After 9/11, Rudy Wasn't Rescue Worker--He Was a Yankee (Spent 2x More Hours at Baseball than WTC)

Giuliani said he spent as much time at ground zero as many rescue workers. Where was he really? Much of the time, at baseball games.

Aug. 18, 2007 | On Friday, a New York Times story examined Rudy Giuliani's schedule in the months after 9/11 to verify his controversial claim that, like rescue workers, he'd spent long hours at ground zero, and so was "in that sense ... one of them." In fact, the Times found, he only spent 29 hours at the terror site between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16.

What was he doing instead? Giuliani's beloved New York Yankees made it to the World Series in 2001. We decided to compare the time he spent on baseball to the time he spent at the ruins of the World Trade Center.

The results were, considering the mayor's long-standing devotion to the Bronx Bombers, unsurprising. By our count, Giuliani spent about 58 hours at Yankees games or flying to them in the 40 days between Sept. 25 and Nov. 4, roughly twice as long as he spent at ground zero in the 60 days between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16. By his own standard, Giuliani was one of the Yankees more than he was one of the rescue workers.

During three postseason playoff series that began Oct. 10, 2001, and ended Nov. 4, 2001, Giuliani attended every one of the team's home games, with the possible exception of the third game of the American League Championship Series, for which Salon could not confirm his attendance. According to Salon's arithmetic, Giuliani spent about 33 hours in stadiums -- this includes two World Series games he watched in Phoenix -- during the Yankees' 2001 postseason run, four hours more than he spent at ground zero. (We do not know if he stayed for every pitch, but famed baseball writer Roger Angell described Giuliani in the the New Yorker as a "devout Yankee fan, a guy who stays on until the end of the game.")

Giuliani also attended the first regular season game the Yankees played in New York after the attacks; that game lasted almost three hours. (We do not know if he was present for any of the Yankees' other seven post-9/11 home games.) And he spent one of the away World Series games in a specially reserved box with his son at the ESPN Zone in Times Square, London's Daily Mail reported. The Daily Mail said he did that, in fact, for every away game of the American League Championship Series and the Yankees' first-round Division Series against the Oakland A's, but Salon could not independently verify that report. (Giuliani watched the first game of the World Series from his City Hall office.)

Then there's the whirlwind tour Giuliani made traveling back and forth to Arizona for games six and seven of the World Series. Granted, he and his now-estranged children were traveling with a small entourage composed of the families of some of 9/11's victims; Major League Baseball had chipped in free tickets, Continental Airlines had donated a charter jet, and hotel rooms were comped as well. Still, once those families were in Arizona, Giuliani -- who had been predicting that game six would bring a Yankees victory and an end to the series -- made an extraordinary effort to ensure that he could attend to his responsibilities in New York and still make it back for game seven.

Giuliani left game six midway through, the Associated Press reported at the time, so that he could make his 12:30 a.m. flight back to New York, where he needed to spend some time discussing the U.S. anthrax attacks, which by then had touched New York's City Hall. The mayor was in Staten Island by 9:30 a.m. to kick off the New York City Marathon. Then it was back to the airport a few hours later, and on to Arizona for game seven. That, in total, meant 22 hours in the air.

But Giuliani's involvement with the team went far beyond a time commitment. He was, in fact, a visible, constant presence at the postseason games and, more than once, a participant in the team's victory celebrations. Dave Johnson, executive sports editor of the Evansville Courier & Press, even wrote a column at the time bemoaning Giuliani's omnipresence and saying, "If I didn't already dislike the New York Yankees, I'd root against them just because of Rudolph Giuliani ... Who anointed Rudy baseball's new Super Fan?" The mayor was pulled on the field after the Yankees clinched both the American League Division Series and Championship Series, and spent time in the clubhouse after those victories as well.

Nor did Giuliani's involvement start as some attempt to boost the city's spirits after the tragedy it experienced. As the Village Voice's Wayne Barrett has previously reported, Giuliani has four Yankees World Series rings from the time he was mayor; by contrast, Barrett reported, no mayor in any other city that's won a championship since 1995 has any Series ring at all. Barrett also reported that Giuliani attended at least 20 of the Yankees regular season games each year he was mayor.

Giuliani also found time during the period studied by the Times to, for example, make a call to slugger Jason Giambi exhorting him to leave the A's and sign with the Yankees. Giambi did, on Dec. 13. A day later, Giuliani introduced Giambi at City Hall, where, according to the Associated Press, Giambi said, "[Giuliani] was going to help me find somewhere to live, so I'm going to take him up on it."

And though the final budget he submitted as mayor called for serious belt-tightening around the city -- cuts as high as 15 percent for most agencies -- in the wake of the attacks and the $40 billion debt New York faced, Giuliani wasn't quite prepared to subject the Yankees or their counterpart Mets to the same penny-pinching. In fact, though nearly everyone expected 9/11 to cause the city to abandon the plans for new stadiums for the teams -- Long Island's Newsday reported that "since Sept. 11, several city officials, including [then-Mayor-elect Michael] Bloomberg, have said the projects were on the back burner because of the city's other pressing needs" -- Giuliani wanted to push forward. The stadiums were projected to have cost $1.6 billion in city, state and private funds.

Giuliani did need a place to play, after all. Though rumors were swirling at the time about what his future held after the end of his final term as mayor, Giuliani was generally unwilling to give specifics. He was willing, however, to jokingly suggest one possibility -- "right field for the Yankees," the Associated Press quoted him as saying while swinging an imaginary bat.

