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Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11

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Of the many results of the 9/11 attack, I find the elevation of Rudy Giuliani to be wholly undeserved. "Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11", is a welcome...if somewhat tardy attempt to set the record straight - which it does exceedingly well.

Keep in mind, by the day before 9/11 Rudy Giuliani had earned the scorn of most New Yorkers, and was limping toward the finish of his final term as Mayor. He had abandoned a run for the Senate against Hillary Clinton, and would soon disappear into relative obscurity.

Then Tuesday morning, September 11th, 2001 dawned, bright and clear...

After the planes struck, Giuliani had no way of communicating with his administrators as his Office of Emergency Management (OEM) was immediately rendered useless. It was Giuliani, over loud protests, who had insisted the OEM be placed in the Trade Center complex. Like building it in a bull's-eye.

As Giuliani rooted around the streets of lower Manhattan - looking for a place to plug in his telephones - the first responders didn't need to hear his orders or exhortations. They responded selflessly.

That he was a divisive mayor is without question.

That he left his first responders vulnerable is tragic.

That he has profited personally and politically is obscene.

This book does an excellent job of examining how Giuliani, now running as the President of 9/11, and an expert on Homeland Security, dealt with the challenge of preparing New York City to cope with another terrorist attack, after the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The authors' conclusion, heavily sourced and thoroughly argued, is that Giuliani failed to do much of anything to make the city safer. Despite all that was learned about the city's inadequate response in '93, Giuliani failed to get the firefighters new walkie-talkies, so they could communicate with the police, failed to establish a chain of command in the event of an emergency, and, most inexplicably, built, at great expense, his Emergency Command Post at the Trade Center itself, across the street from the '93 attack, rendering it useless on 9/11. These and a host of other mistakes almost certainly led to significant loss of life on 9/11, and seriously undermine Giuliani's claim to be the man we should trust with the nation's security. This is surely a must-read for journalists, and for anyone who wants to understand the events of that horrible day, and the character of this man who is running for President.

Rudy Giuliani is a private citizen now. And he'll remain one if this book gets any traction. Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 contains the kind of data that could bring St. Rudy earthward. It's a pretty damning portrait of a lame-duck mayor crippled by petty ideological battles, misplaced priorities, cronyism, plain old incompetence, and a city that dawdled as the signs of an impending terrorist attack grew clearer every day. While crediting Giuliani for his ability to rally the city, the authors zero in on the policies and practices they say created more heroes than survivors on September 11. You can be sure that Hillary has highlighted her copy until it's dripping bright pink.

In New York City they call the police New York's Finest and firefighters New York's Bravest. But as journalists Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins explain in their book GRAND ILLUSION, former mayor Rudy Giuliani was New York's Lamest.

GRAND ILLUSION reviews the public record of Giuliani's failure to prepare New York City for what turned out to be the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center terror attacks even after the February 1993 W.T.C. bombing left the writing on the wall. As authors Barrett and Collins point out, Giuliani should have been nowhere near the twin towers as they burned and collapsed. Ironically, the media made his inappropriate presence that morning into something heroic. And Giuliani let the people worship him when, in good conscience, he should have refunded his mayor's salary and apologized to the survivors of everyone who would not have died that day had New York City properly organized its emergency management.

The Giuliani administration's atrocious lack of preparation for the kind of attack that would be 9/11 rivals that of FEMA and Hurricane Katrina. As you read GRAND ILLUSION, the film BEING THERE may come to mind. Both tell the story of a bumbler whom others misinterpret as someone great. While BEING THERE is fiction, GRAND ILLUSION is a sad, tragic truth.

If you can handle the truth, read GRAND ILLUSION by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins.

