My US Airways shuttle landed at LaGuardia Airport at approximately 8:00 a.m. I jumped into a cab and headed to midtown Manhattan for a board meeting of a charitable foundation of which I was a trustee. As I approached the city from the airport in Queens, I was impressed by the beauty of the New York City skyline against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. When we emerged from the Midtown Tunnel on East Thirty-fourth Street, I saw a concentrated bit of smoke in the distance toward the downtown area.
The date was September 11, 2001.
As I got off the elevator on the nineteenth floor of a building on West Fifty-second Street, instead of the usual crowding around the coffee and pastries, my trustee colleagues were planted in front of the wide-screen television in the conference room. They told me that apparently a small plane had gone off course and slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at about the ninety-fifth floor. As I looked at the TV image of the smoke rising from the tower, I suspected this was the smoke that I had just seen from my taxi. Just as we were discussing how odd it was that a small commercial plane could be so far off course as to hit a skyscraper in lower Manhattan, the unthinkable happened. At 9:03 a.m., a plane that was unquestionably a full-size commercial jet airliner smashed into the south face of the South Tower. The TV cameras had caught the image of an enormous fireball as it splashed out over the New York City skyline. We all rushed to the windows to see if we could get a view downtown, but we could not due to the way the windows were angled and the location of our building. Like tens of millions of other people we stared dumbfounded at the TV, watching the fiery smoke pouring out of both towers. It was clear that the United States was under attack, and like everyone else watching this unfold, we were in total shock. We had no idea who was attacking us or why. One thing was certain. Our world would not be the same.
After a quick call to Christine to let her know I was safe, I called my office in Bethesda. My staff told me that Tommy Thompson wanted to speak with me. I had gotten to know and become close with Thompson over the prior several months, and we had discussed the role of HHS in biodefense preparation and response. He was calling me to ask my advice on what HHS could do to help in that moment. “Tommy, I am actually here in New York City about fifty city blocks from the Twin Towers,” I said.
He replied, “Do you think you can get down to the site and report back to me?”
“I’ll do my very best.”
Things kept getting worse. At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the west side of the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C., and TV coverage shifted back and forth from the World Trade Center to the Pentagon. Shortly after 10:00 a.m., we learned that another plane, United Airlines Flight 93, rumored to be headed for the U.S. Capitol or the White House, crashed in an open field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. The hijackers were overtaken by a group of courageous passengers, who in the course of a struggle with the hijackers caused the plane to crash.
My anxiety shot up even further because I realized that my three daughters, whom just a few hours earlier I had kissed goodbye as they lay sleeping in their beds, were now sitting in class at school. The National Cathedral School is located on the grounds of the National Cathedral, which sits atop an elevated landscape overlooking Washington, D.C.—the highest elevation in the city. I had no idea how many planes were involved in this onslaught, and I worried that the National Cathedral would be a perfect target for another plane attack. I tried desperately to call Christine again at her NIH office. By this time, though, the telephone lines were completely clogged. This meant I also could not reach my father, who now lived on East Sixty-eighth Street in Manhattan, but because he rarely, if ever, went downtown, I was all but certain he was okay.
I later learned that Christine and the girls were terrified for me because they knew that I was in Manhattan, and the attacks were all the more real to my daughters as they saw from the windows of their classrooms smoke emanating from the Pentagon.
The horror of the day continued when it was shown on TV that people were jumping out of the windows of the upper floors of the towers to escape the swirling flames at their backs. Of all the tragedies associated with 9/11, the sight of those innocent people jumping to their deaths struck at me in a way that I will never, ever forget. It was at that point that my horror turned to deep anger and rage at those who propagated this atrocity.
The next unfathomable blows came at 9:59 and 10:28 a.m. when the South and North Towers collapsed in full view of billions of people watching TV throughout the world. A feeling of helplessness and deep depression descended on all of us in the room.
