NY Daily News columnist offers info that The Huckster might want to share with friends in Iowa:
The images and their accompanying story line are, by now, the stuff of legend, seared into memory. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a lame-duck local pol, becomes the take-charge, already prepared leader of a stunned city and nation on Sept. 11, 2001, striding through the streets of lower Manhattan with his top commanders to rescue, rally and reassure the populace.
A number of shortcomings, many with fatal consequences, are listed.
Five years later, Giuliani is a pop-culture superhero (“I didn’t have time to be afraid, Oprah”) and has unabashedly converted 9/11 into wealth, fame and a shot at the White House.
But a new exhaustively researched and unsentimental peek behind the mythology strongly suggests that Giuliani and his top deputies committed many errors that did grave, even fatal, harm to citizens, emergency responders and recovery teams before, on and after that terrible day. Investigative reporters Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, the co-authors of “Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11,” think the time has come for the public to trade in myth for some hard, uncomfortable truths.