Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
—James 1:2–4
WHERE’S THE BEER?” PHIL Smith was holding the door to my refrigerator open, staring at its contents, which consisted of a single large plastic jug of sweet tea, a carton of eggs, and a well-used bottle of Tabasco sauce.
“I don’t drink,” I said.
Standing six feet six and north of 250 pounds, Phil looked around with a disgusted look on his face. “You are such a loser,” he said. Everyone in the room laughed.
It was Norfolk, Virginia, 1984. I had invited several friends from my new job at television station WAVY-TV over to my apartment for pizza and a college football bowl game. We were all young and single and working jobs we loved in a great city. It was a collegial group. Since many of us had begun our television careers in smaller markets, like my experience in Greenville, Norfolk was a step into big-city news. After an intense week, the favorite wind-down activity was a night of conversation about work, listening to music, dancing, lots of laughter, and alcohol. I was not a drinker and never learned to dance, so I was often the odd man out on those occasions. This particular night, it became clear just how different I really was. After the football game was over, one of my friends suggested that we watch a movie. They started going through my pile of VHS tapes next to the television. Much to their surprise, every single tape in the stack was a recording of a network newscast.
My closest friend in the group shook his head and announced, “You really are a loser.” Even I laughed this time.
Back in college, that’s the way many friends would affectionately label me at parties—a loser. “He doesn’t drink, and he can’t dance” was how many male friends would introduce me to their female friends. To which I would respond, “But I will graduate on time.” By my early twenties, being considered an outsider was a badge of honor. I was used to it, almost preferred it that way. For the longest time I had always felt that it was God, Clarice, and me against the world. Now that I lived in a different city, mostly it was just God and me, and God was doing all the heavy lifting. That is one big reason why I have often been alone but never lonely.
My faith was just one of the things that made me feel different from my colleagues. There were professional differences as well. The goal of many reporters is to be the station’s next anchorman or anchorwoman. Not me. I wanted to be a reporter, eventually at the network level, and knew that it was going to take a singleminded focus to become the best in the business. I didn’t really make time for distractions. Many of my colleagues had wide-ranging interests. One reporter loved riding his motorcycle. Another talked about his love for surfing. Another had a great wine collection. I arrived in Norfolk with a couch, a card table, two chairs, a television set, and a VCR that I used to record the CBS Evening News, ABC’s World News Tonight, and the NBC Nightly News. Many thought my focus was too narrow, but childhood difficulties had taught me to keep things simple and linear. Through every obstacle, the keys to success for me have always been the same: prayer, grace, structure, hard work, and more prayer. Whenever I have succeeded, it was because I stuck to the plan. Whenever I have failed, it has usually occurred because I deviated from the plan. There was very little time in my life for distractions.
The move to a bigger market was going to mean greater scrutiny of my performance and greater expectations for the quality of work. In Greenville, my slow, deliberate process had not been a liability. Since I had been expected to deliver one complete report each day, I generally had time to write several drafts of my script until I was satisfied with the product. But in Norfolk I had to report at least two and sometimes three stories a day. This requirement exposed a process that I had managed to keep hidden. When I first learned to read, I read everything out loud. When I began to write my news scripts, I would “write out loud,” reading to myself as I put the words on paper. In Greenville, because I worked alone, my process had never been seen or heard by anyone else. In Norfolk, I was now regularly teamed up with a cameraman, who was with me nearly all the time, and we had to work on much tighter deadlines. I felt self-conscious and uncomfortable. When I began to speak on my side of the van, at least one cameraman would turn up the radio in annoyance. But some seemed more amused by my process. “You know that’s weird, don’t you?” asked one photographer, Tom Costanza. Tom and I were often teamed together. He was on the short list of those who didn’t mind my chatter in the news vehicle. “I get why you talk out loud while you write,” Tom said, while we were out on another story, “but have you ever thought about whispering?” Maybe he was on to something.
