Kerrey mentions that when national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice testified in front of the commission last month, she pointed to a July 5, 2001, meeting in her office as evidence that multiple agencies were closely monitoring the terrorist threat. Kerrey wants to ask Giuliani if anyone bothered to share the alarm with him.

“Did you receive communication from the Feds—the FAA, FBI, the people that were at this July 5 meeting?” Kerrey asks, testing out a possible question. “Did you receive any communication from them saying, ‘The president and the National Security Council adviser are concerned about a domestic attack. Here’s what we’re gonna do, and here’s what we think you should do’? At the very least, they should have notified Giuliani. I think it’s important to know if he or anyone in New York were notified. The Feds said they had an indication that bin Laden was going to try to attack inside the United States, and hijackers were a possibility, and they sent warnings out to the FAA and commercial airliners to get prepared—did you notice any of that preparation? Did it have any impact on the morning of September 11? I’m very much interested in this.”

Kerrey, like his fellow commissioners, rarely asks a public question that he doesn’t already know the answer to. “Thus far, what I’ve seen is, the Feds were surprised by the hijackings and unprepared for multiple hijackings,” he says. “They did an inadequate job of communicating information that could have been critical in allowing the first responders to decide what to do.”

Giuliani, when he answers, certainly won’t criticize Bush. But again Kerrey draws a subtle contrast between the stand-up mayor and the stubborn president. “Just from listening to Rudy yesterday, he’s not going to be afraid to say he made mistakes,” Kerrey says. “He’s not going to be unwilling to identify things he thinks could have been done better.”

The hearings hold some personal risk for Giuliani, too. His overwhelming, enduring popularity, especially outside New York, is founded on his actions during and immediately after the terrorist attacks. “How often do people really pay attention to politicians on TV?” asks Republican strategist Kieran Mahoney. “If you get a minute a month of people’s attention, you’re doing great as a politician. And on September 11, 12, and 13, everybody, literally, watched Rudy all day long. Impressions like that, there’s a searing effect that is unlikely to dissipate anytime soon.” Yet those impressions were based largely on Giuliani’s acting as a selfless and nonpartisan public servant. Though he’s recently kept busy campaigning for Republican congressional candidates, the live, nationally televised New York commission hearings will begin a period in which Giuliani increasingly invokes September 11 on behalf of a purely political cause. He’ll have a similar spotlight late this summer, at the Republican convention. Giuliani’s challenge will be to retain his September 11 halo as the partisan fray grows rougher.

As for what’s at stake for Bob Kerrey, William Safire recently nominated him as director of the CIA under President John Kerry. Kerrey says he’s happy selecting new deans for the New School. However: “I’ve quit saying ‘never’ to stuff. There are a lot of things that in theory are interesting to me. And this one in particular, because I know the agency and have ideas of what I would do if I were there. But I have ideas of what I would do if I were running a magazine. It’s possible. If at some point I decide this is exciting, or I get called in some fashion . . . ”

Maybe then the chief spook, or even somebody at the White House, would give the mayor of New York advance warning the next time trouble is on the way.

Related:

• Archive: “Cityside”
• Articles by Chris Smith
• Table of Contents: May 10, 2004 issue of New York | Subscribe!