Mayor Dodges Death and Calms the City-Minute by Minute with Rudy on 9/11

The routine, odd as it was for the mayor of America's largest city, was the same every morning. At 6:45 a.m., Rudy Giuliani emerged from his bedroom at Howard Koeppel's apartment, poured himself some coffee and sat down with his friend to read the papers.

Three months earlier, the mayor had fled Gracie Mansion, his wife and their miserable existence together and taken up refuge at the upper East Side home of the openly gay car dealer and his lover, Mark Hsiao. The city's liberals had a good laugh over the Republican's decision to move into an apartment decorated with a statue of David, Tiffany lamps and stuffed animals, while others chalked it up as yet another step he'd taken toward political oblivion.

But Giuliani never cared what people thought of him, and this arrangement suited him fine. He had his own bedroom, his own bathroom and his own entrance. His plainclothes police bodyguard watched television in the den each night as he slept. Downstairs, outside the luxury doorman building, another plainclothes detective sat behind the wheel of a parked SUV, its engine running through the night, ready to whisk the chief away in the event of a crisis. Giuliani had taken to calling Koeppel "mom."

Mark prepared the usual spread: Special K for Giuliani, lactose-free milk for Howard, plus berries, bananas, prunes and some fresh melon. Howard left the morning's Times, Post and News on the table for the mayor. As usual, Giuliani read them in silence, keeping whatever annoyed him to himself.

It was Sept. 11, Primary Day in New York City, the beginning of the end of Giuliani's eight-year reign. The public had grown weary of their mayor's endless battles with school chancellors, government bureaucrats, even his wife, and he'd lately been relegated to editorializing from the sidelines as various candidates to succeed him promised to maintain the best of Rudy without the shoot-to-kill rhetoric that had demeaned, outraged, humiliated or hounded out a legion of public servants.

They all made it sound so easy, as if running a city was something anyone with good intentions and a decent résumé could do. But no matter. He'd done what he could. Giuliani's cancer treatments had mercifully ended, and with them all those terrible nights spent repeatedly rushing to the bathroom to throw up. The divorce battle with Donna Hanover had finally receded from the front pages, and his relationship with Judi Nathan was no longer news. Let's just do our best and hope nothing goes wrong between now and then, he'd tell his aides. In all likelihood he was thinking about snowstorms and water main breaks.

It was a cloudless September morning. It still felt like the middle of summer outside, with a blazing sun already warming the streets of Manhattan. Giuliani got into his car and headed for the Peninsula Hotel for his second breakfast of the morning. He planned to vote afterward, uptown at the Richard Green School.

Downtown, at City Hall, Joe Lhota was sitting in his office, writing his secretary a note. The deputy mayor for operations, a garrulous man with a red beard and glasses, sat literally at the center of power in this town, a stately, high-ceilinged room smack in the middle of the mayor's wing of City Hall.

Doomsday Scenario: Smoke billows from the upper quarters of the Twin Towers after the terrorist attacks. Less than six miles above Lhota's office and a few miles west, American Airlines Flight 11 to Los Angeles was sailing across a clear blue sky above the Hudson River. Only a few people on the ground knew how much trouble there was on board.

Shortly after lifting off a runway at Boston's Logan Airport at 7:45 a.m., a 35-year-old flight attendant named Madeline Amy Sweeney called American's flight services manager Michael Woodward back at Logan. "This plane," she said, "has been hijacked."

In a calm, reportorial manner, Sweeney told Woodward that four Middle Eastern men, some wearing red bandanas and brandishing box cutters, had sprung out of their business class seats and slit the throat of another passenger. Then they stormed the cockpit of the Boeing 767.

As she talked, the plane suddenly swerved and started to descend. Woodward asked her to identify the plane's location and she looked out the window. "I see water and buildings," she said. "Oh my God! Oh my God!" Flight 11 was headed for the World Trade Center.

At 8:48 a.m., as Lhota was rifling through papers seven blocks north, Flight 11 found its target. Soaring through the air at 400 mph, its nose plowed through the cool steel exterior of the north tower and shattered into the span between the 96th and 103rd floors, instantly killing the 81 passengers, two pilots, and nine flight attendants.

The plane and its 13,900 gallons of jet fuel exploded on impact, producing a spectacular fireball that blew through the air and engulfed the upper quarter of the tower. It produced a plume of thick black smoke so large that it could be seen from outer space.

