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

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/3257/1/162/

By Political Affairs

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 Guiliani 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.