As a result, Giuliani today faces a political establishment that makes Tammany Hall look like a mom-and-pop operation. During Tammany's heyday the city collected no taxes on income or sales (the first sales tax was a "temporary" measure of La Guardia's), so there was limited revenue available. Giuliani inherited a city with high taxes supporting America's only municipal welfare state: one of every six residents on welfare, one of every five jobs in the public sector. The city is by far the leading landlord and employer, and it finances legions of private workers providing social services - one of New York's few growth industries the past decade. Unlike Tammany's pols, today's establishment can collect its money without breaking laws. In fact, it commands the moral high ground, at least among a certain intellectual elite in Manhattan. Almost any reform of Fiorello Hall can be denounced as an attack on the poor.

"The biggest and largest special interest group in the city," Giuliani says, "is the intellectual establishment. New York is a great intellectual center that has become one of the most backward parts of America - unwilling to think a new thought. I absolutely love, and maybe I overdo this a little, to suggest something new and then watch the reaction to it. Sometimes I'm not even sure we should do it, but I love to watch the reaction from the so-called intellectuals. The thinking establishment goes into convulsions over the idea that we could ask people on welfare to work, or that we should fingerprint them to prevent fraud. It's almost as if a secular religion had developed in which these are the things that you must believe to be considered an educated, intelligent ant moral person."

Giuliani preaches less government and more self-reliance, not just for individuals but for cities -what he called, in a speech earlier this year in Washington, a new urban agenda. The speech repudiated a liberal tradition dating to La Guardia and the New Deal. It might have been headlined "RUDY TO FEDS: DROP DEAD," although Giuliani put it more diplomatically: "Set us free." He argued that New York should stop begging to be rescued by the Federal and state governments, whose programs waste money and impose pointless regulations. Instead of going to Washington and Albany with sad stories and a tin cup, New York should keep its tax dollars and solve its own problems. It should adopt the proposals that Giuliani in his typical workaholic fashion, devised before the 1993 campaign by interviewing hundreds of experts and by studying reinventing government proposals from the Manhattan Institute. His vision is partly technocratic - Giuliani loves to recite statistics and three- point plans - but it is also intensely moralistic.

Giuliani, who once planned to be a priest, shares La Guardia's conviction that there is a true path, that the world is divided into Us and Them, that the city's savior should be guided less by political ideology than by personal virtue. He understands the sentiment that La Guardia expressed to a writer for The New York Times Magazine in 1934, in an article headlined "A Full Day on the Job With the Mayor." As the original Holy Terror denounced the "cancer in the very heart of the city," he had no doubts about his own saintliness. "I am committing political suicide," he said, grandly and inaccurately. "If I succeed in making this city a better place in which to live, I shall feel that the result justified the sacrifice."

9 AM. Arriving at Brooklyn Borough Hall, Giuliani stops in for a meeting with Howard Golden, the Borough President, and borrows three paper clips to secure a trouser cuff that has come loose. They go into the grand courtroom for the cabinet meeting at which several dozen commissioners and officials listen to a list of demands from the Borough President, exhortations from Giuliani ant a speech from Randy Mastro, the Mayor's chief of staff. Mastro begins with a reference to a story in the Times about Giuliani's recent penchant for describing his own courage in making decisions.

"I want to tell a story about another example of this Mayor's courage," Mastro says. "That's my word, not The New York Times'." Mastro, who prosecuted organized crimes under Giuliani at the United States Attorney's office, has been up all night dealing with the Fulton Fish Market. Some workers, angry at a new company brought in to unload fish at the wholesale market, had staged a wildcat strike earlier in the week, whereupon Giuliani went before the television cameras and threatened to shut down the entire market. "I was never prouder of this administration than at that moment," Mastro, says, reporting that the threat has worked. The market was open all night for the usual wholesale deliveries of fish. "Organized crime has been prevalent in the Fulton Fish Market for 70 years, and it's not going to go away overnight," Mastro concludes. "But this Mayor has the guts and the courage to stay the course."

