemed to draw parallels between Giuliani and Ronald Reagan and George Bush, yet the mayor has a reputation as being for abortion and other issues which are not part of the Republican president’s agenda. KK: Giuliani pronounces the battle between the great ideas of our epoch as those between Roosevelt and Reagan. He chooses to be an instrument for destroying the advances of the New Deal. Unlike other leading lights of the right wing of the Republican party, he is a product of an urban environment. The era of a kind of social democratic, working-class-oriented national and local government that was at its apex in New York City when Giuliani was born to a workingclass family in Brooklyn in 1944. There were Communists like Vito Marcantonio on the City Council. LaGuardia as mayor had a friend in Roosevelt, and participated actively in implementing the New Deal, from the WPA programs to free health care provided by the city. Giuliani was a product of that progressive era, and describes being an enthusiastic Democrat from high school through Manhattan College where he had a column in the newspaper titled Ars Politica, regularly attacking conservative Barry Goldwater and supporting Kennedy. He claims he was ardently against the war on Vietnam, and even voted for Democrat George McGovern in 1972. It wasn’t until 1980 that he registered as a Republican just before going to work in the Reagan administration. He had been in the criminal division of the Justice Department for years earlier beginning during the Nixon administration, and very ambitious, associating with powerful Republicans like Judge Harold Tyler, who took him under his wing very early on, and no doubt schooled him in the ways of going along to get along in Washington. The ideological transformation may not have been as complete. That is to say, even now, after essentially welding himself to a proudly fundamentalist Christian, George Bush, he still claims to be “pro-choice” and not anti gay. He oversaw the implementation of the changes to civil service protections of health benefits for same-sex couples who are city workers for instance. I have no doubt that should he have to choose between attachments to those liberal principals and his life-long ambition to becoming president, we will witness a repeat of his bizarre attempt to evict the Brooklyn Museum.

PA: You point out the contradictions between Giuliani’s father’s crime connections and his seemingly lying about knowing about them. Why didn’t the press pursue this?

KK: With the publication of Wayne Barrett’s incredible book his amazing discoveries about the criminal histories of Giuliani’s father Harold Giuliani, his uncle and a cousin who was killed by the FBI, the tabloid press, even incredibly, the Giuliani organ the New York Post, did briefly trumpet headlines like “HIS MOB KIN.” By that time he had pulled out of the race for the Senate, ostensibly because of his recently diagnosed prostate cancer. The public was exhausted with Giuliani and he was nothing more than a lame duck, and a rather deflated one at that. The follow-up by the press was weak, with little interest, of course, until the events of September 11, 2001, and his ascension to super hero status as the press in unison genuflected before his “bravery and leadership.”

PA: How does the Manhattan Institute tie in with the mayor? What are its corporate ties?

KK: The Manhattan Institute is an influential conservative foundation formed by William Casey, Reagan’s director of the CIA in the late 1950’s. It has connections to the Pioneer Fund, a shadowy, extremist right-wing funding source, that publishes racist, eugenicist propaganda similar to the John Birch Society.

With lavish financial support from the usual reactionary sources like the Mellon-Scaife, Bradley and other corporate foundations, they publish books like The Bell Curve, and Fixing Broken Windows. A lavishly produced periodical City Journal is the venue for many neo conservative authors writing about urban policies from policing to ending welfare. We had the pleasure of interviewing a number of them for the film, including Myron Magnet the publisher, and I think they contribute some colorful and controversial notions of governing from their proudly declared support of a “tycoonism” led state to the observation that “hunger is not a problem in our country, obesity is.” Giuliani was schooled at Manhattan Institute after his defeat by Dinkins, and proudly implemented many of the ideas promulgated by the Manhattan Institute and continues to declare how important his exposure to their writers and publications are to his political positions. PA: In your film the police union seems to have taken a 180 degree turn from support to opposition.

KK: After convincing themselves it was the NYPD rank and file who deserved most of the credit for the widely reported drop in crime, at the end of Giuliani’s term they still didn’t have a contract. He pulled the same anti union tactics he did with the teachers’ union and with others. If they didn’t allow themselves to be bought, like AFSME’s DC-37 under Hill, they were dismissed out of hand. The lubrication provided by enormous increases in overtime covered with the rubric of “quality of life policing” finally overcame them and they were face to face with the most anti labor mayor in recent history.

PA: Former school chancellor Rudy Crew along with Bratton seem to come out against him. Why hasn’t this changed the mythology?

KK: What comes to mind when you hear the name Teddy Roosevelt? The most chauvinist, militarist and imperialist president since Polk invaded Mexico, and somehow one doesn’t recollect the names of the luminaries like Mark Twain who were active in the Anti-Imperialist Society, that was broadly popular with the American people of the late 1900’s. While in the film Bratton soundly condemns Giuliani for “breaking the back of the NYPD,” and retarding the suppression of crime strategies he felt would be successful, or being “tone-deaf when it comes to issues of race,” everyone has moved on. I think the same is true of Chancellor Crew, who was forced out after refusing to go along with the mayor’s efforts to privatize schools with a voucher plan. His comments about Giuliani’s essential “pathology” when it comes to issues of race I think are some of the most powerful, and important ideas expressed in the film.

It will take some enormous negative revelations of information, facts regarding Giuliani’s actual leadership for the conventional wisdom to be altered about his “heroic” role that day.