GIULIANI IN THE PARK
Spent part of Sunday afternoon in Central Park and took a Central Park Conservancy guided tour with my husband and brother, who's in town for a few days. The park was fantastic, of course. The leaves are just starting to change and the weather is still warm. The tour was an east-to-west walk around 72nd Street - and we had pretty cool highlights on both side. As we were getting ready to start the walk, there was a big commotion as the Hispanic Day Parade came up Fifth Avenue, and then suddenly a lot of cheering and suited guys and cops walked in our direction. I said it must be Giuliani, but we couldn't see him until he got very close to us on the street leading into the park. He had been smiling and waving, but as he got close to the van that would take him away, it looked like he dropped his game face. He appeared tired and serious, like a man leaving a funeral. The crowds were energized even after he pulled away. It was like seeing a rock star. Then on the other side of the park, we saw Yoko Ono at the edge of Strawberry Fields.

Last night, I resumed reading the Germs book, the one co-written by the New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, who got the powder-filled threatening letter that shuttered the paper's office last week. (Her first-person account appeared in Sunday's paper.) The book talks about Giuliani, who apparently has been mentally preparing for this kind of thing for several years, which could help explain why he has had the coolest head since Sept. 11. Here's an excerpt:

Josh Lederberg continued to raise the alarm about civilian vulnerabilities. In May 1994, the New York City health commissioner, Margaret A. Hamburg, arranged for him to brief Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani on the biological threat. A former prosecutor, Giuliani had begun to grasp the political impact of public-health issues when the New York City tabloids broke the story of an eight-year-old killed by a rare form of streptococcus. Some parents panicked; there were calls to close every school where a child had strep throat - a move, Hamburg noted, that would have shut down every school. The incident, she recalled, marked the first time that Giuliani "understood how unsettling an invisible, infectious disease can be to a population."

The mayor was behind schedule, so the briefing began in the early evening. Lederberg offered a tutorial on the life cycle of the anthrax bug. Hamburg was dismayed. At the end of a long day, the mayor could not possibly be interested in such particulars. "The mayor's going to kill me," she remembered thinking. "But Giuliani loved it. They went into all kinds of detail - how many spores could you get into a lightbulb, that kind of thing. It went on for two hours."

- posted by Amy @ 10/15/2001 10:12:00 AM