The Article: The Thunderbolt: Judi Guiliani’s Run for First Lady<\/a><\/em> by Lloyd Grove. If you’re interested in becoming a power-hungry, manipulative gold digger, learn from the best!<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> If everything works out, it may be the last great political deal brokered in a smoke-filled room. On a balmy June night in 1999, Judith Nathan was having a drink at Club Macanudo, a cigar bar on East 63rd Street. Her companion was Dr. Burt Meyers, an infectious-disease specialist at Mount Sinai hospital and one of the many physicians she had befriended as a hospital sales rep for Bristol-Myers Squibb. Nathan, then 44, was at ease amid the upmarket manliness, a woman of the world among many middle-aged men of the world, including, that night, the mayor of the City of New York, Rudolph Giuliani.<\/p>\n

Club Mac, with its wooden Indians, leather sofas, and \u201cstate-of-the-art ventilation system,\u201d had become a well-known late-night haunt for the mayor. Perhaps it was also something of an escape: He was still living at Gracie Mansion with his second wife, television personality Donna Hanover. Here, he could kick back with a tumbler of Glenlivet and relax with City Hall aides and political associates. Sometimes a woman would approach him, interrupting his cigar-smoking to express her admiration, maybe get an autograph. Perhaps flirt mildly. So it wasn\u2019t surprising when Nathan, a pretty woman with rich brown hair, came over and said hello.<\/p>\n

This story of how they met had to be pieced together from accounts by Giuliani intimates because the couple refuses to talk about it. Even during their gauzy TV interview this past March with Barbara Walters\u2014who was a guest at their wedding in 2003\u2014which was a custom-made moment to safely peddle this type of personal anecdotage, Judith demurred. \u201cThat\u2019s one thing I would kind of like to keep private,\u201d she said, allowing only that \u201cit was by accident.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few days after their fateful meeting, the mayor had an aide retrieve Judith\u2019s business card from his desk drawer at City Hall, then he phoned and asked her out. They took in a movie at Loews Kips Bay, The General\u2019s Daughter, which is about a cover-up at West Point. At dinner afterward, at Peter Luger Steakhouse, they were chaperoned by a couple of City Hall staffers.<\/p>\n

Later, on the occasion of their marriage, Giuliani would tell the Times\u2019 \u201cVows\u201d columnist that \u201cour attraction was instantaneous. There was something mystical about the feeling.\u201d He evoked an appropriately operatic moment from one of his favorite novels, Mario Puzo\u2019s The Godfather, when Michael Corleone spotted his Sicilian bride, Apollonia. \u201cIt was,\u201d Rudy said, \u201cthe thunderbolt.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she met the mayor at Club Macanudo, Judith Nathan couldn\u2019t have imagined the complexity of the relationship she was getting into. At that point, the considerable successes of Rudy\u2019s mayoralty were in the past and his future was uncertain. He may have looked like a catch, but he certainly did not look like a potential president. There was talk of a Senate run. Now, in a Cinderella-like reversal, Judith Giuliani, with her husband\u2019s help, is auditioning for a vast and contradictory role: romantic partner of America\u2019s Mayor, wholesome third wife, definer of gender roles, and emblem of respectable femininity for an entire nation. So far, her attempts to play this impossible part have been riveting, if sometimes comic.<\/p>\n

Rudy Giuliani has always been the most insular of politicians, operating within his personal tribe, at odds with most everyone outside. The prime value is extreme loyalty, and for those in possession of that quality (think Bernard Kerik), much else is forgiven. Like George W. Bush, he and his team create their own reality and wait for the world to follow.<\/p>\n

Judith Giuliani is the latest to join this coterie, and by far the most important. He\u2019s given her influence into all facets of his professional life. He has often referred to Judith as his \u201cclosest adviser.\u201d In a 2003 TV interview, Rudy claimed that Judith is \u201can expert we rely on\u201d at Giuliani Partners. \u201cShe gives us a lot of advice and a lot of help in areas where she\u2019s got a lot of expertise\u2014biological and chemical,\u201d Rudy said as Judith watched him and nodded vigorously. \u201cAnd since we do security work, that\u2019s an area of great concern\u2014you know, another anthrax attack, a smallpox attack, chemical agents. She knows all of that.\u201d Famously, he told Barbara Walters that Judith would be able to sit in on cabinet meetings, acting at the time as if this were a perfectly ordinary responsibility for a president to give his wife.<\/p>\n

