After last night's debate dustup with Rep. Paul, I feel a need to reiterate just what a lying fraud Rudy Guiliani is.
Rudy Giuliani is still being credited, even by some Democrats, with doing something good on 9/11 and in the immediate aftermath.
This is complete and total lie.
In fact his "leadership" that day made things worse. He violated numerous basic rules of disaster management, split the commmand-control-communication of Fire and Police, and contributed to the deaths and confusion among responders. The famous walk was in fact a product of his incompetent ego and cronyism-based leadership.
It is a myth, a lie worthy of ABC's fictional move about Bush and 9-11, that Giuliani did anything good of substance before, during, on or after 9/11. In a book promoting excerpt, in the Viilage Voice on Viilage Voice on August 29, 2006, Barrett and Collins point out what Giuliani likes to remember about 9-11-and what he actually did (or didn't do), corrects Giuliani's of told self serving but highly fictitious story of what he did an did not do on and around 9/11.
Most notable were his contribution to the confusion and lack of communication between the fire department and the police department, the failure to get proper evacuation information to those trapped, and to the first responders, before the towers fell. His concern or style of high levels of personal security and having a personal police entourage, help keep the top police command separate from the top fire command that day. After being unable to use the emergency operations center he had built in World Trade Center building 7, he proceeded to let the Fire department set up one command center, while he literally took both the City Hall and Police Command to another separate site.
Rudy Giuliani's performance on 9-11 is legendary, but for most people, the story boils down to one image: the mayor walking north from the disaster, covered with dust. Afterward, in his greatest achievement, he was able to give voice to all the things the rest of us needed and wanted to hear. He articulated our grief, shored up our confidence, and insisted on a level-headed response that gave no berth to intolerance. We resist knowing anything more-about the eight-year history of error and indifference that preceded that moment, or the toxic disengagement that followed it.
Giuliani had the opportunity to make that kind of unified direction happen-and, by his own description, the obligation to make it happen-but he didn't.
In his first detailed post-9-11 television interview he recalled that he "walked away" from Ganci's post "and took my people with me." But they were not just "his" people, meaning his City Hall deputies. Included in his entourage was the entire police command. In that same September 22 interview, Giuliani offered a different explanation for his initial decision to go to the FDNY post on West Street: "I wanted to join the Fire Department and the Police Department together at one command post, so I asked where the Fire Department command post was." He had inadvertently described what he should have done, indeed what his own protocol required him to do. But obviously, that story didn't fit the facts. So by the time he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show on September 27, he remembered things differently. "And then when I got there," he said, "I wanted to make sure that the police department had a command post so that we could communicate with the White House, and the fire department had one so they could actually focus their attention on fighting the fire and the rescue."
By the time he wrote Leadership in 2002, he'd come up with a detailed rationale. He said the separation of command posts was "absolutely necessary" because "the Fire Department had to lead the rescue and evacuation," while the Police Department "had to protect the rest of the city." Since the departments were "performing different tasks," he argued, they had to have different command posts. Of course, the departments have some different duties in virtually all emergencies, but that reasoning flew in the face of not only all modern understanding of how to coordinate responses to epic catastrophes, but also all the plans Giuliani's own government had put in place. If it were true that different emergency functions required a separation of command, there would have been no rationale for a coordinating Office of Emergency Management. Everybody could just do their own thing. Unified command is now such accepted wisdom that the Department of Homeland Security requires it.