It was an explosion that literally shook the city. Running out of his office onto the steps of City Hall, Joe Lhota could see the fire consuming the tower seven blocks away. He immediately called the mayor, who was finishing up at the Peninsula. Denny Young, Giuliani's counsel, took the call. "Tell the mayor a plane has hit the Trade Center."

Speeding down Fifth Ave. in a Chevrolet Suburban with Young and two police bodyguards, Giuliani tried to make sense of the news. How could a plane hit the Trade Center? It must have been a small twin-engine plane that lost its way. But how did it get so close to the building?

As he spoke over the phone to his police and fire commissioners, Giuliani spotted flames spouting from the north tower. But it wasn't until his van passed St. Vincent's Medical Center in Greenwich Village that it started to dawn on him that this could be a bigger disaster than he'd envisioned. Doctors and nurses in their scrubs were waiting with stretchers outside the hospital. They'd evidently been prepared to expect vast numbers of casualties.

A few minutes later, another explosion, mighty as a sonic boom, came from the direction of the twin towers. Still two miles north of the Trade Center, Giuliani assumed it was further fallout from whatever was going on at the north tower. It would be another minute before the phone in his car would ring and he would get the news that another plane had crashed into the south tower.

He still had no way of knowing that, like the first plane, it had been commandeered soon after flying out of Boston by fanatics bent on a suicide mission. Or that, on this quiet late summer day in September, America was under attack, and New York and Washington were the main targets.

The scene the mayor encountered downtown was straight out of the apocalypse. Hundreds of people were running out of the towers, gasping for air. Windows were shattering 100 stories above, raining glass down on the streets and striking people on the ground. Plane parts were falling from the sky. So were body parts. The streets were greased with blood.

Standing in the shadow of the burning buildings near the Fire Department's makeshift command post on West St., Giuliani squinted up at the skyscrapers. A man jumped out of a top floor, and the mayor's eyes fixed on him as he hurtled through the air to his death on the pavement below.

All the war-torn generals of the Fire Department were at the command post plotting strategy at a big board that outlined their troops' movements. There was Pete Ganci, chief of the department and its highest uniformed officer; Bill Feehan, the first deputy commissioner, and Tommy Von Essen, their boss, the fire commissioner.

Their men had already evacuated half of 1 World Trade Center, the north tower. Breathing air thick with smoke and jet fuel fumes, the firefighters were lumbering up 102 stories of staircases, wading upstream against a floodtide of people scrambling down to get out. The evacuation of the south tower wasn't going as quickly.

"What should I tell people?" Giuliani asked his commanders. Tell people to get in a stairway and come down, they answered. Tell them our guys are coming up the stairwells to get them.

By this time, many of the mayor's closest aides — like Lhota — had joined him at the Fire Department command post. He waved them over and set out for the police command center a few blocks away. Before he left, he turned to Ganci. "God bless you," Giuliani said.

A few steps away, Giuliani and company ran into Fire Department chaplain Mychal Judge, a Franciscan priest.

I assumed the mayor was downtown at the city's new emergency command center, a $15 million bunker constructed on the 23rd floor of one of the smaller buildings in the World Trade Center complex. I didn't know that the building that housed it had already been evacuated. Grabbing a cab downtown, I asked the driver to turn up the radio. On the all-news radio station 1010 WINS, Joan Fleisher, a business-side staffer for the station, was on the line describing the site.

Fleisher: They have police helicopters overhead, I assume to keep everyone away. The smoke is still billowing towards Brooklyn. You can smell the smoke from here. It's coming from the entire area of both buildings. It's unbelievable, an unbelievable sight.

Anchor: Word now that a plane has crashed into the Pentagon. It has been evacuated, along with the West Wing of the White House. The Treasury has been evacuated. The Capitol evacuated. The Sears Tower in Chicago has been evacuated. There was no threat of an attack against the Sears Tower. Obviously they want to quit while they're ahead there. And all of this the World . . .

Fleisher: Oh wait! Oh my God! OH MY GOD! THE BUILDING FELL! Are you there? The building just fell!

Fleisher: The building . . . the whole building just crumbled! Oh my God! The building just crumbled. (gasps)

I stuck my head out the window as we drove down West Broadway and saw the south tower imploding.

