Interview: Rudolph Giuliani
Former Mayor of New York City

How did you first become interested in public service? Were there people in public service in your family?

Rudolph Giuliani: There were a lot of people in civil service in my family, meaning police officers, firefighters. Four of my uncles were police officers, one was a firefighter. So, some of my earliest memories were of them. So, I'm sure that had something to do with the desire for public service. The sort of feeling that if you work for the government, you can help a lot more people, which I think in some ways is the thing that inspires public service. You feel that you can make a bigger contribution to helping people. There are obviously other ways to do it, but one of the ways to do it is through public service.

What kind of student were you?

Rudolph Giuliani: Mostly a good student, but there were lapses. There were some significant lapses. In high school, I remember having to sort of straighten myself out. I would consider it sporadic. There were times I was a good student and times I wasn't, and sometimes my biggest interest was baseball and not study. By college, I became a more serious student, and law school.

Did you always see yourself being a lawyer and going into public service, or were there other things you considered?

Rudolph Giuliani: No, no. I went through many, many, many possible careers that ranged from being a priest to a doctor to an Air Force pilot to a reporter, teacher, philosopher. I finally arrived on the idea of going to law school. I believe it was in my fourth year of college. So it was not something that consumed all my childhood. During most of my childhood, the things I thought of being the most, if people would ask the question "What are you going to be when you grow up?" was a doctor or a priest.

What about your parents? Were they supportive of your going into law?

Rudolph Giuliani: My parents were very, very supportive of getting a good education and then deciding what you want to do. They did not put a great deal of pressure on me to do any particular thing. Their feeling was that you should get a very good education, the best you can get, and then decide on doing something that will make you feel fulfilled, that will make you feel happy. And, I sort of developed the idea -- maybe with their influence and other people -- that you had to find something to do that you were good at, because if you are good at something, it's a lot easier to do it as work than when you are struggling with it. And, the reason I decided to remain a lawyer when I tried law school was I enjoyed it. For me, working on legal problems, writing about them, thinking about them, debating them, was very, very interesting, so I never regretted that decision. It has always been like an adventure for me, being a lawyer.

What was it you enjoyed about the law? Was it the opportunity to learn about so many different things?

Rudolph Giuliani: I found legal education fascinating because of the concentration on logic, trying to determine the logical answer to a problem. Obviously, that applies to law, but it also applies to the way you approach problems in life generally.

You try as best you can to find the rational solution to it, the thing that will work.

Were you a big reader when you were a kid? Are there books that you remember?

Rudolph Giuliani: Yes, I always enjoyed reading. That's a gift from my mother. My mother, from the time I was very young, would read books to me, actually show them to me and tell me things like, "You can travel around the world by reading books; you can relive any period in history by reading books; you can learn anything you need to learn by reading books." So I have always had, in addition to enjoying reading, a kind of fascination with books. So finally writing one was really wonderful. Once it was done and I could actually hold it in my hand, I felt I had finally done what my mother wanted me to do, which was not only to read a lot, but to finally get a book written.

We understand that you were a fan of Profiles in Courage by JFK. Did you read that early on?

Rudolph Giuliani: I read that book when it first came out. I must have been a high school student then. That was a very inspirational book for me, because it concentrated on political leaders acting like leaders and doing things that were unpopular at which they put their career at risk because of principle. And, I can remember saying many, many times over the course of the last 40 or 50 years, when people weren't doing that, "I guess they don't want a chapter in Profiles in Courage." I mean, the reality is that it really does define the highest form of political leadership, which is where your principles conflict with something that might be the best thing for you to do politically. And Profiles in Courage is about those who chose to do the thing they believed was the principled thing.

You entered the U.S. Attorney's office and became a prosecutor shortly after law school. Was that a clear direction you planned to follow while you were in law school?

Rudolph Giuliani: Being a prosecutor, or being an assistant U.S. Attorney, was not a clear direction in law school. It didn't emerge until probably about halfway through law school, when I had a particular professor, Irving Younger, who was an evidence teacher, who had spent a very enjoyable part of his career in the United States Attorney's office. So therefore, his lectures were infected with all these stories of when he was a prosecutor and an assistant U.S. Attorney. And I became friendly with him, and he was my advisor, and that, I think, is the first thing that put in my mind the idea that it would be very, very interesting to be a prosecutor. Because as a young person, it almost seemed kind of harsh. Being a prosecutor sounds like you're going to create difficulties for people. But the reality is that by listening to him and talking to him, I came to the idea that this is when we should really help people. I mean, the reality is that you are dealing with people that do harm to other people, and deterring them from doing it, stopping them from doing it, trying to create more respect for law. I think he's the first one that really, sort of made that turn in my thinking.

