WASHINGTON — In the winter of 1981, with President Reagan freshly moved in to the White House, the nation's newly appointed attorney general summoned a young man from Manhattan to interview for a hugely important job, the No. 3 slot in the Justice Department.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former assistant prosecutor who had taken on organized crime in New York, was only 36 and had only recently become a Republican. But he was bursting with energy and ideas.
Kenneth W. Starr sat quietly on a couch as Giuliani made his pitch to Atty. Gen. William French Smith and his team, telling them that Justice should be more proactive, more eager to knock the heads off of crooks. He kept talking about "vigor, vigor, vigor."
"He was mashing on the accelerator," said Starr, then a counselor to Smith. "They were wowed."
Years before he would become the swaggering, crime-busting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, before he would serve two terms as mayor and help lead New York through its darkest day, Giuliani already was demonstrating a florid sense of self, a high degree of self-confidence and a daring to pull the levers of bureaucratic power.
When police chiefs, including Los Angeles' Daryl F. Gates, challenged Giuliani's plan to make the Drug Enforcement Agency part of the FBI, he fought back. When civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, criticized the government's treatment of a wave of Haitian refugees, he aggressively defended the administration's policies.
Giuliani often appeared hungry for the spotlight, at times flying off at subordinates if he did not get the publicity he relished. He sometimes would brush past department guidelines, using the power of his office, in one instance, to help friends obtain a co-op apartment in Manhattan.
The associate attorney general slot has historically been filled by an anonymous government servant toiling with little public notice. But Giuliani made much more of the position: By solidifying his early leadership style, it set him on a course on which, today, he is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
The energy and brashness that Smith saw in Giuliani was quickly put to use, both inside and outside the department.
His two years at Justice were marked by two major challenges: the Reagan administration's pledge to fight an alarming increase in illegal drug activity, and its efforts to house, feed and clothe thousands of Haitians fleeing to U.S. shores. In typical Giuliani fashion, he tackled both head-on. Both brought mixed results.
