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"Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy," said F. Scott Fitzgerald. On the morning of Sept. 11, primary day in New York City, Rudy Giuliani was paddling along with all the other lame ducks into oblivion. The tower of strength had become an object of pity: the iron man's cancer made him vulnerable, the righteous man's adultery made him hypocritical, the loyal man's passions--for his city and its cops and its streets and its ballplayers--divided the city even as he improved it. After abandoning Gracie Mansion, his marriage in flames, he was camping out with friends on the Upper East Side, and now it was time to choose his successor, and the end was in sight.
The end was, in fact, just a few blocks away. Having raced to the scene at the first news of the attacks, Giuliani was nearly buried alive. In the hours that followed, he had to lock parts of the city down and break others open, create a makeshift command center and a temporary morgue, find a million pairs of gloves and dust masks and respirators, throw up protections against another attack, tame the mobs that might go looking for vengeance and somehow persuade the rest of the city that it had not just been fatally shot through the heart.
There was a test in that moment, and he was the first to pass it. On that day, for his security and the country's, the President was on the move, underground. The rest of us had stopped in our tracks, no idea where we were or what it meant. And so it was up to Giuliani to hold off despair long enough for the rest of us to get our balance, find our armor and join in to fight at his side. That day and the days that followed, he managed to sound realistic and optimistic at the same time. The danger has not passed. Our defenses are not perfect. Our enemies are cunning. He knew the difference between information and inspiration and never substituted one where the other was needed.
Maybe it takes a survivor of cancer, the private pitiless terror, to minister to a city that discovers in a single moment that every moment counts, that everything you were certain of can change in an instant. We knew that he was a tough man. It took the trauma for us to discover the tenderness, the offscreen, backstage, lowlight kindness he showed to widow after widow, child after child. A man considered incapable of empathy, who could scarcely mutter a word of condolence to the mother of an unarmed man his police force had shot 41 times, somehow knew what to say--and just as important, what not to. Tell me about your son, he would say to a speechless mother, and then he would go quiet, and she would start to talk, and his listening gave her her voice back. In the face of so much agony, every instinct instructs you to flee; he has gone to close to 200 wakes and memorials and funerals. He says it gives him his strength.