As Mayor of New York City on September 11, 2001, Rudy Giuliani played a major role in the response to the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center towers in the city.
Preparedness before the attacks
Location of Office of Emergency Management headquarters
In September 2006, Village Voice writer and long-time Giuliani critic Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, a senior producer for CBSNews.com, published The Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, one of the strongest reassessments of Giuliani's role in the events of 9/11. The book highlights his decision to locate the NYC Office of Emergency Management headquarters (long-identified as a target for a terrorist attack) on the 23rd floor inside the 7 World Trade Center building, a decision that had been criticized at the time in light of the previous terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in 1993. The Office of Emergency Management was created to coordinate efforts between police and firefighters, but with the distraction of evacuating its headquarters, it was not able to conduct these efforts properly.
In May 2007, Giuliani put responsibility for selecting the location on Jerome M. Hauer, New York City's first Director of Emergency Management who had been appointed by Giuliani himself and had served under Giuliani from 1996 to 2000. Hauer has taken exception to that account in interviews and has provided Fox News and New York Magazine with a memo demonstrating that he recommended a location in Brooklyn, but was overruled by Giuliani. Television journalist Chris Wallace interviewed Giuliani on May 13, 2007, about his 1997 decision to locate the command center at the World Trade Center. Giuliani laughed during Wallace's questions and said that Hauer recommended the World Trade Center site and claimed that Hauer said that the WTC site was the best location. Wallace presented Giuliani a photocopy of Hauer's directive letter. The letter urged Giuliani to locate the command center in Brooklyn, instead of lower Manhattan, because "not as visible a target as buildings in lower Manhattan." The February 1996 memo read, "The [Brooklyn] building is secure and not as visible a target as buildings in Lower Manhattan."
Radio communications
The 9/11 Commission noted in its report that lack of preparedness could have led to the deaths of first responders at the scene of the attacks. The Commission noted that the radios in use by the fire department were the same radios which had been criticized for their ineffectiveness following the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. Giuliani testified to the commission, where some family members of responders who had died in the attacks appeared to protest his statements. A 1994 mayoral office study of the radios indicated that they were faulty. Replacement radios were purchased in a no-bid contract. They were implemented in early 2001. However, in March 2001 the replacement radios were found to be faulty as well.
Fire Department chiefs issued orders for the firefighters to evacuate. However, the order was issued over the radios that were not working in the towers, thus, the 343 firefighters inside the Twin Towers could not hear the evacuation order. They remained in the towers as the towers collapsed. However, when Giuliani testified before the 9/11 Commission he said that the firefighters ignored the evacuation order out of an effort to save lives.
Also criticized was Giuliani's focus on personal projects and turf wars rather than vital precautions for the city, and his role in communications failures (which may have been the result of patronage deals inside City Hall). Kirkus Reviews stated, "Giuliani may not have been directly responsible for all those woes, but they happened on his watch".
At the scene
During the attack
During the attack, Giuliani may have been near the WTC towers. Interviews with Barry Jennings, a 9/11 survivor of the tower 7 crash, reveal that Giuliani may have been in tower 7 on the day of the attacks, but exited the building hours before collapse. Additionally, in an interview with ABC News on the day of the attacks, Giuliani indicated that he was "at the scene" saying: "We went down to the scene and we set up headquarters at 75 Barclay Street which was right there with the police commissioner [and] the fire commissioner and the head of emergency management. And we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse, and it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building so we were trapped in the building for 10-15 minutes and finally found an exit, got out, walked North, took a lot of people with us."