Rudolph Giuliani: The man they are calling 'Churchill in a Yankees cap'

The Mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, has shown few symptoms of post-traumatic distress. At least not so far. He has not had trouble concentrating, for instance, which is one of the classic first signs of emotional disturbance after a shock. His focus on bandaging his wounded city has been unwavering. But the man Jacques Chirac last week called "Rudy the Rock" will surely need some counselling soon.

His experience of the past few days has been shattering. He has seen his beloved city brutalised. He has witnessed death at close hand and barely escaped it himself. Among those who did perish in the suicide attacks on the twin towers were several leaders from the fire department, all close friends. He has also – though this seems almost flippant during times of such anguish – seen himself transformed overnight from lame duck has-been into international superstar and universal hero.

On that awful Tuesday, residents of the city were due to vote in primaries to choose which candidates would compete in November to succeed Giuliani, 57, as mayor. His second four-year stint expires at the end of the year, and the law forbids him from seeking a third successive term. The voting would have marked the beginning of the end of the Giuliani era. How could he have known as he rose that morning that he had yet to live his finest hour in Gotham?

The Churchillian echo is apposite. Among the myriad compliments paid to him since the disaster was one in the Washington Post. Giuliani is "Winston Churchill in a Yankees cap". The mayor himself quoted Churchill at a ceremony to promote firemen to fill the ranks of fallen comrades. "Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it's the quality which guarantees all others." Churchill was a wartime leader. Arguably, Giuliani is proving himself a wartime leader, too.

He almost wasn't even a politician. The grandson of Italian immigrants and an only child, he nearly succumbed at 17 to an urge to enter a seminary and pursue the priesthood. His parents, Harold and Helen, though devout, argued against the move in favour of him producing grandchildren. So he went to Manhattan College in the Bronx instead and later to law school.

After graduating in 1968 from the New York University Law School, Giuliani married a second cousin, Regina Perrugi. He pursued his legal ambitions clerking at first for a prominent judge, Lloyd MacMahon, who helped him avoid service in Vietnam and finally steered him into a job as an assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York. It was in 1981, after he had spent several years in a private law firm in Manhattan, that Giuliani hit the big time, taking the number three spot in the Justice Department when Ronald Reagan became president. He was in charge of all US attorneys as well drug enforcement, immigration and prisons. During that period, however, the marriage to Perrugi crumbled and was eventually annulled. He married Donna Hanover, a former Miami newscaster, in April 1984. To the surprise of many, meanwhile, Giuliani had returned to become the US attorney in New York. He had been the boss of every US prosecutor. But he wanted to do the job himself in America's largest and most visible city. Among his early, high-profile targets was Ivan Boesky, the stock manipulator and the Colombo crime family.

In those years, Giuliani forged for himself a reputation as a ruthless enforcer of the law and defender of decency, that has served him handsomely ever since. It helped him especially in 1993 when he made his second run at becoming mayor of New York. Fed up with sinking morale and soaring crime, the overwhelmingly Democrat city chose him, even though he was – still is – a Republican, to replace outgoing David Dinkins. They prayed he would take the city by its collar and shake some sense into it.

This he proceeded to do. He drove out the undesirables, the prostitutes and the pimps from Times Square (which now shimmers in all its Disneyfied glory), the squeegee men from the street crossings and the drug dealers and petty criminals. He became the prophet of zero-tolerance policing, also known as the broken-window approach. If there is a single pane gone in a building, you had better fix it quick before a spiral of decline sets in. Apprehend the man who jumps the turnstile in the subway and you may connect him to far more serious unsolved crimes. Crime rates, including the number of murders, went into free-fall. Giuliani breezed through re-election in 1997.

He has also been lucky. His tenure in Gracie Mansion, the mayor's Upper East Side residence, coincided with a slump in crime in all major US cities. It was also a period of unprecedented economic prosperity. Money poured into the city's coffers from a booming Wall Street and an invasion of tourists. But in any event, the world celebrated the city's renaissance. No one has been more certain, however, that the applause should be all his than Giuliani himself. New York magazine cheekily noted this with a campaign of posters on the city's buses back in 1977 describing itself as "possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for". The mayor's response was telling. Deprived of a sense of humour, he forced the transit authority to remove the posters. That prompted the magazine's publishers to sue for the protection of free speech. (They won.)

The second Giuliani term has been more patchy. Voters were turned off when last year he told reporters that his marriage to Hanover, with whom he has two children, Caroline, 11, and Andrew, 15, was over before bothering to tell her of his decision. His liaison with Judith Nathan, who works for a medical philanthropic group, has become a tabloid soap opera. Recently, the mayor moved out of Gracie Mansion, because the courts refused to let him have Ms Nathan over while his wife and children were under the same roof. (Hanover is refusing to leave.)

Months of dithering over the Senate contest last year also damaged him. He finally dropped out in the spring after finding that he had curable prostate cancer. (He is being treated) Two terrible episodes of police abuse – one involving the shooting death of an innocent, unarmed African immigrant by 41 officers – also stoked criticism that Giuliani had allowed his zeal for law enforcement to get in the way of human rights.

None of that matters now. Not even his fiercest critics have faulted his response to the Trade Centre cataclysm. When the South Tower crumbled, Giuliani was barely a block away, in an emergency command post set up minutes before. The avalanche of debris barred his way out and flattened the building over the street. He was led, choking and blinded, through a basement tunnel to a back exit on to a street buried under a foot of ash. He has not stopped moving since. He has kept the city up to date on the rescue operation and death tolls. He has been tour guide at ground zero to visiting dignitaries. He has balanced expressions of grief and empathy with exhortations to New York to rebuild itself.

When they see Giuliani now, New Yorkers cheer. Some chant: "Four more years!" State laws could be repealed to allow him to cancel elections and stay on as mayor after all. Unless he decides to go for a grander prize. That may not extend quite as far as running for president, but almost anything else is now in his grasp.

He has, as they say, had a good war before the real one has even started.