On Wednesday night, I went to a screening in Montclair of my friend Steve McCarthy’s documentary, Finding Paddy. It’s a film Steve made more than 20 years ago about his friend Paddy Brown, in 2001 the most decorated firefighter in the FDNY, a hero with demons who died trying to rescue people burned in the North Tower. The film opens with several of the 80 haunting voicemail messages left on Paddy’s answering machine that day: Paddy, are you OK? Paddy, call me. Paddy, I’m so worried. Paddy!
The film thrust me back to that day, though I was already en route. On September 11, 2001, a spectacular cloudless fall day, I heard on my car radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. With the Lincoln Tunnel now closed, I got off a commuter bus and drove to Secaucus, where MSNBC (my part-time employer) then had its studios. I could see from Route 3: one tower up, the other down, enveloped in smoke. Moments later, the second one fell. I spent the rest of the day and all night at MSNBC, and between 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m., wrote a long piece for a special issue of Newsweek, contained in a collection, that began this way:
Summer is over in America. Fat and happy is history, a closed chapter in our national experience. By midday Tuesday, with the surreal horror sinking in, the sense spread widely that life in the United States would change as permanently as the skyline of New York City. But change how? Despite the unspeakable carnage, maybe we shouldn’t change so much after all.
On one level, we didn’t. At first, no one would even dare to laugh. We were told, “irony is dead.” That lasted only a couple of weeks or so. New York survived and prospered; the skyline was eventually repaired. But my fears of too much change were hardly misplaced.
At first, President Bush responded well, setting the right tone in speeches and by visiting a mosque. It helped. (After 9/11, there were about 500 anti-Muslim hate crimes, about a quarter the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes today.) I finagled my way into a press pool and was three feet from Bush on September 14 at Ground Zero — a hellscape from Dante’s Inferno — when he draped his arm around an ancient fireman from central casting and shouted through a bullhorn: “I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” It was inspiring. In his memoirs, Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary, remembered that I whispered in his ear: “That’s your guy’s defining moment.” And it was.
Unfortunately, the “people who knocked those buildings down” — namely Osama bin Laden and his crew — didn’t hear from us. They escaped at Tora Bora. We later learned that by September 14, Bush’s advisers had already decided to use 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Talk about change. Bush inherited a balanced budget from Bill Clinton and a plan for confronting Al Qaeda that he ignored. Then we spent $8 trillion in a “War on Terror,” lost about 14,000 Americans (if contractors are included), with 53,000 wounded and thousands more dead from suicide after returning home from two forever wars. Today, agencies like ICE and the Joint Terrorism Task Force that expanded after 9/11 are being used by Donald Trump to hunt his domestic enemies.
We learned this week that we were lied to about the toxins at Ground Zero. I went there about a dozen times in the days and weeks after 9/11 and stupidly never wore a mask. In 2004, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. My life was saved by a bone marrow transplant.
A year later, Joe Lhota, deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani, whom I got to know at Ground Zero, asked me to lunch. He told me he had lymphoma, too. (Fortunately, he survived as well.) Lhota said he thought we got it from toxins at Ground Zero. Maybe. Growing up, I spent summers in Beverly Shores, Indiana, where there’s a lymphoma cancer cluster because of groundwater contamination. Given my uncertainty, superstition, and lack of need, I never applied for any of the money that Jon Stewart helped generate.
I wrote several columns for Newsweek about 9/11. Some hold up well; others (including too-nice coverage of Giuliani) make me wince. I grew angry at some of the dopey commentary on the left — still audible — that the United States somehow “had it coming” from the terrorists, that this was “the chickens coming home to roost.”
This reminds me of the cruel anti-Zionists who on October 8 celebrated the murder of children, Holocaust survivors, and innocent concert-goers. It brought to mind the DSA types making excuses for (or even celebrating) Luigi Mangione, who murdered Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. I still have a problem with Abdul El-Sayed saying “hurt people hurt people” to rationalize a Lebanese-American with ties to Hezbollah trying to ram a pickup truck full of explosives into Temple Israel, where 140 children were inside the facility’s early childhood center. El-Sayed recently backpedaled, saying it was “too soon” to provide such “context,” as if the problem with his comments was the timing. No, the “context” of killing innocent Americans is irrelevant.
Here’s the way I put it in 2001:
Obviously, some policies — like the United States stationing troops in Saudi Arabia — have contributed to Osama bin Laden’s rage. But there’s a big difference between understanding Islam and the history of the region, which we need much more of, and understanding evil, which is not just offensive but impossible.
Beyond the recriminations, I like to remember the small acts of grace. A few weeks after 9/11, survivors of the attack and still-grieving family members gathered for a memorial service near the steaming pit. Afterward, I saw them comforted by Old Testament symbols of mourning:
Through the wreckage, a visage in the dusk: a weary firefighter making a slow 100-yard trek from the rubble, his hands full of tower stones. A crowd gathered, as weeping family members took bits of the place where their loved ones had perished. They could also receive a city-issued urn of ashes, but this was more spontaneous and heartbreaking. Soon, an impromptu ritual began. The somber firefighters carried flowers from the survivors to a makeshift shrine in the distance, far beyond where it was safe to go, then returned with the precious stones.