The commissioners applaud vigorously. Loyalty is vital in this administration. Last year, when newspapers were quoting unnamed commissioners complaining about budget cuts, all the commissioners were summoned to City Hall by Peter Powers, Giuliani's First Deputy Mayor as well as a close friend since high school "I told the commissioners," Powers would later recall, "how we discovered after the election that David Dinkins had hidden the deficit so it was three times worse than what we'd thought - but I never heard Rudy once complain that the money ran dry. He took the hand that was dealt. I said to them: You can't complain either. You've got to lead by example. You can't go back to your deputy and complain, because then your deputy will complain to his or her deputy, and it will get out in the press. If it's too hard for you to make these cuts, tell me privately and we'll part friends. If you want to stay on board, you can't criticize the Mayor.' I was upset. They all applauded, and after that the complaining stopped."

The result, of course, has been a lot of complaining from other people. Journalists say they've never seen such a secretive administration - commissioners have become leery of releasing routine information or of even speaking to reporters (especially those deemed enemies) without clearance from the Mayor's office.

"It's an outrage to censor his commissioners that way," says the former Mayor Edward I. Koch, who likes to tell of his own introduction to Giuliani's autocracy. It was shortly after he criticized Giuliani for having police remove candidates' signs from public property during last year's gubernatorial campaign. "Rudy called me and told me I was wrong, that it's illegal to put signs on poles. I started to say, 'I know it's illegal' and he said, 'Don't interrupt me!' So I took the phone, cradled it on my shoulder and read the newspaper while he talked. When he finished, I said, 'Mayor, I know it's illegal' because I passed that law.' I was trying to tell him that there's another way to enforce it, but he didn't want to listen. It was the first time I realized how thin-skinned Rudy is."

'It was amazing to me that people thought the squeegee problem wasn't or couldn't be solved,' Giuliani says. 'A civilized society can't let people go around the streets intimidating other people.'

Even a few Giuliani insiders have complained, although almost never on the record, and even then generally not until they've gone elsewhere. "It's a cult of personality around the great leader," one former aide says. "They don't want anyone to question his decision making. All they understand is intimidation. Rudy loves to shut you down, cut you to the quick. If he wants your opinion, he'll beat it out of you."

Members of the inner circle seem genuinely puzzled at such criticism. Most of them will talk about Giuliani for hours, on or off the record, without uttering a discouraging word - which, of course, helps explain why they're still in the inner circle. They insist he's reasonable and open to other opinions until he makes a decision. "Once a decision is made he won't change it," says Richard Schwartz, the senior adviser to the Mayor. "People call that stubbornness, but it's better than the alternative. You're willing to put in all the work that radical reform requires because you know he wont abandon you when it gets controversial With a regular politician you wouldn't bother trying. We could never have tone welfare reform if the Mayor had been intimidated by screaming advocates and editorial writers." Aides explain their loyalty as both a political necessity - even a hint of disunity would doom their assault on the Democratic establishment - and as a personal obligation to him. They like to tell of the small favors he did them and the hours he spent visiting them in the hospital. The word "family" is used a lot.

At this morning's meeting the paterfamilias has good tidings for everyone. Publicly, Giuliani remained neutral on a commission's report that week recommending pay raises for himself and senior officials, but here behind closed doors he announces that he'll come out shortly in favor of salary increases. 'You deserve it," he tells his cabinet. This is not going to be easy to explain to the public - officials with six-figure salaries and city cars getting pay raises while subway riders are getting a 25-cent fare increase. Golden, the veteran Brooklyn Democrat, leans over to shake Giuliani's hand and announce, "This is a brave man." Everyone applauds again.

