The Haitian issue was more complex. During the Carter years, thousands of Haitians took to the sea in desperate attempts to reach the United States. As their legal status was sorted out, the administration began setting up camps around the nation, most notably in South Florida.
When Reagan took office, Giuliani was handed the problem of caring for the refugees as the courts struggled with their fates. Many were held without due process, and it fell to Giuliani to defend their treatment in the face of activists such as Jackson, who decried the long detentions and demanded they be set free or that conditions be vastly improved.
It also became Giuliani's job to argue the administration's position that many of the Haitians were not political refugees fleeing government repression -- a status that would help ease their legal entry into the United States -- but instead were economic refugees running from poverty, which would give them little standing to argue for permanent U.S. residency.
Giuliani took an extraordinary step: He went to Haiti and met personally with dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier.
Giuliani extracted a promise from Duvalier that the refugees would not be prosecuted if they were returned to the Haiti. Critics called Giuliani naive for trying to negotiate with a dictator.
In a private memo to the U.S. State Department, Giuliani said he was shocked by the dire poverty he saw in Haiti. He urged more U.S. economic aid to the nation, seeing it as "a cost-effective alternative" that might persuade more Haitians to stay home.
It eventually fell to the legal system to decide which refugees were sent home, which were detained further and which were allowed to live freely in the United States.
While at the Justice Department, Giuliani's workday would often drag late into the Washington evening, and he often slogged home to his Capitol Hill apartment with an armload of paperwork.
He buried his father and proposed to the woman who became his second wife. His hair began to thin, and he combed it over at a downward slant. He was young to be in such a high position, yet clearly trying to look even younger.
He seemed to carefully nurture his public persona. When convicted spy Christopher Boyce of Los Angeles was caught after a prison break, Giuliani became enraged that the marshals had not informed him so that he could announce it on TV.
"I am very disturbed," he complained in a letter to William E. Hall, the top marshal in Washington.