A bright cloud of flame shot up from the top of the sinking building, flickering against the blue sky like an improbable daytime fireworks display. It only lingered in the air for a moment before it was followed by a volcanic explosion of dust, smoke and cement particles.

The white noise of destruction muffled the screams of thousands of office workers, janitors, restaurant workers, stock brokers, rescue workers, firefighters and police officers who were being instantly crushed in the planet's worst building collapse. It took 10 seconds for this wonder of human engineering to disintegrate. A mighty cloud of smoke rose up angrily in its place.

Shortly before the south tower collapsed, Giuliani and his aides invaded a city office building that police had decided to turn into a makeshift command center. His prized command center a block away had been designed for precisely this moment, but it was useless now. In a few hours it would lie in rubble.

Tony Carbonetti, his now-graying chief of staff, got on his cell phone and called the White House. "I need Karl Rove!" Bush's senior political aide.

"Sir, he's not here," a military aide responded. "The White House has been evacuated. The Pentagon has been hit."

The vice president was on the line for Giuliani. The mayor walked into a private office to take the call. He barely got out the words "Mr. Vice President," before the phone went dead. New York was under attack, the White House had been evacuated and communications were down. It was a doomsday scenario.

"The tower is coming down!" someone yelled. The building started to shake. A bodyguard shoved Giuliani under a desk. Smoke started to pour into the room. The place had to be evacuated fast.

The party embarked on an odyssey to find a way out of the building. Three doors leading to the street were locked, as the group traveled first downstairs to the basement, then upstairs and then downstairs again. The air smelled of smoke. Outside the windows of the building, on the streets, day had turned to night.

Finally, a building worker thought to lead the group through a corridor that led into the lobby of the building next door.

They emerged into a bleak new world. The streets were covered with ash. There was heavy white smoke in the air. It seemed the very image of a nuclear attack that had been drilled into Giuliani's mind at Bishop Loughlin High School a lifetime ago.

A low-flying plane pierced the sky, and someone yelled, "We're being attacked again!" This is unreal, Giuliani thought. How could this be happening in New York? But a cop realized that it was an American military plane, sent in to protect the airspace. A war seemed to be underway in the skies above Manhattan.

I found Giuliani standing on Church St. with Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik and a clutch of aides. They were as lost and disoriented as the bankers and secretaries and restaurant workers who'd been flocking uptown by foot to escape the destruction. City Hall had been evacuated, and the phones were out at 1 Police Plaza. The destruction a few blocks away had rendered most cell phones useless. There was little communication with the outside world, and no logical place to relocate city government.

As we started to walk north, a noise from behind alerted us that the whole sickening spectacle of the tower collapse was starting to repeat itself. A volcanic explosion erupted as Tower 1, with thousands of office workers, firefighters and rescue crews still inside, collapsed in an instant. It was a terrifying spectacle. Tony Coles, the most buttoned-up of Giuliani's aides, yelled "f---!" And then the mayor and his men started to run.

The collapse produced a huge, violent mushroom of smoke and concrete dust, which rose to the sky and grew larger until it threatened to envelop us. John Huvane, a big, red-headed plainclothes detective, threw his arm around the mayor and started running north with him. "Just keep going north!" Giuliani shouted out.

The run finally slowed to a trot. Giuliani fell back into line. "How the hell did they get the Pentagon?" he asked Kerik.

Giuliani was the calmest one in the bunch. The city — the country — was under a cataclysmic attack, and he'd been reduced to a wandering refugee. He was thinking practically, methodically. Keep the traffic away from the emergency vehicles.

The crowds on the street grew larger the farther we walked. Most companies shut down for the day and sent their employees pouring out of buildings and into the streets. There was nowhere to go: The subways had ground to a halt, and there were no buses or taxis in sight. The only thing to do was find a working telephone booth or stand around and worry.

With crowds teeming on both sides of us, we walked up the avenue in the direction of Greenwich Village. A young man off to the side spotted the mayor and pumped his fist in the air. "Go get 'em, Giuliani!" he yelled. The mayor put his finger to his lips. "Shhhhh."

A few paces later, he encountered a young female cop, a tall black woman with a friendly round face. She flashed him a frightened smile. Still walking, he put his palm on her cheek, like a father.