At other times, their presentation has been lovey-dovey to the point of queasiness. Their displays of affection got so gooey during the taping of the Walters interview that the ABC News doyenne is said to have joked, \u201cEnough already!\u201d They held hands and cooed; he called her \u201cbaby\u201d and she called him \u201csweetheart\u201d as they kissed on the lips. At one point, after he absolved her of responsibility for his divorce from Hanover and his alienation from their two children (\u201cShe\u2019s done everything she can. She loves all the children\u201d), Judith, who was serenely feminine in a sea-green sweater, with another, lavender sweater tied casually around her neck over it, French preppy style, reached out to caress his cheek. When Walters asked her if she was \u201cbothered\u201d by her affair with the married mayor, Judith responded, blandly, \u201cIt was a rocky road, absolutely. But when you have a partnership that is based on mutual respect and communication, the two of you know what\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Americans have an unresolved relationship with their idea of what a First Lady should be. It doesn\u2019t usually involve thunder and lightning. Political consultants know what\u2019s easiest to sell: Harriet Nelson, which is to say more or less Laura Bush. More-assertive types, be it the Svengali socialite in couture (early Nancy Reagan), the defiantly unkittenish liberal crusader (early Hillary Clinton), or the aloof and foreign-seeming heiress (Teresa Heinz-Kerry), are more off-putting because it\u2019s difficult to identify with them.<\/p>\n

Judith Giuliani\u2019s biggest drawback\u2014her three marriages\u2014reminds voters of Rudy\u2019s own three and the associated tawdry drama. The first, to his second cousin, was annulled after fourteen years. His second, to Hanover, ended with Rudy\u2019s televised May 2000 announcement that he intended to separate from her; Hanover\u2019s shocked, tearful, also-televised response blamed Rudy\u2019s \u201crelationship with one staff member,\u201d i.e., his communications director Cristyne Lategano. That was before much was known about Judith. By the summer of 2001, Judith\u2019s face, along with Donna\u2019s and Rudy\u2019s, was plastered on the cover of People magazine with the tawdry headline INSIDE NEW YORK\u2019S NASTIEST SPLIT \u2026 THE MAYOR, THE WIFE, THE MISTRESS.<\/p>\n

Six years later, the rollout of Judith-as-wife, as potential First Lady, is still tainted by the smoke of that thunderous extramarital night at Club Mac.<\/p>\n

Her magazine appearances have tended to be like the one in the March Harper\u2019s Bazaar, where she talked about \u201cmaking him happy, making a happy home\u201d and posed lip-to-lip on Rudy\u2019s lap. \u201cI\u2019ve always liked strong, macho men,\u201d she told the magazine. \u201cRudy\u2019s a very, very romantic guy; we love watching Sleepless in Seattle. Can you imagine my big testosterone-factor husband doing that?\u201d But amid their efforts at cozy public normalcy, suddenly Rudy\u2019s son, Andrew, told a Times reporter that \u201cthere\u2019s obviously a little problem that exists between me and his wife.\u201d<\/p>\n

Theirs is a very New York love story, complicated and, frankly, mature. It\u2019s hard to say how it\u2019ll play in the red states.<\/p>\n

In early 2000, as Rudy\u2019s Senate race was getting under way, Judith Nathan was a mysterious but constant presence in the campaign entourage. Rudy didn\u2019t bother to clarify her role internally, and the few people in the know kept their own counsel. One campaign staffer at first assumed Judith was \u201csome sort of adviser or consultant.\u201d Others believed she was a member of his security detail. Finally, by the time Rudy withdrew from the race in May, most folks had figured it out.<\/p>\n

The couple was quickly beset by crises: his prostate cancer and then 9\/11.<\/p>\n

Under Judith\u2019s guidance, he considered various treatment options and decided against surgically removing the prostate\u2014the method that produces the most reliable outcome\u2014in favor of implanting radioactive seeds. Called brachytherapy, it\u2019s a less common procedure that has its advantages: The risk of long-term erectile dysfunction is lower. \u201cHe didn\u2019t want the knife down there at all,\u201d says an intimate who was privy to Rudy\u2019s worries.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Rudy\u2019s divorce lawyer, Raoul Felder, acting on his image-battered client\u2019s instructions, announced that Rudy\u2019s radiation treatments had for the past year left him impotent, making sex with his girlfriend impossible.<\/p>\n

