Two Rudys, one spectacular fall from grace
An azure sky hung over Manhattan as Rudolph Giuliani, mayor of New York City, pulled up to the chic Peninsula hotel for breakfast with friends.
Now lost in the horrors of the worst terrorist attack in history, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, was also primary day. Giuliani was nearing the end of his second term. It was time for New Yorkers to elect their next leader.
But as he sipped coffee, spitballing his future, 19 al-Qaida terrorists were hijacking four commercial airplanes. At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower at the World Trade Center.
Soon after, Giuliani was in an SUV, speeding south toward the towering inferno in lower Manhattan. He was nearly there when, at 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 smashed into the south tower.
This second impact was broadcast live by TV networks that had cameras on the first. To rewatch that chaotic footage 20 years later, especially the first hour, is to be struck by a loss of innocence.
It’s as if our brains were not wired to grasp such evil.
But as anchors speculated at first about pilot error or a fatal glitch in navigation systems, Giuliani stepped out of his Suburban, stared up at the black smoke choking the skyline and knew his city was under assault. Amid the screams and swirling mayhem, he was reminded of Winston Churchill: “The price of greatness is responsibility.”
An unthinkable crisis was at his door.
New York, and the world, needed him to answer.
On the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the pain inflicted by so much death and destruction has not changed. The malevolence of those terrorists, turning planes into bombs and killing nearly 3,000 people, has not changed. Our flashbulb memories will never change.
What has changed is Rudy Giuliani.
An azure sky hung over Four Seasons Total Landscaping, on the industrial outskirts of Philadelphia. It was Nov. 7, 2020, and Giuliani, personal attorney to Donald Trump, was about to hold a press conference outside a garden centre, near a sex shop and a crematorium.
The triangulated symbolism was apt: Giuliani was now trying to plant a seed and screw voters by claiming without evidence the U.S. election four days earlier was marred by irregularities and outright fraud.
In doing so, he cremated the Rudy Giuliani of 2001.
If Shakespeare were around today, he’d write a tragedy called “King Rudy.” Or maybe a farce: “The Comedy of Rudy’s Errors.” Somewhere between tragedy and farce, that is where Giuliani is now entombed.
To watch him 20 years ago is to see a different person.
Dusted with ash and marching toward a makeshift command post as the second tower collapsed, the old Giuliani projected calm and resolve. He was honest. The new Giuliani is a half-soused bundle of lies and conspiracies.
He says stuff like, “Truth isn’t truth.” He deceives for political sport.
He once preached unity. Now he is more divisive than pineapple pizza.
In those first hours of Sept. 11, the old Giuliani warned against rushing to judgment. With alarms blaring, he refused to be alarmist. The new Giuliani, all bug-eyed and spittle-flecked, sounds like he’s free-falling through hallucinations, as if only he can see the leprechaun with a crossbow riding into the Grand Havana Room atop a sabre-toothed tiger.
Two decades, two Rudys. One spectacular fall from grace.
The man who received an honorary knighthood from the Queen has been reduced to hawking video greetings on Cameo for $375 a pop. The attorney who earned widespread praise as a mob-busting prosecutor and who became mayor in 1994 as a bespectacled Batman primed to fight crime in Gotham is now under federal investigation himself.
There is a memorable line in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight.” Harvey Dent offers an observation that might as well be Giuliani’s epitaph: “You either die a hero or live long
enough to see yourself become the villain.”
In 2001, Giuliani spoke eloquently about how terrorists could never destroy democracy. By 2020, he was trying to destroy it. His approval rating was once 79 per cent. When he talked, people leaned forward. Today, even kindergarteners “lol” when he lies through his picket-fence teeth.
There is a brutal irony at play: those who now believe a word he says are also the ones most likely to think Sept. 11 was an inside job.
On Sept. 23, 2001, at a memorial service at Yankee Stadium, Oprah introduced Giuliani as “America’s Mayor.” Three months later, for its “Person of the Year,” Time elevated his unofficial title to “Mayor of the World.”
Now he’s just Mayor of Crazytown.
Giuliani was toasted by world leaders touring Ground Zero, including Jean Chrétien, Nelson Mandela, Vladimir Putin and Tony Blair. Today, he is more likely to share a marquee with the MyPillow guy in a strip mall where rivulets of hair dye stream down his cheek as he claims there is new evidence alien technology imported to Earth by George Soros was used to tamper with ballots and Joe Biden escaped from a Chinese lab.