There are so many lessons to be drawn from the events of September 11th. This book does a good job of outlining some of them. The "heckuva job Brownie" school of leadership was not limited to FEMA. Hacks, political supporters and hangers-on were rewarded with appointments to positions of power in emergency services. This might have gone unnoticed except for a disaster which called for competence at the time and begged scrutiny after the fact. The failure to play by the rules throughout the history of the WTC, intersecting with greed and politics as usual - in skirting safety regulations and rewarding hapless coat-holders - is the story here. Rudy is a pedestrian leader and a consumate huckster. Shame on us for being fooled.

The authors do a good job of presenting technical info regarding radio communications snafus that were avoidable and centered in sweetheart deals. They also do a good job of capturing the essence of many of the players in this tragedy who were just not up to the tasks thrust upon them. Little in their histories suggest that they would have been.

Now that Rudy wants to be president, partisans will cry that this is an ad hominem attack...but the truth is an absolute defense and Rudy simply can't mount it. Read this for the facts. The ample footnotes give the reader an opportunity to test skepticism.

Rudy, why is that fireman with helmet of thorn

Tapping on your window since 9/11 morn?

Rudolph Giuliani was sworn mayor in 1994 within a minute's walk of the World Trade Center bombed in 1993. Reviewing Giuliani's mayoralty in 2000, Wayne Barrett, one of America's great investigative journalists, saw Giuliani as a cruel, unstable, destructive hypocrite, a man judged by the press to be barely human and inwardly empty. Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani (2000)

In September, 2001, the arc of Giuliani's political life was in the descendant; his second marriage had crashed publicly and his senatorial plans had been aborted by prostate cancer. With an eye on the approaching end of his mayoralty, he had begun planning a consulting business, a natural refuge for unskilled, former office holders.

On September 11th, Giuliani was at breakfast in a midtown hotel when two planes that had just flown overhead made him speed downtown to a Hell where he would see men and women, not long from their breakfasts, holding hands and jumping to their deaths from the flames of the110-story towers of the World Trade Center. There 2,150 would be killed in the Twin Towers alone. Three hundred forty-three firemen would die. We, transfixed by our television screens, stunned by what it all portended, would be calmed by Giuliani's words, credit for which, few know and let history note, belongs to Michael Cohen, a psychologist expert in handling crisis communications who was summoned the night of 9/11 and early the next morning carefully instructed Giuliani on what to say and not to say to the public, after which Giuliani appeared before the media and spoke to us.

And so it was that Giuliani, for a brief moment in our extremity, became us, and we, him. Thus out of 9/11 arose the myth of Giuliani, a myth exhaustively challenged in Grand Illusion, by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, who by daunting proof show that the myth of Giuliani arose out of a Hell in the creation of which he himself had had a hand, a myth from which he now profits, for he travels the nation, self-declared expert on terrorism, redemptor of New York City, receiving tens of millions in his expanding consulting business, eagerly seeking the Presidency with a genuinely commercial smile. If the facts in Grand Illusion are true, a beguiled public may see that their mythical Giuliani is a quick change artist given to the practice of an economy of truth.

Though Giuliani claims to have been obsessed with terrorism almost eight years prior to 9/11, and to have held many meetings concerning it, we know of no one with whom he shared his obsession and no one who recalls having met with him about it, though it was their business to do so. Giuliani had acted during those years as if the 1993 bombing had never happened. As John Miller, an acute City Hall observer of Giuliani, said of Giuliani's claims, "Hello, history. Give me rewrite."

When Giuliani claims that the police and fire departments had been prepared prior to 9/11 to act in coordination in a terror attack, we wonder first over his memory, and then over his integrity, for the operational chiefs of those departments do not recall it, to say nothing of the 9/11 Commission's finding that as of 9/11 those departments "were not prepared to comprehensively coordinate their efforts in responding to a major incident." As Giuliani must recall, the city did not even have a formalized Incident Command System. Bizarre as it sounds, the city on his watch actually suffered from mutually antagonistic fire and police departments, an ongoing scandal in itself . If the police and fire departments had had a joint post, the fire chiefs would have received the police helicopter warnings of the imminent collapse of the South Tower and many lives would have been saved in those nine minutes.