\u201cPart of the reason Rudy loves her so much is that she loved him, and batted her eyes at him, even when his very virility was questioned, when his sexual vitality was knocked out,\u201d says the former Giuliani associate.<\/p>\n

And Giuliani was unquestionably in love.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, at a wedding attended by prominent lawyers and judges, Rudy and Judith were sitting at a table where the other guests were having a spirited legal and political discussion. \u201cRudy was deferring to her the entire evening,\u201d says a fellow guest. \u201cThey were talking about the war in Iraq, and she was opining. They were talking about the Second Circuit, and she had an opinion about that too. People didn\u2019t know what to say. And Rudy, if anything, was drawing her out. \u2018What do you think about that, baby?\u2019 She likes to talk.\u201d<\/p>\n

A former associate of Giuliani\u2019s from the days when he was a mob-busting federal prosecutor says, \u201cLoyalty does mean everything to him. He absolutely adores her. He doesn\u2019t need the expensive Brioni suits she has him wear, or the fancy food she has him eat. He was a cheeseburger-and-martini guy. But Rudy defers to her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost immediately after they came out as a couple, Judith accompanied the mayor everywhere, even marching alongside him in city parades. Paparazzi staked out her apartment building and her condo in Noyack. Donna Hanover obtained a court order barring Judith from Gracie Mansion.<\/p>\n

She quit Bristol-Myers Squibb in March 2001 and, with the connections supplied by her powerful consort, joined a philanthropic consulting firm, Changing Our World Inc., as a managing director.<\/p>\n

Before they were married, he indulged her desire to dine regularly at Le Cirque even though the heavy cuisine tended to make him queasy. \u201cIt was almost required daily, going to Le Cirque for dinner, and Rudy used to throw up afterward, because the food was so rich,\u201d says a witness. \u201cBut she wanted to go, because it was the place to be seen, and the treatment by Sirio [Maccioni, the owner] was incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n

As you descend from the hilltops on Route 309 into the former Judi Ann Stish\u2019s hometown, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, it sparkles like shards of glass in the sunlight. Then\u2014closer in, on the edge of town\u2014the vision loses its luster amid the detritus of a long-abandoned coal-mining economy. You pass a barnlike structure sporting a sign that misspells adult shope, then gigantic Quonset huts, then strip malls, then churches. Since the mines shut down after World War II, Hazleton has struggled mightily. In 2002, U.S. News & World Report labeled Hazleton \u201ca town in need of a tomorrow.\u201d Aside from Judi, the city\u2019s most famous native is Jack Palance.<\/p>\n

Judi\u2019s second cousin, retired Hazleton Area schools superintendent Geraldine Stish Shepperson, says the family patriarch\u2014whose surname was Americanized from Sticia\u2014emigrated from Italy to toil in the mines with Irish and Slovak settlers in the early 1900s. \u201cThey were all poor working people.\u201d Judi\u2019s grandfather Frank Stish, a milkman, was paralyzed in an on-the-job accident, Shepperson says, and Judith\u2019s 81-year-old father, Donald, is a retired circulation manager for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Judi\u2019s mother, Joan, is Polish-American, and these Stishes\u2014including Judi\u2019s older brother, Donnie, and younger sister, Cyndy\u2014attended St. Stanislaus Catholic Church, down the street from their modest two-family house on Carson Street in the Nannygoat Hill neighborhood. These days, Donald and Joan Stish spend part of the year in a Palm Beach condo purchased by Rudy and Judith.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was beautiful and had long, reddish hair,\u201d remembers current Hazleton High School English teacher Mike Saleeba, who was a year behind Judi back in the early seventies. \u201cI remember her face\u2014she had a fantastic complexion. I wouldn\u2019t have dared to ask her out.\u201d Still, \u201cshe would go out of her way to say hello to you. She wasn\u2019t one of the snobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saleeba compares Hazleton\u2019s atmosphere in those days to the sitcom Happy Days. Saturday nights were spent dancing to live bands at the local YMCA. Afterward, the kids headed for the Knotty Pine\u2014\u201cthe Pines,\u201d they called it\u2014a popular diner where they pulled up in their cars, flashed their headlights, and the waitresses served barbecue sandwiches curbside. Judi\u2019s Hazleton High classmate Mike DeCosmo often dropped her home after a night of fun. \u201cShe was one of those people who never had a bad word about anybody, always upbeat, always friendly,\u201d says DeCosmo, today an accountant.<\/p>\n

