Rudolph Giuliani was a hero before he was a joke. Lisa Beamer was a wife and mother before she became a 9/11 symbol — and although her celebrity faded, her widowhood can’t.
In the period after the planes crashed, the United States and the world met a range of personalities. We had known some of them well, but we saw them in different ways. Others were thrown into the public consciousness by tragic circumstances.
Some, like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar, are dead. But others have moved on and lead lives that are epilogue to September 11, 2001. Here are some of the names that appeared in this tumultuous time – what they were then and what has happened to them since then -:
RUDOLPH GIULIANI
THEN: Mayor of New York City, he was a hero of the moment: empathetic, determined, a focus of pain for the nation and a constant presence in the zero zone. “The number of casualties will be more than any of us can ultimately bear,” he said on Sept. 11. Oprah Winfrey named him “the mayor of the United States”; Time magazine declared him the “Person of the Year.”
SINCE THEN: After suggesting (and later ruling out) that his term be extended, which was about to expire, due to the September 11 emergency, Giuliani entered private life, but not so private . He launched a profitable security company and unsuccessfully ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, which he aborted. His adventures as a supporter and agent of President Donald Trump are well documented and resulted in the suspension of his lawyer’s license in his home state.
BERNARD KERIK
THEN: The New York City Police Commissioner. Bald and stocky, he never left Giuliani in the days after 9/11 – and followed the mayor after he left office and joined Giuliani’s security company.
SINCE THEN: President George W. Bush appointed Kerik Interim Minister of the Interior of Iraq in 2003 during the Iraq War, and appointed him to head the State Department of Homeland Security. United, in 2004. She was no longer considered for the latter position when it was revealed that she had employed an undocumented worker as a babysitter and housekeeper; then followed a number of legal issues, including convictions for ethics violations and tax fraud. He was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020.
GEORGE W. BUSH
THEN: The 43rd President of the United States, Bush, was informed of the 9/11 attacks while reading “The Pet Goat” to high school students in Sarasota, Florida. He spoke to the nation that night and visited the zero zone three days later, where he took a megaphone to declare, “I can hear! The rest of the world is listening to them! And the people – and the people who demolished these buildings – , they will soon listen to us all “. His support in the polls reached 85 percent.
SINCE THEN: The war on terror spawned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush’s demand that the Taliban “deliver on terrorists, or … share their destiny.” He had retired from oil painting in Texas a long time ago when U.S. Navy Special Operations Forces (Navy SEAL) killed bin Laden, and when President Joe Biden went withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. In August, he said he watched the events there “with deep sadness.”
RICHARD CHENEY
THEN: While the Secret Service was playing “hide the president” with Bush on September 11 – he was transferred to military bases in Louisiana and Nebraska, for fear of terrorist attacks – his vice president settled in a “safe, undisclosed location,” a bunker inside the White House where he helped direct government actions. Cheney became a fierce advocate of an unbridled response to attacks that used “any means at our disposal.” He lobbied for the 2003 war in Iraq. The interrogation technique known as ‘waterboarding’ (a water torture that causes the sensation of drowning) was a correct way to get information from terrorists, he said – not torture, as his critics have long insisted -.
SINCE THEN: After five heart attacks and a heart transplant in 2012, Cheney has lived to see his daughter Liz win her former seat in Congress in Wyoming and become a Republican persona non grata because of her criticism of Donald Trump.
COLIN POWELL
THEN: ex-chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell was unanimously confirmed as Secretary of State in 2001. He then presented a persuasive case to the United Nations for military action against Iraq, and said that Saddam Hussein built weapons of mass destruction. The war was fought, Saddam was overthrown and assassinated, Iraq was destabilized; no such weapons were found.
SINCE THEN: Powell has consistently defended his support for the Iraq war. But the lifelong Republican did not believe in Trump, supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, and spoke in support of Biden at the 2020 Democratic convention. He left the Republican Party after the September 6 assault January at the Capitol.
ARRICES CONDOLENCE
THEN: Bush national security adviser. In the summer of 2001, he met with CIA Director George Tenet at his request to discuss the threat of al-Qaeda attacks on US targets. The CIA reported that “there will be major terrorist attacks on the United States in the coming weeks or months.” Rice would later say the information was old.
