In Sept. 11 chaos, Giuliani forged lasting image

By Michael Powell

updated 8:09 a.m. ET Sept. 21, 2007

That first tower toppled at 9:59 a.m., a billion pounds of steel and concrete and bodies raining down. Smoke billowed like thunderheads, and New York’s mayor seemed to disappear into death’s maw.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was two blocks from the south tower, in an office on Barclay Street, trying to get the vice president on the phone, when his world went dark with smoke. Back at City Hall, Deputy Mayor Rudy Washington waited and wondered and dialed the governor.

“We really didn’t know what had become of the mayor,” he said. “I spoke to Governor Pataki, and we closed the schools and canceled the election.”

Then Mr. Giuliani was led through a basement and out onto Church Street, his head and shoulders dusted white with ash. He walked north into the surreal brightness of that day, comforting a police officer and dragooning reporters.

He would walk north two miles, pausing in the bay of a deserted fire station in Greenwich Village to call a television station and urge calm. Three hours later he stepped into a press conference with Gov. George E. Pataki.

“Today is obviously one of the most difficult days in the history of the city,” he said softly. “The tragedy that we are undergoing right now is something that we’ve had nightmares about. My heart goes out to all the innocent victims of this horrible and vicious act of terrorism. And our focus now has to be to save as many lives as possible.”

Inevitably the question arose: How many lost? The mayor looked up through his glasses, aware that among the viewers of this live broadcast were the mothers, fathers, spouses, lovers and children of those who labored in the smashed towers.

“The number of casualties,” he said, “will be more than any of us can bear ultimately.”

That walk north, the spareness of his words and his passion became the founding stones in the reconstruction of the mayor’s reputation, transforming him from a grouchy pol slip-sliding into irrelevancy to the Republican presidential candidate introduced as America’s mayor. The former mayor has made this day the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, aware that millions of Americans hold that heroic view in their collective mind’s eye.

Political leadership is an uncertain alchemy, an admixture of the symbolic and substantive and the visceral. In times of consuming trauma, psychologists and historians say, a leader must speak with a trusted voice and sketch honestly the painful steps to safety. A leader must weave a narrative of shared loss while acknowledging consuming anger.

All this Mr. Giuliani accomplished, mourning the dead, comforting the grieving and cheering the living even as the police and the National Guard moved in. His critics have lambasted the rescue failures at ground zero and argued that his inattention before 9/11 cost lives.

Natural comparison to Bush
But his performance shone brighter for the implicit comparison with President George W. Bush, who initially appeared — fairly or not — frozen in his chair, listening to second graders read as a nation came under attack.

Mr. Giuliani declined to be interviewed for this article.

Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic governor and senator, a Vietnam veteran and a member of the commission that studied the 9/11 attacks, harbors no doubt about what he witnessed that day.

“Trust me, the range of possibilities for leaders is quite extreme: Some panic, some get paralyzed,” Mr. Kerrey said. “Giuliani was brave and reassuring, and you can’t subtract that from his résumé.”

Nor, Mr. Kerrey added, did the mayor short the importance of grief. “Giuliani did what the president didn’t do,” he said. “He went to all those funerals. And that grieving got us back to normal.”

What was most difficult to bear about Mr. Giuliani’s mayoralty — his operatic personality, his head-throbbing certainty — became points of strengths in the disorienting weeks after Sept. 11.

But this fusion of personality with a wounded city had an underside. Mr. Giuliani became convinced that he was New York’s indispensable man. He tried to overturn term limits and run again. Failing that, Mr. Giuliani wanted to extend his term three months.

The mayor’s book, “Leadership,” published in 2002, devotes not a sentence to this topic. But the campaign was longer and the lobbying more insistent than he has acknowledged.

“That time was absolutely the best and worst of Rudy,” said Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., the city’s former corporation counsel under Mayor Edward I. Koch. “Rudy stood up strong and rallied us. But that confidence created the very dangerous idea that we couldn’t survive without him.”

Rising after falling
Mr. Giuliani’s eight-year mayoralty was a balloon deflating before Sept. 11.

He had stirred a racial tempest by tearing into the reputation of an unarmed black man who had been killed by an undercover police officer.

The mayor had an affair and announced at a press conference that he would seek a separation — without informing his wife.

He contracted prostate cancer and dropped out of a Senate race against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Then planes hit the World Trade Center. Mr. Giuliani left breakfast in a Midtown hotel, sped south in a van and arrived in time to watch a man leap from the World Trade Center and fall spinning onto a low roof. Film catches Mr. Giuliani watching with hand over mouth, his head recoiling just before the man hit.

What do I tell the public? Mr. Giuliani asked the fire chiefs. Get out of that tower, they replied. Mr. Giuliani grabbed his police and fire commissioners and headed to Barclay Street, seeking phones.

Slide show Giuliani cartoons MSNBC.com's editorial cartoonists weigh in on Rudy Giuliani's candidacy. msnbc.com

Then one tower collapsed and another one went down, forcing him to break into a trot as he headed north.

“He was very, very calm,” recalled Joseph P. Dunne, the first deputy police commissioner. “I modeled my behavior after him for the rest of the day.”

By noon, the mayor had set up shop in the Police Academy, on East 20th Street. He asked Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, the medical examiner, about survivors. “Most of the bodies will be vaporized,” Dr. Hirsch replied, Mr. Giuliani recounts in “Leadership.”

The only time Giuliani cried
Surrounded by death and the rumor of worse to come, the mayor and his staff rerouted subways and found police escorts for food deliveries through closed tunnels. Bulldozers and lights were delivered to ground zero, which was lighted up like a movie set.

But what most people remember was the presence of mind with which the mayor spoke of unimaginable disaster. A reporter mentioned that Barbara Olson, a friend of the mayor, had been on the plane that hit the Pentagon. He flinched, but kept talking.

Then he excused himself and telephoned her husband, Theodore B. Olson, the solicitor general. It was, he wrote, the only time he cried.

Late that night, Mr. Giuliani prepared to return to his post-separation apartment. His estranged wife, daughter and son lived in Gracie Mansion.

He directed his police escort to drive him south to what had already become known as ground zero. He wandered a nightmare-scape of fire and ash and smoke, shaking hands with hard hats, whispering comfort to firefighters. “I just wanted to be sure,” he said, “that everything is here that should be here.”

Mockery and mistakes
Here is the rich irony for those who look askance at Mr. Giuliani’s myth-making moment. His march uptown should not have been necessary, many experts say.

Mr. Giuliani insisted in 1997 on placing his state-of-the-art emergency command center at 7 World Trade Center, mocking critics who warned that it was too close to a terror target. On Sept. 11, that building collapsed. Had the center been placed in Brooklyn, as a mayoral aide had suggested, the cameras might not have made a legend of a dust-shrouded mayor.

In “Leadership,” Mr. Giuliani insists he still would have headed downtown. “I wanted the fire commanders to talk to me face to face — to look into my eyes and give me an undiluted assessment,” he wrote.

Some question that.

“It didn’t make any sense for him to be there on the scene,” said Glenn P. Corbett, an associate professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who studied the attacks.

“ Lincoln was a wartime president,” Professor Corbett added. “But you didn’t see him on the battlefield at Gettysburg.”

Many other things went wrong with the emergency response. Police and fire radios operated on different frequencies, a problem administration officials had known about since the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The Police and Fire Departments established separate command posts. When police helicopters noticed that the north tower showed signs of buckling, they notified police commanders, who ordered an evacuation. But evidence strongly suggests that many firefighters never heard these orders from the police, or from their own commanders.

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