Judi was known as a diligent student and an attractive girl who busied herself with extracurricular activities such as the Future Nurses Association, the tennis and ski clubs, the literary society, and the Diggers Club, a volunteer service organization that \u201cbrightened the days of many handicapped and retarded children in Hazleton\u2019s schools,\u201d according to Janus, the high-school yearbook.<\/p>\n

In a blue-collar place like Hazleton, nursing was one of the few professions that were seen as appropriate for young women. \u201cThere was teaching, and there was nursing. That\u2019s all that was offered to us, really,\u201d says the school librarian, Theresa Krajcirik.<\/p>\n

It also got Judith out. She met medical-supplies salesman Jeffrey Scott Ross and, after two years of nursing school up the road in Bethlehem, married him at the Chapel of the Bells in Las Vegas. Then they moved to North Carolina.<\/p>\n

Their marriage lasted less than five years. By the time of their uncontested Florida divorce on November 14, 1979, husband No. 2 was already in the wings. She married Bruce Nathan five days later.<\/p>\n

They had met in Charlotte, where Bruce had moved after selling the Long Island\u2013based office-furniture business founded by his grandfather. For the 24-year-old Judi, who had spent much of the previous five years on the road, demonstrating and selling surgical equipment, Nathan was a catch. Over the course of their increasingly rocky marriage, they lived in Atlanta and Manhattan (while acquiring a Hamptons summer place) and the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. She left him and moved to New York in March 1992 with their 7-year-old daughter, Whitney.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, Bruce Nathan\u2019s friends remember Judi less than fondly. \u201cShe was a real opportunist, a real Becky Sharp character,\u201d says a Nathan-family friend who shared Thanksgiving dinners with Bruce and Judi. \u201cShe was kind of cute, and Bruce was quite handsome\u2014a rich trust-fund kid from Long Island. She was less sophisticated in those days. I think she really desired to be sort of the Junior League type. She basically struck me as having an inflated, self-important view of herself.\u201d<\/p>\n

AP)<\/p>\n

The voluminous divorce papers filed with Los Angeles County Superior Court paint a more complicated picture. In public court documents, Bruce said he and Judi adopted Whitney in March 1985, when they lived in Atlanta, after trying for five years to have a child on their own. In 1987, they moved to New York, renting a series of apartments on the Upper East Side. The formerly Catholic Judi became an active member of the socially prominent Brick Presbyterian Church. The Nathans enrolled Whitney at the elite Madison Avenue Presbyterian Day School and, later on, Spence. In other court documents, there is mention of a Porsche, a Cadillac, antique furniture, paintings, pricey rugs, a place in Southampton, and, according to Judi, Bruce\u2019s \u201ctrust fund valued at $800,000 to one million dollars.\u201d She added, \u201cMy husband has had a long history of credit loans to support his lavish lifestyle.\u201d<\/p>\n

As with all bad marriages, there seems to have been enough blame to go around. In one of the many affidavits filed and cross-filed by the warring Nathans, Judi accused Bruce of \u201ca violent temper,\u201d \u201cnumerous physical assaults and manhandling of me,\u201d including \u201cscreaming vile epithets, cursing,\u201d and \u201cpunching me in the side of my head\u201d in March 1992. After that alleged attack\u2014which Bruce has denied\u2014Judith retreated with her daughter to a neighbor\u2019s and called the cops. \u201cI feared for my safety and that of my daughter,\u201d she claimed in her affidavit, adding, \u201cI immediately fled California.\u201d She went first to Hazleton and stayed temporarily with her parents, then moved in with friends in Manhattan and took a part-time job in a dentist\u2019s office before eventually finding full-time work at Bristol-Myers Squibb.<\/p>\n

