I had never felt further away from the action.
When the first plane, American Airlines Flight 11, struck the north tower at 8:46 a.m., I was in a breakfast meeting at Bear Stearns, at 245 Park Avenue between East Forty-Sixth and East Forty-Seventh Streets.
This was three miles from the World Trade Center. It might as well have been three hundred—or three thousand.
“A small plane crashed into the Trade Center,” someone at a nearby table said (wrongly, it turned out). At the start, it sounded like a tragedy, a terrible accident, something bad—but nothing that was going to threaten the very future of New York. That assessment changed seventeen minutes later, when I heard a CNN anchor say that a second commercial airliner—a second commercial jetliner, United Airlines Flight 175—had hit the south tower.
There was no getting around it now. This was terrorism on a life-altering scale.
I’d spent thirty-four years in the New York City Police Department, rising from police cadet to police commissioner, and nearly another five in top federal enforcement roles. But on the morning of September 11, 2001, that was all in the past for me. The city was under attack in a way it had never been before, and I wasn’t in law enforcement anymore. I liked the job at Bear Stearns, overseeing corporate security. Smart people, good people—but their business was making money, not countering terrorism or fighting crime.
Over the next eighty-five minutes, I watched on TV, like everyone else, while the tenants scrambled to safety from the twin towers and firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and other first responders ran upstairs in full gear to rescue them. The uniformed personnel had no idea they were rushing toward their deaths.
As the shocking details trickled in, people everywhere struggled to understand what this meant. In the Bear Stearns office, no one even tried to work. They stared in silence at their televisions and computers or simply into space. No one seemed to know what to say.
I did my job. I met with the executives about the precautions the firm should undertake. I was told there were people panicking in the building around the corner on Madison Avenue, where the firm’s headquarters was moving in a month. A skeleton staff was already there. I walked around the corner to calm the people down. Then I rode to the top floor of that new forty-seven-story building. From there, I could see the tops of the two towers and all the smoke pouring out. That’s where I was when the first building fell.
“Look, look!” I heard someone shout as the tower collapsed to the ground. I’m not sure if it was an employee or a vendor or who. It didn’t matter. Everyone felt the same way.
“Oh my God,” I heard someone mumble.
Less than two hours after the first plane hit, both 110-story office buildings were in a mammoth heap on the ground, killing 343 New York City firefighters, 37 Port Authority police officers, 23 New York City police officers—2,753 people in all. As many times as I repeat those numbers, they never lose their power to shock.
So many thoughts were rushing through my head. The sheer enormity of it, the horror, the otherworldliness, the insanity. The fact that our apartment was a two-minute walk from there. And how could this have happened? Modern skyscrapers aren’t supposed to collapse like pancakes, no matter what slams into them. And what might happen next? No one could possibly say.
I thought about the conversation I’d had with the building engineer who’d been stuck in an elevator during the 1993 World Trade Center attack and had cut himself out with a key, the one who’d promised me, “Those buildings could never come down.”
It had sounded so rational when he said it to me. I’m sure he believed every syllable. And now my eyes were telling me he’d simply been wrong.
The towers were rubble on the ground, and thousands of New Yorkers were evacuating the city on their own. No one told people to leave, except in the immediate downtown area. People just left. It wasn’t through any plan or orderly process. They started walking. Up streets, across bridges, just away. Some got in cars or buses or the trains that were still running. Some even got into boats. By any means necessary, they were just gone.
* * *
Even a veteran government official will quickly revert to the role of husband and father in a situation like this one, and I felt it happening to me. At the same time I was taking in the basic facts and directing people at the investment bank, I was attempting to make contact with my own family. Veronica was in Paris. So she was out of harm’s way, though when we spoke on the phone, I could tell she was badly shaken. She was staying in an apartment that didn’t have cable television. As soon as she’d heard what had happened, she’d gone to the Hôtel Lutetia around the corner. The hotel staff were very kind to her, lending her a room to watch the news from America until the guests who’d checked out discovered that their flight to New York had been canceled and checked back in. She found her way to another hotel, the George V, and spent the rest of the day and evening in the business center following the heartbreaking coverage.
She and I were desperate to reach our sons. Both, I assumed, had been somewhere downtown. Jim worked on John Street, just blocks from the towers. He finally got through to me on the phone, which wasn’t easy given the spotty cell service. He’d made his way through the smoke and ash from his building to another building on John Street, then, like thousands of other New Yorkers, he just kept walking uptown. Greg was a reporter for NY1, the local all-news cable channel. I had the advantage of seeing him live from the scene on TV, so I knew he was OK. Greg, I believe, was the first journalist to use the term “Ground Zero” to refer to the former World Trade Center site. That one certainly stuck.
