I think to adequately manage a crisis, you have to see it. Because there's only so much somebody else can tell you about it, and they impose their own distortions on the description. You need to see it yourself.
The only time the private parts of someone's life are relevant is when they're affecting public performance. And just because someone is a public person doesn't mean that any part of his or her private life is open to scrutiny. If someone is doing his or her job, you have to have enough empathy to understand that we all have personal problems.
Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.
Every time New York City suffered a tragedy, Donald Trump was there to help. And he did it anonymously.
When we faced a possibility here in New York of chemical and biological attack, three days after September 11, I called in all of the experts, academic experts, Nobel Prize laureates, and doctors who had dealt with anthrax, doctors who had dealt with various forms of chemical and biological attack.
I probably saved more black lives as mayor of New York City than any mayor in the history of this city. And I did it by having to use police officers in black areas where there was an astounding amount of crime. If that crime was in white areas, police officers would be in white areas.
I have known Donald Trump for almost 30 years. And he has created and accomplished great things. But beyond that, this is a man with a big heart.
We need to know who's in the United States. We need to know everyone who's in the United States that comes in here from a foreign country. And we have to separate the ones who are dangerous from the ones who aren't. To accomplish that, we need a fence. We need a technological fence. We need a border patrol.
My attempt is to try to broaden the base of the Republican Party, to try to bring in people that can agree and that can disagree on that, because I think the issues that we face about terrorism, about our economy, about the growth of our economy are so important that we have to have the biggest outreach possible.
There is a reality to the primary process, and you don't win primaries by being ahead in national polls. You win them by winning Iowa, by winning New Hampshire, by winning South Carolina, winning Florida.
St. Paul's Chapel stands - without so much as a broken window. Little miracle.
The reality is even if you are a hands-on Mayor or Governor or chief executive, at best, you must know about 10 or 20% of what's going on. Otherwise, you never get through the day... I was very hands on, and there's lots of stuff I didn't know, and lots of things that either went wrong or right that I would find out about afterwards.
One of the lessons from Sept. 11 is that America requires a long-term presence in those parts of the world that endanger us. This notion has become controversial, but frankly, the need could not be clearer.
In the 9/11 Commission Report, one of the things they point out is that firefighters saved just about everybody below the fire. I don't think they realize how proud the fire department is of that. Because, conceivably, that's all they could have done. They could not have gotten above that fire.
You never begin a new life. It's a mistake to think that you end one part of your life and start another as if there's no continuity.
America needs to be defended. We need missile defense to better police the skies over the United States.
Courage is managing fear to accomplish what you want to accomplish. And it's a great demonstration of love. It's really what love is. It's finding areas in which other people are more important than you.
There are terrible, terrible memories of September 11th, things that I saw, people that I lost, the devastation, the identification of bodies. I mean, all these memories come back to you at different times. And then the other side of it this tremendous response with the firefighters and the police officers saving people, the rescue workers.
In an emergency, you rarely get one consistent piece of advice. You usually have two or three people with two or three different ideas. So you want to have your own set of thoughts.
Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
