Rudy Giuliani is in the hospital in critical condition. He is eighty-one years old. The news arrived Saturday morning, and it arrived the way news about a person who has been in public life for fifty years arrives — with an instant flood of memory and argument, because the life has been large enough to contain genuine contradictions.

There is the Rudy Giuliani who prosecuted the Five Families and dismantled the infrastructure of organized crime in New York in the 1980s, using legal theories that nobody had tried before and winning convictions that reshaped the city’s economy and its relationship with criminal enterprise. There is the Rudy Giuliani who was elected mayor of New York City in 1993 on a law and order platform and oversaw a genuine reduction in crime that changed the lived experience of the city for millions of people, regardless of the debates about the methods or the credit.

There is the Rudy Giuliani who stood at the center of the city on September 11 and provided a kind of calm leadership that the moment required, who became for a period of years the most admired politician in America, whose approval ratings reached places that no mayor’s approval ratings typically go. And there is the Rudy Giuliani who spent the final years of his public life making claims in hotel ballrooms and parking lots and on television that could not survive contact with evidence, who was disbarred, who lost a defamation judgment for more money than he had, who lost the house in Palm Beach, who lost the apartment in New York, who ended up relying on supporters to cover his legal bills.

The distance between those two Giulianis is the distance American ambition can travel. He was not the only person to make that journey — from the top of the American story to somewhere much harder to describe — but he made it more publicly and more completely than almost anyone in recent memory. The same qualities that made him effective — the certainty, the aggression, the refusal to acknowledge limits — drove both the ascent and the fall.

America produces people like this. It rewards the qualities that later destroy them. It watches the arc from a distance and argues about which part of it was real. Giuliani is in the hospital. The argument will continue regardless of what happens next.

Independent reporting. Real stories. No agenda but truth.