You clerked for a judge after law school. Did he have an influence on you?

Rudolph Giuliani: Judge McMahon was my first real supervisor, boss. My permanent job was as a law clerk to United States Judge Lloyd F. McMahon, and he had a very big influence on me, a dramatic influence. He was a very, very good lawyer. He was a very good teacher, and he enjoyed taking his time teaching his law clerks. And in addition to being a judge, he enjoyed sitting down with his law clerks and giving them almost a seminar on how to be a trial lawyer, and his lessons -- "Four hours of preparation for every one hour in court; anticipate everything that's going to happen" -- the thing that you mentioned earlier, the idea that being a lawyer is wonderful because you can learn everything. He had a library of books that ranged from astronomy to chemistry to biology, because at one time or another as a trial lawyer, he had to learn all those things for the cases that he was involved in. So he helped me develop both as a lawyer and ultimately -- as I point out in my book -- as a leader.

What about your father? We've read that he was an influence on your moral education.

Rudolph Giuliani: My father was a very strong influence on me because he was always giving me lessons about how to deal with the difficulties of life. I guess he had a real sense that you've got to prepare your children -- not only for the good things that are going to happen in life -- but the bad and difficult things, because nobody gets through life without difficult things happening. We all have to know how to handle crisis.

My father used to say to me, "Whenever you get into a jam, whenever you get into a crisis or an emergency, and everybody around you is getting very excited," he said, "You become the calmest person in the room and you'll be able to figure your way out of it, force yourself to be calmer than you feel."

He would give me lots of lessons like that. I think it's from him that I really developed the idea that you've got to find something to do in life that you enjoy, that if you don't find a way to do something as work that is fulfilling and enjoyable, then your life is going to be really sad. So that's what I focused on when I was in college. What will I be good at?

He himself had had some tough times, and even a brush with the law, didn't he?

Rudolph Giuliani: Right. He had a lot of difficulties in his life, which he overcame. I think his mission in life was to make sure that I didn't have those same difficulties. He made sure that I was physically secure, had a good education, had a good set of moral principles. He would spend a lot of time talking about that. In retrospect, knowing more about his life, I can understand why he did that. Sometimes he may have overemphasized it, but now I think I realize why.

What do you suppose led him to make some of those mistakes that he made?

Rudolph Giuliani: Oh, I don't really know. You don't get to know your parents as children or as young people, so you get to know them much later in life. Now I can see why he overemphasized doing what was right, being honest, never taking anything from anyone, being sure you tell the truth, and if you have done anything that you think is wrong, correct it. It was like a whole series of lessons that were emphasized over and over again.

Did he actually do time in jail?

Rudolph Giuliani: He did, yes. I found that out recently.

One of the things that is very interesting about your career is that there seems to be a direct link between your work in the U.S. Attorney's Office and your work as a mayor, particularly in the area of crime-fighting. Did that form a connection for you?

Rudolph Giuliani: In a psychological way, it probably did, but I would have to go deeper than things I actually know to really see that, because during the time my father was alive, he didn't make that connection. But now, when I look back on it, I realize that that is probably one of the reasons why he emphasized respecting the law, obeying the law, how important it was. When he was doing it, I didn't have the knowledge I have now. I didn't realize why he spent so much time on making sure you are honest, making sure you obey the law. When I made the choice to be a lawyer, and even during my early career as a lawyer, his real wish for me was to be a judge. He used to tell me that, that he wanted me to be a judge, not go into politics. He said, "You'd be a very good judge, and I'd be very happy if you were a judge." And at the time, I didn't know why he emphasized that so much, and now I think I do, but I'm not absolutely sure. I think I do from the additional facts that I was able to get a few years ago.

How long did he live? Long enough to see your success?

