Our header picture is of Deputy Mayor Peter J. Powers, left, with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in 1994, The credit goes to James Estrin of The New York Times

Who was Powers?

Peter J. Powers, a high school friend whom Rudolph W. Giuliani recruited to impose order on his chaotic novice mayoral campaign and later installed as his even-tempered alter ego to manage New York City’s government, died on Thursday in the Bronx at Calvary Hospital Hospice.  He was 72.  The cause was complications of lung cancer, according to his lifelong friend Mr. Giuliani.

“I never had a brother,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview this week discussing his long-time associate and friend.. “Peter was my brother.”

Before being hired to manage Mr. Giuliani’s 1989 mayoral race, Mr. Powers, a tax lawyer, had been involved in a college campaign effort for senior class council president. That fiasco was managed by Mr. Giuliani, but may have been more because of Power’s natural shyness and reluctance to go out and front a campaign than Giuliani’s incompetence. This is because of his Mars in Cancer in the first house. Mars, the energy and dynamism needed for a successful run in politics, is in its detriment in Cancer.

Mr. Giuliani, the most famous prosecutor in America but a neophyte candidate, had squandered $2 million, was being challenged for the Republican nomination and was trailing the Democrat, David N. Dinkins, by about 29 points in public opinion polls when he enlisted Mr. Powers. In 1993, with Mr. Powers managing the rematch, joined by the media consultant David Garth, Mr. Giuliani toppled Mayor Dinkins with 51 percent of the vote.

Mr. Giuliani himself described their relationship in familial terms. “I never had a brother,” he said in a telephone interview this week. “Peter was my brother.”    They met during their sophomore year at Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn. Mr. Giuliani induced him to join the opera club, though Powers preferred country music, and before meeting President Ronald Reagan, Giuliani was a lifelong Democrat while Powers was always the Republican.

                          Map of P.J. Powers

Peter James Powers was born on April 9, 1944, in Middle Village, Queens, the son of Thomas Powers, an organizer for the retail clerks’ union, and the former Florence Fitzgibbon.  We have rectified Mr. Powers to 05 Cancer, that G. K. McClung writes is symbolic of “celebrities conversing at a banquet in their honour” (see our header picture that depicts just that.)  McClung says this indicates the idea of fraternity.

                                                    “Peter was the glue that held the thing together,” Joseph J. Lhota, Mr. Giuliani’s former budget director and deputy mayor for operations, said in an interview on Thursday.

He also has a strong Western tilt to his locomotive temperament type, highlighting not only his own resourcefulness but also his concentrated approach to the problems at hand. This helped Giuliani focus on key areas, because while Giuliani, like Mayor Ed Koch, was always a libertarian at heart, but his change in party loyalties from Democrat to then Republican, caused him to not understand the differences in the politics.

Powers, though, was not hampered by that, as he was always a Republican, and so was more in tune with the overall differences between the two political parties. This gave him the ability to ignore those issues and instead canvas the political arena and catch the Roger Ailes-Fox domination of the networks. This was a natural to him because Power’s focal determinator is Pluto, thus how people interact and work with people in power is something he was attuned to, while Rudy was more in touch with the problems of corruption.

This difference gave the two men a strength that neither had individually, and made Powers’s favored position, a natural defense against jealousy and questioned loyalties. This dynamic, and Giuliani’s very successful approach to crime, brought the team mayoral success and may have been what was missing in Rudy’s disastrous Presidential 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney, as Rudy misread the populace so wrongly.

Powers’s Line of Vitality is inconjunct highlighting a poor lung-to-heart connection.. His Line of Efficiency is square, showing how he worked best with lots of disparate things going on. His Line of Motivation is sextile, highlighting how friendships and associations worked to his advantage and his Line of Culture is trine, giving him an easy-going appearance that people naturally liked, but square the Mars in Cancer made him prefer the backstage to front man.

Mr. Powers is survived by  daughters, Heather McBride and Krista Harvey; his wife, Sylvia and  brothers, Jack and Don and four grandchildren.