* * *
When most people had left the office, I went over to the CNN bureau across from Madison Square Garden, where I shared my take on the day’s events with Wolf Blitzer in Washington and Paula Zahn in New York. I thought it was important to add my perspective. I had, after all, been New York’s police commissioner the last time terrorists attacked the city, striking the very same target. But, honestly, being a talking head on television wasn’t exactly how I wanted to fill out my day. I didn’t like watching the drama unfold from the nosebleed seats. After decades of running toward the action—whatever the action was—here I was offering commentary from afar.
“Terrorism is theater,” I said that night, an expression I had used many times in the eight years since the last World Trade Center attack.
When I finished my TV segments for the evening, I walked a block up Eighth Avenue to a no-frills hotel room CNN had booked for me. I spent the rest of the night there by myself, watching television, making phone calls, and occasionally glancing out the window into the smoky night sky. Actually, I was lucky to have the room. There was no way I was getting back into our apartment in Battery Park City. Truly, I had no place else to go.
I checked in with some of my former law enforcement colleagues. I took calls from worried relatives and friends. No one seemed to know much more than what was being reported, including my police contacts, other than the fact that the loss of life was going to be horrific and al-Qaeda was suspect number one.
The next morning in Paris, Veronica made her way to the American Cathedral on avenue George V in the 8th arrondissement. They were having a special service in honor of the victims in New York. As she waited for the service to begin, she overheard one of the clergymen say, “All we need is someone to carry the flag.”
Veronica spoke up. “I’m from New York,” she said.
“Would you mind?” the minister asked, motioning to a large red, white, and blue flag leaning in a corner in the sacristy.
“I’d be honored,” she said.
She joined the procession of more than a dozen clergy in white vestments, carrying the flag to the altar in her black suit. When the service was over, she led the procession back down the center aisle.
About halfway down, they stopped between the two rows of pews. A deacon leaned over and whispered to Veronica, “Can you swing that flag?”
She nodded.
With Veronica swinging the flag back and forth, the whole congregation sang “God Bless America.”
Veronica told me later she didn’t even try to hold back her tears.
* * *
On Thursday, September 13, the titans of Wall Street gathered in an executive conference room at Bear Stearns and mapped out the immediate future of America’s financial markets. That’s no exaggeration.
The heads of the leading investment banks were there. So were the chiefs of the major brokerage houses and stock exchanges. Representatives of the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other financial regulators attended as well. So was I. The meeting was hosted by Bear Stearns because the firm was located in Midtown and the downtown Financial District was still a civilian no-go zone. As the finance executives began their meeting, the New York Stock Exchange was closed for a third straight day, the longest interruption since the outbreak of World War I, when the Big Board was idled from July 31 to November 28, 1914. The pressing question for the assembled: When could the markets safely open again?
“We have to be certain that when we go, nothing brings us back down,” warned NYSE chairman Richard Grasso. And that was far more complicated than unlocking the doors and switching the lights on.
Grasso’s exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Market were both physically able to open and eager to do so. But some huge impediments remained. While the exchanges’ internal technologies did not seem to have been damaged in the terror attack, their outside telecommunications connections were only beginning to be stitched back together two days later. Those data links are what allow investors to send buy and sell orders to the markets. Without them, the exchanges cannot operate.
One big worry was a Verizon switching facility. It handled more than three-quarters of the stock exchange’s external data connections and was now running on backup diesel generators. Only thirty-six hours of fuel remained, though fresh supplies were being trucked in. The Financial District was still experiencing scattered power outages, including at the American Stock Exchange, just two blocks from the World Trade Center site. Hardwick Simmons, chairman and CEO of Nasdaq, which owns the American Stock Exchange, said his people had a contingency plan to shift options trading to exchanges in other cities. And Simmons had even bigger problems than that. At noon on Wednesday, his IT team had tested the electronic links to the thirty-two broker-dealer member firms that were located in the World Trade Center. “Nineteen were unable to respond,” he said.
It was hard not to think the worst.
“I’m very worried about them,” Simmons said. “We haven’t heard from those firms in any fashion.”
Meanwhile, 1 Liberty Plaza, directly across from where the towers had stood, partially collapsed on Wednesday, displacing 10 percent of Nasdaq’s employees. Even with the staff moved to new locations, there was the question of how thousands of market professionals would get back into lower Manhattan, which was still filled with dust and debris and closed to nearly all traffic except for rescue workers. No one wanted an army of brokers, traders, and clerks interfering with the rescue and recovery efforts.