On 9/11, there was no central command position to control our reaction to the attack, for, mysteriously, Giuliani, against all advice and in a highly questionable exercise of judgment, had insisted that the Office of Emergency Management be located within walking distance of City Hall in the predictably targeted 47-story 7World Trade Center, 23 floors over a Con Ed substation and its 106,000 gallon fuel tank, the world's first bunker in the sky that was instantly evacuated on 9/11 and that collapsed, leaving the city without any command center and, as the 9/11 Commission noted, without any "backup site". Picture the mayor stumbling through a choking, blinding chaos looking for his police commissioner, the learned Bernard Kerick, who in the police department had never been higher than a third grade detective, thereafter chauffeur and bodyguard to Giuliani, later to be unforgettably recommended by Giuliani to President Bush as the head of Homeland Security and overseer of its billions of dollars, such is the nature of chance and opportunity in our wonderful democracy. Giuliani looked too, for his politically selected fire commissioner, Tom Von Essen, once head of the firefighters union who had never achieved any rank above that of a uniformed fireman but had thoughtfully delivered firefighters as political campaign workers for Giulianni in 1993. As fire commissioner, Von Essen failed to create a substantial plan for the handling of high-rise fires. These intellectual stars wound up in Giuliani's post-9/11 consulting business.

As for the hundreds of our dead firemen, they and their wives and children must haunt Giuliani, for he knew that they were equipped by his administration with notoriously ineffective"walkie-talkies" condemned as dangerous to firemen and public as early as 1990. They caused the deaths of those firemen and many others in the towers. The departmental brass did not know that civilians below the fires were told to stay in place after the chiefs had ordered full evacuations. One cannot but think that there was a glacial silence when Giuliani before the 9/11 Commission said that the command and control breakdown on 9/11 "was not a major problem", a breakdown in which fire chiefs relied on runners for messages. He even suggested before the Commission that it was "unpatriotic" to discuss mistakes. This from the mayor whose heroic firemen were sent to their deaths to extinguish fires that their superiors knew were uncontrollable. This mayor in his uniquely hidden eight-year obsession with terrorism never had room for a plan for handling mega fires in one of the largest citys on earth, no plan for aircraft striking the towers, no holding of even one multi-agency coordinated drill for a mega high attack, no systematic approach for the rescue of the 200 people trapped in elevators where they died. This the mayor who, as his myth widened, thoughtfully wrote a book entitled "Leadership", the leader who failed to inform workers at Ground Zero, and the public, of the hazardous toxicity of the air proved by the city's own test results.

Surely, Grand Illusion proves beyond argument that this is the point at which Giuliani's political life is over, when the piano player stops, the lights are turned out, and the fat lady sings.

TV images of Mayor Giuliani striding through the WTC area immediately after the airplanes, along with the steady progress in cleaning up the site, have let many to attribute Churchillian qualities to NYC's mayor. Barrett assures us that this is simply a grand illusion, using Giuliani's actions (and non-actions) prior to 9/11 to make his point.

1)Giuliani claimed that his having established an Office of Emergency Management (OEM) was a key positive step in responding to 9/11. Reality is that it was located in the WTC (despite the '93's bombing proved it to be a prime terrorist target), and unusable on 9/11. (Ironically, the result - Giuliani having to visibly walk around the area, instead of being hidden within a command center - created the mistaken image of Giuliani being a "great leader.)

2)The NYFD Chief appointed by Giuliani had previously occupied a low-level position (failed the Lieutenant's exam twice); however, being president of a union that supported Giuliani's election was enough to earn him appointment as Chief.

3)OEM did not perform its coordination function on 9/11 - NYPD and NYFD simply operated on their own, as they always had. Thus, NYPD chopper pilots warned of building collapse nine minutes before it occured, but this message never made it to the NYFD. Similarly, a Department of Buildings engineer also warned of the danger of imminent collapse, but there was no way to relay his warning either. (OEM also had no plan for a high-rise fire, nor input from a structural engineer.)

