Written, instead, by Amanda Ripley, it pretends to look "Behind Giuliani's Tough Talk," yet absolves him of any accountability for the death, chaos, and catastrophe on 9/11 that were the result of his bombast.
The gold standard on this topic is Wayne Barret. But don't look for any comments from him in this article. Amanda Ripley wants to present a "balanced" view of Giuliani.
The result? Ripley slaps Giuliani on wrist...then gives him a big old wet juicy kiss.
Now, you and I might blow off Time as hopelessly clueless, but plenty of people read it and, more importantly, plenty of reporters and observers will use this piece to fashion the campaign template on Giuliani going forward.
In other words, this profile will come back to haunt those of us who do NOT want the Rudy Freak Show anywhere near the Oval Office in our lifetimes.
That said, I read the article so you won't have to. Some high- and low-lights:
On his disastrous decision to locate NYC's Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in the WTC (even though it had already been bombed once) the article quotes the 9/11 senior counsel as saying it was "a tough call." Ripley herself quotes a question-and-answer from 3 years ago (!), effectively giving Giuliani a free pass today.
"You had to put it somewhere," [Giuliani] said. And he noted that the Secret Service and the CIA also had offices in that building. The center was above ground level, leaving it less prone to flood damage (a serious concern in lower Manhattan), and it was within walking distance of City Hall—one of Giuliani's priorities.
Rudy shrugs and Ripley moves on.
On the issue of the non-compatible radios and Giuliani's failure to correct that fatal feature of NYC's emergency response capability, Ripley says that the record is "complicated."
On the fact that Giuliani broke up the police/fire unified command on 9/11, a mistake so fundamental that emergency management professionals are still rolling their eyes nearly six years later, little is addressed. And in recounting the results of that disastrous decision, Giuliani completely vanishes from the record:
On 9/11 the police and fire departments ran separate command centers, and communication was poor. The firefighters carried the same radios that had failed them in the 1993 bombing.
At 10:04 a.m. on 9/11, after Tower Two had collapsed, a member of the New York Police Department's Aviation Unit warned that the top 15 floors of Tower One were "glowing red" and might collapse. Four minutes later, a helicopter pilot said he did not believe the tower would last much longer. Neither of these warnings made it to the fire chiefs. That tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m. "If communications were better," concluded the federal investigation into the collapse, conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, "more firefighters would have been saved."
Ripley doesn't try to fit Giuliani into this narrative. She's too busy trying to absolve him of any accountability whatsoever.
No one could have expected communications to be flawless.
Strawman: how about "functional?"
"That emergency would have probably overwhelmed any emergency system," notes 9/11 commission staffer Farmer, who was the attorney general for New Jersey under a Republican administration. But Giuliani owns some accountability for the failures.
That's about as tough as Ripley gets. "Some accountability." Beyond that, he's off the hook.
"To say that he had identified problems and he'd been in office for a while and they hadn't been fixed—that's fair," Farmer says. Gorelick, the 9/11 commissioner, says Giuliani's shortcomings became clear when the commission looked at the Pentagon on 9/11. "If you compare the incident command at the Pentagon to the one at the World Trade Center, you will see the difference between life and death," she says.
And...and....and...? Where is the accountability? Where're Giuliani at all in this formulation?
At this point, on this most gaping failure in Giuliani's performance as a municipal executive, this most shocking reversal of his true record, Ripley writes this:
"In New York, the hard decisions were not made. There was not a unity of command. And heroic firefighters went up into the towers when they should have been coming down."
This is what English majors call writing in a passive voice: "Mistakes were made." Move on, nothing to look at here.
In those sections of the article that "debunk" Giuliani's nut-job message are rebutted by ... Giuliani himself!
Retired Lieut. General William Odom was director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan from 1985 to 1988. He calls Giuliani's terrorism rhetoric "the most delightful thing that al-Qaeda could want." And he laments that Giuliani isn't showing the stoicism he displayed on 9/11.
"We need a President who cools it," says Odom, a senior fellow with the conservative Hudson Institute. As for Giuliani's analogy to the cold war, a period Odom knows rather well, he is unimpressed. "Jihadism is a mosquito bite compared to communism," he says. "Anybody who talks about terrorism this way is like a witch doctor."
Finally! Straight talk from a real tough guy. Alas, Ripley gives Rudy the last word.
Giuliani, however, seems to think it is almost impossible to overstate the risk. "We've never had a history of overestimating threats," says the former mayor. "We underestimated by a lot the threat of Nazism."
Translation: They laughed at Churchill, too!
Again and again, Ripley rescues Rudy.
[Giuliani] has apparently made a tactical decision to thunder loudly about terrorism, perhaps to deflect from his personal life and his liberal record on social issues—which an internal campaign memo termed potentially "insurmountable" last year.
But...but....but...9/11!
As Giuliani himself put it to the Detroit News recently, "The American people are not going to vote for a weakling. They're going to elect someone who will protect them from terrorism for the next four years."
Thank you, General Patton.
And there you have it: the entire Giuliani campaign message delivered to you, courtesy of Time Magazine: Terrorism Trumps Family Values.
Ripley ties the ribbon on the pretty gift-wrapped package.
Borrowing rhetoric from one of the least popular Presidents in history may backfire, even for America's mayor. In a recent CBS poll, 46% of respondents said the war in Iraq is actually creating more terrorists.
But...
For many, though, the same words sound different when Giuliani says them. Sherie Silverman, 62, went to hear Giuliani in Rockville and left convinced that he "gets it" on terrorism. "He said what I wanted to hear," she said. "I'm looking for a more competent version of Bush." The crowd gave Giuliani a standing ovation.
Yes, that's right. The very last word in the article invokes the sound of applause. Courtesy of Time Magazine. For Rudy Giuliani.
Comments are closed on this story.