When Giuliani’s tenure as mayor ended, he left behind a city that was grateful, and more than a little relieved to see him go. PHILIP BURKE

Correction appended.

The South Carolina State House, a grand, copper-domed structure in downtown Columbia, is a showplace for the state’s long history of hellbent defiance. The most prominent feature on the grounds is a monument to fallen Confederate soldiers, whose virtues “plead for just judgment of the cause in which they perished.” Beside it, atop a thirty-foot pole, waves the Rebel flag, the object of fierce national debate a decade ago, when it flew above the capitol dome, and no less conspicuous now, in its new location. Among the nearby statuary stands a life-size likeness of Benjamin R. (Pitchfork Ben) Tillman, the four-term United States senator who led the movement that disenfranchised black voters in 1895 and instituted Jim Crow. Inside the building, cast-iron staircases rise to an elegant lobby, and portraits honor the men who shaped the state’s querulous history, including John C. Calhoun, who contrived the rationale—nullification—for Southern secession, and Strom Thurmond, who led the South out of the Democratic Party. The lobby opens at either end to the state’s two legislative chambers, which, in March, ratified an amendment to the state constitution that bans not only gay marriage but gay civil unions. That month, the state house of representatives also passed a bill requiring any woman considering abortion to reflect upon an ultrasound image of the fetus.

It was here that Rudolph Giuliani, New York’s thrice-married, anti-gun, pro-gay, pro-choice former mayor, found himself one morning in April, in what appeared to be a critical moment in his young campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination. The previous day, during a campaign stop in Florida, he was asked by CNN’s Dana Bash if he supported the public funding of abortions. Giuliani seemed flustered by the question and finally answered, “If that’s the status of the law, I would, yes.”

Even before Giuliani began his run for the Presidency, the consensus, sounded in news columns, blogs, and political journals, was that he could not survive scrutiny of his political heterodoxy and his personal imperfections by the Republican Party’s conservative base.

Now, as Giuliani made his way into the capitol, his candidate smile firmly fixed, he was met by reporters. “Mayor, you talk about being a straight shooter,” one said. “Is this position you have on abortion something that’s going to shoot a hole in a key Republican plank?”

Giuliani said he was comfortable with the fact that some voters would never agree with him, a point he chose to illustrate by telling a story about New York. When he was a novice political candidate, he said, the late Louis Lefkowitz, the longest-serving attorney general in New York history, had taught him the basics of retail campaigning on the streets of the city. “I’m walking along the street, shaking hands,” Giuliani recounted, “and this guy started questioning me about some position or other, and he was opposed to me on this position. And I spent twenty minutes trying to convince him. And at some point Louie put his arm around me, and he said”—here Giuliani’s voice assumed a gravelly, mock-Lower East Side timbre—“ ‘Hey, kid, you’re not gonna get this guy’s vote.’ ” Giuliani chuckled at his story. The consensus seemed validated—this was a man wholly out of place in the Republican South. “He’s toast,” the Clemson University political scientist Dave Woodard told the Associated Press that day.

When Giuliani left Columbia, he travelled to Charleston, where a group of prosperous-looking potential donors and political insiders were waiting to see him. A closed-door meeting, in a private room at a restaurant called Magnolia’s, was scheduled for 1 P.M. But at that moment Giuliani’s caravan, including the candidate, in a black S.U.V., and his security team and campaign staff, was creeping through traffic in the busy Market Center of the old city, several blocks away. It was a warm, bright day, and the streets were jammed. Giuliani asked his driver to stop. He got out and started walking toward the restaurant. He was immediately mobbed. “Give her a run for her money, Mayor!” one woman screamed, feeling no need to mention Hillary Clinton by name. A tourist carriage rolled by, and the driver shouted, “Hey, Mayor! I’ve got three votes for you right here!” Giuliani—wearing his signature dark suit, white dress shirt, and tie—signed autographs, posed for pictures, and even knelt on the sidewalk to be photographed with a dog. “That’s our next President, right there,” said Chris Workman, a Myrtle Beach firefighter and former McCain supporter, who had chatted with Giuliani with a dip of snuff bulging from his lip.