Since then: Rice has succeeded Powell as secretary of state and then returned to Stanford University as rector and then as a faculty member. In 2012, she also became one of the first two women to be allowed to join the Augusta National Golf Club.
JOHN ASHCROFT
THEN: Attorney General during Bush’s first term. Following 9/11, he was the main proponent of the administration of the anti-terrorism law Patriot Act, which gave the government broad powers to investigate and prosecute those suspected of terrorism. But in 2004, while in an intensive care unit with gallstone pancreatitis, he refused the administration’s pleas to invalidate a Justice Department verdict that Bush’s national intelligence program was ill-fated. · Legal.
SINCE THEN: After leaving office in 2005, Ashcroft became a lobbyist and consultant. His appearances as a gospel singer (and songwriter — his melody “Let the Eagle Soar,” “Let the Eagle Soar,” performed at Bush’s second inauguration — have declined).
JOHN YOO
THEN: As an assistant attorney general to the Department of Justice’s Legal Advisory Office, Yoo provided much of the legal food for the war on terror. He argued that the “enemy fighters” captured in Afghanistan did not need to receive the status of prisoners of war; that the President could authorize wiretaps without a court order on U.S. citizens in U.S. territory; that the use of “improved interrogation techniques” such as water torture were within the power of the president in times of war.
SINCE THEN: Yoo is a professor in the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He is still a staunch supporter of presidential prerogatives; in 2020, his book “Defending in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power” argued that Trump’s view of the presidency was in line with that of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton.
KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED
THEN: Prominent al Qaeda propagandist, described as the “main mastermind of the 9/11 attacks” by the 9/11 Commission. He was captured in 2003 by the CIA and the Pakistani secret police, and then taken to CIA prisons in Poland, Afghanistan and finally to Guantanamo. Under duress – some called it torture – he confessed to being involved in almost every major al Qaeda operation, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the assassination of journalist Daniel Pearl, the 2001 attacks and others.
SINCE THEN: His trial date has been postponed again and again. He remains at Guantánamo, indefinitely.
HAMID KARZAI
THEN: Acting leader and then president-elect of Afghanistan after 9/11, he managed to maintain a delicate act of balance and remain on friendly terms with the United States and the West while unifying the many factions in his country – at least for a time-. More than once he called the Taliban “brothers,” and the last years of his presidency were marked by friction with the United States.
SINCE THEN: Karzai has survived numerous assassination attempts, but when his second term expired, in 2014, the transfer of power to his successor, Ashraf Ghani, was peaceful. Ghani would lead the country for almost seven years, until he fled in the face of the triumphant return of the Taliban.
HOWARD LUTNICK
THEN: The president of the stock exchange company Cantor Fitzgerald would have been at the company’s offices at the top of the One World Trade Center, but brought his son Kyle to the first day of kindergarten. A total of 658 of the company’s workers died – two-thirds of its workforce in New York City, including Lutnick’s brother, Gary. In three days, Lutnick had established the Cantor-Fitzgerald Aid Fund for the victims of his company.
SINCE THEN: The fund has disbursed more than $ 250 million, including money for other victims of terrorism and disasters. Twenty years later, Lutnick remains the president of the company.
LISA BEAMER
THEN: After 9/11, Lisa Beamer became the face of the mourners of that day and a reminder of the heroism of the day. Her husband, Todd, a former college baseball and basketball player, is believed to have led other passengers in an attack on the hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed the plane before it could crash into Washington. His exhortation “Let’s roll!” (“Come on!”) It became a battle cry. His widow made 200 public appearances in the six months following the attacks.
SINCE THEN: Lisa Beamer co-wrote the book “Let’s Roll! Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage,” and set up a foundation in memory of her husband. Donations dwindled and Beamer disappeared from public life. The couple had three children and they all attended Wheaton University, where they met their parents. They are all athletes, like their father: Dave, who was three years old when his father died, was an American football quarterback; Drew, who was one year old, played soccer, as did Morgan, born four months after the attacks. Morgan was his father’s middle name.