This article was published in the December 2012 issue of Esquire.

The knock on the hotel-room door is gentle but deliberate. The night before, just hours ago, was a respite, a friend's birthday party. But now the knock. It's after 2:30 A.M., July 20. The door opens. "Governor?" a voice says softly. "You'd better turn on the television."

He watches the footage, sees the movie theater, the police tape, the weeping victims. And once he's come up with a reasoned plan for the morning, he sits alone on a bed in a hotel room.

John Hickenlooper can be forgiven for wondering how much hotter Colorado's summer can get.

A month ago, he hovered close to the most destructive fire in Colorado history, blades swirling overhead amid funnels of smoke rising off a hillside like devilish geysers. This was during a worst-in-decades drought that literally dried up nearly $100 million in agricultural and tourism revenue. He watched from his chopper window as fire claimed a whole neighborhood. When a community, a city, a state breaks—when a forest fire vaporizes 346 homes in one day, when a deranged, heavily armed young man destroys seventy lives in minutes—it is the governor's job to stand resiliently, to remind people that things will get better.

President Barack Obama speaks alongside Colorado Senator Mark Udal (L)l and Hickenlooper (R) at the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, Colorado on July 22, 2012, following a visit with victims and family members of the Aurora movie theater shooting that left 12 killed and 58 injured. Getty Images

The next morning, Hickenlooper's dressed in casual pants and a button-down shirt, the uniform the sixty-year-old's worn since his first days running a Denver microbrew pub. In front of him is the theater complex, a large structure at the far corner of a mall in Aurora, Colorado, just across the parking lot from a childcare center. A state public-safety official leads him under a flimsy ribbon of crime-scene tape to the mobile command center. Beyond sit rows of empty cars. Victims, Hickenlooper knows.

The governor introduces himself. There's Aurora's police chief, Daniel J. Oates; members of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. In one part of the trailer, Hickenlooper sees a diagram of the movie-theater complex. It's a simple rendering. The back of the building—where the gunman was arrested—is sketched out. Feet from where Hickenlooper stands, ten bodies are splayed out inside theater 9, where the shooting happened. Another two people died at hospitals. Among the dead are a budding sports journalist, a young Navy veteran, and a six-year-old girl who'd just learned how to swim. Another fifty-eight are wounded. The governor studies the diagram and imagines the theater at the moment when bullets began spraying. He's amazed more people aren't dead.



He's always prided himself on his ability to listen and to watch—to take everything in before making a decision.

The gunman is twenty-four, a former neuroscience Ph.D. student from a local university. In the shooter's apartment a few miles away, police are maneuvering a robot, trying to figure out how to take apart trip wires rigged to kill.

The trailer door opens and a police officer enters, holding a crime-scene video he made inside. As Denver's former mayor, Hickenlooper has seen the aftermath of big-city crime before. He's always prided himself on his ability to listen and to watch—to take everything in before making a decision. It's one of his greatest traits, leaning forward in situations where others might jump back. But this scope and scale are wholly different.

The scene plays out in shadows and low light. It's a nightmarish tour: lobby, hallway, theater 9. Bodies lay where they landed ten hours before. Nothing's moved. Overturned soda cups. Popcorn everywhere. After twelve minutes, the video is stopped. No one speaks, the void filled by an overwhelming disbelief.

As an eight-year-old boy growing up outside Philadelphia, Hickenlooper watched his father die after a two-year battle with intestinal cancer. He witnessed his mother—a twice-widowed homemaker—pick up the fragments of her life and raise four children alone. In the Hickenlooper home, John couldn't waste time feeling sorry for himself. He had to find purpose; he needed to find ways to make himself happy. In his nine years in public service—a meteoric rise through his state's Democratic party, from mayor to governor—Hickenlooper has never needed to draw from that emotional reservoir before.

Hickenlooper, attends the funeral of Alexander Jonathan "A.J." Boik at the Queen of Peace Catholic church on July 27, 2012 in Aurora, Colorado. Boik was one of 12 people killed during a mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora. Getty Images

Outside, he steps before the television cameras. He knows much of the nation is watching and he keeps his remarks short, never mentioning the shooter's name, because to mention his name is to publicize him. "We need to recognize that we can't allow people that are aberrations of nature to take away the joys and freedoms that we enjoy," he says. His voice is calm, fatherly. "But we can't let it keep us from our lives.... We will come back stronger than ever from this, although it's obviously going to be a very hard process."

After he speaks, he's driven to the Medical Center of Aurora. Inside, the hallways are bustling. The hospital's staff pulls the governor into a waiting room, and soon he's taken to see the first victim. The governor introduces himself to the person's family. Hickenlooper understands his role. He doesn't want to intrude on these fragile lives. "Is it okay for me to be here?" he asks. "Do you want me to go?"

"Stay with us," they tell him.

Hickenlooper hugs his wife, Helen Thorpe, following a memorial service for Gordon Ware Cowden, one of 12 victims who died during the Aurora Theater Shooting Getty Images

He repeats the same thing in the next room, and then another. And so it goes from room to room: mothers and fathers, friends and relatives. They are eager to talk. Hickenlooper listens. He offers a knowing smile, a shoulder on which to cry. There are six families today, and there will be dozens more in the days ahead. During those intimate moments, the governor learns about the police officers who gathered the first victims and rushed them to safety. There are stories of people dying to protect others. Survivors—with shattered arms and broken bodies—say they are blessed to be alive.

One woman pulls the governor aside and speaks to him as his mother had shortly after his father's death. "You can't control what life does to you," she tells him. "But you can control if it makes you better or worse, stronger or weaker."

Two months later, Hickenlooper repeats those words from a chair in his oversized office at the state capitol. He's relentlessly upbeat. "I felt, in some deep way, privileged and blessed to be a part of their lives," he says. "You feel this incredible, intense connection.... I didn't feel paralyzed. In a funny way, I almost felt released."

Across the state, plains farmers are preparing their sun-rutted fields for the next season. In the fire-ravaged lands far outside Denver, homes are beginning to sprout from burned earth. And in Aurora, a city that will never be quite the same, life is returning.

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