All of this was worrisome, and not just in New York. No one knew yet how the terror attack would affect U.S. stock prices. Immediately after the attack, equity prices plunged in Europe and Latin America, and on Wednesday they did so in Asia as well. But they stabilized Wednesday in Europe, leading to hopes that the damage would be limited when New York trading resumed. Still, some people were starting to question the whole idea of physical places where financial instruments were traded, especially physical places in packed urban neighborhoods. Had 9/11 revealed that the financial services industry, New York’s largest employer and the single most powerful engine of the city’s economy, didn’t really need to exist in the city in its current physical form?
The Wall Streeters answered that with a resounding no.
The U.S. equity markets would resume trading “no later than Monday,” Grasso said later to the media. “In the course of the next few days, we will do all the… stress testing that’s required of our industry to make sure that by Monday morning the American people are served by the finest capital market the world has known.”
Added Grasso, “New York is the financial capital of the world. It has been, it is, and it will remain so in the future.”
Statements like that were hugely important. They told the world that New York might be down, but the city most definitely was not out. The markets opened Monday, right on time.
* * *
In the days that followed, I continued to take care of business at Bear Stearns, but I kept thinking about what had happened downtown. I shared my insights with the media. I was happy to do that. I thought it was important to remind people about the earlier attack and reflect on what it meant that the terrorists had returned. I sketched the history and motives of al-Qaeda and described what I knew about the inspirational power and twisted mind of Osama bin Laden. Everywhere I went, people had their own 9/11 stories. In countless conversations with friends and longtime colleagues, I traded stories about people who were missing and people who were found. The streets were eerily empty. People, serious people, were talking about leaving New York City and never coming back. Shell-shocked was the right term for how a lot of people looked, even those who hadn’t been anywhere near the towers and didn’t even know anyone there. At CNN, Paula Zahn reminded me that her husband, Richard Cohen, owned office buildings within blocks of Ground Zero. “How are the buildings?” she whispered to me during one of the breaks.
On September 14, President George W. Bush stood with Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the still smoldering pit and spoke through a bullhorn to the construction workers and rescue personnel.
“I want you all to know that America today—America today is on bended knee, in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn,” the president said. “This nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens.”
“I can’t hear you!” one rescue worker called out from the back.
“I can hear you!” Bush called back through the bullhorn. “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!”
That was met with a loud, throaty chant.
“USA! USA! USA!”
Mayor Giuliani exhibited real leadership in those early days, I thought. In the years to come, many people, including me, would question some of his decisions and how well the city was prepared for a second attack. But in the crucial days and weeks after September 11, as a leader and a spokesman for New York, Giuliani projected strength and calm.
A few hours after President Bush had gone, I did manage to slip back into our downtown apartment and get a pile of clothes. A couple of my NYPD friends drove me down and walked with me through the security lines. The elevators in the building were off. I had to walk up sixteen flights of stairs. I grabbed some suits and shirts and toiletries. All flights had been grounded, and I didn’t know when Veronica would get back to town. Unfortunately, I had left a window open in the apartment when I went to work on Tuesday morning. We faced south. The whole apartment was filled with a fine white dust. In my mind, I could already see the cleaning crews in their space suits.
I remained at the hotel for one more night and then stayed with a friend of mine, Michael Saperstein, and then at the apartment of my brother-in-law, Martin Clarke. Then I moved to other places and bunked with other friends. Like many New Yorkers that disconcerting month of September, I was somewhere between homeless and a nomad.
* * *
On the Sunday after 9/11, I was called to Washington by Norman Mineta, the secretary of transportation in the Bush administration. He told me he was putting together two small Rapid Response Teams to come up with safety improvements for America’s air travel system and wanted me to be part of the process. Five days earlier, hijackers with box cutters had managed to commandeer four commercial airliners with devastating effects. Mineta was a very hands-on transportation secretary, and he was looking for practical reforms that could be instituted immediately, if not sooner.
He’d had his own harrowing 9/11 drama. As American Airlines Flight 77 approached the Pentagon, he’d been with Vice President Dick Cheney in the President’s Emergency Operating Center. It was Mineta who made the white-knuckles decision to ground all aircraft coast to coast, the first unplanned, nationwide “ground stop” in U.S. aviation history. At that moment, there were 4,546 planes in the air. It was too late to do anything about Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. But in a matter of minutes, pilots everywhere were seeking the nearest airports. Now, five days later, as the air travel system was groaning back to life, an obvious question had to be asked: What can be done to make the system safer? My four-person Rapid Response Team focused on airport safety, while the other team turned its attention to the planes. We were given two weeks to make our recommendations, an almost unheard-of timetable in bureaucratic Washington.
