Dan Collins, a journalist who co-wrote a scathing revisionist account of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s actions before and after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, died July 9 in Manhattan. He was 80.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of pneumonia and COVID, said his wife, Gail Collins, an opinion columnist for The New York Times.
Dan Collins, who had worked for United Press International and CBS News, wrote several books, the most prominent of which was “Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11” (2006), a collaboration with Wayne Barrett, a veteran investigative reporter for The Village Voice.
In damning detail, the authors documented how the Giuliani administration had failed to heed the warnings from an earlier attack on the World Trade Center, the bombing in 1993. That lapse, they wrote, had left the city unprepared for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Advertisement
Further, they wrote, while basking in accolades about his leadership during the crisis, Giuliani, after his second term ended that December, cashed in as a “hero for hire” by forming a consulting firm that specialized in security and crisis management.
Assessing “Grand Illusion” in The New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, was more forgiving. Providing some context for Giuliani’s behavior, he wrote that before the attack, for which the entire nation was unprepared, the mayor was preoccupied with reducing crime and that afterward, in his zeal to heal the city, some ill-advised decisions were made.
Mahler wrote that the authors were on “firmer ground when they dissect Giuliani’s post-9/11 performance, in particular his reluctance to acknowledge any mistakes.”
One mistake, the authors said, was that in setting a 180-day deadline to clean up ground zero, the mayor failed to recognize that the site contained potentially lethal toxins.
Their book challenged the widespread lionizing of Giuliani as “America’s mayor” as he contemplated his political future.
Mr. Collins had originally considered writing an authorized biography of Giuliani while he was a swashbuckling federal prosecutor. But they parted ways when Giuliani first ran for mayor, in 1989.
Giuliani might have been forewarned: With Arthur Browne of The Daily News and Michael Goodwin of the Times, Mr. Collins had written “I, Koch: A Decidedly Unauthorized Biography of the Mayor of New York City, Edward I. Koch” (1985). That book was a muckraking account of official turpitude and other imperfections during the Koch administration.
Advertisement
Daniel Joseph Collins was born on Nov. 11, 1943, in Boston to Daniel J. and Mary T. Collins. His father was a Boston police officer, his mother a social worker.
After graduating from Northeastern University in 1965, he served in the Army, then studied at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he met Gail Gleason, who, like him, was enrolled in the political science program.
“We first got acquainted in ‘Imperialism,’ a class that we each had signed up for imagining a semester of talking about Vietnam,” Gail Collins wrote in a recent reminiscence. “But our professor was way more interested in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War.”
They married and moved to Connecticut, where Dan Collins became a reporter for the New Haven Register. In his reporting he discovered that more absentee votes had been recorded in New Haven than in Boston, though Boston had about five times New Haven’s population, and that the city’s Democratic machine had cast them fraudulently.
The couple moved to New York, where both worked for United Press International. He covered the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981 by John Hinckley Jr. and revealed that the authorities had found tapes on which the gunman had spoken and sung about his obsession with actress Jodie Foster months before the shooting.
Together, the Collinses wrote “The Millennium Book: Your Essential All-Purpose Guide to the Year 2000,” which was published in 1990 and described by the publisher as listing “the greatest, the best, the most of everything, plus predictions for the year 2000 and a retrospective on life 1,000 years ago.”
Advertisement
After working as a reporter for U.S. News & World Report, Dan Collins joined CBSNews.com as a senior producer. He lived in Manhattan.
In addition to his wife, he leaves his brother, Steven. His sisters, Cecilia and Kathleen, died earlier.
Browne, one of his collaborators on the Koch book, recalled that for all of Mr. Collins’s dogged investigative reporting, he also had a quick wit.
Koch was so opinionated and accessible to the press that during one of his morning briefings — no-holds-barred sessions that might last 90 minutes — exasperated reporters had run out of questions. Mr. Collins, in desperation, ended the awkward lull by posing what he figured was a preposterous query: “Mr. Mayor, what’s your favorite color?”
Without missing a beat, Koch replied, in all seriousness, “Blue.” With that solipsistic revelation, another lengthy nod to the First Amendment finally ended, not with a scoop but with a snicker, and the mayor left for lunch.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.