As one of its many consequences, 9/11 upended New York City politics.
The Democratic and Republican primary elections for the mayoral race to replace Rudy Giuliani had been scheduled for September 11. Polls opened as planned that morning. They didn’t stay open for long. Voting was halted shortly after the planes hit the towers, and the primary was postponed for two weeks, with a runoff sixteen days after that, if needed. But as the four Democratic and two Republican candidates tried to figure out what the delay meant for them, another unexpected question was dropped into the race: Would Giuliani really leave office?
On September 10, he was a lame-duck mayor who’d managed to exhaust New Yorkers with his acerbic style, his tumultuous personal life, and his zero-tolerance attitude toward anyone and anything he didn’t like. What a difference a day can make. Suddenly Giuliani was “America’s mayor” with soaring approval ratings. Some people were clamoring for him to remain in office even after his second term expired when the ball dropped at Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
I didn’t like the idea of Giuliani staying longer than the law allowed. I didn’t believe—I still don’t—that any individual is indispensable to the city of New York, even after a major catastrophe. Leaders come and leaders go. That’s as it should be, the natural order of things.
At first, Giuliani brushed aside the suggestion that New York’s election law be changed to accommodate a third term for him—or that he be given a few extra months of bonus time to steer New York’s recovery. But as the hosannas grew louder—“Rudy the Rock,” French president Jacques Chirac called him—the mayor seemed increasingly open to the idea. “I don’t know what the right thing to do is. I really don’t know,” he teased just before Public Advocate Mark Green and Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer finished first and second, respectively, in the delayed Democratic primary and headed to the October 11 runoff. “It’s a very important decision and I need time to think about it, and I need time to talk to people about it, and I’ve not had the time to do that.”
Giuliani’s political allies began to lobby Albany, where the state legislature would have to bless any term extension. Governor George Pataki, who’d been at odds with Giuliani before 9/11 but was now a giant booster, was staunchly supportive. “I’ll tell you,” Pataki said in a press conference on September 21, “if I were a resident of New York City, I’d write him in” on Election Day. It wasn’t just Giuliani’s longtime allies who said he should stay. Two unlikely supporters jumped on board—Mark Green, the Democratic front-runner for mayor, and billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg, the top Republican, both came out for more Rudy. Ferrer, the other Democrat in the runoff, was firmly opposed.
All this adulation must have been heady for Giuliani. One poll, from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, found that 91 percent of New Yorkers rated his post-9/11 performance excellent or good. Still, that didn’t mean most New Yorkers wanted him to remain at city hall. In the Marist poll, only 33 percent said they’d support changing the election law to accommodate him.
On October 3, eight days before Green and Ferrer were to meet in the Democratic runoff, Giuliani ruled out the third-term idea. But he would still like an extra three months in office, he said, if state legislators would go along with it.
“The offer is there,” he said during a hastily called press conference. “If they want to accept it, they can.”
This wasn’t a power grab, the outgoing mayor insisted. It was “based on the good of the city.” The next mayor, he said, “should have a longer—significantly longer—transition period. I think that anybody that thinks they’re ready for this job on January 1, given the monumental tasks that lie ahead, doesn’t understand this job really well.”
And that’s about where the idea died.
State assembly members, especially Democrats from minority districts in the city, were adamantly opposed. Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver said he was in no rush to consider anything of the kind. Somehow or another, the city would have to get along without Rudy Giuliani in charge.
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While the Ground Zero recovery and Giuliani’s machinations dominated the news, the actual mayoral race got relatively little attention. In the Democratic runoff, Green squeaked out a victory over Ferrer with 52 percent of the vote, though not before an ugly turn at the end. Green supporters distributed New York Post caricatures of Ferrer and the Reverend Al Sharpton in white sections of Brooklyn, leading to claims of racism. No one could prove the public advocate knew about the questionable literature, but he entered the general election with a sharply divided party and some angry African American and Latino Democrats.
Still, Green was widely expected to win.
Bloomberg, who’d rolled past former Bronx borough president Herman Badillo for the Republican nomination, had made a huge fortune selling financial data to Wall Street and vowed to spend whatever it took to get elected. But he had never run for public office before. He was not widely known. Green, by contrast, was a citywide officeholder, an energetic campaigner, and the nominee of the Democrats, who held a five-to-one registration advantage over Republicans. It’s true, Giuliani had won as a Republican and then been reelected—but could lightning like that really strike again? Election Day was November 6.
