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CNN Sunday Morning
Interview With Steve Kepp
Aired December 23, 2001 - 10:19 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: If you haven't heard yet, the announcement came early this morning for "TIME" magazine's Person of the Year, and the winner is not Osama bin Laden or George W. Bush. It's the Mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, great-looking cover there.
Steve Kepp is deputy editor of "TIME" magazine. He's with us now from New York to explain the choice.
Good to have you with us, Steve.
STEVE KEPP, DEPUTY EDITOR, TIME MAGAZINE: Hello, Miles.
O'BRIEN: All right, first of all, why Rudy?
KEPP: Well, we felt in thinking about it and reporting on this, that while the initial attack on New York was the big shock of the year, the more surprising and enduring event, in terms of its legacy, is really the response, and that response was led from the first minutes and hours and days by Rudy Giuliani.
First the rescue, the recovery, then the grieving process, securing New York, and then the getting people back to work again. And that, he was a real pillar of strength, and this came from a guy that a lot of New Yorkers had written off as somebody whose term was ending, who had a lot of problems in his personal life, whose legacy seemed like it would be that he was a great Mayor but not so great a guy. So, his story is a terrific one.
O'BRIEN: If you accept the premise that the response is the story, also in the running might be George W. Bush. Of course, he was chosen last year. Did that go into your thinking?
KEPP: It did, but long before the military response was really ready and the bombing started and the war started, the response at home was a very dramatic and powerful thing. People, every citizen especially in New York, but all over America had to decide how they wanted to respond to this, with being calm and going about their work and things like that, or panicking.
There was a lot of chaos and misinformation around, potentially, but Rudy was really the voice of America in those first few hours and those days. If you consider in terms of terrorism, it's impact is primarily local at first and that's where the first response was. O'BRIEN: All right, you could also make a case, I suppose, if the response is the story to collectively group the rescue workers, the firefighters and the police officers and make them the People of the Year. Was there much discussion about that?
KEPP: Yes, we did and theirs is a terrific story too, but it ties very well into the way that Rudy Giuliani honored them, going to 200 of their funerals.
He was their biggest supporter from even before 9/11, and he really is emblematic of the way, of the city's response in terms of rescuers and police, firefighters and the whole way that he pulled all this emergency response together, and didn't shut the city down.
He got New Yorkers out for baseball and the marathon and a lot of other things, basically showing a kind of vulnerability which took a lot of courage.
O'BRIEN: All right, of course the parlor games among journalists go on every year at this time and this year, most people in most newsrooms I think felt that if you based it strictly on who made the most news, single-handedly you'd have to give it to Osama bin Laden.
And once again, you have to understand the criteria for the selection. This is not a civic honor. This is who changed the world for better or worse in the course of the year.
How do you get around that argument, that everything we talked about right now emanates from Osama bin Laden. Wouldn't he be the Person of the Year based on that criteria?
KEPP: Well a good way to look at it would be, the long historical view and that's the way we try to do it. We want to make sure that our choice holds up as well a decade from now as it does this week.
And one historical comparison might be Pearl Harbor. Most Americans don't remember any of the characters involved in launching that attack. All they remember is some Japanese admiral saying "I feel that all we've done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled them with a terrible resolve."
It's the terrible resolve that wound up being the story of World War II, and not any particular person, except perhaps FDR. And in this case, Rudy Giuliani really set the tone right from the beginning.
O'BRIEN: All right, Steve Kepp is the Deputy Editor of "TIME" magazine. Thanks for joining us, giving us some insight into that choice. We appreciate it.
KEPP: Thank you.
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