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Unravelling the Rudy Giuliani myth

— AP

New York Governor George Pataki (left), Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (centre), and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton at the site of the World Trade Center disaster on September 12, 2001.

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s calculated gamble appears to be coming off as well as it could. While George Bush squandered the underserved aura that descended on him as the United States responded to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the ex-Mayor of New York retains his place in the powerful iconography of a day of infamy and redemption. Mr. Giuliani’s bet is that the image of him emerging ash-covered from the dust storm generated by the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center will serve as a spell-casting talisman as he marches towards the Republican nomination and perhaps even victory in the presidential election of 2008.

It is time the myth was shattered. During six years of the Bush dispensation, the world has been provided abundant evidence of the enormous harm that can be inflicted when the media embed in the public consciousness illusory images of people who occupy positions of power. With global terror being a phenomenon that will not fade away any time soon, there is a widespread even if subliminal longing for a leader who has the right answers. Mr. Giuliani is clearly bent on exploiting this sentiment. He claims that the manner in which New York under his mayoralty absorbed and then recovered from the shock of 9/11 was an affirmation of his suitability for the role. For an unconscionably long time, the mainstream media appeared to be playing along. Now, they have finally begun to discharge their responsibilities.

To go by a string of recent stories in The New York Times, city reporters seem to have woken up appalled that the rest of the United States is developing an impression of the man quite at variance with the reality of the Rudy they know intimately. In corrective mode, they have begun putting out stories about his irascibility, ruthlessness in private and public affairs, winner-takes-all attitude towards politics, indulgence of cronies and readiness to abandon what were supposedly firmly-held views. But many of those who have over the years tracked the Democrat-turned moderate Republican-turned conservative have stopped short of questioning the legend that is the leitmotif of the Giuliani candidacy. The importance of an intense scrutiny of the man’s performance in the days leading up to and following an earth-shaking event cannot be underestimated especially since he could take on the most consequential job on the planet 15 months from now. In Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 (Harper Collins, 2006, hardcover price US $25.95), authors Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins carry out a thorough-going expose of the man once touted as the World’s Mayor.

On the stump, Mr. Giuliani puts out that he was acutely attuned to the threat posed by global terror and well prepared to meet it long before the first plane hit the North Tower. Not so, say Barrett and Collins. They drag to the foreground the inconvenient, if overlooked, truth that although New York had very good reason to be prepared for the attacks of September 11, it actually was not. Not only had al-Qaeda affiliates detonated a 1,500-pound bomb in the basement of the WTC on February 26, 1993, terrorist groups had repeatedly promised that they would continue to target the complex at the southern tip of Manhattan. Among those arrested in connection with subsequent plots, there was at least one person who had taken lessons in American flying schools. The intelligence and investigative arms of the U.S. federal government had always thought that the twin towers would figure high on the list of potential targets and had not ruled out the possibility of aircraft being driven into them.

The 1993 attack also exposed the inadequacies in the response systems. There was no central coordinating agency and, as a result, the police and fire departments worked at cross-purposes. The reports churned out by city government departments had drawn attention to other fundamental problems that needed to be speedily addressed. Flaws in the architectural design of the WTC hampered swift evacuation.

The Fire Department was gripped by the belief that fires in the 40,000 square foot floors of a mega high rise could be extinguished when in reality such a feat was beyond the limits of the possible. Courage and heroism were fine up to a point but adequate response required a degree of forethought and planning that was not discernible in 1993. The substance of the case made out by Messers Barrett and Collins is that Mr. Giuliani did little to correct these drawbacks during an eight-year mayoral tenure that ended less than three months after the attacks.

After the 2001 attacks, Mr. Giuliani made much of the Office of Emergency Management that he established post-1993. According to him, the OEM had been envisaged as an agency that would coordinate the functioning of various departments of the city administration as they responded to extraordinary situations, especially terrorist attack. He would, of course, go on to claim that the OEM had lived up to expectations on the crucial day. The authors of Grand Illusion debunk these claims. While the need for a coordinating agency was felt after the 1993 attacks, the New York City administration got down to creating it only after a major avenue subsided following the rupture of an underground water main. Several people who had served as Commissioners of the OEM or held other important posts in the department told the authors that they had always thought that hurricanes or snowstorms, and not terrorist strikes, would be the primary challenges they would have to deal with. The Police and Fire Departments, constantly at loggerheads over which of them would be in overall charge during rescue operations at disaster sites, never subscribed to the OEM’s protocols that assigned command responsibilities for different kinds of emergencies.

The OEM not only failed to draw up plans that other agencies would stick to once disaster struck, it played no role on September 11. As policemen, fire-fighters and even civilian construction workers were rushing towards the twin towers, none of the 60-odd agencies that were supposed to be linked to the OEM sent representatives to its command centre. It was just as well. Mr. Giuliani, disregarding expert advice from many quarters, had located this superbly equipped command centre at the very heart of the most likely target in his city — no. 7 WTC. While the authors point out that the evidence is not conclusive, they provide enough material to support the conjecture that the sprawling office on the 23rd storey of the building was vaporised when falling debris from the taller neighbouring towers ignited the 43,000 gallons of generator oil stored in basement and mezzanine floor fuel tanks.

The failure to set up an effective mechanism to deal with a very probable terrorist strike was not the only count on which Mr. Giuliani’s methods of functioning had left his city vulnerable. The authors believe and assert the point time and again that the mayor was personally incorruptible. However, given his headstrong approach to politics, Rudy could never shake off the cronies who clung to him. The result was that city contracts were invariably passed on to Republicans without adequate scrutiny of credentials or competence. The choice of 7 WTC for the command post was just one incident when a flawed contracting process led to a situation in which the potential for disaster was increased, not mitigated.

Even worse was the contract for the supply of communication equipment to the Fire Department. In line with a long-standing practice, followed by Democratic as well as Republican city administrations, Motorola was handed what was essentially a no-bid contract. Assured as it was of a monopoly, the telephone company took its time to fulfil the contract, including by way of presenting untested equipment that would inevitably be returned. Consequently, the Fire and Police Departments could not communicate with each other. More disastrously, firemen had such poor contact with their command centres that many in the North Tower did not hear the order to evacuate after the South Tower collapsed.

While Barrett and Collins are meticulous in examining the Giulianisms that contributed to the devastation of 9/11, they are also scrupulously fair. At no point is this more evident than at the very beginning when they write about the heroism that Rudy displayed from the moment he heard of the plane hitting the North Tower. That, however, is the main argument in their book.

Through their examination of the response made by New York City and its mayor to a shattering event, the authors convincingly argue that in choosing a leader, the people must look beyond the valorous images he may invoke to see whether the man has real substance.

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