10:40. A.M. After a brief press conference outside the cabinet meeting Giuliani rides into Manhattan with his communications director, Cristyne Lategano. She feigns disappointment that the news conference didn't deal with a hot topic that week, Giuliani's decision to exclude Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat from the upcoming dinner and concert for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. "I'm surprised you didn't talk about Castro," Lategano says jokingly. "Your position there - you haven't enunciated it clearly enough." Giuliani, who has been happily excoriating the Cuban dictator at every public opportunity, laughs and marvels at New Yorker's who like Castro. "Maybe only in New York City can you actually find people who have a romantic fascination with people who hate their country," he reflects. "It's like having a romantic fascination with someone who hates your family."

11:10 A.M. Reaching City Hall, he ducks into his office, then heads upstairs to give awards and praise to city employees packed into the public hearing chamber. "New York City," he reminds everyone, "is the best city in the world." Then back to the van for a ride to midtown. On the way he reminisces about his father: "He gave me the best definition of courage and bravery that I ever heard. I asked him right before he died if he was ever afraid. He said he was always afraid-- 'If you're not afraid, you're not courageous, you're just crazy.' He said the real test is to overcome it, to not let it stop you from doing the things that you think you should do."

Giuliani's father gave him an exceptional opportunity to learn this skill at an early age. The father, a Manhattanite exiled to his wife's Brooklyn neighborhood, was a Yankee fan. The son had no particular allegiance until the day his father dressed him in a Yankee uniform and sent him out to play in the heart of Dodger territory. "The first thing they did was throw me in the mud," Giuliani recounted during a campaign commercial in 1993 that briefly described his travails as the only Yankee fan in Brooklyn. But the full story is much better: "One day a group of four or five children put a noose around my neck and tried to hang me on a tree. My grandmother saw this and started yelling and they stopped. But my proudest moment was I didn't renounce the Yankees. I kept telling them: 'I am a Yankee fan. I am a Yankee fan. I'm gonna stay a Yankee fan.' All of our family in that four-block area were Dodger fans, so this was a constant fight for me - go out and acquire statistics to prove that the Yankees were better than the Dodgers. The most wonderful thing was that the last time they played in the World Series, in 1956, the Yankees won - which I used for 10 years to totally destroy all my Dodger relatives. To my father, it was a joke. Put a Yankee uniform on the kid and it'll irritate all my friends and relatives and it'll be fun. But to me it was like being a martyr: I'm not gonna give up my religion. You're not gonna change me."

12:30 P.M. After a speech to maritime union leaders, Giuliani heads downtown to his inevitable lunch on the road - pizza, today at John's on Bleecker Street. On the way, in between his phone calls to aides, Lategano tells him of a letter in The Times that morning from a restaurant owner supporting the new anti-smoking law. "That's going to pass away within six months," Giuliani says, referring to the controversy about the law. "If you regulate people's behavior somewhat differently, they'll respond to it."

1:45 P.M. Back in his office, Giuliani poses for photos with six visiting teen-agers from Israel and makes small talk. ("Tel Aviv, that's a teeming city.") Joseph Verner Reed, an under secretary general at the United Nations, comes into lobby him to attend the world leaders' speeches at the United Nations on Sunday.

"I have the two best seats in the house for you," Reed says. "You can listen to President Clinton, and when Castro gets up to speak you can walk out."

"I can bang my shoe," Giuliani says. "I'll bring my spikes."

2 P.M. Time for the daily ritual in the Blue Room, which is crammed with reporters and 17 television cameras. "It's like going into the arena," Giuliani says. "I look forward to it." Today the reporters want to know once again why he is excluding Castro and Arafat.

"Some people," a reporter says, "think that if the party is financed by public money, then you have no right to exclude people, including Castro."

"Well," Giuliani replies, "some people think that, because you say that, but you're wrong."

"Why?"

"Why? Because you don't bother to check your facts, which is a very irresponsible thing to do."

"I'm asking you the--."

"Get your facts right in the premise of your question."

"I'm asking you to get the facts."

"No, you're not," Giuliani says, glaring at the reporter. "You asked the question, 'Some people think that' - the fact is, it is not funded by public dollars. The fact is that party is funded by private dollars."

