Heres the whole article.
The Hero
ne of the running gags of the Giuliani years was ‘‘the bunker’’ — press shorthand for the $15 million Emergency Command Center the mayor built on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center in 1998. The bunker symbolized the mayor’s bunker mentality — his love of crisis, his almost delighted sense that a besieged city needed an untiring and unsmiling defender.
Now that bunker lies in a great heap of rubble. On the morning of the disaster, which infinitely exceeded even his own direst imaginings, the mayor and his chief aides abandoned the Emergency Command Center for another installation and fled that one in turn only 10 minutes before it was destroyed, killing the men who stayed behind. In the news conferences he gave that afternoon, the mayor spoke of his own escape from death and of the many friends who had died. There was a delicacy in his manner, an anxious concern for the sufferings of others that few had ever associated with him. Giuliani’s stoicism in the past had seemed to come of unfeeling; this was the stoicism of deep feeling held rigorously in check.
At one point during the day, Ed Koch, the former mayor, suggested that America obliterate the capital of any nation that continued to harbor terrorists. You couldn’t help feeling grateful that Koch was no longer mayor. Mayor Giuliani issued no such threats. Quite the contrary: he assured New Yorkers that the Bush administration would find the appropriate response, whatever that was, and urged them to refrain from all forms of hatred, especially ‘‘group hatred’’ directed at Muslims. And then he apologized for having even to suggest something that was beneath the dignity of New Yorkers. The mayor is normally the least graceful of men, but on that day he brought to mind Hemingway’s phrase ‘‘grace under pressure.’’
The time will come when our sense of crisis will settle into a kind of permanent substrate, and New Yorkers will return to their perennial concerns — the schools, the streets, the parks. By November, when voters choose a new mayor, they may not regard grace under pressure as the cardinal mayoral virtue. You could, in fact, argue that by defusing New York’s fixed atmosphere of crisis, Mayor Giuliani has made the city safe for a very different kind of successor. The candidates might embrace this logic themselves if doing so wouldn’t implicitly diminish them.
Indeed, the World Trade Center disaster magnifies the widespread sense that the men hoping to succeed the mayor are smaller than he. But we should remind ourselves that Giuliani himself wasn’t always so magisterial a figure; the hothead candidate of 1993 probably could have started a nuclear war on his own. The crisis shapes the man as much as the other way around; he is, if he has any substance at all, fired in the crucible of office. Giuliani’s bearing at this moment of anguish ensures that he will be remembered fondly, at least by many; New Yorkers can hope that the man they elect may someday surprise them with the same gifts.