At Magnolia’s, Giuliani’s advance people tried to fill time. Barry Wynn, his South Carolina campaign chairman, talked up his candidate’s chances, solicited donations, and took questions from the waiting group seated before him. Someone asked what effect the Christian right would have on Giuliani’s prospects. “Good question,” Wynn replied. He lives in the Greenville-Spartanburg area, the home of Bob Jones University. In South Carolina, another way of saying Christian right is “Greenville Republicans,” the group credited with John McCain’s undoing in his 2000 run against George W. Bush. Wynn’s uncle was Lester Maddox, the axe-handle-wielding Atlanta segregationist who became governor of Georgia. Wynn himself is a former state Party chairman. “I’ve already talked to a lot of people I consider very hard-core social conservatives, part of the religious right, who are supporting Rudy Giuliani,” Wynn said. “I think this idea that someone just blows a whistle and all of a sudden people go heading off in one direction—it doesn’t happen that way. It’s a little bit of a myth that’s created by the press.”

Giuliani finally arrived, and after a few remarks he asked for questions from the gathering. When the subject of public funding of abortion came up, Giuliani did not invoke Louis Lefkowitz. He said he knew that many people would disagree with his position on abortion and other social issues. “But what I ask them to do if they disagree is to take a look at my whole record and see if, in the context of my whole record, I still wouldn’t be the best person to lead the country right now, given the threat we have from terrorism.” Here he paused and added, “And, I think, given the threat we have from Democrats.” The audience laughed. Giuliani went on, “Which is not the same thing.” The audience laughed again. “The Democrats will lead us to more socialism-type solutions to our problems.”

Among those smiling appreciatively at Giuliani’s remarks was retired Rear Admiral William L. Schachte, seated several rows back. Schachte gained notoriety in 2004 as a key figure in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against John Kerry. Schachte had been Kerry’s commanding officer in Vietnam and, in August, 2004, declared that he was on Kerry’s boat the night Kerry saw combat action that brought him his first Purple Heart. Schachte asserted that Kerry had not encountered enemy fire that night. (Kerry and two of the men who served with him have said that Schachte wasn’t on the boat.)

Schachte, a native of Charleston, is a Catholic who describes himself as “a devout Christian.” He has contributed twenty-three hundred dollars to Giuliani, the maximum amount allowed for an individual donor. I asked him what attracted him to Giuliani’s candidacy. “I was in New York before Rudy, after Rudy, and during Rudy,” he said. “And that was the tale of the tape.” Schachte said that he had been lastingly impressed by Giuliani’s governance of the city in the face of a political and media culture that was pointedly unsympathetic. He especially admired the way that Giuliani stood up to hostile reporters at his daily press conferences. “He’s tough,” Schachte said.

Giuliani filed papers to form a Presidential exploratory committee last November 10th, three days after the voter rebuke of Republicans that narrowly placed both houses of Congress under Democratic control. The election seemed a warrant for a candidacy such as Giuliani’s, with its promise of reaching beyond the Republican base; but that promise also contained Giuliani’s greatest peril. He could not be nominated without the base, which holds media-certified moderates like McCain and Senator Chuck Hagel, of Nebraska, in contempt. McCain had been admired in Washington for his ability to find consensus with Democrats, but that was his undoing with the talk-radio wing of the Republican Party. Giuliani’s challenge was to convince Republicans that his social positions should not be held against him any more than the color of his eyes—he was from New York, he couldn’t help it. Giuliani had to demonstrate that he was one of them, and that their enemies were his enemies, too.