I felt that I needed to at least attempt to keep my promise to Thompson to get downtown to the site. As soon as I walked out onto Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, it became apparent to me that I was going nowhere by taxi, bus, or any other vehicle. There was a complete shutdown of all traffic, and I decided to walk. By chance, I ran into a New York City police lieutenant huddling with a group of officers on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. I explained to him that Secretary Thompson had asked me to go down to the site and report back to him. He looked at me quizzically at best and as if I were insane at worst, and said, “Who’s Secretary Thompson? Buddy, the only people we are letting in down there are the police, ambulances, and firefighters.”
I had no choice but to return to the foundation headquarters. I tried repeatedly over the next couple of hours to call my office to no avail. Miraculously, I finally did get through, and my assistant told me that Secretary Thompson wanted me back in Washington immediately. There would be high-level meetings to plan how we might respond to a potential bioterror attack that might follow the airplane attacks, and he wanted me there.
All plane traffic had stopped, but I had to get back to Washington that evening. My only chance, though slim, was Amtrak. I took off with my fellow board member Nan Keohane, then president of Duke University, and headed for Penn Station on Seventh Avenue and West Thirty-second Street. Because the only way to get there was on foot, we set out walking south through a surrealistic midtown Manhattan. I had never seen anything like it. There were hardly any vehicles on the streets at all. We literally walked through Times Square in the middle of Broadway. It was an eerie feeling, reminding me of some of the movies I have seen over the years where the streets of New York City are totally empty after a deadly disaster. When we arrived at Penn Station after our thirty-five-minute walk, I got lucky. I was able to get on a train heading south to Washington, D.C., that evening.
As we emerged out of the tunnel on the way to the first stop at Newark, where the smoke and the glow from Ground Zero were fully visible from the train, I saw an abrupt explosion of smoke, dust, and glow from the site. I thought that another plane might have struck yet another building. I just could not believe what was happening. I sat numb in my seat for the trip to Washington not knowing what awaited me back home. I found out as soon as I arrived that the burst of smoke and dust was the collapse of the forty-seven-story building at 7 World Trade Center, referred to as Tower 7. It had not been hit by a plane, but had caught fire as collateral damage from the explosions, fire, and collapse of the North and South Towers.
On the taxi ride from Union Station to our house, I saw military police stationed at almost every major intersection. Reagan National Airport and Dulles International Airport were closed indefinitely. There were reports on the taxi’s radio that the FBI was claiming several terrorist sleeper cells were still in the United States with plans to carry out further attacks with Washington, D.C., as the prime target. I could not stop hugging my daughters as I walked in the door. Christine and I lay in bed that night to the sound of F-16 jets flying in combat formation over the city, ready to intercept any further attacks.
The following day, Tommy Thompson told me that HHS would be one of the lead government agencies in preparing our defense against possible future bioterror attacks and asked me to be his point man in this effort. In a flash, at least for the time being, HIV and AIDS fell off the radar screen of just about everyone in the U.S. government, and in the entire country for that matter. Over the next few days, I participated in a number of meetings at the White House chaired by Richard Falkenrath, director for proliferation strategy at the National Security Council. The meetings were aimed at putting together short- and long-term plans for how to handle a bioterror attack.
The general feeling of the group was that such an attack was inevitable, and of all the possible bioterror agents that could be used against us, aerosolized smallpox virus was believed to be the primary threat. Smallpox was a historically deadly disease that spread from person to person. It was well-known from defected Soviet officials that the Soviet Union had stockpiled massive amounts of smallpox virus, among other deadly infectious agents, during the Cold War as potential bioweapons to be used in the event open hostilities broke out between the Soviet Union and the Western allies. In the chaos that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was unclear whether any of the bioweapons stocks had fallen into the hands of al-Qaeda or other radical Islamic groups. The White House was taking seriously the possibility, however remote, that such weapons had become available to terrorists.
The meetings started to pile up at HHS Washington headquarters in the Hubert H. Humphrey Building. The underlying theme of the discussions was that with this new bioterror threat we needed to develop countermeasures in the form of diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines. The agency tapped to take the lead in this effort: NIAID. It would be our job to design and coordinate the direction of the research, carried out by our grantees and contractors, who would develop the required countermeasures. The task took on even greater urgency when another shock wave hit our nation.