... Mr. Giuliani was led through a basement and out onto Church
Street, his head and shoulders dusted white with ash. He walked
north into the surreal brightness of that day, comforting a
police officer and dragooning reporters....Do we have an
irrational attachment to Giuliani? Is he satisfying
psychological needs that we ought to start examining
objectively? That walk north, the spareness of his words and his
passion became the founding stones in the reconstruction of the
mayor’s reputation, transforming him from a grouchy pol slip-
sliding into irrelevancy to the Republican presidential
candidate introduced as America’s mayor. The former mayor has
made this day the centerpiece of his presidential campaign,
aware that millions of Americans hold that heroic view in their
collective mind’s eye. Political leadership is an uncertain
alchemy, an admixture of the symbolic and substantive and the
visceral. In times of consuming trauma, psychologists and
historians say, a leader must speak with a trusted voice and s