The base was willing to be convinced. Giuliani has led the Republican field in the national polls from the start, partly because of his September 11th celebrity but also because of his September 10th celebrity. The common refrain among New Yorkers is that although Giuliani showed leadership on the day of the terrorist attacks, in the preceding months he had been a spent and isolated lame duck, his viability sapped by churlishness and the spectacle of his unattractive personal dramas. But to many in the heartland Giuliani was heroic for what he did in New York before September 11th: his policy prescriptions and, mostly, his taming of the city’s liberal political culture—his famous crackdown on squeegee-men panhandlers, his workfare program, his attacks on controversial museum exhibits (“The idea of . . . so-called works of art in which people are throwing elephant dung at a picture of the Virgin Mary is sick!”), and the like. Speaking before the Alabama legislature this spring, he received a standing ovation, and Governor Bob Riley told him, “One of these days, you have to tell me how you really cleaned up New York.” To conservatives, pre-Giuliani New York was a study in failed liberalism, a city that had surrendered to moral and physical decay, crime, racial hucksterism, and ruinous economic pathologies. Perhaps the most common words that Giuliani heard when he travelled around the country this spring were epithets aimed at his city (“a crime-infested cesspool,” one Southern politician declared), offered without fear of giving offense. Giuliani cheerfully agreed.

Giuliani’s Presidential candidacy made its début in early March, at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, in Washington. The event is a gathering of feverish ideologues, eager for a battle cry, such as that provided by the speaker preceding Giuliani, Wayne LaPierre, of the National Rifle Association, who urged the audience to throw “a new Boston Tea Party.” When George Will introduced Giuliani, he described him as a Margaret Thatcher conservative and someone “for whom pugnacity is a political philosophy.”

The audience greeted Giuliani enthusiastically, but what happened next was puzzling. Giuliani addressed the crowd like a man who hadn’t expected to be called on—or, worse, like a man who felt that he’d done his part by showing up. He paid homage to Ronald Reagan, then spoke disjointedly about his record in New York, the war on terror, and “the second most important thing that I’m worried about”—education. It was thin stuff for this crowd, as Will later groused. “Rudy Giuliani came in and informally meandered a bit,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” “And a lot of the energy seeped out of the room.”

Over the next several weeks, Giuliani campaigned as though he hadn’t yet made the distinction between celebrity and candidacy. After leaving office, in 2002, he started a consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, and embarked on a series of highly lucrative lecture tours, commanding the transportation (Gulfstream IV), the accommodation (a two-bedroom suite, plus four rooms for his entourage), and the remuneration (up to a hundred thousand dollars per appearance) accorded only to the highest tier. Now he seemed bemused by questions that he should have easily anticipated, and his answers made him seem glib, or uninformed. When, on a campaign trip to Florida, he was asked whether he supported the controversial 2005 intervention in the Terri Schiavo case by the President and Congress (then controlled by Republicans), Giuliani couldn’t quite say. “I believe I did,” he responded. “I don’t, I—it’s a while ago and I think I said that I thought every effort should be made to keep her alive. I don’t know that I supported the whole thing to the very end, but I am not sure now.”

This Rudy Giuliani, with his new wealth, his new wife, and his new, natural haircut (replacing the familiar comb-over), seemed plainly unready for the mission he had undertaken. At the first Republican debate, held in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in California, with Nancy Reagan in the audience, the ten Republican candidates were asked whether it would be “a good day for Americans” when Roe v. Wade was overturned. All the respondents answered that it would, except Giuliani, who said, “It would be O.K.” He said that it would “be O.K. also if a strict-constructionist judge viewed it as precedent.”

It was a disastrous performance, and failed to placate critics on the right who had been voicing their disappointment in the candidate for several weeks. “There is an embarrassing ad-hoc-ness, a bush-leagueness to this,” the columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan remarked in the Wall Street Journal. “It’s as if he hasn’t thought it through, as if he’s just deciding everything each day. But by the time you’re running for president you should have decided.”

Those most dismayed were Giuliani’s advocates in the press, who knew that he was failing to make his case to conservatives. In a remarkable put-down, John Podhoretz, a conservative New York Post columnist who had touted Giuliani as the one Presidential candidate who could stop Hillary Clinton, addressed him in an “open letter’’ that questioned his competence. He wrote that “something strange” was going on, and warned, “If you keep winging it this way, you’re going to fly off a cliff.”

