'Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11'

LAT book review: Myths of a 9/11 hero, debunked

....although Giuliani's "quick response and personal fearlessness ... provided a clean and reassuring narrative," Barrett, a senior writer at the Village Voice, and Collins, a senior producer at CBSNews.com, argue that there is a darker, more important narrative of the mayor's failures, one they contend cost many lives on Sept. 11 and may contribute to future illnesses and deaths due to lax safety standards during the cleanup. The tone of "Grand Illusion" is often prosecutorial. But the writers' extensive research results in a convincing indictment of Giuliani's priorities as mayor and his later self-promotion as a terrorism expert.

The city's problems on Sept. 11 are now well known. Police officers and firefighters hardly communicated. With radios that didn't operate between departments or work at all in steel high-rises, many firefighters didn't get the final mayday call to evacuate the North Tower before it fell. Cut off from relevant information, emergency operators continued to tell victims in the tower to stay put even though top fire chiefs had called for a complete evacuation almost immediately after arriving on the scene. The list goes on. But somehow, the mayor has been able to escape much of the blame. Barrett and Collins now hold Giuliani accountable.

The focus of their ire is Giuliani's claim that, although the magnitude of the attacks was unforeseeable, he had assumed from the moment he came into office in 1994 that terrorists would attack New York City and so he made the city's emergency response a priority. There has been little in Giuliani's record to support that claim. But "Grand Illusion" now reveals a record that directly contradicts it.

It is not that Giuliani wouldn't have had reason to prepare. After all, terrorists had exploded a car bomb underneath one World Trade Center tower in 1993. But Barrett and Collins' detailed research shows a mayor who utterly failed to grasp the importance of readying the city for another terrorist attack. Lou Anemone, the police department's chief operating officer during much of Giuliani's tenure, recalls trying to brief the mayor on a citywide terrorism security plan in 1998. "Rudy glazed over," he said, adding: "We never had any discussion about security at the World Trade Center. We never even had a drill or exercise there.... There was just a lack of recognition of the problem at City Hall."...