Rudolph Giuliani: My father lived until 1981. At the time that he died, I was just being appointed Associate Attorney General of the United States. So he lived to see a lot of my career, but not when I became the United States Attorney, not Mayor of New York City. Very, very often, I wish that he had, because he played a much more instrumental role in all that than I realized.

What do you think made you such a forceful and effective prosecutor?

Rudolph Giuliani: I think I was very fortunate to have a very good education -- both just general education in high school, college, law school -- and then directly from the people that I worked with. I think two years with Judge McMahon taught me how to be a really, really good trial lawyer. I probably would not have had at least that knowledge. And, it fit my talents. If I had tried to be a nuclear scientist, I probably wouldn't have been a success, because I'm not sure I'd have those talents. But I have essentially a logical mind, and sort of a natural desire to solve problems, and I enjoy speaking and analyzing and writing. So all the things that a lawyer has to do are things that I like to do, and if I had selected -- I guess the technical term for it is "a profession with other skill sets" -- I'd have been a big failure. You're fortunate if you select the area in which your strengths are emphasized rather than your weaknesses.

So when did you make the connection between your work in the U.S. Attorney's Office and a run for Mayor of New York City?

Rudolph Giuliani: The first time that I really thought about running for Mayor of New York City, I was trying a case in New Haven, Connecticut -- when I was United States Attorney in New York -- that had been removed. The venue had been changed, and it was a case involving municipal corruption of commissioners and county leaders, political leaders, who were involved in a bribery scheme in New York City. And during the trial, the thought entered my mind that maybe if I was the mayor, I could straighten this out.

As I started to think about it after the case was over, that thought was tempered by the fact that I'm a Republican, and New York City is a 5-to-1 Democratic city. Maybe you could run for the Senate, or maybe you could run for Governor, or maybe you could run where things are more balanced. But running for Mayor of New York City -- there haven't been many Republican mayors. The one before me, John Lindsay, became a Democrat while he was mayor, in his second term. But I thought about it more and more. A couple of years went by, and I thought about it more and more. It seemed to me like it was worth going through all the organization and effort, because it's something where I can make a contribution.

As the United States Attorney and assistant United States Attorney, a native New Yorker, I knew all the things that were wrong with the city. I had investigated organized crime, prosecuted organized crime, white-collar crime, drug dealing, municipal corruption, other forms of government corruption. I got to see all the bad parts of the city, and I knew all the good parts just from my life as a New Yorker. So I felt, well, this is an ideal situation for me. The city needs a reform mayor right now. It needs somebody who is going to change things. It needs a mayor who understands how to reduce crime, because we were averaging thousands and thousands of murders -- at one point, we were averaging 2,000 murders a year -- and so maybe I could get myself elected.

The first time I ran, I lost by two percent, and the second time I ran, I won by two percent, and then I got reelected by a much larger number. But maybe the fact that so many people told me it couldn't be done challenged me. I'd go talk to people about, "Should I run for mayor?" and they would tell me, "You're crazy. You can't. You're a Republican. A Republican can't get elected. Being a mayor is a thankless job. The city's unmanageable, the city's ungovernable." Even books were written with those titles, "New York City is Ungovernable," "New York City is Unmanageable." Maybe there's something about my personality, but the more people told me that, the more I wanted to do it. It didn't make sense to me that the city was unmanageable or ungovernable. Nothing is unmanageable or ungovernable.

You've got to try your best to do it. I had a different approach to social problems. I thought I saw what was wrong in the way we were handling social problems. We were promising grand solutions and hurting more people than helping them, because we weren't helping individual people. The solutions were macro solutions that didn't work and that weren't helping individual people. So I thought I could also get an opportunity to sort of adjust that, so that we would actually help individual people, rather than have some kind of a broad-based approach that didn't really offer any help to people, that was actually making their condition worse.

In fighting crime, you also started small. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the "Broken Windows" theory. Why was it so important to clean up the streets and get rid of graffiti?

