Here's the transcript of my interview with Mayor Giuliani. The audio will be posted here later.
HH: Mayor Giuliani, welcome back to the Hugh Hewitt Show.
RG: Nice to talk to you again, Hugh. How are you?
HH: Good. When we talked in February, we were just getting into biography when we ran out of time. So I went to Fred Siegel’s book, and by the way, do you think that’s a pretty good book, The Prince of the City?
RG: I do, yes. Actually, I just saw Fred today, so yeah (laughing)
HH: Well, I find…but it doesn’t tell us much about your early years, born in ’44 in Brooklyn. You’re an only child, right, Mayor?
RG: That’s correct.
HH: And your dad had a run-in with the law, he had some tough years afterwards, but it’s a Catholic…give us some idea of what it’s like growing up ’44 to the early 60’s in your Brooklyn life.
RG: (laughing) You know, it was sort of a much calmer period of time. My first memories, actually, are of baseball. My father came from Manhattan, and my mother from Brooklyn. And my mother sort of required my father to live in Brooklyn near her family. And his revenge was to make me a Yankee fan right in the shadow of Ebbets Field. So my early experiences were being thrown in the mud by the Dodgers fans that have made me a very, very loyal Yankee fan. And then I remember my first Yankee game, Joe DiMaggio and Dominic DiMaggio were playing on opposite teams, Joe for the Yankees, and Dominic for the Red Sox. And I…baseball was a large part of my early life, both when I lived in Brooklyn…I lived in Brooklyn up until the time I was about seven, and then we moved to Garden City South, which is in Nassau County, and I went to parochial schools. I went to St. Francis of Assisi Grammar School, and St. Anne’s Grammar School in Stewart Manor. But then, it was a strange thing, I went to high school in Brooklyn.
HH: Okay…
RG: So I would commute back into Brooklyn everyday from the time I was 13, to the time I was 17.
HH: Was money tight in the Giuliani family?
RG: Yeah, it was. I mean, yes, yeah, I understood that there were limited amounts of money, and I didn’t grow up with anything like wealth, or I would consider it middle class, maybe, you know, there was money, but it was tight, and it wasn’t unlimited amounts of money by any means.
HH: And how did you pay for college, because you go to Manhattan College, you go to law school, how do you foot that bill?
RG: I had partial scholarships in both cases.
HH: Okay.
RG: Both to Manhattan and to NYU Law School, and that helped, that helped a great deal.
HH: Okay, and Brother O’Leary shows up in some of the stories I find. Who’s he?
RG: Brother Kevin…
HH: Yeah.
RG: That’s how I knew him as. Brother Kevin was a very, very big influence on my life, and he was an English, he was my English teacher and my homeroom teacher in the second year of high school, and he’s the one who really got me interested in reading, in opera, in writing, and sort of convinced me that there was a whole intellectual side of me that I could develop. And I really credit him with that. I mean, he and my mother, my mother was a frustrated history teacher. She always wanted to be a history teacher, and she came through the Depression, and she wasn’t able to go to college, she had to go to work, but she had a great interest in history, and in English. So I became her singular student. And the two of them probably developed, the two of them probably developed this tremendous interest in learning and reading, and the excitement of it that to this day that I have.
HH: And was Rudy Giuliani ever an altar boy?
RG: No.
HH: Okay, just checking on it.
RG: I was a very, I was a very religious kid, and wanted to be a priest for a good deal of my childhood. My real ambitions as a youngster were being a priest, or being a doctor. Those were the two things I went back and forth with during most of my childhood, and then a whole bunch of other ambitions came about, and different things to do, and I was on the verge of going in the seminary when I graduated from high school, changed my mind that summer, and then ended up going to Manhattan College.
HH: What changed your mind?
RG: I think celibacy, to tell you the truth.
HH: Ah, good argument.
RG: At least initially.
HH: Now how is the Catholic faith imprinted itself on you?
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