On September 11, with the command center shut down, Giuliani and his top aides were left with no obvious place to gather away from City Hall. That left the mayor on the street, resulting in the heroically iconic image of the soot-covered Giuliani leading hundreds of other New Yorkers to safety as he walked north through the gray clouds of debris unleashed by the collapse of the Twin Towers.
In all the hero worship of Rudy Giuliani after 9/11, why didn’t people remember what had happened within the city’s government in the years before the attack? It was a question that John Farmer and others on his team of investigators on the 9/11 commission—Team 8, the emergency response team—asked themselves over and over during the investigation. In the public’s desperation to make Giuliani a global hero after 9/11, they had forgotten that the Giuliani administration was, in many ways, shockingly ill-prepared for the attacks.
But would the ten commissioners be brave enough to say that out loud, to risk the vengeance of Giuliani and his adoring public? Farmer had reason to be skeptical. This was Rudy Giuliani they were talking about—“America’s Mayor,” “Mayor of the World.” It was one thing for the commission to take on the FAA or the Pentagon; finally, to the public, these were faceless Washington bureaucracies.
But would the commission be willing to take on the most popular political figure in the country—the president-in-waiting, it seemed? By 2004, it was almost crass to refer to New York City’s former mayor as some mere politician. “Rudy” was a hero, the embodiment of everything Americans wanted to believe about themselves after 9/11.
Giuliani was scheduled to testify before the commission in May 2004, when the panel would return to New York for its final public hearings in the city. It was being billed by Giuliani’s critics, and he still had a few left who were brave enough to speak out, as a showdown that might finally establish the truth about Giuliani.
Farmer and his team always qualified their criticism of the former mayor. There was no doubt that Giuliani had performed heroically on the morning of September 11 and in the days and weeks that followed. On the day of the attacks, when the government in Washington was all but shut down and the president of the United States had disappeared into the skies aboard Air Force One after fleeing that elementary school in Florida, Giuliani was the face of calm and courage. If Bush was nowhere to be seen, Giuliani was everywhere. He comforted a traumatized city—and, it was no exaggeration, the nation and the world. The unflattering parts of Giuliani’s reputation as mayor—his well-documented vindictiveness and egomania, his bouts of puritanical intolerance—seemed to have been entombed in the dust at ground zero, as if they had never been all that important to begin with.
But Farmer and his team believed that Giuliani’s brave performance after the attacks should not lead the commission to whitewash his record before then. The city had been warned for years to prepare itself for a catastrophic terrorist attack that might take thousands of lives. The most terrifying of the warnings was delivered to the city on February 26, 1993, when a 1,200-pound bomb hidden in a rented Ryder van was detonated in a parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Six people died; more than one thousand people were injured; the Twin Towers suffered hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage, with smoke damage up to the ninety-third floor.
Giuliani was elected mayor the following year, and he seemed well suited to the job of rethinking the city’s preparations for a terrorist attack. He had some background on the issue from his years in federal law enforcement, both at the Justice Department in Washington during the Reagan administration and later as United States attorney in Manhattan. But as mayor, Giuliani was obsessed with street crime, not terrorism. And as Farmer and his team began to review the history of the 1993 attack and what had happened as a result, they were startled to discover how little Giuliani’s administration had done to ready the city—and specifically the police and fire departments—in case terrorists struck again.
The foolish decision to place his emergency bunker on a high floor in a building in the shadow of the Twin Towers was only the most obvious of the failures.
Giuliani created an Office of Emergency Management in 1996 to try to end the generations-long turf wars between police and firefighters over how they should coordinate operations in a crisis and who should take command. But on September 11, the confusion was everywhere; the police and fire departments set up separate command centers and had difficulty talking to each other.
Even more troubling, the city’s basic emergency radio networks malfunctioned in the hours after the planes struck the towers, and it should not have been a surprise. In responding to the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, firefighters who entered the Twin Towers discovered that their analog radios did not function well in such massive concrete-and-steel buildings; the radio frequencies used by the fire department were overwhelmed.
Eight years later, the radio problems had still not been solved. The commission’s investigators were certain that the radios were responsible for the deaths of many of the 343 firefighters lost at the World Trade Center on September 11. Because their radios did not work, many firemen inside the Twin Towers did not hear evacuation orders until it was too late to get out. An electronic “repeater” system that was installed in the World Trade Center after 1993 specifically to boost radio signals in an emergency was never turned on by fire chiefs in the North Tower on 9/11. The chiefs believed, mistakenly, that the system was broken. If it had been turned on, the lives of many firefighters in the tower almost certainly would have been saved; they would have known to flee.
Farmer and his team wrote up their findings in staff statements that were scheduled to be made public in the commission’s final pair of New York hearings—on May 18, when Giuliani’s former police and fire commissioners had been called to testify, and the next day, when Giuliani himself would be the commission’s star witness. The staff reports were blistering in their findings about the city’s performance on 9/11. After distributing drafts of the statements to the commissioners, Farmer heard back from several of them; they were dumbfounded to discover how vulnerable New York had been on 9/11. They said they intended to ask tough questions of Giuliani.