Rudolph Giuliani: Well, I very much subscribe to the "Broken Windows" theory, a theory that was developed by Professors Wilson and Kelling, 25 years ago maybe. The idea of it is that you had to pay attention to small things, otherwise they would get out of control and become much worse. And that, in fact, in a lot of our approach to crime, quality of life, social programs, we were allowing small things to get worse rather than dealing with them at the earliest possible stage. That approach had been tried in other cities, but all small cities, and there was a big debate about whether it could work in a city as large as New York. One of the ways that New York used to resist any kind of change was to say, "It can't work here," because they wanted to keep the status quo. There is such a desire for people to do that, to keep the status quo. And I thought, "Well, there's no reason why it can't work in New York City. We have bigger resources. We may have bigger problems, we have bigger resources, the same theory should work." So we started paying attention to the things that were being ignored. Aggressive panhandling, the squeegee operators that would come up to your car and wash the window of your car whether you wanted it or not -- and sometimes smashed people's cars or tires or windows -- the street-level drug-dealing; the prostitution; the graffiti, all these things that were deteriorating the city. So we said, "We're going to pay attention to that," and it worked. It worked because we not only got a big reduction in that, and an improvement in the quality of life, but massive reductions in homicide, and New York City turned from the crime capital of America to the safest large city in the country for five, six years in a row.

To what do you attribute the drastic cut in serious, violent crime?

Rudolph Giuliani: The drastic cut in crime in New York City -- which continued after crime started going up in other cities -- has to do with two principal things and then a lot of other things. One is the "Broken Windows" theory. You've got to pay attention to everything, and you can't give criminals a sense of immunity. The second is the COMSTAT program, the computer program that measures crime every single day in every single part of the city, pin-maps it, plots it, and gives you real hard data on which you can make decisions about your law enforcement strategies. So every day, you can look at where crime is going up, where crime is going down, and assign your police not based on some kind of a hunch or guess, but based on the fact that crime is going up in this part of the city, and this is where we have to put our police officers, and these are the kinds of police officers that we need to do it, because you need different kinds of police officers based on different kinds of crimes. In one part of the city, you can have auto theft going up. You need a certain kind of policing and a certain kind of police officer to reduce that. In another part of the city, you could have thefts of office buildings. You need a different kind of police officer, you need a different kind of policing, and you need the help of the security people in the buildings. But by having these accurate statistics and keeping after them very intensely, you get to see these trends right away, and then you can take action to stop it before it gets out of control.

How did you get so many people off welfare in such a short time?

Rudolph Giuliani: We got a tremendous number of people off welfare and into work, but it wasn't a short time. It was a six or seven-year period. And the number is about 700,000 people that were removed from the welfare rolls. And the last couple of years, we were averaging finding jobs for about 100,000 people each year. So it wasn't just getting them off welfare, it was getting them off welfare and getting them into work. And it was by explaining the value of work and challenging the notion that it was kinder and better to put people on welfare than to keep people in the work force, because I didn't accept the idea that you were really helping people by putting them on welfare. You really help people when you help them to stay self-sufficient, or you lead them to self-sufficiency. That's really compassion. That's really caring, that's really worrying about a person as a person rather than as a statistic. And I found that social philosophy in New York for 15-20 years to be very, very damaging to the work ethic. The idea that you would sign people up for welfare, you would encourage people to be on welfare, you would make welfare user-friendly, and then, all of a sudden, you would see a deterioration of the work ethic. Well of course you would. I mean, the idea is to take welfare officers and make them employment officers. I'm going to help my friend by finding my friend a job, not by giving my friend a sense of somebody else can take care of you for the rest of your life, unless that is really necessary because of disability, medical problem, mental issues, whatever.

So that's what we tried to do. We changed the social philosophy. It was very hard at first.

There was a knee-jerk reaction that you're going to help people more by putting the maximum people on welfare. But I would stand up to that and say, "No, that's not right. You don't care about people as much as I do, because what I want to do is find them a job." I want to work harder on this problem than just signing them up for a welfare check. I want to work with them to keep their job. Get another job if they have lost their work ethic, reestablish it for them, help reestablish it for them, so then I can leave them with a chance to take care of the rest of their life by being self-sufficient, as opposed to leaving them maybe in many cases in a certain sense disabled.

It's like the concept of codependency in the treatment of alcoholism.

Rudolph Giuliani: There's no question about it. The approach to welfare that I took is very, very similar to the approach that's taken to dealing with alcoholism, dealing with drug addiction, dealing with other issues in which people need help -- homelessness. Do you ignore it and not help a person and enable them to remain in that status? Or do you try to move them into a situation where the maximum number can take care of themselves? I think there is a difference in philosophical approach in how to deal with social programs in all of those areas. The view had been, back in the '70s and the '80s, that people who enabled were the ones who were really compassionate, and it always seemed to me it was people that helped to bring about self-sufficiency that were the people that really cared.

