A profile of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) in the April 2 issue of Time magazine (posted March 21 on the Time website) referred to Giuliani as “America's mayor” and the “rock of 9/11,” and further asserted that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were “Giuliani's finest hour” and gave him “automatic standing” on the issue of terrorism. But the article, written by David Von Drehle, made no mention of allegations that Giuliani was responsible for terrorism-related failures before, during, and after the 9-11 attacks. In an earlier profile accompanying the magazine's naming Giuliani as its 2001 "Person of the Year," Time similarly lauded Giuliani as a “great leader” and a “gutsy decision maker” who, on 9-11, took “on half a dozen critical roles and perform[ed] each masterfully.”

Von Drehle wrote that “few things in politics are more unusual” than Giuliani and went on to call him “the rock of 9/11” and repeat the common description of him as “America's mayor”:

[T]he political rule book has been stuffed into a shredder this year. Come summer of 2008, one or both parties will likely fire it from a confetti gun. A million fluttery pieces of conventional wisdom will swirl around a nominee or nominees once thought to be impossible: a woman, a black man, a guy in his 70s, a Mormon, a Hispanic, a Baptist preacher who used to be 100 lbs. overweight. Who knows? This is the year to bet on something unusual happening, and few things in politics are more unusual than Rudolph Giuliani -- “America's mayor,” the rock of 9/11, crime fighter and tax cutter.

As Media Matters for America has noted, media figures have repeatedly touted Giuliani's reputation as "America's Mayor" and the "hero of 9-11," despite the numerous controversies that have marked his political career, including his handling of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Indeed, the article asserted as fact that Giuliani's performance as mayor during “New York City's worst catastrophe” gave him “automatic standing” on the “powerful topic” of terrorism:

Then al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center. New York City's worst catastrophe was Giuliani's finest hour, and the worldwide acclaim he received gave his start-up company [the consulting firm Giuliani Partners] instant momentum.

[...]

Giuliani takes a similar approach to his signature issue, the fight against terrorism. Those memorable images of September 2001, Giuliani dusted with the soot of fallen buildings and atomized aircraft, give him automatic standing on this powerful topic in every corner of the country. Traveling by private jet (Gulfstream IV or better, his contract stipulates) and charging $100,000 for each speech, Giuliani reassures audiences that all America requires to prevail is confidence.

However, as Media Matters has repeatedly documented, Village Voice senior editor Wayne Barrett and CBSNews.com senior producer Dan Collins, in their book, Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 (HarperCollins, August 2006), expressed a very different view of Giuliani's conduct.

For instance, Barrett and Collins wrote that in the late 1990s, Giuliani selected the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center (7 WTC) as the location of the Office of Emergency Management's (OEM) new command center, having “insisted” that the facility reside “within walking distance of City Hall.” In settling on the downtown location, Giuliani “overruled” warnings from a previous police commissioner, Howard Safir, and NYPD chief operating officer Lou Anemone not to put the command center at 7 WTC and rejected “an already secure, technologically advanced city facility across the Brooklyn Bridge” (Page 41). According to Barrett and Collins, when Giuliani heard about the disaster on 9-11, his “original destination” wasn't “the street corner” but his “much-ballyhooed command center” (Page 6). However, when Giuliani arrived near 7 WTC, then-New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik “decided it was too dangerous to bring the mayor up to the command center he had so carefully and expensively built” (Page 340). The building ultimately collapsed that day. Thus, Barrett and Collins concluded that if the command center had not posed such a safety risk to Giuliani, “all the dramatic visuals ... would instead have been tense but tame footage from its barren press conference room” (Page 41). Indeed, according to Barrett and Collins, the “memorable images” of “Giuliani dusted with soot” -- cited by Time -- would likely not exist if Giuliani had listened to Safir and Anemone and placed his command center for emergencies elsewhere.

Barrett and Collins further argued that Giuliani mishandled the cleanup at Ground Zero, putting workers' lives and health at excessive risk; that he failed to set up a unified command post for the New York Fire and Police departments, contributing to a lack of communication between police officers and firefighters on 9-11; and that his history with Kerik was part of a pattern of security-related cronyism in Giuliani's administration. With regard to Kerik, a leaked memo detailing Giuliani's 2008 campaign plans appeared to include the former police commissioner on a list of several potential “prob[lems]” that may be “insurm[ountable].” Moreover, a March 30 New York Times article -- published after the Time profile -- reported that in 2006 Giuliani “told a grand jury that his former chief investigator remembered having briefed him on some aspects of Bernard B. Kerik's relationship with a company suspected of ties to organized crime before Mr. Kerik's appointment as New York City police commissioner.”

Additionally, the Time profile reported that Giuliani “was endorsed by ... the executive director of the state firefighters association” at a South Carolina rally in February, but did not note recent criticism of Giuliani by the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) and a New York City IAFF union affiliate that had supported President Bush's re-election in 2004. As Media Matters noted, some of those criticisms were expressed in a February 28 draft letter from the IAFF to its union members. Additionally, a March 15 Cox News Service article reported: “As revered as he is by many for his efforts after the attacks, Giuliani is reviled by some firefighters who believe he mishandled the development of a radio system that could have saved lives on 9/11 and turned his back on first responders' remains in the rubble.” A March 30 Associated Press article further noted September 11 criticisms by the IAFF and by Sally Regenhard, chairwoman of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign and mother of a firefighter killed on 9/11. The AP noted that the Giuliani “administration's failure to provide the World Trade Center's first responders with adequate radios [is] a long-standing complaint from relatives of the firefighters killed when the twin towers collapsed. The Sept. 11 Commission noted the firefighters at the World Trade Center were using the same ineffective radios employed by the first responders to the 1993 terrorist attack on the trade center.”