Forty-nine percent of registered voters nationwide would like to see former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani seek the presidency in 2008, and 51 percent would like to see Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., run for the White House, according to a survey released by Marist College in May. For anyone who has read Floyd Abrams’ recently released memoir, “Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment,” these poll figures are frightening.

Among the biographical similarities between Giuliani and McCain: both men are divorcees and recent prostate cancer survivors; both men list Theodore Roosevelt as their role model; and—most significantly—both men have displayed an appalling disregard for the First Amendment’s free-speech guarantee.

It’s for the last reason that they both figure prominently in Abrams’ memoir, which recounts the author’s career as a high-profile First Amendment lawyer.

LIFE AND TIMES

Abrams rose to national prominence as an attorney for the New York Times in the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, in which the Nixon administration sought to block the Gray Lady from printing a classified report on the Vietnam War. The Times won the case—in part, according to Abrams, because Nixon’s lawyer, Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, performed “lamely” in front of the Supreme Court. (Griswold, a former Harvard Law School dean, will go down in the history books for being on the wrong side of the high court’s 6-to-3 landmark decision. But here on campus, he will be forever known as the namesake of the supremely ugly gray brick office building northwest of the Science Center.)

RED-NOSED RUDOLPH

From the Pentagon Papers victory, Abrams traces the trajectory of his own career, which was marked by victories defending broadcasters and print journalists in several landmark libel lawsuits. Then, on page 188, Giuliani enters Abrams’ narrative, and the plot thickens.

“When recent college graduates were polled late in 2002 about whom they wished to emulate most in the world, their first two choices were their mothers and their fathers,” Abrams writes. “The third was Rudolph Giuliani.” But, the author continues, “I knew a different Giuliani…a Giuliani deeply contemptuous of the First Amendment.”

In some instances, Giuliani behaved like a Third World despot, barring political opponents from staging public protests. In other cases, the mayor’s behavior was, according to Abrams, simply “bizarre.” In 1997, the weekly magazine New York placed ads on city buses proclaiming—in jest—that the glossy periodical was “probably the only good thing in New York that Rudy hasn’t taken credit for.” Giuliani tried—and failed—to get a court to stop the magazine’s publicity campaign. The mayor argued that the ads violated his “privacy rights.”

Most notoriously, Giuliani blasted the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999 for exhibiting a painting entitled “The Holy Virgin Mary” that used elephant dung and pornographic images as compositional elements. Of course, almost everyone agrees that if the museum were a private entity it would have the right to display whatever it wanted. But Giuliani argued that the city could cut off public funding to the museum in response to offensive exhibits. “The city should not have to pay for sick stuff,” he told reporters at the time.

Maybe he’s right, but Supreme Court precedent unambiguously prohibits government agencies from withholding subsidies to groups in retaliation for the expression of controversial ideas. Abrams represented the museum as it fought to forestall Giuliani’s funding cuts, and federal courts ruled against the mayor. “I still believe that Giuliani knew perfectly well that First Amendment law made his conduct lawless,” Abrams writes. “He was, after all, a graduate of Harvard Law School,” Abrams notes on page 224. This is not true: Giuliani earned his J.D. from New York University in 1968. Yet Abrams’ error here is a rare deviation from an otherwise carefully constructed account.

THE MARK OF MCCAIN

When Giuliani sought to rein in free expression in Brooklyn, he lost—and was humiliated. When McCain sought to curb free speech nationwide, he won—and was lionized.

In 2002, Congress passed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act by wide margins: 60-40 in the Senate, and 240-189 in the House. President Bush signed the act into law that same year. In other words, McCain was not alone in steamrollering the First Amendment. But the fact that the Arizona senator is a charismatic figure who convinced others to join him in his attack on free speech is, if anything, even more unnerving.

Under McCain-Feingold’s provisions, for a 60-day period before any federal general election—or a 30-day window before a primary—ads paid for by unions, corporations, and non-profit groups cannot even mention the name of a candidate for office within the area where the candidate is running. For instance, if McCain seeks the White House in 2008, then the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the ad restriction, would not be able to run a radio spot criticizing the McCain-Feingold law by name in the month before each state’s presidential primary.