Part 2

I believe then, I believe now, that the terrorists had two purposes in attacking us. One purpose was to kill many, many people to make some kind of, in their words, spectacular demonstration. And the other was to break our will, because they were convinced we were a weak people, that we would become disunited, that we would start fighting with each other, that there would be tremendous chaos and confusion.

And I believe today, as I believed then, because I observed it and was part of it. I believed it because I knew so many of these men and women, that it was their initial heroism that thwarted the objectives of the terrorists by going into the building, by standing their ground, by interpreting an evacuation order the way a brave rescue worker would interpret an evacuation order, which is first get the civilians out, and then get yourself out.

By doing that they thwarted the objectives that the terrorists had. The terrorists killed too many people, almost 3,000, but the first number that I was given in less than one hour of the collapse of the two buildings, was that over 12,000 people had died. And, in fact, at another point I was given a figure of 15,000 people. That was the calculation made by the Port Authority and the others, of the number of people that had been in the building at the time of the attack which may have been close to 22 to 25,000. And the number of people you could conceivably have gotten out, in the amount of time that the rescue workers hadto get people out, and their calculation was 12 to 15,000 people.

When I said to the people of New York and the people of America that the losses were too much for us to bear, that was the number that was in my mind. They were too much for us to bear, even what it turned out to be. But the reason that you have that difference between the 12 to 15,000 originally estimated, and the less than 3,000 that actually took place, is the way in which a combination of the rescue workers and the civilians themselves conducted this evacuation.

Not flawless, not without mistakes, and not without some terribly tragedies attached to it. But overall, maybe 8,000 people more, maybe 9,000 people more than anyone could rightfully expect evacuated from that building because firefighters were walking upstairs while civilians were walking downstairs.

I can't tell you how many civilians come up to me no matter where I go, and say to me, I want you to thank your fire department. I want you to thank them. And I'll say why, and they'll say, because I was walking down, or my brother was, or my sister, or my father, and I saw one of your firefighters walking up while we were rushing down. And I'll say, well what did that do? And they'll say, it made me calmer, it made me feel confident, it made me continue to walk in the right direction.

What we avoided was exactly what any novelist would have written about in an attack like this, had it been written a day before. He would have written that the evacuation, the exit from the building would cause more casualties than the actual attack.

It's happened, I don't want to mention the emergencies, I know them, you know them, in which more people are killed trying to get out of the building than are actually killed in the fire or the attack. People exited this building carefully, they exited this building quickly, they exited this building without harming or hurting each other. And the credit for that goes to Pete Ganci and Bill Feehan and Terry Hatton and Patty Brown and Michael Judge and I wish I could mention all the firefighters and the police officers, those happened to be the ones that I saw that morning, right before they died. And that's the reason they were thwarted in their ambition of sort of breaking our will.