Razzle Dazzle: A Dad Gives Rudy His Due

Razzle Dazzle
A Dad Gives Rudy His Due

By RICHARD STEIER

Rudy Giuliani was working from a script at the 9/11 memorial service, the Bloomberg administration's answer to putting a net under a high-wire act.

Given the former Mayor's tendency to sometimes overplay the World Trade Center card, this wasn't a bad thing for him, or his more implacable critics among the families of those who perished during the rescue efforts six years ago. The sodden weather, with a steady drizzle sometimes turning heavy, seemed appropriate for the solemnity of the occasion; it was best not to risk another "I'm one of them" moment and the backlash that would have followed any attempt by Mr. Giuliani to link himself too closely to those who died or labored for months in search of their remains.

Instead, Mr. Giuliani's remarks, however heartfelt, seemed like boilerplate as he spoke of how, amid the grief and uncertainty that followed the destruction of the Trade Center and the loss of nearly 3,000 lives, "We also witnessed uncompromising strength and resilience as a people. It was a day with no answers but with an unending line of those who came forward to try to help one another."

The Chief-Leader/Eric Weiss BACKING RUDY, WARTS AND ALL: Former Uniformed Firefighters Association President Jimmy Boyle (left), whose son died in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11, is among those who believes he would have gotten out alive if the Fire Department wasn't still using the hand-held radios that failed during the previous attack on the Trade Center. He parts company, however, with other 9/11 families who are opposing Rudy Giuliani (speaking at right during the 9/11 memorial last week) for President largely because of the radio issue, saying that 'he was very considerate toward the families - more than the public knows.'

Despair, Hope and Unhealed Wounds

Those were sentiments that could not be disputed, as were the lines from Elie Wiesel that closed the former Mayor's brief remarks: "Just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings."

Except for a brief incident earlier, before he stood in the rain holding an umbrella over his wife and himself, there was no sign of the antipathy that some 9/11 families have developed toward Mr. Giuliani. If some of them made good their pledge to turn their backs when he spoke as a form of silent protest, it was not noticed. Nor, perhaps, should it have been.

Those families have raised legitimate questions about whether the steadfast image Mr. Giuliani projected on Sept. 11, 2001 and the days immediately following should overwhelm the mistakes and omissions of his administration that they believe contributed to the deaths of many firefighters at the Trade Center. He appeared then to embody Ed Koch's old line that "public service is the noblest profession if done honorably and done well."

Mayors are as much skillful politicians as they are public servants, of course, and so it should surprise no one that Mr. Giuliani has looked to parlay that image into a successful run for President, using it for all it's worth to overcome doubts within the Republican Party about his stands on other issues, his tangled private life, and his endorsement of Mario Cuomo's re-election as Governor against a Republican challenger 13 years ago.

However clumsy he could be in dealing with his critics or in sharing credit with his top aides (think Bill Bratton), early in his mayoralty he showed his political smarts by making a point of bringing emergency workers who had done something heroic to City Hall for press conferences. Until then, such feats were recognized at departmental award ceremonies, which meant that those being honored in some cases were not honored until many months after they had distinguished themselves. In the Police and Fire departments, those employees were competing against numerous colleagues for media attention at Medal Day ceremonies.

Glory Reflected Gracefully

Mr. Giuliani's change had several beneficial effects. It gave the heroes a day of their own, one that closely followed their outstanding performance, something they and their families surely appreciated. It also, not so incidentally, created positive media attention for the man paying tribute to his employees and further identified him with those workers in the eyes of the public, without his having to overreach, as he did earlier this summer by suggesting that he had endured everything those laboring at Ground Zero had, ridiculously putting himself on an equal plane with those who spent far more time there and with sometimes-dire consequences to their health.

Even as Mr. Giuliani has invoked his 9/11 legacy for political advantage, he has simultaneously used that aura to get rich, with his company becoming a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal for corporations in need of image makeovers that could be conferred with the payment of multi-million-dollar fees, and the ex-Mayor commanding $100,000 a pop to speak to audiences about what a swell guy he is. Since the reality was not as pretty, there was bound to be resentment and outrage among those who believe he was partly responsible for their children or siblings not getting out of the North Tower of the Trade Center before it came down.

Most of those are the survivors of firefighters, and the bitterness can be easily explained by the fact that 340 of them died in the Twin Towers compared to just 59 cops from two departments - the NYPD and the Port Authority Police.

The discrepancy is explained to a large extent by the fact that police radios allowed for communication inside the Trade Center and so most cops were able to evacuated the complex in time. Firefighters, on the other hand, were using the same radios that had failed to function properly during the earlier bombing of the Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993. The Giuliani administration did not offer a potential upgrade on those models until his eighth and final year in office, and when the new digital radios failed, firefighters were simply handed back the old, flawed analog version that 121 of them carried to their deaths in the North Tower.

'Doubt He Pushed 'em'

"I wish the radios worked - they all would've gotten out," Jimmy Boyle, the former Firefighters union leader whose son Michael died in the North Tower, said the day after the memorial ceremony. "Am I personally going to blame Giuliani for the radios not working? I can't do that; I think it's not something that he made the decision on. I don't think it was Giuliani that was pushing the [digital] radios."

Mr. Boyle surprised and disappointed some of his admirers when he recently became a member of First Responders for Giuliani, the group formed by former Fire and Police Commissioner Howard Safir to counter the attacks on the ex-Mayor by some of the 9/11 families and the International Association of Fire Fighters. He admitted it wasn't an easy decision to make, and his close friendship with a prime Giuliani supporter, Long Island Congressman Peter King, makes it at least possible that he did it with an eye to how Mr. King and other Republicans statewide would fare if someone other than Rudy was the Republican nominee next November against, say, Hillary Clinton.

