Person of The Year 2001: Rudy Giuliani

Sept. 11 delivered both a shock and a surprise–the attack, and our response to it–and we can argue forever over which mattered more. There has been so much talk of the goodness that erupted that day that we forget how unprepared we were for it. We did not expect much from a generation that had spent its middle age examining all the ways it failed to measure up to the one that had come before–all fat, no muscle, less a beacon to the world than a bully, drunk on blessings taken for granted.

It was tempting to say that Sept. 11 changed all that, just as it is tempting to say that every hero needs a villain, and goodness needs evil as its grinding stone. But try looking a widow in the eye and talking about all the good that has come of this. It may not be a coincidence, but neither is it a partnership: good does not need evil, we owe no debt to demons, and the attack did not make us better. It was an occasion to discover what we already were. “Maybe the purpose of all this,” New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said at a funeral for a friend, “is to find out if America today is as strong as when we fought for our independence or when we fought for ourselves as a Union to end slavery or as strong as our fathers and grandfathers who fought to rid the world of Nazism and communism.” The terrorists, he argues, were counting on our cowardice. They’ve learned a lot about us since then. And so have we.

For leading that lesson, for having more faith in us than we had in ourselves, for being brave when required and rude where appropriate and tender without being trite, for not sleeping and not quitting and not shrinking from the pain all around him, Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of the World, is TIME’s 2001 Person of the Year.

If the graves alone were the measure, Osama bin Laden would own this year; we lost more lives on Sept. 11 than in any terrorist attack in U.S. history. And bin Laden did more than kill people. We had just packed up and stored away the century of Hitler and Stalin–both Men of the Year in their time–which we imagined had shown us the depths to which a despot could sink. To watch bin Laden sit in delight and create a skyscraper with his hand–like a child playing Here’s the Church, Here’s the Steeple–then slowly crumple it into a fist was to confront not only the nature of evil but how much we still don’t know about it.

But bin Laden is too small a man to get the credit for all that has happened in America in the autumn of 2001. Imagination makes him larger than he is in order that he fit his crime; yet those who have studied his work do not elevate him to the company of history’s monsters, despite the monstrousness of what he has done. It is easy to turn grievance into violence; that takes no genius, just a lack of scruple and a loaded gun. The killers he dispatched were braver men than he; he has a lot of money and a lot of hate, and when he is gone there will be others to take his place.

It is what came after his men had finished their job that has come to define this year. The first page of a new century had unfolded neat as a legal pad, a few scribbles in the margins, but nothing worth underlining. We had our worries. There were fears that cell phones would cause brain cancer. Fears that we were overprescribing antibiotics. Drinking too much arsenic. That sharks were stalking us. The lights went out in California. There was the fight over stem cells, the fear about clones. Do we drill in the Arctic? On Sept. 10, Congress was debating another tax cut, schools were debating dress codes: Are spaghetti straps too risque? There was news of a suicide bombing in Istanbul. That seemed very far away.

The next day, history rose up and growled. And with that the testing began. Sometimes the greater the tragedy, the easier it is to learn wrong lessons from it: truth turns into myth, mortals into heroes, luck into fate, scars into badges. It is hard for the fire fighters, brave as they are, to be greeted as heroes everywhere they go, proposed to in bars, showered with gifts, when in private they know that many of them cannot sleep and cannot think and cannot find words longer than two syllables, and on the days they don’t wake up feeling terrible they feel guilty that they don’t. And so their fight goes on.

It is hard for mothers to wrestle the Christmas tree into the living room and answer their three-year-old when he asks for the hundredth time, Will Daddy be home soon? Getting out of bed can take an act of courage. One widow, a breast-cancer survivor, pretty much stopped eating after Sept. 11. She shot herself a couple of weeks ago. She lost her fight, but others go on.

It was hard for a President who began his term on a rainy, windy Inauguration Day last January and addressed a citizenry with differences so deep that sometimes, he said, “it seems we share a continent but not a country.” George W. Bush’s promise to restore honor to the office could not be kept just by wearing his tie every day or learning a crisp salute. A leap of faith is not something that can be faked or borrowed or bought. A man who always said he trusted his team would have to trust himself even more; a man with no use for alliances would have to build the biggest, unlikeliest one ever. And when the enemy honors no borders and knows no rules, that fight is certain to go on.

And therein lies the answer to people who wonder whether any of the changes of this dark autumn will stick, or whether they pass like a fad, more honorable than most but no more lasting. No one has got it perfectly right. This is not a Disney cartoon. But every time we fail or fall short, we admire just a little more the ones who manage to keep going. And we do our best to catch up.

“Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald. On the morning of Sept. 11, primary day in New York City, Rudy Giuliani was paddling along with all the other lame ducks into oblivion. The tower of strength had become an object of pity: the iron man’s cancer made him vulnerable, the righteous man’s adultery made him hypocritical, the loyal man’s passions–for his city and its cops and its streets and its ballplayers–divided the city even as he improved it. After abandoning Gracie Mansion, his marriage in flames, he was camping out with friends on the Upper East Side, and now it was time to choose his successor, and the end was in sight.

The end was, in fact, just a few blocks away. Having raced to the scene at the first news of the attacks, Giuliani was nearly buried alive. In the hours that followed, he had to lock parts of the city down and break others open, create a makeshift command center and a temporary morgue, find a million pairs of gloves and dust masks and respirators, throw up protections against another attack, tame the mobs that might go looking for vengeance and somehow persuade the rest of the city that it had not just been fatally shot through the heart.

There was a test in that moment, and he was the first to pass it. On that day, for his security and the country’s, the President was on the move, underground. The rest of us had stopped in our tracks, no idea where we were or what it meant. And so it was up to Giuliani to hold off despair long enough for the rest of us to get our balance, find our armor and join in to fight at his side. That day and the days that followed, he managed to sound realistic and optimistic at the same time. The danger has not passed. Our defenses are not perfect. Our enemies are cunning. He knew the difference between information and inspiration and never substituted one where the other was needed.

Maybe it takes a survivor of cancer, the private pitiless terror, to minister to a city that discovers in a single moment that every moment counts, that everything you were certain of can change in an instant. We knew that he was a tough man. It took the trauma for us to discover the tenderness, the offscreen, backstage, lowlight kindness he showed to widow after widow, child after child. A man considered incapable of empathy, who could scarcely mutter a word of condolence to the mother of an unarmed man his police force had shot 41 times, somehow knew what to say–and just as important, what not to. Tell me about your son, he would say to a speechless mother, and then he would go quiet, and she would start to talk, and his listening gave her her voice back. In the face of so much agony, every instinct instructs you to flee; he has gone to close to 200 wakes and memorials and funerals. He says it gives him his strength.

The reason it is possible not to mourn Sept. 10, to believe that the days ahead may be both more painful and more precious, is that there is evidence we are willing to do the hard work by choice, not just because we have to. And so the year can end, and the fires go out at last at ground zero, and Liberty Island reopens, and soldiers guarding the airport at Kandahar drape mine tape on tumbleweed for a Christmas tree and raise a huge American flag, inscribed with the names of slain men and women. Our job is by no means finished. But Rudy Giuliani’s is, not because his term is ending but because maybe we have passed the first test as well.