Giuliani’s supporters longed for the old Rudy, who could marshal the facts, vanquish his foes, and then, for good measure, berate the “jerks.” That was a moderate the movement could love. ****

Over the years, Giuliani has often spoken of his childhood in Brooklyn, giving special place to a story about the discordance of growing up a Yankees fan in the shadow of Ebbets Field. His father, Harold, a Yankees partisan from East Harlem, once dressed young Rudy in Yankee pinstripes and sent him out to play in the Dodger-mad streets of Brooklyn. Too young to have any say in the matter, Rudy was set upon by the neighborhood toughs, Dodger fans all. A gang of boys seized him, placed a noose around his neck, and threatened to lynch him. (His grandmother intervened.) In one recounting, to John Tierney, of the Times, a dozen years ago, Giuliani said that the incident was his proudest moment, because he refused to renounce his team. “I kept telling them: ‘I am a Yankee fan. I am a Yankee fan. I’m gonna stay a Yankee fan,’ ” he recounted. “To me it was like being a martyr: I’m not gonna give up my religion. You’re not gonna change me.”

Giuliani has said that the experience reveals much about his character: he is, by his account, the stalwart, the lone defender of the cause, even unto martyrdom. At the time that Giuliani spoke with Tierney, he was midway through his first term as mayor, having already achieved a lot, and having already earned the headline “THE HOLY TERROR.” Whatever lesson Harold Giuliani meant to impart to his son, he certainly provided him with a motif for the narrative of his public life.

Harold Giuliani died, of prostate cancer, in 1981, but he continued to assert a commanding presence in his son’s life. Both he and his wife, Helen, were children of Italians who came to America in the great migration wave of the early twentieth century. Rudolph William Louis Giuliani, born in 1944, was brought up within a tight family circle filled with uncles who wore the uniforms of the police and fire departments. Rudy idolized his father, a thick, bespectacled former boxer who managed a tavern on Kingston Avenue, in Flatbush. In his eyes, Harold was a model of strength and courage, uneducated but gifted with a native wisdom. Even now, Giuliani routinely quotes his father about the value of work or the nature of courage, or recites how his father’s words helped him through the crisis of September 11th. Harold wanted his son to be tough, but he also insisted that he be honest, and he harped on the issue so relentlessly—never cheat another man, never steal, never try to bend the law—that Rudy sometimes thought he was overdoing it. He sensed, rightly, that there was some hidden part of his father’s life that might explain it.

Harold had dropped out of school at fifteen, worked briefly as a plumber’s helper, and hung out on the streets, where his violent temper earned him the reputation of a brawler. Harold was arrested for burglary and sentenced to probation by the Children’s Court, and in 1934, at the height of the Depression, he and an accomplice set upon a Borden’s milkman as he was making a morning collection call, robbing him, at gunpoint, of $128.82. The accomplice escaped, but Harold was captured at the scene. He was convicted of third-degree burglary and entered Sing Sing Prison, as inmate No. 89183. Harold Giuliani was paroled after serving nearly sixteen months, and he remained a parolee for the first two years of his marriage. His conviction disqualified him for the draft, and he went to work with his brother-in-law Leo D’Avanzo, who had just bought the tavern on Kingston Avenue. D’Avanzo was a hoodlum with Mob connections, and his establishment was a front for various rackets. Harold, who tended bar, doubled as his enforcer.

But, as Rudy reached school age, Harold began to consider making a break from Brooklyn and his criminal associations there. It was the early nineteen-fifties, an era when families by the thousand availed themselves of Robert Moses’s vast complex of bridges, tunnels, and wide new highways to escape to the suburbs of Long Island and Westchester. In 1951, when Rudy was seven, Harold moved the family to the Long Island town of Garden City South, settling in a neighborhood of neat new houses, near a new Catholic grade school that had been built to accommodate the city exodus. Rudy returned to Brooklyn in high school as a scholarship day student at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High, commuting daily on the Long Island Rail Road.