A spokeswoman for Giuliani did not return a voice-mail message left seeking comment

Thirty hours is about what I spent there starting on the 12th, most of it in the pit. . . Where were you?

Thank you for your service. About then, I was home, 60-odd miles away, writing this, which was removed from the FrontPage archives about a year later:

AIRPORT INSECURITY—And Why Manhood Cures Terrorism

FrontPageMagazine.com | September 14, 2001

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11 tell us that we are not in a crisis of security measures, but of manhood. It appears that the pirates who commandeered the aircraft of the most high-tech civilization in history, subjugating passengers and crew who outnumbered them 20 to 1, were armed only with knives.

There were heroic moments nevertheless. A handful of passengers on one of the four planes, United Flight 93, apparently rushed the hijackers and made them miss their target as the plane went down. No doubt other acts of heroism and self-sacrifice occurred on that and other flights, which we may not learn about in this life. But Flight 93 raises the question of whether swift action by passengers at the first sign of trouble might have entirely prevented all four hijackings. Why didn’t it?

Thwarting the crimes would have required the presence of a number of daring, independent-minded men on each plane who were willing to violate the taboos of our polite, white-collar society.

I heard John Lawless, public safety director for Logan Airport, explaining the Sisyphean program by which the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) hopes to make flying in Boston safe. It includes banning all knives, including plastic ones, from the secure areas of the airport, even at food concessions. That seems likely to make airports more vulnerable, rather than less. Everyone in the perimeter will be sufficiently disarmed that all it will take to hijack a plane is a case of bad breath.

One might reply that Logan’s security guards (who henceforth will be state policemen) will have weapons. Or that an armed Sky Marshal will be aboard each plane. But consider that guns can be swiped from holsters. In an airport or plane sterilized of all other weaponry, a terrorist with an officer’s Glock becomes the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind — facing a populace armed with plastic spoons.

I hesitate to say that the logical conclusion is to force all passengers to board planes naked and unconscious, because someone might take me seriously.

People in the public safety business seem to have 19th-century ideas in a world of 21st-century transportation. They have only one solution to any problem: trying to control it from the top down, keeping ordinary citizens as helpless as possible, lest they cause more problems.

In the interest of creating a safer and easier society, we in the West have passed laws designed to keep weapons out of the hands of disorderly persons. What the laws effectively do is keep weapons out of the hands of most persons. And that can work well—in a controlled environment. But we are in a mobile society with a flight system open to the entire world. No police force or army can protect people who have emasculated themselves of all weapons. Order cannot survive where men in particular have given up the idea that it is right and good that they be equipped to stand up for themselves and protect the innocent.

Rather than seeking the diminishing returns of intensified control over the innocent, surely it would be simpler and safer to use the leverage of freedom to intimidate the guilty:

Allow any airline passenger to carry any sidearm of his choosing—concealed or unconcealed.

Anyone who tried to commandeer a plane would find himself surrounded by hostile fire, and enjoy a short career. There might be a risk of injury or death to some innocent passengers from stray shots or cabin punctures. But isn’t that a better risk than that of losing all 300 passengers and thousands of other innocents on the ground?

But it’s more likely that there would be no in-air firefights at all. If the FAA solemnly announced that passengers were free to carry private firearms, that would end discussion of the plane-hijack option among terrorists, whose greatest fear is to die in humiliating failure.

Some terrorists would try to think of other approaches to terror, of course. But the spell would be broken. For a small band of lunatics to hold a huge crowd helpless and sear the psyche of the civilized world, the crowd must be unarmed. The whole warped project of the terrorist — using a small piece of technology to make large numbers of people sit still for ideas they would otherwise laugh at — cannot survive the democracy of force.

I doubt the FAA will change its mind tomorrow. The institutions of Western culture long ago adopted feminism—a philosophy that holds that the leadership and physical strength of ordinary men are dangerous, unnecessary, and possibly evil. But feminism is built on a contradiction. For women and children — including feminists — to survive without male leadership and protection, they must be kept in a protected world where unseen male policemen or soldiers keep the bad men far away. That world is now gone.

Even now, our culture could be in the process of reclaiming its true sense of purpose to defeat its terrorist enemies. Perhaps Jeremy Glick will be an example for other men. A passenger on Flight 93, Glick called his wife on his cell phone to tell her that he and some others were about to jump the hijackers — and he told her to have a good life and raise their three-month-old daughter well. Because of these men’s heroics, Flight 93 crashed in a field south of Pittsburgh, instead of destroying the White House.

There will be no more hijackings when American men decide that they will defend their families and their neighbors from barbarians, risking their lives if necessary. Perhaps next week, men inspired by recent events will start practicing at shooting ranges. Others may take up (or re-learn) boxing or wrestling, or the Oriental martial arts — which were invented by peasants denied the use of weapons by their overlords. But rather than the specifics, it is the change in our attitude from passivity to mastery that will change our culture and our destiny.

Right now, civilized people wonder where the next disruption to their lives will occur. When they quietly arm themselves, it will be the terrorists — the diminishing number who will be attracted to that trade — who will be moving nervously from place to place, wondering which face in the crowd, which stockbroker, which accountant, which shopkeeper, which schoolteacher, will make their dreams of domination evaporate in an instant.

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