By Lloyd Grove
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. … 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.
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And while “I (Bruce Nathan) maintained my Jewish heritage,” Bruce alleged that “my wife thought nothing of physically and mentally abusing me within (adopted daughter) Whitney’s earshot.” When he couldn’t afford something, she referred to him as “Jew boy” and other slurs. Mike McKeon, Judith’s campaign press secretary, dismisses the “ridiculous” fifteen-year-old allegation. “Anti-Semites don’t marry Jews.”
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In his best-selling 2002 autobiography, Leadership, Giuliani wrote that his future wife had been an effective mayoral adviser after 9/11 because she “had 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.” He added that he “put her to work helping me organize the hospitals” to treat the injured from ground zero. His campaign Website, meanwhile, notes, “In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Mrs. Giuliani coordinated the efforts at the Family Assistance Center on Pier 94.”
But concerning Judith’s participation in the city’s response to 9/11, public-health and security consultant Jerry Hauer takes exception to the Giuliani campaign’s assertions. Hauer—a nationally known bioterrorism expert who was Rudy’s first director of the newly created Office of Emergency Management—minced no words about the claim that the mayor’s then-girlfriend “coordinated the efforts at the Family Assistance Center on Pier 94.”
“That is simply a lie,” Hauer tells me. “But Rudy’s not shy about rewriting history when it suits him.”
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