Bruce, in his own court filings, claimed that Judi had kidnapped their child and branded her an \u201cunfit mother\u201d and a \u201csocial climber\u201d whose \u201c\u2018main goal\u2019 in life was being involved with whatever was \u2018the in thing\u2019 at the moment. Whether it was belonging to \u2018the right church\u2019 by converting from Catholicism to Presbyterian; playing bridge with the \u2018right people\u2019 \u2026 enrolling Whitney at the \u2018right schools\u2019 in order to further my wife\u2019s social aspirations; wearing designer clothes and jewelry; and vacationing at the fashionable Hamptons.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while \u201cI maintained my Jewish heritage,\u201d Bruce alleged that \u201cmy wife thought nothing of physically and mentally abusing me within Whitney\u2019s earshot.\u201d When he couldn\u2019t afford something, she referred to him as \u201cJew boy\u201d and other slurs. Mike McKeon, Judith\u2019s campaign press secretary, dismisses the \u201cridiculous\u201d fifteen-year-old allegation. \u201cAnti-Semites don\u2019t marry Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, she went on with her life, having various romances. One is said to have been with a French diplomatic staffer. For four years, she and Whitney and clinical psychologist Manos Zacharioudakis lived together in a one-bedroom apartment on East 55th Street.<\/p>\n

Years later, after Rudy made Judith the third Mrs. Giuliani and launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Zacharioudakis rhapsodized to the Daily News about his former lover\u2019s \u201cpassion,\u201d \u201csensual\u201d nature, and \u201cItalian eroticism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Around the same time, Judith went back to court over custody arrangements for 16-year-old Whitney. She\u2019d fled her mother\u2019s Upper East Side apartment to move in with her father, safely out of the limelight.<\/p>\n

Then 9\/11 happened, and everything changed. For one thing, Rudy\u2019s political career was resuscitated. During his illness, Giuliani had become increasingly dependent on her, a relationship that continued into his professional life. \u201cShe had to approve his schedule, which had already been finalized weeks before,\u201d says an insider. \u201cPeople eventually knew not to lock anything in until she\u2019d looked at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his best-selling 2002 autobiography, Leadership, Giuliani wrote that his future wife had been an effective mayoral adviser after 9\/11 because she \u201chad been a nurse for many years, and afterward a pharmaceutical executive; she had managed a team of people and had many organizational skills. Further, she had wide-ranging scientific knowledge and research expertise.\u201d He added that he \u201cput her to work helping me organize the hospitals\u201d to treat the injured from ground zero. His campaign Website, meanwhile, notes, \u201cIn the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Mrs. Giuliani coordinated the efforts at the Family Assistance Center on Pier 94.\u201d<\/p>\n

But concerning Judith\u2019s participation in the city\u2019s response to 9\/11, public-health and security consultant Jerry Hauer takes exception to the Giuliani campaign\u2019s assertions. Hauer\u2014a nationally known bioterrorism expert who was Rudy\u2019s first director of the newly created Office of Emergency Management\u2014minced no words about the claim that the mayor\u2019s then-girlfriend \u201ccoordinated the efforts at the Family Assistance Center on Pier 94.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is simply a lie,\u201d Hauer tells me. \u201cBut Rudy\u2019s not shy about rewriting history when it suits him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hauer had a bitter falling-out with Giuliani after Hauer endorsed Democrat Mark Green\u2019s mayoral candidacy in 2001. \u201cYou\u2019re done,\u201d Rudy told him ominously after he and former police commissioner Bill Bratton staged a press conference endorsing Green.<\/p>\n

Rex USA)<\/p>\n

\u201cI had left city government before 9\/11, and Rudy called me back to help out,\u201d Hauer says. \u201cHe asked me to relocate the Family Assistance Center from the Armory on Lexington Avenue, which was too small, to Pier 94. We put it together in two and a half days. At that point, he had already announced his separation from Donna and he wanted to get Judith involved somehow. Most people didn\u2019t really care. We had a job to do. Where she had opinions, she offered them, and where they were valuable, we listened. The fact that she was the mayor\u2019s girlfriend didn\u2019t carry a lot of weight with most of the folks working there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Afterward, Rudy installed her on the board of the Twin Towers Fund.<\/p>\n

The Giuliani-Nathan nuptials were a star-studded extravaganza at which the bride wore a bejeweled Vera Wang gown and a diamond tiara, Mayor Michael Bloomberg officiated, and the 400 guests included Wang, Walters, Beverly Sills, Yogi Berra, Joe Torre, Donald Trump and Melania Knauss, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, Mort Zuckerman and Henry Kissinger, even Cristyne Lategano-Nicholas.<\/p>\n