Options were discussed and rejected. We'd go to the first police precinct house. No, the fire museum. At last his aides settled on the Tribeca Grand Hotel, unquestionably one of the trendiest spots in all of downtown Manhattan. We all marched into this temple of chic, a ragtag contingent comically out of our element, led by our general. Too public. Too much glass. Making our way past dozens of puzzled hotel guests, we turned around and walked out.

Our trek finally brought us to Engine Co. 24, a firehouse off Houston St. When we arrived, no one was home. The doors were all locked. Every member of the fire station was down at the World Trade Center. The mayor, the police commissioner and crew stood around a locked door for 15 minutes, unable to get inside. Eventually, someone was able to jimmy the lock open. We were finally out of the desert.

At 10:54 a.m., two hours and six minutes after Flight 11 crashed into the north tower, Giuliani called New York 1 from a tiny glass-enclosed office at the Greenwich Village firehouse and spoke live on the air with anchors Pat Kiernan and Sharon Dizenhuz.

"The first thing I'd like to do is to take this opportunity to tell everyone to remain calm and to the extent that they can, to evacuate lower Manhattan," he said. "We've been in contact with the White House and asked them to secure the space around the city. They've been doing that for at least the last hour, hour and a half. I've spoken to the governor several times and the governor and I agree that the election today should be canceled.

"My heart goes out to [people who have lost loved ones]. I've never seen anything like this. I was there from shortly after it happened and saw people jumping out of the World Trade Center. It's a horrible, horrible situation, and all that I can tell them is that every resource that we have is attempting to rescue as many people as possible. And the end result is going to be some horrendous number of lives lost. I don't think we know yet, but right now we have to just focus on saving as many people as possible."

At 2:35 p.m., the mayor of New York City held his first televised press conference. It was held at the city's Police Academy, which for the next six days would serve as New York's makeshift City Hall. Giuliani spoke slowly and deliberately. The gravity of the moment hung in the air.

"Today is obviously one of the most difficult days in the history of the city and the country," he began. "The tragedy that we're all undergoing right now is something that we've had nightmares about — probably thought wouldn't happen. My heart goes out to all of the innocent victims of this horrible and vicious act of terrorism.

"We will strive now very hard to save as many people as possible. And to send a message that the City of New York and the United States of America is much stronger than any group of barbaric terrorists. That our democracy, that our rule of law, that our strength and our willingness to defend ourselves will ultimately prevail."

Giuliani took questions. He moved effortlessly from the smallest, most prosaic details to the broad sweep of the calamity, playing military leader and chief psychologist.

Behind the scenes, he and his aides were learning horrific details about the destruction of the World Trade Center. Maybe 15 minutes after he and Fire Commissioner Tom Von Essen left the Fire Department command post, the men they parted with were lost in the tower collapse. Pete Ganci and Bill Feehan, proud and grizzled veterans of the department, were killed. Chaplain Mychal Judge died administering last rites to a firefighter.

More than 300 firefighters perished in the disaster, several hundred more than the department had ever lost in one day. Von Essen was so overcome with grief he couldn't speak about it for two days.

Giuliani didn't cry publicly, but he didn't hide his pain, either. At a 6 p.m. briefing, he explained trying to reconcile his feelings of loss with his need to lead the city out of its worst crisis in decades. "I feel terrible for the people we lost, some of whom I spoke to 15 minutes before we lost them," he said.

"The city is going to survive. We're going to get through it. It's going to be a very difficult time. I don't think we yet know the pain we're going to feel when we find out who we lost. But the thing we have to focus on now is getting the city through this and surviving and being stronger for it."

The words were those of a leader. Told of people dancing in the streets of Arab countries at the news of the World Trade Center's destruction, he didn't rise to the bait. Instead, he urged New Yorkers not to engage in group blame against the city's Arab residents.

His words were riveting. "New York is still here," he said. "We've undergone tremendous losses, but New York is going to be here tomorrow morning, and this is the way of life that people want throughout the world."

Giuliani was under enormous pressure. The city was paralyzed, with all of lower Manhattan and the city's bridges and tunnels closed. Schools were shut down. And the public was traumatized: The death toll was in the thousands.

Sometime early the next morning, Giuliani finally came home to Howard Koeppel's apartment. Awakened by his entrance, Koeppel put on a bathrobe, went into the foyer and gave his friend a hug. The mayor was shaken. He'd been with Ganci and Feehan and Judge just 15 minutes before they'd died, he explained. The destruction at the Trade Center, he said, "was the most horrific thing I'd ever seen."