Jacques Chirac coined a nickname for Giuliani: “Rudy the Rock.” If the former president of France were still alive, he’d revise this sobriquet to: “Rudy the Crackpot.” Then he’d shake his head and exclaim, “Mon Dieu!”
In 2001, Giuliani was a voracious reader. The book at his bedside on that dreadful day was “Churchill,” a biography by Roy Jenkins. As he would later recall, he consciously relied upon historical lessons while handling this real-time disaster. One of those lessons was to frame horrific unknowns with empathy, to offer succour without sugar-coating.
On Sept. 11, 2001, when asked for a body count hours after the World Trade Center was reduced to smouldering rubble, Giuliani paused and said, “The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear ultimately.”
It was pitch perfect, poignant. The new Rudy is tone-deaf, strident.
At one point in the book “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reconstruct election night inside the White House where the former president and his inner circle were having panic attacks as the returns started to tip toward Biden.
An allegedly drunk Giuliani
came up with a plan: “Just say we won.”
Yes. Just say the sky is green. Just say up is down. The folly and potential treachery of this hare-brained gambit to overturn a free and fair election will hound all the co-conspirators to their graves.
But Giuliani doomed himself to Biggest Loser status the second those four words tumbled from his boozy lips. And with a first-class cabin on the MAGA Mendacity Express, the Giuliani of 2021 has made some momentous stops this year: he was suspended from practising law in
New York and D.C.
The FBI raided his apartment. His reckless lies have placed him in the crosshairs of a $1.3-billion defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.
He is revered only by those detached from reality.
It’s not hard to imagine a future Giuliani in an orange jumpsuit, befriending sparrows in the prison courtyard. And then twisting off their heads because he suspects they were sent on a spy mission by the Clintons.
What’s hard to imagine is why Giuliani fed his reputation into a shredder.
It’s as if our brains are not wired to grasp such self-destruction.
“Who is it who can tell me who I am?” asks King Lear.
“Lear’s Shadow,” replies the Fool.
An azure sky did not hang over city hall in New York on Dec. 31, 2001, when Giuliani’s run as mayor ended. He had tried and failed to extend his time following the attack, making dubious arguments about continuity.
Earlier in the day, he attended a graduation ceremony for firefighters in Brooklyn, where he was raised in a family that was both law and disorder. He had uncles who were cops. And a dad who did time for armed robbery. Giuliani gravitated toward the good guys — until he didn’t. He wanted to be on the right side of history — until he wasn’t. It’s as if he forgot a quote from legendary New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia: “The devil is easy to identify. He appears when
you’re terribly tired and makes a very reasonable request which you know you shouldn’t grant.”
On that December day, with the temp dipping to minus 7, there was a ribbon cutting in Central Park. Giuliani did numerous TV interviews. He held a press conference to announce a new Sept. 11 memorial.
And now, as day turned to night, as staffers cheered and bagpipers played a traditional “piping out” ceremony, Giuliani walked down the stairs of city hall for the last time as mayor.
He did so as one of the greatest, maybe the best, in NYC history.
That was the consensus as he left for the New Year’s Eve ball drop at Times Square and to swear in the incoming mayor, Michael Bloomberg. There was no reason to spitball his future. There were book deals and speaking engagements worth millions. The TV networks were calling. Federal politics beckoned. A lucrative private practice was in the offing.
As the face of the response to the deadliest attack on American soil, Giuliani banked a potential lifetime of respect, goodwill and opportunity. He squandered it all to become a cable ghoul who now cavorts with kooky conspiracists and fake patriots. He went from “we will rebuild, we will be stronger” to “just say we won.”
That’s not Churchillian statesmanship — it’s closer to enemy of the state.
Maybe there’s a physical or mental explanation for this perilous decline. Maybe it was a grift that drifted out of control. Or maybe Giuliani wasn’t lying when he told New York magazine: “My attitude about my legacy is f--k it.”
While hindsight raises questions about some of his decisions following the terrorist attacks — including risking his own life by going to Ground Zero or allowing two separate command posts for the police and fire departments — Giuliani was lionized for years and deservedly so.
He shone brightest when it was darkest.
That Rudolph Giuliani would not recognize his shadow today.
Giuliani banked a potential lifetime of respect. He squandered it all to become a cable ghoul who now cavorts with kooky conspiracists and fake patriots