by Mike Lupica
"My family didn't want me to go," Bob Beckwith says. "Told me I was too old. Told me it was a young man's job at Ground Zero. I told them I was going in. That's what you always did on the job. You went in."
He got to the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge that morning, saw it blocked off with orange cones, then saw two police cars heading for the city. Beckwith pulled inside the cones and followed.
"Nobody stopped me," he says. "But then nobody was going to."
He made his way to Engine 55 on Broome St. - the old FDNY guy still calls it "55 Engine" - paid his condolences there. They had lost four men from 55 Engine on Sept. 11, and a pumper. Beckwith told the guys that when he left there he was going over to Ground Zero.
Good luck getting inside the perimeter, they told him. Watch me, the old man said.
Beckwith cut in and out around police barriers and street closures, made his way over there. He had his helmet on by now, kept flashing his identification card in his hand like it was a badge until he had finally made it all the way from Baldwin, L.I., to Ground Zero.
This was the morning of Sept. 14. Before long, Beckwith was working a bucket brigade, thinking that was the only appointment he had that day, not knowing he would soon be standing next to the President, standing next to him on the day when bullhorn politics officially began in this country.
Beckwith got off the bucket brigade, moved to the front of the line with a shovel and started digging. When he finally took a break from The Pile, moved closer to where he'd seen a tent and microphones set up for the President, he saw a ruined fire truck and climbed up on it, stood back near the hoses. Beckwith thought he might get a better look at George Bush from there, thought this was as close as he was ever going to be to a President of the United States.
It all happened fast after that. A guy he thought was from the Secret Service - and turned out to be Karl Rove - asked if the spot where Beckwith was standing was safe, even asked the old man to jump up and down a little bit to prove it.
Then, right in front of Beckwith was President Bush.
"He makes a right turn and I make a right turn and then I help him up and turn him around," Beckwith says.
Beckwith started to get down. The President said, "Where are you going? You stay right here." Beckwith did as he was told, and then Bush had that bullhorn in one hand and an arm around Beckwith as he told the first responders that he could hear them and the world could hear them, that soon the people who knocked down these buildings would hear them, too.
"I never did see where he got that bullhorn from," Beckwith said the other day. "But if you were standing right there, it sure was loud."
And that was the beginning of bullhorn politics.
That was the beginning of the politics of talking louder and tougher than anybody else, of using Sept. 11 as a way to make political hay. If the world changed forever when those planes flew into our buildings, politics changed three days later when George Bush climbed up on that old FDNY pumper next to Bob Beckwith, FDNY, retired.
Now it is six years later, five years since Bush, metaphorically at least, used that bullhorn again to begin sounding the call for a war against Iraq. It is six years later, and there have been more men and women from the U.S. military killed in Iraq than were killed when the planes hit, and there is no end in sight, just the sight of our bullhorn President as desperate to make his case for continuing this war as he did for starting it, still wanting to be a hero because of it.
Bush was the first to see what a gold mine the politics of Sept. 11 could be. Now Rudy Giuliani is the front-runner for the Republican nomination because of Sept. 11. He uses his own bullhorn politics, tries to convince people that the best reason for him to replace Bush isn't because he has a bigger and better vision for the future than all those running against him, but because he is tougher.
Beckwith has nothing bad to say about Giuliani the other day, or his President. He didn't want to talk about the toughness of politicians, just of his city. Then or now.
"This place is a tough old nut," he says. "I guess I'm a little bit like that myself."
Giuliani was not the hero of those days six years ago. Neither was the President. The heroes were all like Beckwith, who didn't show up to get his picture taken, who saw his country get hit - "right in our backyard" - and put his helmet back on and went to work.
The enduring symbol of the day, of this city, wasn't the bullhorn, or the politician holding it. It was the old fireman standing next to him.He came in on the BQE that day, came in from Long Island at the age of 69, seven years retired from the Fire Department of the City of New York, came because he thought his city still needed him.
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