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Vince Gill
Country Music Hall of Fame
Vince Gill: When it happened -- it happened I think in 1989 or 1990. And he came to see me play in New York. I was a huge fan of Mark Knopfler's and the band (Dire Straits) and loved their records, and loved the way he played the guitar. Once again, that common bond that would have drawn him to me and me to him was that we liked the way each other played. So there was that, we had something in common. And at the time it was a fork in the road. And the obvious choice, because of what had happened up until then, would have been go and go play with this nationally known band, do a world tour, make a bunch of money, get your family healthy and pay for your house and all that. But I chose the other one, just because I believed in myself. And it was not the decision that would have probably made the most sense for the circumstances that I was in. But once again, I just felt like making that decision was the acceptance of failure.
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Rudolph Giuliani
Former Mayor of New York City
Rudolph Giuliani: Fighting prostate cancer, having to accept the fact that you had cancer -- my father died of prostate cancer -- having to figure out how to deal with it, had a big impact one me. It probably helped a lot to understand some of what people were going through on September 11 -- having to face mortality, having to face death, having to face these perplexing questions of why someone is alive and why someone else is dead. Why does someone get cancer and someone else doesn't? Why does someone who is standing on the north side of the building live and a person standing on the south side of the building die? What about the person that came to work that day late and lived? Or the person that decided that they were going to walk into the World Trade Center just to see someone, and they had never been there before, and they died? Those are the questions that perplex human beings. And when you have to face that in your life, you either grow or you recede. And I think that having prostate cancer helped me to grow, philosophically, religiously, so that at least I had that perspective when I had to deal with my own losses on September 11. The danger that I was in, the risk, and then the tremendous losses that so many other people had that were even greater than mine.
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Rudolph Giuliani
Former Mayor of New York City
The first report that I got of the number of losses at the World Trade Center was 12,000 or more; and the reason it ended up being less than 3,000 -- which is still a horrific, horrible number -- but the only reason that that difference occurred is because of the way in which they handled the evacuation. And a lot of it was just plain bravery, just the fact that they were willing to stay there -- even knowing in large part the risk -- and more or less not abandon the ship, stay there with the ship. And it created a sense of calm that allowed the evacuation to take place in an orderly way. Because one of the things that did not happen at the World Trade Center -- which I think people who deal with emergencies would say can happen, and maybe if you did a fiction account of it, you would include in it -- is a lot of people being trampled, a lot of people being killed in the evacuation. And even when the first building went down, the evacuation continued to be fast, swift, but orderly, and people weren't killed as a result of the evacuation. I give a lot of the credit for that, if not all of it, to the firefighters and the police officers, the rescue workers, and then the group of civilians that acted as heroes that we just are never going to know about. I know about some of those stories, because I was so close to it, but you never know about all of them.
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Rudolph Giuliani
Former Mayor of New York City
People would get very excited, and I would say to myself, "Okay, now, you've got to remain calmer, and you've got to think your way through this." I remember a couple weeks later, when I was headed for wakes in the suburbs north of New York, and I was going to go by helicopter, and I got a call from the head of the Office of Emergency Management that four planes were unaccounted for, and they were headed for New York and we had to ground everything. And it turned out that -- you might remember this -- that is when I think it ended up being two planes were off-course, and they had to be guided down. But there was a point at which we thought there would be another attack on the city. And I remember saying to myself then -- and things like that probably happened a dozen times in that four or five-week period -- and I remember saying to myself: "Okay, remain calm. Get calmer. Remember what your father said, and then we'll figure out how we deal with this."
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Whoopi Goldberg
Actress and Activist
Whoopi Goldberg: I don't know if it's guts, I think it is. I think of guts as something that gives you that Kirk Douglas look. But I think what I mean is the knowledge that it is okay to feel differently than the pack. That that is a fundamental right. That it's okay to disagree. It's better to be able to disagree and have a dialogue, than to go along with the pack and be truly unhappy. I don't want to be truly unhappy. I mean, there's enough out there to piss me off. You know, to bother me. I'm sorry, there's enough out there to bother me.
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