While I continued to work on the mechanics of the broadcast craft, how best to hold a microphone or position myself at a press conference, the one natural talent I brought to my profession was the ability to understand the thread of humanity in every news story and find a way for the viewer to connect and relate. Most news stories are stories about struggle: a struggle for political or economic power, a struggle over land, a struggle over life and death. More than who wins or loses, I relate most to the struggle. Most of the reporters in Norfolk had more experience than me, better contacts, were better writers, and many had wonderful voices. But I decided that no one had an intrinsic understanding of struggle and could bring that experience to life as I could. Take what little you have and build on it. That was something Father Bart had taught me back in high school at Archbishop Curley. It doesn’t matter where you start, only where you finish. I came to Norfolk with few material possessions and limited ability, but what I did possess I could build upon with God’s grace. That was all I could do. And just as in the past, it would have to be enough. As a young general-assignment reporter, I had to learn in a hurry how to make those connections on a story.
One of my first such experiences in Norfolk was a fatal car crash that killed five young men in November of 1985, members of a basketball team driving home from a tournament. The accident had occurred over the weekend. I was assigned to the story with one of the best photographers at the station, Michael Ridge. There was no video of the accident scene, and the authorities would not allow us to take pictures of the damaged cars. None of the relatives wanted to talk on camera. It appeared that the opportunity to tell an important story in a compelling way might be lost. But we did not give up. We eventually convinced the grieving families to provide us with pictures of the five young men. At the home of one family, Michael persuaded those assembled to let us photograph the pictures on the kitchen table. Being in the house reminded me of the many times I had been in the home of relatives during the first few days of mourning. Some people wanted to be left alone. Some needed to talk.
These five families were no different from mine. I had found a human connection. We politely asked if anyone who wanted to say something in remembrance of the five young men would come into the kitchen, in front of the photo array, in front of our microphone, and just talk. We did not ask any questions. We just listened. A few of the mourners welcomed the opportunity. Ranging in age from late teens to early twenties, most of the five were lifelong friends. They went to the same church. Some were in college. One elderly man with a deep scratchy voice said something that has always stuck with me. He said, “Death is something you never get used to.” The comment was simple yet profound. Like almost every other family in a similar situation, these families would survive what happened, but they would never get used to it.
That night we aired our story on the accident, using family photographs, the voices of relatives, and video from the highway. One of the anchors choked up on the air. Colleagues who had never spoken to me before complimented me on the piece. And some of the relatives called after the broadcast to thank us for honoring their loved ones respectfully. We had captured and communicated a human moment.
Despite some success early on, I still felt like a country bumpkin in the big city in Norfolk. Compared to Greenville it was a high-rise metropolis. I was not one of those twenty-something reporters who was full of myself, believing I could conquer the world or that I was ready for big-time television. I was a kid who simply believed I had the tools to work hard and make up for my shortcomings as a reporter. I was full of energy but not confidence.
Terrell Harris was a reporter at the ABC affiliate who covered the same beat. He was everything I wasn’t—good-looking and confident, he wore expensive suits and drove a fancy car. All the girls in Norfolk seemed to be in love with him. I owned two blazers, three pair of slacks, two red ties, one yellow tie, two pairs of brown loafers, and one shirt collar extender. I walked to work. Every time I saw him on a story I felt intimidated.
In fact, the only time I have ever stuttered on the air was during a live shot, when I was standing next to Terrell Harris. We were both covering a case of government corruption in the county. We were lined up outside the government office doing our live shots for the noon news on our respective stations. My trick to avoid stuttering in general on the air—but particularly on live shots—was to carefully prepare and rehearse what I intended to say. I needed that repetition to ensure that I would say every word correctly. A few minutes before noon I was rehearsed and ready. But that morning it had been snowing, which was unusual for Norfolk, and rather than hearing the introduction I expected on the corruption story, the anchor asked me a question about the weather. I froze. I was unable to react quickly to the unexpected question. In trying to respond, I stuttered. I intended to say that it had started to snow when we first arrived this morning. But it came out as “s-s-s-s-s-s-snow.” I looked at my feet to try to kick-start my brain. I saw the cameraman peek from behind his camera in amazement, and I could hear Terrell next to me delivering his live report flawlessly. I wanted to die. To my relief, the cameraman kindly moved the camera away from my face to take pictures of the snow. It gave me a moment to gather my thoughts. I produced a nervous smile, imagined I could see my grandmother’s face (which calmed me down), and got back on the topic I was prepared to discuss.