The fire and police departments were acting on long-held instinct by staying apart, and the mayor shied away from interfering with men who were busy making life-and-death decisions. It was as human a response as his calming and compassionate statements later that day. But it was also a mistake with consequences, and if New York and the nation actually examined Giuliani's unified-command dysfunction that day, both might be better prepared the next time. Unfortunately, admitting all this would not square with Time's salute: "When the day of infamy came, Giuliani seized it as if he had been waiting for it all his life, taking on half a dozen critical roles and performing each masterfully. Improvising on the fly, he became 'America's homeland-security boss,' as well as its 'gutsy decision-maker' and 'crisis manager.' "
There was another reason for the Barclay command post, and Kerik hasn't been as shy as the mayor about mentioning it: security. "I was worried about the mayor and making sure we didn't put him in harm's way," he said later. Kerik's "immediate problem" was finding space "far enough removed that the mayor wasn't in danger." As sensible as protecting Giuliani was, it's a far different explanation from the mayor's rationale for the two posts. Whatever the mix of reasons, Giuliani has never been forced to explain, by investigators or reporters, how he squares the two-post decision with his own rules for how the police and fire departments were supposed to behave.
The 9-11 Commission members reached conclusions similar... but so quietly that no one noticed. The commission report never described Giuliani's step-by-step actions that day, though it chronicles just about everyone else's, and it certainly never mentioned his role in creating two posts. But when it reached its ultimate conclusion that the fire department was not "responsible for the management of the City's response as the Mayor's directive would have required," the very next line was "the command posts were in different locations." Thus, the commission's best example of the violation of the mayor's directive was the mayor's own action.
Ray Kelly, the police commissioner who preceded and followed the Giuliani years, said in an interview, "Sure, the separate command post was a violation of the protocols. The radios would have been no problem if they had been at the same command post, if they'd been face-to-face.
The mayor's main mission, as he has put it in repeated accounts, was to gather the information he needed to tell a television and radio audience what they should do, especially people in jeopardy. By the time he talked directly to an audience, however, both towers had collapsed, and the message Ganci asked him to give occupants was moot. The mayor was, in the end, just one more dispatcher who failed to relay useful information.
Even the mayor eventually acknowledged that it might have been a mistake that his entire 25-member inner circle, including three deputy mayors, the police, fire, and Office of Emergency Management commissioners, was marching with him on this hazardous pilgrimage, a vulnerability that hardly reflected strategic thinking. This time, Giuliani's preference for the comfort of a huge entourage had disconnected the city's management and its fighting force at a crucial moment.
Kerik was actually a prime example of this managerial dysfunction all morning. For the 102 minutes when the city most needed a police commissioner orchestrating an overall response with an embattled fire department, Kerik became Giuliani's body guard, just as he had been in the 1993 mayoral campaign. His own account of what he did that morning contained no indication that he was actually managing the police response to this emergency. The command center at 1 Police Plaza wasn't opened until 9:45, an hour after the attack, a decision that led the independent consultants commissioned by the Bloomberg administration, McKinsey & Company, to raise questions about why it was "underused."
McKinsey also criticized the "number and continual movement of command posts," and the absence of any "clearly identifiable, main command post," errors associated with the top brass including Kerik, who, unlike Von Essen, is an operational chief. "Many leaders of the Department," the independent consultant found, "indicated that they operated primarily from instinct and experience during an emergency rather than according to a prioritized or structured set of objectives." Only 45 percent of the 557 cops who were surveyed by McKinsey said they "received clear instructions regarding my role on 9-11," with 34 percent saying they didn't and the rest undecided. A meager 24 percent said they were "confident" that the police department had adequate emergency plans. Remarkably, 89 percent had no training in building collapse, 84 percent had none in counterterrorism, 73 percent none in fire rescue/evacuation, and 70 percent none in bio/chem. Of the few who had training in any of these areas, less than a third found it "useful." The McKinsey report faulted virtually everything Kerik did that day without naming him or anyone else in top management, criticizing a "perceived lack of a strong operational leader commanding the response" and the "absence of clear command structure and direction on 9-11."
Instead of dealing with any of these complex tactical issues on 9-11, Kerik's decisions - at 7 WTC, West Street, Barclay, and the basement - all revolved around the mayor's safety. Chris Marley, the building engineer at Barclay who guided the Giuliani group out, said, "Kerik had his arm around the mayor to protect him." Kerik was later asked what his priorities were that day and he told NPR, "Well, the first thing to do was to get the mayor out of there and get to a secure site." With Kerik, Esposito, Dunne, and McCarthy guarding him at points, Giuliani was protected by the highest-ranking detail in the history of the New York City Police Department. Yet not once did he look around and ask the question: Who's running the shop?