4)The NYFD did not have reliable radio capabilities for within skyscrapers. New digital models had been ordered, did not work properly, and the department had gone back to its 1960-era equipment. Thus, many firemen never heard the order to evacuate. Prior to that, they had no way to communicate which floors had been searched, resulting in more men being sent into the building than otherwise would have, and floors being searched more than one time.

5)Those that did receive the message to evacuate were not told of the immediate need for action - many simply continued to rest from the strenuous climb up 15-20 flights with 100+ lbs. of equipment. (However, there was no need to carry such a load - there was a fireman's closet every five floors with masks, air packs, oxygen, and poles; the buildings had their own hoses).

6)911, fire dispatcher, and Port Authority police desk communications all told civilians below the fires to stay in place - long after evacuations were ordered by the NYFD chiefs.

7)The 1993 WTC bombing had trapped 500 people in elevators for hours; elevator mechanics played a key role in manually releasing elevators stuck in shafts. Nonetheless, on 9/11 the elevator mechanics were ordered out after the second plane hit and were not asked to return until minutes before the South Tower collapsed. (The 9/11 Commission was unclear whether the NYFD checked WTC lobby elevators.)

8)The NYC air quality monitors allowed WTC cleanup workers to work without air maska; now thousands are exhibiting resulting symptoms.

Should Giuliani have personally avoided each of these issues? The OEM mislocation was per his direction, as was the poor choice of NYFD leadership and failure to ensure that OEM could accomplish its role. The rest of the 9/11 failures inexorably flowed from these fundamental errors.

In addition, while not related to 9/11, Giuliani ran a series of budget deficits (hitting $4 billion his last year), and forced out NYPD Commissioner William Bratton for garnering too much publicity as a result of his methods of lowering crime.

Bottom Line: Giuliani's image really is a grand illusion.

I just finished reading the book, Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, Harper Collins, 2006. Barrett and Collins are local writers/reports who compiled the information contained in this book through their observations and the Report of the 9/11 Commission. They state incontrovertible proof that this is a dangerous man!

He was warned, on more than one occasion, by more than one of his advisors, that after the 1993 WTC bombings, setting up his Office of Emergency Management Control Center on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center was impractical and foolhardy! Yet he ignored the warnings of his staff to put the Control Center in Brooklyn because he "couldn't walk there from City Hall!"! His staff was already (1996) calling the World Trade Center "Ground Zero" because of the implications of the 1993 WTC bombing. Giuliani wanted his presence felt, in an emergency, and think of all the great "photo ops" we saw of his walking amongst the rubble! Can you believe he took advantage of this catastrophe?

Also, right after the collapse of the towers and having conferred with his aides, he contacted a public relations specialist and met with him through the first night so he would know what to say and how to act!

He ignored pleas from his consultants, for six years, to unify command and control and use the same radios for "first responders" (FDNY and NYPD). He hired cronies and hangers-on to be his advisors and Commissioners and he still ignored them!

Barrett and Colllins, state, event after event, that almost every viable suggestion to coordinate the responses of both emergency services fell on deaf ears! They site his ambition and arrogance as the only things that guided many of his decisions! They attribute the deaths of 343 firefighters, brave and honorable as they were, to the illusions of this egomaniac! After 9/11, the press deemed Rudy Giuliani as "America's Mayor". He was more like "America's Murderer!

The chapter titled "The Air" is the only historically accurate account of 9/11 available touching on the plight of the 20,000 displaced residents.

This book renews my belief in accurate reporting: the truth is finally here. It should be used in our schools to teach our children.

If you read only one account on what occurred on 9/11: this is your book.

As a person who experienced the horrors of 9/11 I found this book to be accurate, insightful and fascinating. The research that went into this book is impeccable. This is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the events of that terrible day.