Judith elevated her profile in the charity world by touting various good causes in her column in Gotham magazine. She lent her name to the all-girls Mother Cabrini High School and the McCarton School for autistic children.<\/p>\n

In 2003, Judith posed in a cranberry bejeweled Carolina Herrera gown for the cover of the society glossy Avenue. She sported a huge Chopard brooch and Jimmy Choo shoes while reclining languidly in her so-called Moroccan sitting room. From the magazine\u2019s excitable perspective, the Giulianis had \u201ccreated their own Chartwell,\u201d the name of Sir Winston Churchill\u2019s country house, on the Upper East Side. The article confidently predicted that Judith \u201ccould be the most stylish First Lady since another Upper East Sider, Jacqueline Kennedy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have a successful marriage when you have each other as a priority,\u201d she told the magazine. \u201cI travel with Rudy. He respects me and involved me in all aspects of his life. We get involved in speechwriting. We make decisions together about which places we are going to go. It\u2019s a busy life and we live it together.\u201d<\/p>\n

They have adjoining offices at Giuliani Partners at 5 Times Square, where she has installed Pilates machines, the better to keep her husband fit. Today, she doesn\u2019t like to leave his side, her arm possessively around his waist at social gatherings such as a buffet dinner last July at Ronald Perelman\u2019s East Hampton estate, where I saw the two of them navigating the A-list crowd joined at the hip. Manhattan hostesses have long known that if they invite the Giulianis to dinner, they must be prepared to breach protocol by seating them not only at the same table but next to each other, and Rudy\u2019s standard lecture contract explicitly requires that his wife be placed beside him in case his appearance involves sitting through a meal.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no surprise to veteran Rudy watchers that in recent weeks, senior presidential-campaign operatives have apparently been grumbling about what they consider Judith\u2019s meddling in matters outside her areas of competence. \u201cShe\u2019s, uh, feisty, as they say,\u201d a high-level supporter told Newsday. \u201cThe staff people go a little nuts.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story of Manny Papir is a cautionary tale for anyone who doubts that Judith Giuliani is a force to be reckoned with. Papir, Rudy\u2019s longtime personal aide, learned the hard way during a trip to Europe when Rudy, taking a 9\/11 victory lap in early 2002, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and then was honored with the German Media Prize in Baden-Baden. Among Rudy\u2019s inner circle, Judith was fast becoming known for her demanding requirements. Even loyalist Sunny Mindel was overheard joking that whenever they arranged a chartered jet for their principal and his companion, \u201cwe need two seats for Judith\u2014one for her and one for her Gucci bag.\u201d (\u201cI have no recollection of saying that,\u201d Mindel says.)<\/p>\n

When Judith asked to stay two nights in Baden-Baden instead of the previously planned one\u2014throwing the intricate schedule into disarray\u2014Papir, who was advancing Rudy\u2019s triumphal tour, made the mistake of betraying his impatience. Running into other members of the entourage in the lobby, he muttered, \u201cLet me guess\u2014you\u2019re waiting for Princess, too.\u201d When the quip was reported back to Rudy and Judith, Papir\u2014who declined to comment\u2014was out of a $200,000-a-year job.<\/p>\n

McKeon dismisses the complaints, arguing that Judith is not trying to be a political strategist. \u201cIt comes from people who are not on the inside of the campaign. Maybe that\u2019s why they\u2019re grumbling,\u201d he says. \u201cJudith is nothing but an asset, and, as the campaign continues, she\u2019s going to be a larger and larger asset.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her early work on the stump has been marred by occasional gaffes, but he calls her \u201can experienced public speaker\u201d and says there are no plans to get her a speechwriter. \u201cHer primary role is as a support system for Rudy in a personal way and as a character witness for him in a public way. She knows him as a man, as a husband, and as a good person, and that\u2019s what she\u2019ll be talking about. She\u2019ll be one of our key surrogates.\u201d<\/p>\n

Judith Giuliani was introduced to the public by the tabloids. But that experience did not fully prepare her for the current one. Friends describe a woman who is hurt and baffled\u2014\u201cfreaked out,\u201d says one\u2014by the barrage of coverage of her first marriage and the fact that long ago, her job had her demonstrating surgical-stapling procedures on live dogs.<\/p>\n