A couple of weeks before the election, Bloomberg’s campaign manager, Bill Cunningham, reached out to me. He wanted to know if I would consider endorsing Mike. I didn’t know Bloomberg well, but we’d met a couple of times. I was impressed by him. Working at Bear Stearns, I knew how beloved his “Bloomberg terminals” were.
Several friends of mine warned me that an endorsement wasn’t a smart idea. First of all, Bloomberg would probably lose, they said. Why attach myself to a loser? How did we know the Bloomberg campaign was anything more than an ego trip by another Manhattan billionaire? Did I really want to go along with that?
Those friends, some of them sharp political thinkers, had my best interests at heart. They didn’t want to see me out on a limb I would later regret. I understood all that. But another consideration seemed more important. These weren’t normal times. In such a moment of crisis, I thought the city could use someone who’d proven himself a savvy business leader. Bloomberg seemed smart, focused, public spirited, and eager to serve, even if he didn’t have much special knowledge about municipal affairs. I just had confidence in him.
I endorsed Mike Bloomberg for mayor.
I didn’t seek anything in return and nothing was offered. In my endorsement, I focused on his obvious strength. “The overriding issue in this election is the health of our economy, and there is no question that New York City needs Mike Bloomberg to prevent an economic catastrophe,” I said.
That night, I attended the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria New York, an annual fund-raiser for Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York. It’s a formal affair that always attracts an elite group of business and political leaders. Veronica was busy, so Jim came with me. All night, people kept asking about the Bloomberg endorsement, the questions often accompanied by quizzical looks. At one point, Rosanna Scotto, a popular anchor at the local Fox affiliate, WYNY Channel 5, and now my son Greg’s partner on Good Day New York, pulled Jim aside.
“What’s he thinking?” she asked, motioning toward me. “Does Bloomberg really have a chance?” Rosanna was just asking. But if you’d polled the ballroom, I’m sure the yeses would have been a distinct minority.
I didn’t care about the odds. I thought Mike was the better candidate. I attended a few campaign events and offered some issue suggestions to Jonathan Capehart, a former Daily News editorial writer who was advising the candidate on criminal-justice matters. Green’s two most visible law enforcement supporters were Bill Bratton, Rudy Giuliani’s first police commissioner, and Pat Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. The outgoing mayor waited a long time to make it official, but he also endorsed his fellow Republican Mike Bloomberg. Giuliani struck the same business chord that I had. “I am very, very confident that the city would be in absolutely excellent hands in the hands of Mike Bloomberg,” he said. “If he can have half the success with New York City that he has had in business, New York is going to have an even greater future.” Though the gap had been narrowing, the last New York Times poll of likely voters still had Green up by five percentage points.
On election night, I joined Bloomberg and a couple dozen of his supporters in a suite at the Hilton Times Square while other staffers and volunteers gathered for an optimistically billed “victory party” across West Forty-Second Street at the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill. Before any votes were tallied, Bloomberg said to me, “I hope we can get jobs for everybody.” He didn’t mean jobs at city hall. He could read the polls as well as anyone. Bloomberg was clearly expecting to lose and eager to provide soft landings for the campaign staffers and volunteers. Even David Garth, Bloomberg’s top strategist, seemed to be steeling himself for a loss. “Mike is a very big boy,” Garth told the media. “He understands reality. He knew from the beginning what he was getting himself into.”
But sometime after 10:00 p.m., I saw Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki sitting side by side in the hotel suite, poring over a long column of numbers. They were vote totals from Staten Island. Both men smiled. They nodded at each other. That was it, they decided. Bloomberg had won.
Everyone from the hotel suite walked across the street to the blues club, where Bloomberg delivered a victory speech, one of three versions he’d handwritten back at the hotel—win, lose, or too close to call.
There were several reasons Bloomberg was elected, I believe. The terror attacks made voters seek a more serious mayor, someone with a little extra gravitas. Some Democrats were still smarting from the bitter primary runoff. Giuliani’s endorsement helped tremendously after his stellar post-9/11 leadership. And one other thing, more important than all the others combined: Bloomberg spent $74 million of his own money on TV ads, direct mail, and other campaign expenses, the most ever spent in a nonpresidential campaign. Had it not been for that and the terror attack, I’m certain New York would have been preparing for the New Year’s inauguration of Mayor Green.
No one looked more surprised than Mike Bloomberg did as he stood in front of his cheering supporters at the blues club. “New York is alive and well and open for business,” the next mayor declared. “The easy part is done. Now comes the hard part.”
