Giuliani never one to run away from a fight

WASHINGTON -- Rudy Giuliani minces no words and suffers no fools.

"I don't wink and nod," he says. "I am a very direct person."

It is a statement of the obvious to any New Yorker who lived through Giuliani's years as mayor. The boy from Brooklyn who got his first boxing gloves as a toddler and developed a passion for opera at age 6 is a man of contradictions.

He is the leader whose steadiness and compassion helped bring calm after 9/11 and whose volcanic eruptions of pique have come to be known as the "full Rudy."

He is the man of a thousand insults who imposed a civility campaign on in-your-face New Yorkers.

He is the man who dreamed of becoming a priest and has worked his way up to three marriages.

Giuliani, it seems, wakes up every morning looking to pick a fight that he can win, a welcome quality when the bad guys are clear-cut but less admirable when they're not.

Targets have ranged from the windshield squeegee men who intimidated New York motorists to the police chief who helped to tame the city's crime problem (and got too much of the credit, in Giuliani's view).

Now, Giuliani is in his biggest fight ever -- the race for the presidency -- and at age 63, a new scene is unfolding.

The story so far: An only child is born to doting yet demanding parents. The boy is smart and hardworking and thrives in the moral exactitude of a Catholic education. His pursuit of the law is a natural fit. His career in politics, a more hard-fought endeavor that brings him both acclaim and contempt.

All this is largely forgotten when the Twin Towers fall.

Asked to predict the death toll, Giuliani answers with his heart rather than his head: "The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear ultimately."

In those dark moments, Giuliani draws on the best that is in him.

But that is to leap ahead in the story.

Rudolph William Louis Giuliani's first memories involve combat, of sorts. He was born May 28, 1944, in Brooklyn, within earshot of Ebbets Field, Dodgers territory. Rudy's father, Harold, dressed him in a Yankees uniform, a dangerous anomaly in that part of town. Giuliani said years later, "I had to physically defend myself from neighborhood kids."

Giuliani's father, a plumber turned bartender, gave his son boxing gloves; his mother's gift, no less challenging, was her high expectations.

Giuliani graduated from Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in 1961, voted "class politician" by schoolmates. He signed up to become a priest, but decided he liked girls more than piety.

He attended Manhattan College and interned at a New York law firm.

Giuliani landed as an assistant in the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, a premier office for a young prosecutor.

Giuliani distinguished himself with his quick legal mind and as a demanding but fair prosecutor. Giuliani voted for George McGovern in 1972, but says he knew in his heart he was no longer a Democrat. He reregistered as an independent, then a few years later signed up as a Republican, in time to vote for Gerald Ford.

Giuliani turned up as the No. 3 man at the Justice Department in 1981. Ted Olson, the future solicitor general, was a few steps below him in the pecking order and remembers him as dynamic, likable -- "the kind of person you'd not only want to work with but the kind of person you'd want to go out with for a pizza at night."

Others saw glimpses of "the Full Rudy." Michael Lubin, a young prosecutor in the department's criminal fraud section, dared to send Giuliani an accusatory letter questioning his decision to meet with a corporate lawyer whose company was under investigation. Giuliani called in Lubin for what Lubin remembers 25 years later as the rants of a "madman" that went on for 20 minutes.

Giuliani, who oversaw the replacement of U.S. attorneys around the country, got the idea to fill the U.S. attorney's slot in New York himself. His prosecutions of the mob, white collar criminals and public corruption made him front-page material.

On his second run for mayor, Giuliani convinced New Yorkers he was the cure for a city so sick that Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had described it as "defining deviancy down."

Once sworn in, he immediately set about picking fights -- and winning.

His achievements were the stuff of lore -- crime down 56 percent, welfare rolls slashed nearly 60 percent, taxes cut 23 times. So was his domineering style and petulance.

In a rare case of understatement, Giuliani describes the year 2000 as an "interesting phase" in his life.

Deep into a second mayoral term that was running out of gas, Giuliani was gearing up for a Rudy-vs.-Hillary run for the Senate. His second marriage was crumbling. And he then he found out he had prostate cancer.

It all seemed to collide in a news conference in which Giuliani discussed his cancer diagnosis, spoke publicly of his "very good friend" (and future wife) Judith Nathan and left open the door to pulling out of the Senate race.

And, for good measure, he tossed out the news that he was seeking a legal separation from Donna Hanover -- in effect informing his wife via news conference that their marriage was over. The bitter breakup and Giuliani's subsequent marriage to Nathan have left relations between Giuliani and his two children -- Andrew, 21, and Caroline, 18 -- strained at best.

Giuliani pulled out of the Senate race to focus on fighting the cancer.

He was having breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel with an aide and a friend when first word came that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. He sped toward the scene. As he rounded a corner and got his first view of the damage, Giuliani saw a man jump from the North Tower, then others following.

The horrors only grew from there. In the hours and days that followed, Giuliani drew on advice his father had often given him: In a crisis, "be the calmest person in the room."

The righteous certainty that had grated on New Yorkers in earlier days was now what they wanted.

Oprah dubbed him America's Mayor. Queen Elizabeth knighted him. Time named him Person of the Year.

Exit stage left, Giuliani the political pariah; enter stage right, Giuliani the stuff of presidential speculation.