Candice Stark, who\u2019s known Judith for twenty years, believes that she\u2019s a target of opportunity. \u201cI read these things in the newspaper trying to trash her, trying to make her seem like something that she\u2019s not, and I think it\u2019s just people looking for anything they can to take Rudy down,\u201d she theorizes. \u201cEverything about his life is so well known they can\u2019t dig much further, so they\u2019re going after her instead. So much of politics is cruel. You\u2019ve got to be strong.\u201d<\/p>\n

A confidant of Judith\u2019s from the Hamptons, where the Giulianis paid $3 million for a 6,000-square-foot shingled house in Water Mill, complete with swimming pool, wine cellar, and cigar room, argues that she\u2019s been unfairly caricatured. \u201cThis is a woman, a single mother, who has struggled most of her life, and she married somebody not because he was famous or because she thought he would be the president but because she was in love with him,\u201d the friend says. \u201cNow she\u2019s very worried that something she will do or say will hurt his opportunity. She loses sleep over it. Reading in the newspapers that she\u2019s a liability has been very, very hard for her.\u201d<\/p>\n

The friend added, \u201cI think Rudy\u2019s the one that\u2019s sabotaging her. He\u2019s out of control. There\u2019s too much hand-holding and kissing on the lips, behaving like a couple of 18-year-olds in their first love affair. She doesn\u2019t have the political smarts, and I don\u2019t think she expected any of this.\u201d (Like many people interviewed for this article, this friend asked for anonymity. \u201cNo good deed goes unpunished,\u201d explained Howard Koeppel, declining to share his impressions of the mayor\u2019s then-girlfriend, who was a frequent visitor after Rudy moved out of Gracie Mansion to bunk with Koeppel and his domestic partner, Mark Hsiao.)<\/p>\n

Republican fund-raiser and Manhattan hostess Georgette Mosbacher\u2014the ex-wife of Texas oilman Robert Mosbacher, who was Commerce secretary under the first President Bush\u2014is a new member of Judith\u2019s social circle, along with Walters and Beverly Sills. All three were Judith\u2019s guests in December at an intimate ladies\u2019 lunch at the Giulianis\u2019 East 66th Street co-op off Madison Avenue. \u201cIt\u2019s a tough role\u2014I\u2019ve been there,\u201d says the flame-haired Mosbacher. \u201cFor me, it was horrible, devastating. You don\u2019t want to hurt your husband, and everything you do reflects on him. You become hypersensitive and you try to be what you think the press wants you to be so they won\u2019t come after you. But you learn pretty quick\u2014at least I did\u2014that you can\u2019t win that way. In the end, you gotta be yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Judith, who had been Rudy\u2019s constant companion during early campaign swings in New Hampshire, has more recently stayed behind and lowered her profile\u2014and Rudy has urged reporters to cut her some slack, pointing out that \u201cI am a candidate. She\u2019s a civilian, to use the old Mafia distinction.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I ran into Rudy at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner in late April, he told me Judith skipped the event because \u201cshe\u2019s up taking care of our daughter [Whitney] at Skidmore.\u201d The locution \u201cour daughter\u201d was hardly calculated to repair his frayed relations with the biological children he shares with Hanover, especially 17-year-old Trinity-prep-school senior Caroline, who uses Donna\u2019s surname and reportedly didn\u2019t bother telling him when she was accepted recently by Harvard. (\u201cIn the next few months, Rudy really has to repair his relationships with Andrew and Caroline,\u201d says a Republican strategist. \u201cHe can\u2019t be the Republican nominee and have his kids estranged from him. That ain\u2019t gonna cut it.\u201d)<\/p>\n

As for the brickbats Judith has been absorbing of late, \u201cI tell her it\u2019s just like when I was mayor and every day people want to disagree with your policies and criticize you,\u201d he said. \u201cOver time, you get used to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Analysis: <\/strong> I wrote a poem to commemorate the event:<\/p>\n

Rudi and Judi sitting in a tree,
\nK-I-S-S-I-N-G
\nFirst came the homewrecking hussy,
\nNext came state-defined love,
\nThen a 9\/11 baby sprouted out of that whores undercarriage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: The Thunderbolt: Judi Guiliani’s Run for First Lady by Lloyd Grove. If you’re interested in becoming a power-hungry, manipulative gold digger, learn from the best! The Text: If everything works out, it may be the last great political deal brokered in a smoke-filled room. On a balmy June night in 1999, Judith Nathan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n