Kerik was with the mayor because Giuliani wanted him to be. "I need the police and fire commissioners with me," Giuliani said when he summoned Von Essen. He also reached out to Richie Sheirer-the third member of the team who would be at his side for every 9-11 press briefing, then go with him to Giuliani Partners. All three had no real management credentials until Giuliani promoted them. Von Essen and Kerik went from the lowest ranks of their departments to the very top without ever passing a promotional exam.
Giuliani had begun his mayoralty with a circle of managers, like Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and OEM's Hauer, who had track records elsewhere. He was ending it with a cult of personality. When he chose Kerik over the seasoned professional Dunne, he told reporters that the decision had come to him in a moment of personal inspiration. Not surprisingly, all Kerik could think about in a moment of great crisis was protecting the leader, even if it meant leaving a void in the department he was charged with commanding.
Despite all these missteps, Giuliani was depicted almost immediately as the calmest man in the eye of the worst storm-decisive, self-sufficient, ironhearted. "It was so well orchestrated that you would have thought he had prepared for it forever," his lifelong secretary Beth Petrone-Hatton told Time. His own Time comments set the subsequent television interview tone: "There were times I was afraid. Everybody was. But the concentration was on. If I don't do what I have to do, everything falls apart. Something I learned a long time ago, from my father, is that the more emotional things get, the calmer you have to become to figure your way out. Those things have become a matter of instinct for me at 57 years old. I didn't have to invent them." He told CNN, "When it's an emergency, I'm very, very calm and very deliberate."
If Giuliani had actually been doing all the things he now sees himself as having done that day-prioritizing, making strategic decisions about deployment of personnel, command centers, and communications-it would have been a superhuman performance. But actually, in those first hours, Giuliani was doing what most of us, in his place, would have done-struggling, stumbling, and even making a weighty mistake, in the case of the two command posts. His decision to try to get on the air as quickly as possible was sensible, as was his hunt for phones and, later, an alternative command center. But as unforgettable a visual as he was, roaming the canyons of Lower Manhattan, he did not do one thing in those 102 minutes that had any impact.
And it isn't just his own story that he has hyped. Giuliani has repeatedly contended that 25,000 people were rescued, though government investigators determined that there were actually 15,000 survivors and that most of these people were able to make their own way to safety. While these facts do nothing to dim the magnificent bravery of the firefighters, police officers, and other responders who saved many lives that day, they do turn Giuliani's claim into just one more self-serving boast.
The centerpiece of Giuliani's experience on 9-11, his dust-covered march uptown, was truly important to the city and the nation. His ordeal was not about management or even leadership-it was the sight of the mayor sharing that terrible experience with so many other fleeing New Yorkers.
We rely on our leaders to behave well in such a moment, to set an example of calm and compassion. But we do not expect them to manage the intricacies of the rescue operation. For that, we hope there are men and women throughout the government who have been preparing and training just so that if a crisis comes, they can operate on instinct, yet automatically make the proper decisions. If the mayor of New York had made sure that the city's emergency headquarters was securely located and had put in place communications and command systems that worked, he would have been of greater service on 9-11-even if he had spent the whole day cowering under his desk.
Giuliani has never acknowledged a single failing in his own performance. Yet he did nothing before September 11 to alleviate the effects of a terror attack. He embodied his city's lack of preparation on West Street that morning.
The iconic walk that made him a hero, was in fact a unplanned disaster that directly contributed to the failure of communication that morning, and should in fact have been symbolic of his failure to properly plan ahead, follow what plans there were, or place the safety of the people ahead of his own safety or image.
Anybody who wants to know the true story should read the reporting of Wayne Barrett, now in book form: Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 with Dan Collins as coauthor.
With no actual expertise or success in emergency management, he has marketed his myth to the corporate world for great personal profit, and now offers to do the same for high public office.