That night I ate my dinner alone in an edit suite and watched that live shot over and over again. I made a copy on a VHS tape and took it home so I could watch it again. I wanted to study it to see if there was a way to prevent something like that from ever happening again. But the shame has never left me.
I went to every story thinking every other reporter was smarter than me, knew more than me, and had more talent. I tended to fight my sense of insecurity by getting angry, and in my mind Terrell was the standard I needed to beat. I would purposely take offense at the smallest slight. If the police chief answered his question first, I would get angry. If he got more time for his story than I got for mine, I would get angry. But rather than raise my voice or force a confrontation, I used the anger as motivation to improve my performance. Because it often took me a bit more time to read through the press releases or the prep material, I had to apply a different set of skills to my work. Thus, if my competitor interviewed two people, I would interview four. I would always have to do my best to get to the story first. I would also have to make sure I left the story last to pick up any crumbs the other reporters had left behind. Like Terrell, I needed to develop some techniques for nurturing sources. Terrell was tight with all the secretaries in city hall and the police headquarters, so I worked the people in the maintenance department. Terrell knew the hot spots in town and could meet sources after hours, and I would just hang out at the police station at night with the people forced to work the night shift. Terrell had his ways, and I found mine.
At my station, there was a reporter named Ed Hazel-wood. With a thick beard, glasses, and a deep baritone voice, Ed won numerous awards for his investigative work and for any number of reports on the U.S. military. But that’s not what impressed me most about him. It was the notebook he kept with the names and numbers of every contact he ever made. He had them listed by title, profession, spouse’s name, their girlfriend’s phone number, and address if needed. His contacts were always at his fingertips. He’d call people just to check in. He called contacts on their birthdays, their children’s birthday, a bar mitzvah, any special occasion, or just to say hello. In a business where we are often takers showing up at the doorstep in the midst of some personal tragedy, Ed was a giver. He respected the people with whom he came in contact. But that’s not to say they were always thrilled to hear from Ed or were pleased with his reporting—just that he respected his contacts.
If Ed kept names and phone numbers and birth dates, so would I. Somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea of sending handwritten notes to people kind enough to give me their time or an interview. It’s something I have done for most of my career. “Kindness will take you a long way in this life,” my grandmother always used to say. Most people have never written back, but those who have always seemed to appreciate the simple gesture. Besides, a person interviewed today might become a source or an expert the next day, and on a few occasions they have even become a friend. It was one more vital tool for my tool bag, and I knew I needed a good tool bag. I had places to go and things God wanted me to do.
My goal was to make it to the network by age thirty-five. Based on my research, thirty-five was about the median age for a young network correspondent. But my journey required baby steps, or rather two steps forward and one step back. I wanted to become a network correspondent for two basic reasons. For one, it is the biggest stage for a broadcast journalist. That same stubborn child who wanted to read Hemingway now insisted that the most exclusive club in television would someday open its doors to him. The second reason was that it would be the only way my mother and grandmother would ever get to see me regularly on television. From 1982 to 1996, during my career in local news, I changed markets about every two years and worked in cities up and down the eastern seaboard, while my family was mostly based in North Carolina. Occasionally, I would send a videocassette to my mother and grandmother so they could see my work. Somehow, sending them a tape once in a while never seemed to satisfy them. When she did see my work, my grandmother had this sound she would make, like a single grunt, but she would hold it for several seconds, as if it were a song. She would make that sound with a high-pitched voice, and then say, “Baby, you sure look good on my television.” No praise from a boss or a television critic ever meant as much as the sound she made and the smile that followed. She would have appreciated seeing me more often.