Some of the foreign correspondents here for the celebrations appear startled to see the Mayor lashing out at a mild-mannered reporter, but the regular press corps is nonchalant. It's used to much worse. Giuliani came into office suspicious of the media (particularly stalwarts of the liberal establishment, like The Times and The New Yorker, that had supported Dinkins), and the relationship quickly deteriorated to what reporters call a historic low at City Hall. Many reporters blame the bad relations on his communications director whom they consider needlessly hostile; others say the real problem is that Lategano is doing exactly what Giuliani wants. There are members of Giuliani's inner circle who complain privately that the 30-year-old Lategano is too inexperienced. One of them says: "Rudy needs someone who can get along with reporters and protect him from his own instinct to retaliate when he's angry. He needs someone to say, 'Don't worry, I'll handle this - and then let things blow over. Instead she just agrees with him and even eggs him on."

John Miller, the former spokesman for the Police Department who quit in a huff after the Mayor's office ordered him to reduce the size of his staff, says the Mayor is obsessed with controlling press coverage "I couldn't figure out where he and Cristyne found the time to get mad about every little detail of the way he was covered," Miller says. "All it did was make the press more hostile and produce worse coverage. Substantively, this Mayor has had one triumph after another, but his public image is suffering because he keeps stabbing himself in the eye with an ice pick."

5:10 P.M. After two hours of telephone calls and meetings in his office, Giuliani rides to the headquarters of the United Jewish Appeal. He gets a standing ovation and is introduced as the man with courage who "has changed the face of the city in two years." He outlines the three goals he has never stopped talking about since the start of the 1993 campaign: safer streets, more jobs, better schools. He reminds everyone of the disaster he inherited, a city that had lost 400,000 jobs in the previous four years.

"Jobs were increasing in the rest of America, and jobs were fleeing New York in numbers that approached the Great Depression," he says. He blames the city's bloated government and its many enterprises: vast real-estate holdings, 500 gas stations 17 hospitals, even radio and television stations. "The other governments that owned radio and television stations were on the other side of the Iron Curtain The anomaly of this never occurred to anyone." He tells how the welfare rolls had grown from 850,000 to 1.2 million.

"A city of 7.5 million cannot sustain a million people on welfare," he says. "You can't do it from the point of view of the amount of misery and hopelessness that it creates among a million people, and you can't sustain it because the number of people supporting the people on welfare keeps diminishing."

The numbers have been declining since his administration began verifying applicants' addresses, fingerprinting them and requiring able-bodied single adults to work for the city. Giuliani gets his biggest round of applause when he moralizes about the workfare program. "In exchange for this benefit you have an obligation to give something back," he says. "That should be true for poor people, middle-class people, rich people. That's part of the social contract that we were losing in this city."

6:20 PM. Shaking hands as he walks along, Giuliani leads his entourage down Park Avenue, pausing to look at a tie in a store window. "It's ridiculous to pay $80 for a tie. I could find the same thing for $20." At the Waldorf-Astoria he changes into white tie and tails for the Alfred E. Smith political dinner. At the reception Gov. George Pataki greets him with what looks like sincere pleasure. Giuliani sees Koch and asks him how he's doing.

"I'm doing terrific, and so you are you!" Koch replies, eyeing Giuliani playfully. "And you do have courage!"

11 PM. After dashing from the dinner to a live interview on the 10 o'clock news at WPIX-TV, Giuliani heads home, sounding unaccountably energetic for a 51-year-old man who has just worked 15 straight hours. He explains that he often likes to write at this time of night. "Today has been a fairly easy day," he says when he gets out at Gracie Mansion. "I'm not tired. I'll be up for another two hours."

'Just as in Eastern Europe, there's a building sense in the minority community that the principles enforced by the so-called leadership aren't going anywhere - the battle over more entitlements and more welfare and more government solutions,' Giuliani says.