Giuliani's Rhetoric on Terror Contrasts With His Record

'Worst Crisis in Our History'

Throughout his tenure as mayor, Giuliani had to contend with more limited incidents of politically tinged violence, often involving Islamic extremism. But, not wanting to cause undue alarm, he described the attacks as isolated events and repeatedly expressed faith in the ability of law enforcement agencies to contain any threat.

When, in 1994, a Lebanese livery car driver shot at a van carrying Hasidic students on the Brooklyn Bridge, killing one, Giuliani resisted declaring it terrorism and praised the police response. "The person who allegedly did this . . . is now going to be in a legal system that is really a very effective one," he said. When later that year a man set off a firebomb in a subway, Giuliani pushed for reinstating the death penalty, calling it the "ultimate deterrent" against terrorism.

And after the 1997 shooting atop the Empire State Building, Giuliani said it was "irresponsible" to label it terrorism, a judgment that brought criticism from the Anti-Defamation League after the gunman's anti-Israel note surfaced.

Giuliani's desire to keep terrorism in perspective could be discerned even on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the days following, when he sought to marginalize the attackers and the threat they represented. Asked on the day of the attacks whether they constituted an "act of war," he said, "I don't know that I want to use those words. . . . I'm totally confident that American democracy and the American rule of law will prevail."

In an interview later that month, he noted that one of the inexplicable things about the attacks was that, unlike the attack on Pearl Harbor, they lacked broader context: "This has no purpose," he said. "They're not going to gain freedom as a result of this. They're not going to win a war as a result. They're not going to stop us. America's not going to stop as a result of this."

But Giuliani's rhetoric changed as time went on. Campaigning for President Bush in 2004, he described the attacks as part of an existential war for survival -- "the worst crisis in our history" -- that had been going on for years, but that Clinton and others had failed to recognize. It was, he said in his speech at the 2004 GOP convention in New York, "much like observing Europe appease Hitler or trying to accommodate the Soviet Union through the use of mutually assured destruction."

On the trail this year, he has noted that the lack of awareness about terrorism was widely shared before Sept. 11. But this statement often precedes an attack on Democrats for lapsing into the "big mistake" of the 1990s. The Democratic candidates, he warned members of the National Rifle Association last week, would, if elected, cause a "slip back to the Clinton era of playing defense against Islamic terrorism. . . . That may be the single defining issue."

Lhota, the former deputy mayor, said Giuliani's shift from not dwelling on terrorism to his full-throated warnings today could be attributed to the difference between being a mayor and being a presidential candidate. "It's really the role of the [mayor] to reassure the public that the situation is under control. It's the role of national leader to tell Americans that we are vulnerable," he said.

Hauer, the former emergency commissioner, said he does not know what to make of the rhetorical shift. In the 1990s, Giuliani "wanted to play the threat down," he said. "Rudy felt like talking about [terrorism] was alarmist. He never talked about it except in reaction to something. Now he's screaming that the sky is falling."