Later that night, I met Giuliani and a few others at Club Macanudo, a cigar bar on East Sixty-Third Street.
It was a heady evening that few people expected. To be with the winners on election night was a great experience. I stayed and enjoyed the scene long into the night. Late the next morning, I was walking on the street near my office at Bear Stearns when my phone rang. It was Mike Bloomberg.
“So,” he said, getting right down to business with a minimum of pleasantries, an approach he would rarely veer from in the next twelve years. “You want to be police commissioner?”
We had never discussed that possibility, not in any explicit way. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I guess I had thought that, if by some odd chance Bloomberg actually got elected, my returning as police commissioner might be something to explore. I had no idea whether a similar thought had even occurred to him. One day when he and I were just talking, he had floated a totally different possibility, as if he were musing—the idea of my being schools chancellor.
That seemed like a stretch at the time. While I had several academic degrees—a bachelor’s from Manhattan College, a law degree from St. John’s, a master of laws from NYU, and a master of public administration from the Kennedy School at Harvard—I had never worked in education. I’d never taken an education course. I’ve never even taught second grade.
As I would discover later, Bloomberg is a big believer in the notion that a strong manager can manage anything. A lifelong investment banker and financial-data and media entrepreneur, he’d just gotten himself elected mayor of the nation’s largest city, after all. But the schools musing had gone no further, and now he was offering something real—and right in my area of interest, experience, and expertise. I’d held the police commissioner job before. I knew that no one had ever done it for two nonconsecutive New York mayors. But I’d had a good run the previous time. I believed I had left with my reputation and integrity intact. I’d spent the eight years since broadening my experience with important federal responsibilities at the Customs Service, at the Treasury Department, and in Haiti. Since early 2001, I’d been learning Wall Street from the inside as senior managing director for corporate security at Bear Stearns. I certainly had the credentials, and I wasn’t a stranger to New York politics. Bill Bratton, one of several other potential candidates, had backed Mark Green for mayor. If Green had won, Bratton would have a gotten a call like I just had.
Of course, the call from Bloomberg wasn’t a total surprise. Veronica and I had kicked the idea around in a what-if kind of way. There were several arguments against taking the job, even if it was offered. After four decades of government work, we weren’t exactly suffering, but we were far from wealthy. I still had to make a living. At Bear Stearns, I was finally making private-sector money. That was nice. The $150,500 police commissioner’s salary would amount to a major pay cut. And there were other financial practicalities. I’d been receiving a police pension since I left the department at the end of 1993—a regular pension, not one of those tax-free, three-quarters disability pensions that top police brass had often gotten for themselves. But it was something, and if I went back to the department, those checks would stop coming in. Veronica had just retired from her job as an account executive at Tyco International. So we would be a one-salary family. But Veronica also knew how important I thought this mission was and how much the city needed to have the right people at the top during a time like this.
“It’s not like it would be forever,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as my wife. “How long would I really stay in the job? Realistically, I could be back in the private sector in a couple of years.”
Veronica nodded.
She’d been with me every step of the way. She made clear, as she always had, that she’d stand with me 100 percent.
If the call came, I already knew what I would say. The real surprise on this postelection Wednesday morning was that the billionaire Republican and first-time candidate was in the position to make it—that he had actually won the race for mayor of New York.
I didn’t ask for any time to consider the offer. “Sure,” I said, answering as directly and as succinctly as I had been asked. “It would be an honor.”
That was it. No sit-down meeting. No committee. No formal interview. No discussion of policing policies or the post-9/11 challenges ahead. None of that. Just a call and an offer. Just an unqualified yes—and a journey into the dark unknown.
I had to give credit to Mike for moving quickly. It wasn’t like he had an appointments list drawn up in advance of the election, as the overconfident Mark Green apparently had. Even before the election, some top officials in the police department had met with Bratton to discuss their future assignments once Green won and brought Bratton back.
Mike was also fortunate to have Nat Leventhal in charge of his postelection transition. While the incoming mayor had no experience in city government and didn’t know many people in New York politics, Leventhal had been on the inside of four city administrations, going all the way back to his youthful days as chief of staff to Mayor John Lindsay. He’d served as chairman of the Citizens Union and had recently stepped down after seventeen years as president of Lincoln Center. He was the ultimate New York insider. I believe he urged Bloomberg to fill the police commissioner job as quickly as possible, given the pressing need to rebuild public confidence that the city was safe to live and work in.
I knew—and I’m sure Mike did—that we didn’t have a second to waste.