MIDDLEBURY, Vt. (AP) – Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani told 544 Middlebury College seniors, many of whom started college shortly before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that the country ultimately will be stronger because of that tragedy.

“We’re going to be stronger because we’ve educated young people like you to understand that the world is complex and difficult,” he told the crowd, estimated at 5,000, Sunday.

“But if you can apply a reason, sense, a rationality to it, it’s going to be a much, much better place.”

Giuliani, who led New York following the attacks on the World Trade Center, urged the graduates to enter public service, whether it be through politics, government, medicine, teaching or some other avenue.

“If you can understand that it’s not just a good thing for you to give back, but it is critical to your happiness, you are going to be a very successful person,” he said.

Giuliani, a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2008, offered advice on leadership.

A good leader must have strong beliefs, optimism, morality and relentless preparation, he said.

He cited the optimism of Martin Luther King: “He faced a problem that up until then had been insolvable. He didn’t face it by saying there is nothing we can do about it, there is no hope. He faced it by saying he saw a country in which people would eventually be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

“That’s leading with hope, with dreams, with solutions to … problems that others couldn’t solve and that’s what it means to be an optimist,” he said.

Giuliani recalled arriving at the site of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and feeling unprepared for what he witnessed. He saw a man throw himself out of the tower to escape the flames.

“My emotion and my intellect just changed,” Giuliani said. “I said to myself this is way beyond anything we have ever faced before. This is much worse and we’re not prepared for this. We don’t have a plan for it.

New York asked for fighter jets to protect the city and deployed police in case of other attacks, closed down bridges and tunnels, set up evacuation routes and brought in generators, he said.

Then Giuliani said he remembered the advice of his law professor: If you can prepare for what you can anticipate you’ll be prepared for the unanticipated.

The city already had in place plans for plane crashes and other emergencies. “I realized every decision I was making came out of one of those plans. It gave me a great source of confidence that at least I’d be most of the time somewhere approaching the right decision.”

A small group of seniors tied red pieces of cloth around their mouths while Giuliani spoke.

Cynthia Hernandez, who organized the protest, said although Giuliani’s actions following the terrorist attacks were admirable, “the eight years he spent terrorizing the poor, the homeless, the artistic community, the queer community, the minority communities in New York City should not be forgotten.”

Most of the graduates rose in applause following Giuliani’s speech.

Middlebury awarded the former mayor an honorary degree as well as ones to actor Donald Sutherland, a veteran of more than 100 films and whose son graduated Sunday from Middlebury; Charles Houston, a physician, mountaineer and emeritus professor at the University of Vermont who helped invent a forerunner of the Jarvik artificial heart; Robert Moses, a civil rights organizer in Mississippi who organized the Algebra Project, which helps students in inner city and rural areas in math, and Mary Patterson McPherson, who is vice president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and president emerita of Bryn Mawr College.

AP-ES-05-22-05 1636EDT