As Mayor of New York City on September 11, 2001, Rudy Giuliani played a major role in the immediate response to the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center towers in the city.

Preparedness before the attacks

Location of Office of Emergency Management headquarters In September 2006, Village Voice writer and long-time Giuliani critic Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, a senior producer for CBS News, published The Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, one of the strongest reassessments of Giuliani's role in the events of 9/11. The book highlights his decision to locate the NYC Office of Emergency Management headquarters (long-identified as a target for a terrorist attack) on the 23rd floor inside the 7 World Trade Center building, a decision that had been criticized at the time in light of the previous terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in 1993."Rudy Giuliani's 5 Big Lies About 9/11: On the Stump, Rudy Can't Help Spreading Smoke and Ashes About His Dubious Record," Village Voice August 8–14, 2007, p. 22-36. The Office of Emergency Management was created to coordinate efforts between police and firefighters, but with the distraction of evacuating its headquarters, it was not able to conduct these efforts properly.

In May 2007, Giuliani put responsibility for selecting the location on Jerome M. Hauer, New York City's first Director of Emergency Management who had been appointed by Giuliani himself and had served under Giuliani from 1996 to 2000. Hauer has taken exception to that account in interviews and has provided Fox News and New York Magazine with a memo demonstrating that he recommended a location in Brooklyn, but was overruled by Giuliani. Television journalist Chris Wallace interviewed Giuliani on May 13, 2007, about his 1997 decision to locate the command center at the World Trade Center. Giuliani laughed during Wallace's questions and said that Hauer recommended the World Trade Center site and claimed that Hauer said that the WTC site was the best location. Wallace presented Giuliani a photocopy of Hauer's directive letter. The letter urged Giuliani to locate the command center in Brooklyn, instead of lower Manhattan, because "not as visible a target as buildings in lower Manhattan."audio and video from interview available on Robert Greenwald's "The REAL Rudy: Command Center" The February 1996 memo read, "The [Brooklyn] building is secure and not as visible a target as buildings in Lower Manhattan."

Radio communications

The 9/11 Commission noted in its report that lack of preparedness could have led to the deaths of first responders at the scene of the attacks. The Commission noted that the radios in use by the fire department were the same radios which had been criticized for their ineffectiveness following the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. Giuliani testified to the commission, where some family members of responders who had died in the attacks appeared to protest his statements. A 1994 mayoral office study of the radios indicated that they were faulty. Replacement radios were purchased in a no-bid contract. They were implemented in early 2001. However, in March 2001 the replacement radios were found to be faulty as well.

Fire Department chiefs issued orders for the firefighters to evacuate. However, the order was issued over the radios that were not working in the towers, thus, the 343 firefighters inside the Twin Towers could not hear the evacuation order. They remained in the towers as the towers collapsed.Urban Legend video, https://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3367678 However, when Giuliani testified before the 9/11 Commission he said that the firefighters ignored the evacuation order out of an effort to save lives.Kevin Baker, "A Fate Worse than Bush: Rudy Giuliani and the Politics of Personality," Harpers, August 2007, p. 37, citing Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes (Times Books, 2002)

Also criticized was Giuliani's focus on personal projects and turf wars rather than vital precautions for the city, and his role in communications failures (which may have been the result of patronage deals inside City Hall). Kirkus Reviews stated, "Giuliani may not have been directly responsible for all those woes, but they happened on his watch".

At the scene

During the attack During the attack, Giuliani may have been near the WTC towers. Interviews with Barry Jennings, a 9/11 survivor of the tower 7 collapse, reveal that Giuliani may have been in tower 7 on the day of the attacks, but exited the building hours before collapse. Additionally, in an interview with ABC News on the day of the attacks, Giuliani indicated that he was "at the scene" saying: "We went down to the scene and we set up headquarters at 75 Barclay Street which was right there with the police commissioner [and] the fire commissioner and the head of emergency management. And we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse, and it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building so we were trapped in the building for 10-15 minutes and finally found an exit, got out, walked North, took a lot of people with us."

After the attack Giuliani was highly visible in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. After the attacks, Giuliani coordinated the response of various city departments while organizing the support of state and federal authorities for the World Trade Center site, for citywide anti-terrorist measures, and for restoration of destroyed infrastructure. He made frequent appearances on radio and television on September 11 and afterwards — for example, to indicate that tunnels would be closed as a precautionary measure, and that there was no reason to believe that the dispersion of chemical or biological weaponry into the air was a factor in the attack.

When Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal suggested that the attacks were an indication that the United States "should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause", Giuliani asserted,There is no moral equivalent for this [terrorist] act. There is no justification for it... And one of the reasons I think this happened is because people were engaged in moral equivalency in not understanding the difference between liberal democracies like the United States, like Israel, and terrorist states and those who condone terrorism. So I think not only are those statements wrong, they're part of the problem.Giuliani subsequently rejected the prince's $10 million donation to disaster relief in the aftermath of the attack.

Giuliani claimed on August 9, 2007, that "I was at Ground Zero as often, if not more, than most workers.... I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them." This angered NY Fire and Police personnel 911 workers. A New York Times study a week later found that he spent a total of 29 hours over three months at the site; his appointment logs were unavailable for the six days immediately following the attacks. This contrasted with recovery workers at the site who spent this much time at the site in two to three days. The recovery workers often spent hundreds of hours working 8- to 12-hour shifts.

"America's Mayor" In the wake of the attacks, Giuliani was hailed by many for his leadership during the crisis. When polled just six weeks after the attack Giuliani received a 79% approval rating among New York City voters, a dramatic increase over the 36% rating he had received a year earlier — seven years into his administration.

In his public statements, Giuliani mirrored the emotions of New Yorkers after the September 11 attacks: shock, sadness, anger, resolution to rebuild, and the desire for justice to be done to those responsible. "Tomorrow New York is going to be here", he said. "And we're going to rebuild, and we're going to be stronger than we were before...I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, that terrorism can't stop us." Giuliani was widely praised by some for his close involvement with the rescue and recovery efforts, but others, including many police, rescue workers, and families of WTC victims argue that "Giuliani has exaggerated the role he played after the terrorist attacks, casting himself as a hero for political gain."

As an avid and public fan of the New York Yankees, who won four World Series Championships during his time as mayor, Giuliani was frequently sighted at Yankee games, often accompanied by his son. On September 21, 2001, the first game was played in New York City after the attacks, with the New York Mets at home facing the Atlanta Braves. Despite him being a Yankee fan, the crowd cheered for him and for his leadership over the preceding days.

The term "America's Mayor", now in common usage among Giuliani supporters, was coined by Oprah Winfrey at a 9/11 memorial service held at Yankee Stadium on September 23, 2001.

Mayoral term extension proposal The 9/11 attack occurred on the scheduled date of the mayoral primary to select the Democratic and Republican candidates to succeed Giuliani. The primary was immediately delayed two weeks to September 25. During this period, Giuliani sought an unprecedented three-month emergency extension of his term, from its scheduled expiration on January 1 to April 1, due to the circumstances of the emergency besetting the city. He threatened to challenge the law imposing term limits on elected New York City officials and run for another full four-year term, if the primary candidates did not consent to permit the extension of his mayoralty.

Advocates for the extension contended that Giuliani was needed to manage the initial requests for funds from Albany and Washington, speed up recovery, and slow down the exodus of jobs from lower Manhattan to outside New York City.

Although a provision for emergency extensions is written into the New York State Constitution (Article 3 Section 25), in the end leaders in the State Assembly and Senate indicated that they did not believe the extension was necessary. The election proceeded as scheduled, and the winning candidate, the Giuliani-endorsed Republican Michael Bloomberg, took office on January 1, 2002, per normal custom.

Time Person of the Year

On December 24, 2001, Time magazine named Giuliani its Person of the Year for 2001. Time observed that, prior to 9/11, the public image of Giuliani had been that of a rigid, self-righteous, ambitious politician. After 9/11, and perhaps owing also to his bout with prostate cancer, his public image had been reformed to that of a man who could be counted on to unite a city in the midst of its greatest crisis. Thus historian Vincent J. Cannato concluded in September 2006, "With time, Giuliani's legacy will be based on more than just 9/11. He left a city immeasurably better off — safer, more prosperous, more confident — than the one he had inherited eight years earlier, even with the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center at its heart. Debates about his accomplishments will continue, but the significance of his mayoralty is hard to deny."

Handling of the Ground Zero air quality issue