After September 11, there was a feeling around the country that you were suddenly a kinder, gentler Rudolph Giuliani. Is that true?

Rudolph Giuliani: I was the same person, affected by a horrific event. It had to have an impact on you, and probably even now, less than two years later, I don't really understand the impact that it had on me. But I didn't feel like I was a different person. I had to call upon different things, and I had to rely on different things, and I had to deal with things that I never thought I had to deal with before. But maybe it emphasized certain parts of my personality that being in another situation wouldn't emphasize. Or maybe people got a chance to look at you differently. Maybe they got a chance to see you in a different way, when a lot of that was there in the past. It's hard to know which of the two dominates.

You've often been described as a fighter. As mayor, you fought with criminals, you fought with the media, you fought with your own staff sometimes. But after September 11, you were seen more as "consoler-in-chief." Was the country just getting to see what your close friends had seen all along? How do you see yourself?

Rudolph Giuliani: I think I'm both. I'm capable of fighting when I have to, or consoling when I have to. As the mayor, whenever somebody who worked for the city was seriously hurt, I was there and tried to help them, tried to help their family. I see that as part of my job. But , if somebody is going to take advantage of the city, then I would fight very hard for it. Being a mayor calls upon all different parts of your personality. If the city is under attack, you've got to fight back. If the city is going through mourning, you have to understand that, and you've got to mourn with them, and you've got to share that.

I never saw myself as any different than another New Yorker, because I had been -- that's who I was. I was born in Brooklyn, and I lived in Queens, and I went to school in the Bronx, and I lived in Manhattan, and I spent a lot of time in Staten Island. So I felt very much a part of the city. And even when people would say to me later, "You showed great strength," I would always say, because it's true, that I just reflected the strength of the people of the city. Whatever I have is very similar to what they have, because I'm one of them. So, I always felt that. I always felt that, well, I'm one of them. I have responsibilities. In certain areas, I am in charge. And I think New Yorkers are fighters. I mean, you've got to be tough about what you believe in, and then, when people need help, you've got to be willing to help them.

People are complex. You have different parts of your personality.

What effect do you think fighting prostate cancer had on you, in dealing with September 11th?

Rudolph Giuliani: Fighting prostate cancer, having to accept the fact that you had cancer -- my father died of prostate cancer -- having to figure out how to deal with it, had a big impact one me. It probably helped a lot to understand some of what people were going through on September 11 -- having to face mortality, having to face death, having to face these perplexing questions of why someone is alive and why someone else is dead. Why does someone get cancer and someone else doesn't? Why does someone who is standing on the north side of the building live and a person standing on the south side of the building die? What about the person that came to work that day late and lived? Or the person that decided that they were going to walk into the World Trade Center just to see someone, and they had never been there before, and they died? Those are the questions that perplex human beings. And when you have to face that in your life, you either grow or you recede. And I think that having prostate cancer helped me to grow, philosophically, religiously, so that at least I had that perspective when I had to deal with my own losses on September 11. The danger that I was in, the risk, and then the tremendous losses that so many other people had that were even greater than mine.

So I think having prostate cancer just developed me as a human being. It gave me much more insight into life, death, and how to deal with that as best you can.

You also had some domestic problems that were aired in the media. Do you think your passion for your work as mayor may have had some negative effect on your personal life?

Rudolph Giuliani: There's no question, when you are passionately dedicated to your work, whether it is as United States Attorney or as a mayor or as a baseball player or a doctor, it's going to have an impact on your personal life. It becomes very difficult. And you know, I'm just a human being. I have the same problems in balancing all that that I think other people have. It takes a lot of growth and a lot of understanding and a lot of maturity, and who knows what else, to be able to put all that together. The reality is that there are tradeoffs in life, and if you devote so much of yourself to your work, or the obligations that revolve around your work, it's going to have an impact on your personal life. You just have to deal with that.

It's hard to recall another political figure recovering from as difficult a situation as you were in with the media.