And then Rudy Giuliani collapsed into a chair in the living room and stared straight ahead at the television. Original Publication Date: 10/21/01

Over a month after the incident I still sob at the thought of all those people and the absolute horror they must have felt as the buildings collapsed.

I am stunned at the people who are fretting over the bombing in Afghanistan.

They all made it sound so easy, as if running a city was something anyone with good intentions and a decent résumé could do.

Boy, are those types going to get a wake-up call on January 1. It almost doesn't matter whether it's Bloomberg or Green that wins; it's just trading one version of Hell for another. A union-controlled party hack vs Captain Clueless.

Boy am I outta touch...didn't know Rudy was a packer. Wish I hadn't read this article.

Um ... I think you misread the article.

Whoever is elected the next mayor will serve only one term, if he isn't thrown out of office before his term is up. I remember NYC before Rudy. I spent about one week a month in NYC for several years. It wasn't pretty. You could not have paid me enough to live there.

Rudy has a lot of faults and he is far too left wing for my tastes, but there is no question that he is the best mayor that NYC has had in my lifetime, maybe ever. Another mayor like Dinkins will set the city back more than the WTC terrorists.

"A low-flying plane pierced the sky, and someone yelled, "We're being attacked again!" This is unreal, Giuliani thought. How could this be happening in New York? But a cop realized that it was an American military plane, sent in to protect the airspace.

Huh?

Bump. Its hard to live in NYC and not have homosexual friends or co-workers. I just respect their right to do what they will with their personal lives while rejecting the public gay agenda.

I didn't know the term 'packer' until I read further down in the posts that it was a slang term for a homosexual...I don't see your point...NYC has a very large gay population...I live in a very racially mixed neighborhood of Brooklyn and there are 3 male monogamous couples on the block...they are homeowners...participate in block parties and do community service...they are not 'flitty' or in your face about their lifestyles...they are well-adjusted members of our community...the only homosexuals that I have problems with are pedophiles...I also dislike heterosexual pedophiles BTW.

Since Rudy cannot run for mayor again for a few years, he should relocate to San Francisco and help to rescue that city from Willie Brown. San Francisco is going down for the count, it is so bad off that only someone as strong and decisive as Rudy can save it at this point. Rudy, if you're reading this out there, please consider running for mayor of San Francisco!

Actually, the term in full is "fudge packer". As for my point, I'm not one who accepts homosexuality as healthy, normal or acceptable behavior. I realize many people today do, I just don't happen to be one of them. As for the other posts who state I have misread the article, I hope you're right! Perhaps this was a kind of "outing" on the author's part, but I hope it is completely false.

this is the best collage of the 9/11 attack I have ever seen.

Don't try it unless you have a high-speed connection and about 10 minutes to spare.

Perhaps this was a kind of "outing" on the author's part, but I hope it is completely false.

Oh give me a break, "outing". Are you not aware that Rudy's marriage broke up over a WOMAN??

Sheesh. Not a biggie. Gracie Mansion wasn't big enough for Rudy and Donna anymore, Judi's got her own problems with a custody battle for her daughter, and these gay guys have a truly huge apartment--you read it, Rudy has "his own bedroom, his own bathroom, his own entrance", plus room for the bodyguards.

They're not even charging him rent, from what I've read in previous articles. Frankly I wish these guys were friends of *mine*, I could use more space.

You can really see the leadership abilities, character, and integrity a person has when they are put into such a situation. Rudy has definately demonstrated what a good leader he really is. Rudy has really stepped up and taken control during such a terrible crisis. No amount of training could have prepared anyone for such a situation as this.
BTW, is he going to run against The Bitch for the U.S. Senate in 06?

"Actually, the term in full is "fudge packer"...."

AKA "Sewer orifice discharge reversal"

Also, reverse flow on a one-way check valve invalidates the parts warranty!

Most people who know Rudy think that he would be ill-suited to be a Senator--one out of 100 is not his style. Some rumors say that he will be replacing Tenet as the head of the CIA. My personal favorite is him joining the Justice Dept. with a special focus on tracking down and bringing to trial the al Queda memebers in the USA--he has vast experience dealing with RICO statutes from when he was a federal prosecutor fighting the MOB.

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