NEW YORK CITY — George Pataki
remembers the call. It came from Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York,
on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. As rescue crews and medical
personnel scrambled to save lives and unravel the horrifying reality of
the 9/11 attacks, Giuliani told Gov. Pataki that he had set up a
temporary command center in an old police academy building.
Pataki remembers his response, too.
He considers it his most important decision that day. “I thought for a
second and said, ‘I’ll be right there,’ ” recalled Pataki, who brought
his full emergency response team to Giuliani’s command center, where
they set up alongside city and federal personnel.
“We had a seamless response,” Pataki said. “I had no doubt the most important thing was for us to act together.”
Working together. It seems so simple,
so obvious – and today, in Pataki’s view, a nearly lost concept.
Earlier this month, on Sept. 11, I joined the former three-term
Republican governor on the 64th floor of One World Trade Center, the
skyscraper built adjacent to the 9/11 Memorial, where he had spent his
morning consoling family members of people lost in the attacks, and
thanking police and firefighters on duty.
Since leaving the governorship in
2006, Pataki, 72, has worked as a lawyer and consultant. His name
recognition, especially outside New York, has faded since then, too. In
2015, when Pataki briefly ran for president, he struggled to get media
or voter attention in the crowded Republican field and his poll numbers
never registered above in the low single digits. That, presumably, was
in part a byproduct of choices Pataki made in September 2001. In
contrast to Giuliani, who became an international figure while visibly
leading New York through the recovery, Pataki willingly stayed in the
background.
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