MORE THAN the other commissioners, John Lehman had reason to be disturbed about what Farmer’s team had uncovered about Rudy Giuliani. New York was Lehman’s adopted home. He had moved to the city from Washington after stepping down as navy secretary in the Reagan administration. He had raised his children in Manhattan. The only other commissioner who lived in New York, Bob Kerrey, was a much more recent arrival to the city.
On the eve of the first hearing in New York, Farmer met with the commissioners to remind them that they needed to be careful; they needed to remember where they were.
“Welcome to New York,” he told them. “It’s not Washington. It’s different here. You know that.”
This was a tougher city; politics were nasty in Washington, of course, but at least in the capital there was usually a patina of formality and courtesy, however thin, layered onto the partisan savagery. None of that in New York. After their first difficult public hearing in New York more than a year earlier, the commissioners should have known what they faced. The debates over 9/11 were much more visceral in New York than in Washington; so many more people had died at the World Trade Center than at the Pentagon.
Farmer told the commissioner that they should ask tough questions, but they should be careful not to give a platform to Giuliani and his loyalists to counterattack; John Ashcroft’s campaign against Jamie Gorelick would look like a “garden party” by comparison. The city’s take-no-prisoners tabloid newspapers were Giuliani’s defenders, and they could be expected to weigh in to defend him if the commission’s questioning of the former mayor became too fierce.
Farmer’s team had worked up long lists of questions for the commissioners to ask Giuliani and his former deputies—pages and pages of questions about the “sky bunker,” about the radios, about the confusion and miscommunication
between the police and fire departments, about the 911 telephone operators who had told people trapped in the World Trade Center to stay put in their offices until help arrived, guaranteeing their deaths. Most of the commissioners seemed to be listening to Farmer as he warned them again to watch their rhetoric during the hearings. All except Lehman, apparently.
THE NEW york hearings were held, at Bob Kerrey’s invitation, in the central auditorium at the New School in Greenwich Village. The scene outside the Tishman Auditorium on West 12th Street was chaotic, with row upon row of television cameras capturing the scene. An unusually large number of the 9/11 families showed up for the hearings, including many of the widows, widowers, parents, and children of New York City firefighters and police officers who had died in the World Trade Center. They knew that the hearings offered their best, and perhaps only, chance to hear Giuliani and his top aides questioned aggressively about the city’s inadequate emergency plans before 9/11. Someone had draped a huge banner that read NEVER FORGET across a building near the auditorium.
Farmer’s team opened the first day of hearings with a riveting video re-creation of the morning of the attacks. It included the remarkable images caught by Gédéon and Jules Naudet, French filmmakers and brothers, of American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, as it plunged into the North Tower and exploded in a fireball. The video re-creation was produced for the commission by Allison Prince, a veteran documentary maker who had spent weeks in the city’s archives scouting for previously unseen videos that, while not graphic, captured the horrors of the day.
Then the first witnesses were sworn in, including Bernard Kerik, who had been the city’s police commissioner on 9/11, and Thomas Von Essen, who had been the fire commissioner. Both Kerik and Von Essen had left their city jobs to sign on as partners at Giuliani’s newly opened and wildly successful private consulting firm. Both men read out statements defending the actions of the police and fire departments on September 11.
JOHN LEHMAN would later say that he was certain he had been set up by Kerik and Von Essen on behalf of Giuliani. He suspected they had come to the hearing with a script. They were waiting for the right question from one of the commissioners that would allow them to launch a prescripted fusillade of insults back at the commission, turning the hearing into an us-versus-them fight that the city’s tabloids would devour.
Since he was as much a New Yorker as anyone on the commission, Lehman should have known that he was taking a terrible risk when he opened his questioning of Kerik and Von Essen with a direct attack on the city’s emergency response on 9/11:
“I’m aware of the history and of the traditions and of the politics that have shaped the public service agencies in this city over many, many years, and I agree with you all that we certainly have the finest police and fire departments, Port Authority police, anywhere in the world,” Lehman began. “They’re the proudest.
“But pride runneth before the fall,” he continued. “And I think that the command and control and communications of this city’s public service is a scandal.”
Many in the audience, especially the families of the dead firefighters and police, began to cheer Lehman. There was applause. Kean had to call for quiet in the audience.
The anger in Lehman’s voice grew as he described the city’s emergency response system on September 11 as “not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city.”
He said it was a “scandal” that the city had not bought adequate radios. “I think it’s a scandal that the fire commissioner has no line authority. It’s a scandal that there’s nobody that has clear line authority and accountability for a crisis of the magnitude that we’re going to have to deal with in the years ahead. It’s a scandal that after laboring for eight years, the city comes up with a plan for incident management that simply puts in concrete this clearly dysfunctional system.”
Farmer winced at the intensity of Lehman’s attack. This was just what he had warned the commissioners against. He knew too well what was going to happen next. Kerik and Von Essen would counterattack. The hearing would be portrayed on television that night and in the newspapers the next day as a screaming match between the commission and the heroes of 9/11. Any hope of forcing Giuliani to answer hard questions the next day had evaporated. The dynamic would now turn in Giuliani’s favor.
