Giuliani's Rhetoric on Terror Contrasts With His Record

Gross still marvels at Giuliani's concern for his son, recalling how often the mayor visited the hospital, and watched as he took the same approach, on a much larger scale, after Sept. 11.

"I do think he rose to greatness after the World Trade Center, but it wasn't because he was an expert on terrorism but because he was an affected and obviously level-headed leader when we didn't need cheerleading, we needed honesty," Gross said. "That's the tone he set. But it wasn't because he was some kind of expert on terrorism."

One of Giuliani's rivals for the Republican nomination, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), made a similar distinction, saying recently that while "the nation respects the mayor's leadership after 9/11," it is unclear that it "translates, necessarily, into foreign policy or national security expertise. I know of nothing in his background that indicates that he has any experience in it."

Giuliani, through his campaign, declined to discuss his record on terrorism. But supporters say he gained unique insight into the issue when he witnessed people jumping from the twin towers and was almost trapped in a nearby building when the South Tower collapsed.

"You have to understand what the results of [terrorism] entail, and that's very personal. If you have compassion for that, you can lead this effort, and if you don't understand the personal consequences, you can't," said Lewis Schiliro, who ran the FBI's New York office in the late 1990s.

Others say Giuliani's experience with terrorism is not the point. What matters to voters, they say, is that he is a strong leader who has taken on scourges such as the Mafia and the New York murder rate, and so can be trusted to triumph over a new threat. "Giuliani does have a track record of being a no-nonsense S.O.B., a really tough guy," said New York state Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat. "Rudy is not someone you can picture waffling when it comes to terrorism."

As Mayor, a Focus on Crime

Giuliani argues that his experience with terrorism long predates Sept. 11. His campaign notes that his work as a Justice Department official and as a U.S. attorney in New York included several encounters with the issue, such as serving on a 1976 task force, writing a 1982 letter to the State Department recommending counterterrorism legislation and prosecuting a member of a Puerto Rican terrorist group, FALN, for making false passports.

On the campaign trail, Giuliani particularly stresses the time he spent as U.S. attorney investigating Yasser Arafat for his role in the death of a wheelchair-bound New Yorker, Leon Klinghoffer, in the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. "I investigated Yasser Arafat before anybody knew who he really was," Giuliani said in Las Vegas.

But prosecutors who led that case say Giuliani overstates his role. He assisted in the later, failed attempt to evict the Palestine Liberation Organization from its New York office, but the investigation of an Arafat link to the ship hijacking was handled by the Justice Department in Washington, say former Justice officials, including Stephen Trott, now a federal appeals judge.

Jay Fischer, a lawyer who represented the Klinghoffer family, said he never talked with Giuliani about the case. "When I heard [him] just in the last six months making a speech that he knew about terrorism because he had led the investigation, I recall turning around to my wife and saying, 'That comes as news to me,' " Fischer said.

Giuliani's focus throughout the 1990s was on reducing crime -- New York had more than 2,000 murders a year when he took office as mayor. So fixated was he on crime during his 1993 campaign against David Dinkins that Giuliani said little on the trail about the explosion, that Feb. 26, of a 1,200-pound bomb in a rental van in a garage beneath the World Trade Center. That blast killed six and injured 1,000 in the first major attack by Islamic extremists on U.S. soil.

After winning that fall, he invoked the attack in his inaugural speech in passing, as a sign of the city's resilience: "It was a day in which 50,000 New Yorkers took charge of themselves and each other."