However, over the years my grandmother did express concern about how often I changed jobs on my way to the network. “What’s wrong baby?” she’d say with her Southern drawl. “Why can’t you keep a job for very long?” She was talking about my stops in Greenville, Norfolk, Orlando, Tampa, Boston, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. As I said, I took the long way. I knew I needed a body of work and a wealth of experience to be ready for the network. I didn’t want to end up in the revolving door I had seen for other journalists of color at the network level. I kept track of all the network correspondents, and with a few notable exceptions, I noticed what looked like a pattern for African-Americans who would arrive and then disappear a few years later. When I asked why it happened, I received a variety of explanations, ranging from blatant discrimination to a shortage of opportunities to a lack of preparedness. It depended on whether I was asking a manager or another journalist of color. Since the odds might be against me, I wanted to make sure I was prepared in every possible way. That meant choosing my next jobs with a purpose.
In 1989 I had a chance to work in New York, Chicago, or Boston. I chose Boston, the sixth largest television market in the country. Though it was smaller than New York or Chicago, it was the perfect environment for things I needed to learn. The city had a reputation for producing some of the best writers in journalism, and I knew that one of the criticisms that followed many African-American correspondents at the network was that they couldn’t write a good script. I wanted to polish my writing skills, and Boston was the place to do it. This newsroom was the first where my colleagues spent much of their time discussing sentence structure and phraseology.
I quickly learned one important distinction between the smaller markets and the top-ten newsrooms. There was no tolerance for using emotion as a substitute for good reporting. One of my first big stories in Boston was a house fire with fatalities, and I was the only one to secure an interview with a relative of the victims. The woman cried throughout the interview, and I thought I had done an admirable job in capturing the drama of the event. In my previous jobs I would have been praised for such an emotional delivery—but not in Boston. The next morning the news director called me to his office to chastise me for sensationalizing the story and wasting time with a crying interview when I could have been reporting more facts of the story.
In addition to writing, there was another important reason why I chose Boston. Of the three cities where I could have worked, the Boston station had the least diversity in the newsroom, and I wanted to test my skill and my temperament in such a setting. Within weeks of my arrival, I got what I asked for with a major breaking news story. A white man named Charles Stewart accused a black man of shooting and killing his pregnant wife. As the reporter on the night beat, I covered the initial report for our eleven o’clock newscast. By morning, it had morphed into one of the most sensational crime stories in Boston since the Boston Strangler. Stewart’s depiction of the attack on his wife was chilling, and his claim that a black man was the perpetrator ignited the undercurrent of racial tension in the city. I was called in early the morning after the shooting to attend a special editorial meeting, where assignments were being handed out and where I happened to be the only African-American in the room. A manager turned to me and said, “We need reaction from the black community. Why don’t you go call your contacts?” Since I had been living in the city only for a few weeks, my “contacts” were nonexistent. But his assumption remained: I was black, therefore I had black contacts, and I was to cover the black angle of the story.
I knew I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into covering only race, but I wanted to appear to be a team player. My immediate response was “You want my contacts in Tampa?” (my previous station). There was nervous laughter and the realization that the request might have been ill conceived, given my brief tenure in Boston. But I agreed to take on the assignment and pursued it aggressively. Eventually, police uncovered the truth, that Charles Stewart had killed his wife and created a mythical assailant upon whom to place the blame. A year later, in the aftermath of that case, many journalists in Boston’s newsrooms were forced to examine how a lack of staff diversity adversely affected the coverage of the Stewart case and how their own biased assumptions about class and race had become part of the coverage.
I will always remember the night a black family had their front door firebombed in one of the city’s housing projects. The photographer and I walked up to three elderly white women. “Excuse me, ladies, my name is Byron Pitts. I’m a reporter from Channel 5. What do you think about what happened to one of your neighbors?” I asked. The women looked at me expressionless when one of them said, “We don’t want any niggers living here. They should have known better.” The photographer I was with turned to me, smiled, and said, “Welcome to Boston.” It left an impression. I fought to make my own reporting more reflective of the population we served. For me, it was a challenging time but a growth experience, working in a racially charged environment, learning to keep my cool but not compromising what I believed to be my journalistic or moral integrity. I ended up spending five years in Boston, covering politics and crime, and doing some investigative reporting.