Von Essen led the attack on Lehman, with a tone that suggested Lehman and the 9/11 commissioners had somehow defiled the graves of the firefighters who died in the Twin Towers.
“I couldn’t disagree with you more,” he said, glowering at Lehman. “I think that one of the criticisms of this committee has been statements like you just made, talking about scandalous procedures and scandalous operations and rules and everything else. There’s nothing scandalous about the way that New York City handles its emergencies. We had strong leadership with the mayor. We had strong leadership with the fire commissioner, and the same with the police commissioner.
“You make it sound like everything was wrong about September eleventh or the way we function,” he continued. “I think it’s outrageous that you make a statement like that.”
Just as some of the family members had cheered Lehman, now others in the audience cheered Von Essen.
The tabloid reporters in the audience were scribbling furiously in their notepads. The clash between Lehman and Von Essen and Kerik had lasted only a few minutes. But this story—Lehman and the 9/11 commissioners versus Giuliani and his men—wrote itself. And to make sure the point was not lost on anyone, Kerik and Von Essen went to the streets after the hearing and began giving interviews for the television cameras in which they stepped up their attacks on Lehman and the other commissioners:
“It’s almost pitiful that this is what he had to stoop to in order to get his name in lights,” Kerik told the Daily News. Von Essen described Lehman’s questioning as “despicable” and said: “If I had the opportunity, I probably would have choked him because that’s what he deserved.”
LEHMAN WAS the host at a dinner for the commissioners that night at his apartment on the Upper East Side, overlooking Central Park. It was meant to be a relaxing evening ahead of Giuliani’s testimony the next day. But Jim Thompson, the former Chicago prosecutor and Illinois governor, and therefore veteran of the toughest sort of local politics, had a sense of what was coming for Lehman and the commission after Lehman’s outburst at the hearing that morning. He walked up to Lehman at the dinner.
“What . . . the . . . fuck?” he said with exasperation.
Lehman tried to smile.
THE TABLOID headlines were worse than Lehman and the other commissioners could have imagined. INSULT! screamed the front-page headline in the Post. Beneath the headline was an image of a fireman at ground zero, kneeling as if in prayer, next to a smaller headline: “Memo to 9/11 Commission: This Man Is a New York Hero, Not a Boy Scout.” The Daily News was no kinder, with one columnist urging Lehman to “get down on his hands and knees and beg forgiveness of the public servants he insulted if he wants to preserve a scrap of his reputation. If he wants to be able to walk the streets of New York. If he wants the 9/11 Commission ever to be taken seriously.”
IT WAS never clear that the events of the day before were stage-managed by Rudy Giuliani and his allies. But the former mayor arrived for his testimony on May 19 looking supremely confident. He was joined by his adoring new wife, Judith Nathan Giuliani, who rarely took her eyes off Giuliani, as if there were some magnetic field that kept her gaze locked on her husband.
If anyone was still billing the hearing as a showdown between Giuliani and the 9/11 commission, they were mistaken. The battle was over before it had begun, with Giuliani the winner. The tabloid attacks on Lehman that morning had cowed the other commissioners. They were frightened. They had seen what happened when Lehman dared to take on Giuliani’s deputies; imagine the wrath they would face if they took on Giuliani himself.
The hearing was a Rudy Giuliani lovefest. In his testimony, G
iuliani retold the story of his actions on the morning of September 11. It was gripping even for those in the audience who had heard him tell it so many times before. He described approaching the Twin Towers to see people throwing themselves from the top floors, choosing to die in the fall rather than in the fire or the rubble.
“All of us kept looking up, kept looking up, because things were falling,” Giuliani said. “I realized that I saw a man, it wasn’t debris, that I saw a man hurling himself out of the 102nd, 103rd, 104th floor. And I stopped, probably for two seconds, but it seemed like a minute or two, and I was in shock.”
He acknowledged, without detail, that “terrible mistakes” were made on 9/11. But the “blame should be clearly directed at one source and one source alone—the terrorists who killed our loved ones.”
Many of the questions directed at Giuliani by the commissioners barely qualified as softballs, they were so gentle. The long list of tough questions that Farmer’s team had drawn up was forgotten
“I salute you,” said Richard Ben-Veniste in opening his questioning of Giuliani. “Your leadership on that day and in the days following gave the rest of the nation, and indeed the world, an unvarnished view of the indomitable spirit and the humanity of this great city.”
Tom Kean described Giuliani as a “great, great leader to take charge of a terrible, terrible event.”
Branded by the tabloids that morning as a traitor to the city in which he lived, John Lehman joined in the adulation of Giuliani. On September 11, he said, “there was no question to the world that the captain was on the bridge.”
The families of the dead firefighters and police, the ones who had come to the hearing to see Giuliani finally called to account for the city’s failures in planning for a terrorist attack, were enraged as they listened to Giuliani being showered with praise. But initially the families muffled their anger; it showed only in their faces.
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