New York, NY, May 11, 2000. New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's diagnosis of prostate cancer has torn through his public persona. Some of Mr. Giulian's advisors are trying to pull the spotlight off the cancer and push Mr. Giuliani back into the political fray.
Rudy's firt task, obviously, as he himself keeps saying, is to find the best treatment, take it and begin healing and recovery. He says he has not yet decided whether to withdraw from the Senate race, in which he is pitted against Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Yet Giuliani has taken to time (or had it thrust it upon him) to announce that he is seeking a separation from his wife of 16 years, Donna Hanover.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
"Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's budget, unveiled last month as he was being tested for prostate cancer, would eliminate a $750,000 program that provides free screenings for the disease for uninsured New Yorkers."Robert Polner, Newsday
Giuliani's openness about the cancer was forced upon him when a reporter saw him at the hospital with another woman. Ms. Hanover, a TV anchor and movie actor who graduated from Stanford University and Columbia School of Journalism, was not with him. His "very good friend" Ms. Judith Nathan, a nurse and executive of a pharmaceutical company, was.
So the "wrong" woman's support for this man while he went through the grueling process of prostate cancer diagnosis blew the lid off the politician's broken marriage.
If cancer wasn't in it, Mr. Giuliani's story would be soap opera. A man, his estranged wife, his new "very good friend" and an old resentment. "For several years, it was difficult to participate in Rudy's public life," Ms. Hanover said yesterday, "because of his relationship with one staff member." A press secretary said Ms. Hanover was referring to former City Hall communications director Cristyne F. Lategano. Ms. Lategano, since married, now runs the tourism bureau. Her staff say she does a great job.
Ms. Hanover had been criticized by conservatives for dropping "Giuliani" from her name during the marriage. A few weeks ago, she accepted a role in the off-Broadway feminist play The Vagina Monologues. Steam frothed up like cappuccino. With the news of her husband's prostate cancer in the media, she bowed out of rehearsals.
Now, instead of printing diagrams of the prostate or explaining Gleason score, staging and treatment options -- which might help many men -- the press is blowing up photos of the St. Patrick's Day Parade and other events attended by the Mayor to show a blurry Ms. Nathan at his shoulder. Ms. Nathan and her daughter and their neighbors are under press siege.
Any man diagnosed with prostate cancer needs all the love and passion he can keep. Mr. Giuliani is doing right to deal head-on with this crisis in his emotional, sexual and family life. We are not laughing at his problems with women. But as he says, he has a lot of medical decisions still to make. Why distract himself by announcing marriage separation at a press conference now?
Meanwhile, in Newsday Robert Polner reports that "Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's budget, unveiled last month as he was being tested for prostate cancer, would eliminate a $750,000 program that provides free screenings for the disease for uninsured New Yorkers."
This brings up how other men figure in the worst part of the Giuliani drama -- men who have no health insurance, men who are at raised risk for prostate cancer, men in some instances killed before they were old enough to hear about prostate cancer and the PSA test.
As Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani has stood up for the police during three tragedies -- the Abner Louima case, the Amadou Diallo case, and the Patrick M. Dorismond case. All involved brutal police assaults on young black male immigrant citizens.
Hillary Clinton, not wanting to look insensitive -- and probably stunned to see her rival candidate unravelling -- is reported to have stopped talking about Giuliani's reaction to the police shooting of Patrick Dorismond.
The Louima case led to the jailing of a policeman for ramming a broomstick into the rectum of a man who was wrongly arrest while hailing a cab to get away from a sidewalk mellee. Publicly, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani seemed detached from assault's horrific brutality. Either he felt nothing or he went into denial or he put on a stone hatchet face for political reasons.
Some say they hate the Mayor's politics but care about him as an individual who is dealing with prostate cancer. But cancer is almost always more than a purely personal matter. In view of Giuliani's hard-boiled attitudes toward these poor, black men's traumas, his display of a soft-center when he summoned the press and invited the city to show sensitivity toward his personal health crisis (and toward his marriage breakup and his girl-friend) takes some nerve.
This degree of nerve -- and hope -- he could put to tremendous effect by way of civic, state, and national action campaigns aimed at improving prostate cancer outcomes for other men.
Mr. Giuliani lives a high stress life. On top of his father's death from the disease, he fits one special risk pattern for prostate cancer among white men -- high status plus separation or divorce. That finding, from Norway, sits at an angle to a broader pattern. In the USA and worldwide, the single highest risk factor for prostate cancer, for late diagnosis and and for poor treatment outcome is to be an African-American man.
A suggestion. The mayor and, too, his police chief Howard Safir have abysmal ratings in the African-American community. Both of them have prostate cancer. Both of them will remember every detail of their diagnosis. They will remember how they sought the best care for best hope for their personal survival. How afraid they were. How determined they were, and are, to beat the cancer. Now what will they do with all that? Make ads for Viagra? Talk to their friends?
Why not take it to Harlem, to the Bronx, to Flatbush ... to the statehouse in Albany. To Washington. Even to Haiti. Make a difference.
For a start, Mr. Giuliani can undo this slashing of a program to screen the uninsured. But this goes far beyond the PSA test. What good is a PSA test without health insurance to pay for surgery, radiation and/or drugs to treat cancer if it is found?
Mr. Giuliani could work with African Americans including Virgil Simons, who is leading a global fight against prostate cancer from New Jersey. He could work with other leaders in the African-American community.
Without a doubt, prostate cancer survivors and women and men and children who love them generally wish Mr. Giuliani well. Most of them will wish him good counsel, good lawyers, lots of love, and privacy.
That said, the problem of other men dying of prostate cancer is a public issue calling out for combative drive mixed with sensitivity. With the power Giuliani has over the fates of other men, we urge him in this direction. Rudy, you saw it happen to your father. Right here in the capital of the world, some men still never get to see a doctor before the cancer gets out of the capsule and into nodes and bones. You can make a difference like no one else.
Related
Mayor Rudy Giuliani Has Prostate Cancer . . . and Memories of His Father April 27, 2000
Mayor Giuliani's Entourage Jumps on the Bandwagon April 28, 2000.
PETA Picks on Rudy Giuliani - That Sucks August 27, 2000.
PETA apologizes to Rudy Giuliani, but still doesn't get it. Sept 2, 2000.
