So much praise, quite deservedly, has been heaped on Mayor Rudy Giuliani for his handling of the Twin Towers attack that New Yorkers have seriously considered keeping him on in City Hall past this year’s statutory end of his eight-year term. The ex-prosecutor who caused such havoc in civic calm brought such reassurance in the crisis that he is being compared with Churchill in the Blitz, a “wartime consigliere“. The mayoral election rules will not be changed, not least because candidates have been campaigning for a year or more to take over. But the move is symbolic of the yearning in post-attack America, and especially in New York, for a leader who can guide the country, and the city, out of its moment of darkness.
Beyond the flag-waving, “God Bless America” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, and the respectful welcome given to George Bush on 14 September when he came to see for himself the mutilated stumps of the Twin Towers, lies a deep unease that Bush may not be able to do this. New Yorkers scolded him for waiting four days to come. “Where’s Dubbya?” they asked. He’s not a Lincoln, a Kennedy, or a Johnson, they cried. He’s not even Clinton, who they couldn’t imagine staying away while New York burned. Some came close to calling Bush a coward, hiding behind his Secret Service agents.
In the president’s absence, Giuliani’s understanding of grief and resolve led a remarkable recovery in which New York’s “finest” (the cops), and the “bravest” (the firefighters), who lost more than 300 of their number, were not the only heroes. In the rescue operation, there were truck drivers and welders, teachers and clerics. Corporations immediately chipped in more than $200m for relief efforts. George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees, gave $5m. Thousands donated food and clothing to keep the rescue operation going.
Everyone had a chance to be a part of the healing. Union Square, at the border of downtown Manhattan and the site of workers’ rallies from the civil war to the 20th century, became a memorial of candles, cut flowers and a patchwork of painful notices of the 5,422 still listed as “missing” – Giordano, Dipasquale, Milenski, Duffy, Esposito . . . people from 62 nations died in the calamity. Some posters called for revenge, others for peace. The word “peacenik” was heard for the first time in 20 years as the remnants of a forgotten movement burst on to the streets.
Union Square’s equestrian statue of George Washington, facing south towards the gaping hole where the Twin Towers stood, was covered with the chalked words “Love, Love, Love, Love”. A sign offered “Free Hugs and Neck Rubs”. To the west, where the security perimeter cordoned off the Twin Towers site, New Yorkers gathered respectfully behind police lines, cheering the emergency work. Black people and Hispanics applauded the police. Bond traders applauded construction workers.
Every New Yorker had a story to tell about the unreal epidemic of civility. A man crossed the road sneezing and a cop standing nearby said: “Bless you.” “Thank you,” said the man.
But how long will it last? How different will America be from the day before Tuesday, 11 September 2001? Is an entire culture in the process of being transformed by a single event? Is America going to be, as Francis Fukuyama suggested, “less self-absorbed, a more ordinary country . . . [with] concrete interests and real vulnerabilities”? Will New Yorkers stop calling themselves the greatest of this and the greatest of that? Will they stop believing that they not only invented sliced bread, but bread?
And what is New York’s part in this transformation? Yesterday’s Big Apple gave the world Sex and the City and Studio 54. The Twin Towers were the symbol and, to an extent, housed the engine of the fun-filled stock market binge of the 1990s that produced never-lived-in “trophy homes”, propelled Americans into a permanent shopping spree, sent car ownership spiralling to 220 million and allowed people to think they could go wildly into debt – from $1.4trn in 1980 to $7.4trn today.
Some things are bound to change, in the short term. Within hours, scriptwriters were furiously rewriting films and TV dramas to take account of the projected new mood: no bombs, no hijackers, no skyscraper infernos, no planes taking off and landing. For the first time since the Gulf war, or so it seemed, the TV network anchors were actually discussing foreign policy. In the months ahead, the networks will be forced into more foreign coverage as the hunt for Osama Bin Laden plays out, and they try to “get behind the story” of how the terrorists prevailed. Still, the idea that this will translate into a permanent shift seems a fantasy.
But could the moment be upon us when the million-dollar question on the TV quiz show is “Name the nations that border Afghanistan”? Will there be a sudden rush of foreign policy majors at the city’s university? Clearly, there is room for a change, if anyone wants to make it. New Yorkers are now demanding answers to a host of serious questions for the government that boil down to this: How did the city become so vulnerable? And what is the “appropriate” response that will ensure this terrible thing never happens again?
The words and phrases from the Oval Office – phrases like “whip the evil”, “dead or alive”, “smoke ’em out” – did not instil comfort in the victims. New Yorkers preferred to hear their mayor. From hour one, when Giuliani himself was nearly trapped by the falling debris, he was telling them to avoid finger-pointing, be tolerant, stay calm.
Under the mayor’s steady hand, the physical return to “normalcy” is happening at an astonishing pace: within a week, 50,000 tons of debris had been moved and four million square feet of office space had been rented in the city to companies displaced by the attack. The stock exchange reopened to “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Stars and Stripes Forever”. Investors shrugged off the first day’s unprecedented fall in the Dow; federal aid packages were on the way. When the numbness goes and mental wounds heal, a changed America could have its roots in Union Square.
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