Rudolph Giuliani: I always felt, and I still feel, that the media doesn't belong in a public official's private life. It's a very difficult balance, because if you are elected to public office, people have a right to know a great deal about you, and the press has an absolute obligation to report all of that. But the reality is that there are times in which the reporting is really happening for almost voyeuristic reasons, in the gossip columns. Maybe half of it is wrong, and half of it is correct, and a lot of it is exaggerated. You've just got to get used to that if you're in public life.

I would try very hard to keep my private life out of the press, but most of the time couldn't succeed, and when it happened, I would just say to myself, well, you just have to accept that. This is part of the bad part, for all the good parts of being in public service. And when I counsel people about running for public office at any level, I always try to explain to them that that is a tradeoff that you're making. You're going to give up a lot more of your private life than you realize when you run for --- particularly a major public office -- and you just better be ready for it. And honestly, until you go through it, nobody is ready for it. I have sat with people, looked in their eyes and told them that, as people did with me. But then, when you go through it, it's different than anybody can describe it. And then, you just have to get used to it and move on, which I eventually did, but there was an adjustment period.

Take us back to the morning of September 11th. Where were you when you heard the news, and who informed you of what had happened?

Rudolph Giuliani: I was at the Peninsula Hotel on 55th Street, right off Fifth Avenue, and I was having breakfast with Denny Young -- who is my long-time friend and was counsel to the mayor at the time -- and with Bill Simon, who ran for Governor of California. At that point, I think he was a candidate in the primary. Bill won the Republican primary for Governor and then lost a close election. We are old friends; we had worked together in the United States Attorney's Office. Denny, Bill, and I were discussing the Governor's race. We finished breakfast, and Patty Verone, one of the detectives who was on my detail, walked over to Denny Young and had a short conversation with him.

Denny came over to me and told me that there was a fire at the World Trade Center and that a twin-engine plane had hit the North Tower, and that it was a very, very bad fire and very bad emergency. And I said we'd better get down there right away and then walked out of the hotel and looked up in the sky and saw a perfect, beautiful, blue sky and said to myself, "I can't believe this could be an accident. This can't be an accident, not on a day like today."

Because it's easy to navigate an aircraft on a perfectly clear day?

Rudolph Giuliani: Yes. To be that far off-course and to hit a large building just couldn't possibly have happened by accident. It had to be some kind of deliberate act, although it wasn't until the second plane hit that I knew for sure, as we all did, that it was a terrorist attack.

You said in your book that you had not forgotten the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and that you acted after that to help secure the city agencies.

Rudolph Giuliani: I became mayor in 1994, after that bombing took place, but it was during the time that I was beginning to run for mayor.

One of the first things that I did when I became mayor is to start a new office that we never had before, the Office of Emergency Management, which was an agency that would pull together the emergency response for the police department, the fire department, all of the public health agencies, the emergency services divisions. And also, not only coordinate those emergency efforts, but to train us for newer emergencies that we might not have really thought about in 1994. So as a result of the Office of Emergency Management, we had had drills for Sarin gas, plane crashes, anthrax, suicide bombings -- all the different kinds of things that you would have imagined might have happened. And we had antidote available to deal with anthrax, to deal with botulism, to deal with the other, Sarin gas. So as a result of the Office of Emergency Management, we had a lot more training in emergencies than we had had before. And we had a lot more training in emergencies than I'm even sure we thought we needed, because we were doing all this training, but when terrorism was predicted, it didn't happen. So then on September 11, when it did happen in an unpredictable way, there was a lot more preparation for it than people would realize, because we had been training in the past, even when it didn't happen, which is a really good lesson for now.

The reality is we get these alerts, then something doesn't happen. What you don't want to occur is complacency. We have to assume that it will happen, and all that training helps even when the unanticipated occurs.

Do you think that preparation saved lives?

Rudolph Giuliani: There's no question that being better trained helped to save lives.

The first report that I got of the number of losses at the World Trade Center was 12,000 or more; and the reason it ended up being less than 3,000 -- which is still a horrific, horrible number -- but the only reason that that difference occurred is because of the way in which they handled the evacuation. And a lot of it was just plain bravery, just the fact that they were willing to stay there -- even knowing in large part the risk -- and more or less not abandon the ship, stay there with the ship. And it created a sense of calm that allowed the evacuation to take place in an orderly way. Because one of the things that did not happen at the World Trade Center -- which I think people who deal with emergencies would say can happen, and maybe if you did a fiction account of it, you would include in it -- is a lot of people being trampled, a lot of people being killed in the evacuation. And even when the first building went down, the evacuation continued to be fast, swift, but orderly, and people weren't killed as a result of the evacuation. I give a lot of the credit for that, if not all of it, to the firefighters and the police officers, the rescue workers, and then the group of civilians that acted as heroes that we just are never going to know about. I know about some of those stories, because I was so close to it, but you never know about all of them.