But Mr. Boyle said that whatever misgivings he may harbor about Mr. Giuliani, he believes some of the criticism of him has been over the top.

"There's a lot of stuff he's getting a bum rap on," he said. "You look at the idea that he could be President because he was the Mayor of New York on 9/11; I think that scares a lot of people in New York. But he was very considerate toward the families - more than the public knows."

Boosted Victims' Pensions

He mentioned the fact that the cops and firefighters who died at the Trade Center were all promoted to a higher rank posthumously, increasing their pensions. It is also known that Mr. Giuliani allowed those who weren't initially found in the wreckage to remain on the payroll on overtime for an extended period, which increased both their final compensation and the pension payments to their survivors.

And Mr. Giuliani's strength in the hours and days after the Twin Towers came down helped to fortify families dealing with unspeakable grief, Mr. Boyle said.

"He was a leader; he did project leadership back then," he said. "He was arrogant, he was a dictator sometimes, but he was also very compassionate. At a personal level, there was a lot of compassion shown - and I didn't work for the guy."

There had been a prior connection between the two men even though Mr. Boyle stepped down as president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association in June 1993, when Mr. Giuliani's mayoral campaign was just beginning to percolate. His son Michael, whose interest in politics was such that on 9/11 he was heading out to Queens to help a cousin running for City Council get out the vote on primary day when he learned that a plane had hit the North Tower - leading him to turn around and ride down to the Trade Center with his colleagues from Engine Co. 33 wearing his civilian clothes - was active in Mr. Giuliani's campaign. Michael helped convince Mr. Boyle's successor, Tom Von Essen, to give the union's endorsement to Mr. Giuliani.

Cites Support of FDNY

The reasons were simple, said Mr. Boyle, a liberal Democrat who nonetheless endorsed President Bush's re-election three years ago: he and Michael believed Mr. Giuliani would be more supportive of the Fire Department than the incumbent Mayor, David Dinkins.

"He was night and day better," Jimmy Boyle said last week. "He viewed the Fire Department as a truly professional emergency service, and he tried to put as much money into it as possible."

All that, he said, entered into his calculus about whether to support Mr. Giuliani now, with the anguish over the inadequate radios the strongest argument against doing so.

"It was a big, big obstacle, because I knew that the radios were no good," Mr. Boyle said. "But Motorola is so dominant in the industry that what I thought should be done - create a satellite system on which police and fire could jointly communicate - I found out would never be done."

Mr. Boyle was among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by firefighter families against Motorola, which a judge dismissed on the grounds that their receiving compensation from a Federal fund for victims required that they relinquish their right to bring such suits.

Mr. Von Essen, who left the UFA in 1996 to become Mr. Giuliani's Fire Commissioner, had violated labor contracts by putting the digital Motorola radios into service without consulting the unions, and when they malfunctioned at a basement fire in Queens in March 2001, it was revealed that they had not been field-tested.

'Clear There Was Problem'

Mr. Boyle is convinced that the radios were slipped past the unions because someone high up in the Fire Department knew they were flawed but saw no viable alternative to using them. "When they couldn't hear the kid in the building except for people who were seven miles away," he said in a reference to the basement fire, "it was pretty clear there was a problem. On the other hand, you know the other models were outdated, and they put them back in."

He said, however, that he did not fault Mr. Giuliani for the failure to come up with a better alternative in the five-plus months between the digital radio failure and 9/11. There are those who believe Mr. Giuliani's stubbornness was a factor - that having been attacked over the no-bid process used to purchase the new radios by then-City Comptroller Alan Hevesi, he was not going to dignify that criticism by putting out a contract for bids - but Mr. Boyle does not share that view.

Asked then why the Giuliani administration offered no solution beyond a return to the old analog radios, he said, "Oh God, I don't know."

Some firefighter family survivors have never forgiven Mr. Giuliani for telling the 9/11 Commission in 2004 that he believed many firefighters died not because they never heard the radio order to evacuate but because they were determined to rescue everyone still inside the North Tower and gave that objective priority over their own survival.

Pausing to Help

Information he has been able to gather from firefighters who made it out, Mr. Boyle said, indicated that "there were a lot of people in the building injured or exhausted - heat exhaustion - including Fire Department people, and firefighters stopped to try to help get them down."

His voice broke up frequently while he used a speakerphone as he drove back home to Rochester with two of his grandchildren after several days visiting old friends and attending 9/11 commemorations. He had begun his itinerary last Tuesday with a visit to Engine 33, where Michael and his best friend from childhood, David "Buddha" Arce, had worked until their deaths six years ago.

The memorial ceremony in John Zuccotti Park, across from the area Mr. Boyle still calls "The Pit," was no less resonant for the slight change of venue and the passage of time.

"It felt pretty emotional," he said. "Maybe the weather affected that a little. And it really annoys me, that Deutsche Bank thing. You're down there and you look up at that building and think about what happened, and also think about how much worse it could have been."

He spoke of a column his friend Michael Daly had written a few days earlier about trying to remember what the days just prior to Sept. 11, 2001 had been like. Mr. Boyle remembered getting a call the previous Saturday from his son and David Arce, who were exulting over a winning bet at Belmont Racetrack. "Buddha had had a big hit - Gary Stevens had won a stakes race that day," he recalled. "I told him to bet Bailey in the race right after that." The elation from the memory left Mr. Boyle's voice. "It doesn't get easier," he said. "I thought it would."