Charles Hill, a Yale University diplomat-in-residence who served as chief foreign-policy adviser to Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential campaign, has some somewhat undiplomatic things to say about how the campaign was handled in an article in today’s Yale Daily News.
He told the student newspaper that he wished he had taken a role that gave him more say over the failed campaign’s communications strategy. He thinks the campaign was badly hurt by the failure of its communications staff to engage the media and the public.
Mr. Hill said it was a mistake for the campaign to focus on Florida’s January 29 Republican Primary at the expense of the primaries and caucuses held earlier that month in five other states.
“When the media was gearing up and becoming totally focused on the early primaries, they gave Giuliani almost zero coverage because he wasn’t a factor,” Mr. Hill told the newspaper. The exception, he said, was The New York Times, which he called “a never-ceasing slander machine” focused on printing unflattering feature stories based on the former New York mayor’s past.
The Giuliani campaign, which called it quits last week after a poor finish in Florida, also suffered from its failure to fight back, out of a fear of seeming negative, when other Republican candidates attacked.
At least when it comes to foreign affairs, Mr. Hill knows a thing or two about planning strategy. A veteran of the foreign service who served as a top aide to Secretary of State George P. Schultz in the late 1980s, Mr. Hill now teaches at Yale as a distinguished fellow in international-security studies and helped create the university’s “Studies in Grand Strategy” seminar, which puts students in a simulated war room where they are forced to handle simulated international crises.
Mr. Hill said he was drawn to work for the campaign because he thought Mr. Giuliani had a comprehensive view of international affairs, capable of seeing interconnections between different nations and regarding the world as “a system” rather than focusing on specific countries.