So you looked upon this beautiful blue sky, and then you heard about the second plane. Where were you, and where you were headed at that time?

Rudolph Giuliani: The second plane hit when I was about a mile away and in my van, rushing toward the site of the World Trade Center. I was about one mile north when the second plane hit. But we didn't know that a second plane hit at first, because all you could really see was more smoke, more fire. And then we got a call, probably within seconds, that there had been a second attack, and that a second plane had hit what would be the South Tower. And at that point, we knew for sure that it was a terrorist attack. Probably by that point it was pretty certain even before that that it was a terrorist attack, but that certainly clarified it and made it very, very clear that this had to be a concerted, organized terrorist attack. And I have to tell you we assumed that there would be multiple attacks that day. And not only did we assume that, the White House told us that there were seven planes that were unaccounted for. So we knew about two, then we found out about the Pentagon and the one over Pennsylvania. But that left three planes -- and at various times four and five -- that we thought were unaccounted for that might hit us.

So rather than heading away from a dangerous situation, you went toward it.

Rudolph Giuliani: That was my job.

I was mayor. Part of my job description was to coordinate and supervise emergencies. The agencies that were the primary responders were all agencies that worked for the mayor. The police department is a mayoral agency. The fire department, EMS, and the commissioners were all my appointees. And we had been through hundreds of emergencies and dozens of significant ones. We had been through airplane crashes before. We had been through building collapses. We had been through blackouts. We had been through hostage situations. We went through West Nile Virus. So, it was a group that handled many, many emergencies, and we had a format for how we did it, and so part of that included my being there, so that I could help to coordinate and make sure everybody was working together, and also communicate with the public, so that you'd get out the information that people needed to be safer.

So that's why I went there.

Wasn't your emergency command center supposed to be at the World Trade Center?

Rudolph Giuliani: The command center was at 7 World Trade Center, which is the building that was north of the World Trade Center that went down in the afternoon. It went down maybe 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon. But from the very moment that the first plane hit, 7 World Trade Center was evacuated. So we had to set up a new command center, and we actually set up two, which turns out to have been a very, very important difference, and made a very big difference in what happened. We set up a command post for the fire department and a command post for the police department. The fire department was placed at the site of the World Trade Center so that the fire chiefs could see the fire. The police department command post was about two-and-a-half blocks away, in an office building, on the ground floor of an office building, so they could have the hard lines available to communicate with the State police, with the Defense Department. And that's the difference between so many of the firefighters being lost and so many of the police high command actually getting through. They got trapped in the building, but they didn't get killed. That was all a question of how the building fell.

That's an image of heroism that this country will probably never forget: the firefighters rushing into the building, not out.

Rudolph Giuliani: I have often been asked, did it surprise me that the firefighters and the police officers went into the building, remained in the building, didn't leave, and the answer is it didn't surprise me. The heroism didn't surprise me, because I used to see it all the time. I saw it for seven and three-quarters years. Not on that scale, not in those numbers, but the same individual bravery in countless situations of rescuing children from fires, going into gun battle to protect people, taking out hostages. I mean, this is what they do day in and day out. So the one thing I was not surprised by was the heroism of the New York Police Department and the New York Fire Department. That is something I used to see every single day.

How did you have the stamina to attend those hundreds of funerals?

Rudolph Giuliani: It helped me to attend all those funerals and memorial services. I felt -- and still feel -- a tremendous amount of grief and pain about what happened. I lost very, very good friends. I lost people I had promoted, appointed, worked with, been through really horrible situations with, and I felt a great deal of grief. And to be able to share that with people and to help them in some way -- As the Mayor of New York City, I used to go to police and fire funerals, and I knew from early on that being there helped people a lot. Not because of me personally, but because of my office, because it said something about the importance of the person and what they did. And I knew that I could help in some way, and it would help me religiously -- it helped me spiritually, it helped me a lot of different ways -- and emotionally. And maybe it gave me a chance to get out some of the grief which I wasn't able to show if I were making decisions about the emergency, or making decisions about the recovery, or making decisions about anthrax, or making decisions about other things, where you had to present a very clear, focused picture to keep everybody together. This gave me a chance to get out some of my emotions, which were very, very strong.

