We started the morning with some Giuliani-9/11 news, so here's some end-of-the-day Giuliani-9/11 musings. There's an awesome update to one of our favorite Rudy Giuliani stories - the story, or mystery, of why was the Office of Emergency Management's emergency center placed at 7 World Trade Center. Here's how it goes:
Sunday - Giuliani appears on Fox News Sunday. Host Chris Wallace asks him why the city's emergency command center was put in 7 World Trade Center:
WALLACE: Nine-eleven. No one questions your courage or your leadership in the days after 9/11, but one question has come up that I'm very curious about.
You put the emergency response command center in the World Trade Center in 1997, even though your director of emergency management suggested — recommended that you not put it there because it had been a target in 1993. Why'd you do that?
GIULIANI: My director of emergency management recommended 7 World Trade Center, and that was...
WALLACE: I have got a copy right here of Jerry Hauer's directive to you. And there were meetings in which Jerry Hauer said that it's a bad idea. And the police chief, Howard Safir, said it was a bad idea.
GIULIANI: Jerry Hauer recommended that as the prime site and the site that would make the most sense, and he recommended it because...
WALLACE: Then why did he say the building — he said it's not — the place in Brooklyn is not as visible a target as buildings in Lower Manhattan.
GIULIANI: He recommended that site as the site that would be the best site. It was largely on his recommendation that that site was selected.
Tuesday - Lloyd Grove, whose New York magazine feature about Judi Giuliani* ran on Monday, has Hauer's response to Giuliani's story: "Rudy's getting a lot of heat for the decision. He's trying to run on his homeland-security and national-security background, and if you start peeling back the skin on the errors he made when he was mayor, you take away a lot of the basis for his candidacy."
Now the Empire Zone follows up with more details: Joseph Lhota, deputy mayor under Giuliani, says that Hauer made the decision to place the OEM emergency ops center in 7WTC. In an interesting bit of spin, Lhota tells the EZ, "Jerry made the recommendation, and you know what? He made the right recommendation," since 7WTC was pretty new, had many federal agencies there already, was blast-proof, etc. (7 WTC collapsed at 5:20PM on September 11, 2001; by then, everyone had been evacuated.)
The OEM director after Hauer, Richard Sheirer later said that the OEM center should never have been in 7WTC. And THEN a 2004 Newsday article says that "Giuliani and Hauer were consistent in their accounts of how the command center came to be removed from 1 Police Plaza in 1996 and put in leased space at 7 WTC" - that "Hauer and other mayoral aides drove the decision, but Giuliani guided them and ultimately made the choice. "
*In the article, Hauer says Rudy's repeated refrain about trained nurse Judi coordinating post-9/11 family assistance efforts "is simply a lie."