I was joined by Northwest Airlines CEO Richard Anderson, Chip Barclay of the American Association of Airport Executives, and, the one who did most of the talking, Herb Kelleher, the colorful cofounder and chairman of Southwest Airlines. The other group was similarly industry-heavy: American Airlines vice chairman Robert Baker, former Boeing vice president Robert Davis, Captain Duane Woerth of the Air Line Pilots Association, and Patricia Friend, president of the Association of Flight Attendants. Paul Browne accompanied me. As a former U.S. Customs commissioner, undersecretary of the Treasury, and New York police commissioner, I was the only member of either panel with a law enforcement background.
My impression was that the industry people, though concerned about safety, were even more concerned about interrupting the flow of the air travel business. So as I pushed for stricter background checks, closer body searches, and tighter luggage rules, Kelleher especially pushed back hard, emphasizing how challenging, expensive, or inconvenient each new step might be. I thought it was especially important that the government take the passenger-screening process away from the airlines, who’d overseen it for as long as anyone could recall. A federal safety agency should run that, I believed. I’d flown enough to know that as long as the airlines were in charge, the screeners would feel pressure to make sure all passengers reached the gate on time, whatever security shortcuts that might entail.
In the end, the two Rapid Response Teams came up with more than a dozen practical suggestions, many of which were quickly adopted or became part of a road map for future improvement: Wider use of passenger background profiles to catch people who pose potential security threats before they step aboard aircraft. Limiting carry-on luggage to one bag and one personal item per passenger. Requiring that some items be carried in clear plastic bags. Using Computer-Assisted Passenger Screening to check more people before they boarded the plane. Requiring airport and airline employees to undergo new criminal background checks. Scrutinizing travel patterns as soon as tickets are purchased. Fortifying cockpit doors. And perhaps most important of all, establishing a new federal agency, which became the Transportation Security Administration, to be in charge of air travel safety, taking that crucial responsibility out of the airlines’ hands.
These measures would become part of an upgraded safety network for America.
As we began putting our proposals into practice, Mineta declared, “These are extraordinary times, and we are rejecting bureaucratic business-as-usual when it comes to transportation safety and security.” Almost nothing in Washington had ever moved as swiftly as this.
* * *
Veronica had wanted to end her trip early and fly home from Europe as soon as the flight ban was lifted. Jim called and urged her not to. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “There’s nothing to come home to. Just stay there.” She came back to New York in late September as planned. I was thrilled to see her. I was also tired of bunking with friends. So we checked into the Plaza Hotel, which wasn’t quite as pricey as you might think. The Plaza was just about empty. Hardly any tourists were there. I think the staff were happy to see us when we arrived.
One afternoon soon after Veronica returned, she and I went down to our neighborhood. This time they wouldn’t let us into our building, which was fully sealed off at that point. It wasn’t until almost Election Day that we could get back inside. But we did manage to go up to the roof of another building in the area. By that point, I’d been down to Ground Zero a few times. Some of the cops had taken me to the edge of the hole for an up-close look. I thought I had a clear sense of what remained of the towers and all the damage that had been done there. But from the ground, there was simply no way to grasp the sheer size of it.
Standing on the roof with Veronica that afternoon, a hint of New York’s crisp fall finally in the sour downtown air, I could hardly believe what I was seeing with my very own eyes. Just the breadth and the scope of it, the sheer magnitude, how much debris there was, how high the pile went, the number of people working down here, the enormity of removing collapsed office towers—every girder, every chunk of sheetrock, every ceiling tile—and knowing in my mind the great human loss that had taken place right there. We wondered what other names we would hear among the dead or the missing. We loved the area. We knew it the way you can know only your own patch of a city. It wasn’t just the World Trade Center to us. It was part of our neighborhood. Thousands and thousands of facts, memories, preferences, and tiny little details.
Gone. All of it. Literally gone. With nothing but a pile of rubble left behind, the most enormous pile of rubble I’d ever seen in my life.
As we stood on the roof that afternoon, the sun setting against the west bank of the Hudson and New Jersey behind it, the pile straight ahead, Veronica started to cry. We tried to pick out familiar landmarks across the ruins. On the far side of the pile, we could see the top of the Millenium Hotel on Church Street and the top of the Woolworth Building up Broadway. It’s not like I hadn’t thought about any of this before. I’d thought about little else for weeks. But standing there, the whole scene crystallized for me. This was war, and I wanted to be in it.