Did you think of your father's words? The more scared and excited everyone else gets, you try to be the calmest one?

Rudolph Giuliani: Yes. That is a lesson that I used a lot in those days.

People would get very excited, and I would say to myself, "Okay, now, you've got to remain calmer, and you've got to think your way through this." I remember a couple weeks later, when I was headed for wakes in the suburbs north of New York, and I was going to go by helicopter, and I got a call from the head of the Office of Emergency Management that four planes were unaccounted for, and they were headed for New York and we had to ground everything. And it turned out that -- you might remember this -- that is when I think it ended up being two planes were off-course, and they had to be guided down. But there was a point at which we thought there would be another attack on the city. And I remember saying to myself then -- and things like that probably happened a dozen times in that four or five-week period -- and I remember saying to myself: "Okay, remain calm. Get calmer. Remember what your father said, and then we'll figure out how we deal with this."

We've heard about the most beautiful exhibitions of the human spirit that day, people giving up their lives for total strangers. It's hard to explain such an act. Has this country changed since September 11?

Rudolph Giuliani: Well, I mean,

The number of people that gave up their lives or put their lives at risk at the World Trade Center, during and after the attack, just totally overwhelmed the evil of the act. I think about that day, September 11, as the worst day and the greatest day. I think of it as the worst day because I don't think I ever witnessed -- I hope I never do -- such positive hatred and evil as crashing airplanes into a building and killing absolutely innocent people, thousands and thousands of them. And probably the expectations were killing even many more than they did! I also never witnessed more love than the people who lay down their lives or put their lives at risk to save people, and in many, many cases, people they never knew. Obviously, the firefighters and the police officers, but I know many, many civilian stories of security officers. I know a story of an elderly man, about 70 years old, who kept getting people into an elevator. And the people getting in kept urging him to get in the elevator, and he said, "No, I'm older. I'll get down. Don't worry. I'm older." And he never did. I think he guided four elevators out, and kept staying behind because he was helping people get in the elevator. He felt he was older, and younger people should go first. That's love. That's a kind of love that overwhelms, ultimately, the hatred and the anger and the bitterness.

I think America discovered something about itself that's there. It isn't as if it was created on September 11 or after. I think America discovered something about itself, about how much we could help each other, how much we care about each other, how much we care about being Americans, how important our freedom and democracy is to us. And we're not going to let people take it away from us or jeopardize it for our children. I think that's been the primary thing that's happened in this country. I think there is much more of an appreciation for what we have, and therefore we're not going to let people jeopardize it. We're not going to let people take it away from us or even attempt to.

What do you think you learned about yourself over those days?

Rudolph Giuliani: I guess that I believe in God a lot more than I probably acknowledged before. That probably started with going through prostate cancer.

I have just an absolutely unshakeable belief about the value of living in freedom, that people who live in freedom have incalculable strength that they don't display until somebody challenges them and creates the possibility of taking it away from them, and that people who live in freedom prevail over people who live in oppression. And they just will, because they're not going to give this up. Once you give people freedom, they don't willingly give it up. And we've had freedom for a long time, and I think the mission of this country is to try to share it with others, because we realize the more people who live in freedom, the more peaceful the world is going to be.

What's next for you?

Rudolph Giuliani: I don't know. You know, after prostate cancer and September 11, I take life philosophically. I think that the future takes care of itself, and you can't overplan it. I am enjoying private life. It's very fulfilling. I'm in the consulting business, and I share a lot of the expertise that I have with people about security, security management, fiscal management. I have a former police commissioner, fire commissioner, head of emergency services, and a lot of people that survived with me after we were trapped in a building. We work together in the same business, so that's really emotionally fulfilling. I go all around the country. I give talks, I've written a book. So I feel like I'm contributing a lot and growing a lot. I'll probably want to go back to public service at some point, after a few years of reflection and development and growth in the private sector.

Thank you very much for taking this time to talk with us.

Thank you.