I have been asked plenty of times if racism exists in the news business. The simple answer is that racism and otherisms have always existed in America. Newsrooms are not immune. Like many people in many professions, I have bumped up against the low expectations of others. Whether you are black, white, brown, or yellow, low expectations can weigh you down like an anvil. For one thing, I was often hired as the “black” reporter. A black male reporter would leave, and then I would show up. I could see on the faces of many of my colleagues, white male colleagues especially, the suspicion that I was the “affirmative action” hire. Maybe in the minds of management, that is what I was. I have worked in many newsrooms where reporters were recruited and handpicked to be groomed for a big anchor job. That never happened for me.
In fact, about halfway through my tour of states and stations, I stuck my neck out and for the first time expressed interest in anchoring a broadcast. It had disastrous consequences. For reasons that will become apparent, I won’t mention which city it was. I was actually up for a weekend anchor job since I had been filling in for weeks, but the station was delaying making a decision. The ratings were good and my work was fine, but the company would not pull the trigger. Finally, I pressed my news director, who was a friend. “What’s the deal?” I insisted. His response shocked me. His boss, a station executive, had said, “A nigger would never anchor one of my broadcasts.” My news director passed on the quotation reluctantly.
“You can sue if you’d like. Then you’ll be blackballed and never work in TV. If subpoenaed by a judge, I’d testify to what was said. You can be angry and let it eat you up inside. Or you can press on,” he said, with a mix of sadness and disgust in his voice.
It is the one and only time I have ever cried about a job. Not to his face, but when I left the newsroom. I had been polite and shook hands with my boss, and we agreed to revisit the subject in a few days. This was the first time I was hit squarely in the nose with racism at work. The first thing I did was call my mother. She yelled and fussed with me, and then we prayed. Next, I called my sister. She yelled and fussed with me, and then we prayed. Next, I called my brother. He yelled and fussed with me, then offered to fly into town and meet the offending TV executive in the parking lot, and then we prayed. (Funny yet reassuring thing about my family, regardless of the crisis, big or small, the response is always the same. Since I was eight years old, my older brother has always volunteered to fight my battles.)
The next morning my mother called me up early. “What have you decided to do?” she asked. Before I could offer an answer, she gave her opinion. “I think you should just get past it. You didn’t go to that job to stay forever. It’s just a stop on the journey. Hold your head up. Push your shoulders back. Learn what you’re there to learn, and move on,” she pleaded.
I knew she was not advocating that I back down. Lord knows Clarice Pitts never shied away from a fight. But, for her, the point wasn’t about a man’s judgment of me; it was about what God had planned. Later that day, I went to my news director, thanked him for his honesty, and asked for his support when the chance came to move along. He agreed. A few months later I moved on.
Perhaps I should rephrase that. I didn’t move on. God moved me along. In fact, most of the jobs I have ever had in television I never applied for. They usually just came along. Trust me, it is not because anyone was beating the bushes looking for me. As best I can tell, I have never been the first choice for any job, rather the second or third choice, but I always tried to reward those who hired me with my best effort, and I thank God for the many second chances He has given me. Like most people, I have sometimes failed to live up to my own expectations. At other times, I have had to work beyond the low expectations of others.
Pretty far along in my career, I was having a pleasant get-to-know-you conversation with an executive at a new station where I had been hired. I had been in the news business for quite a while, had won a few awards, and covered a few major events. It was a discussion about the expectations of the job and where I wanted to take my career. By this time, I was focused on the goal of being a 60 Minutes correspondent someday. For me, it was the promised land of journalism. I could do everything I wanted to do as a reporter, from investigative work to profiles of the famous and the infamous, and it would be a chance to showcase my writing and my interviewing skills. I expressed that wish quite forcefully. The executive’s response surprised me. “Byron, the thing I like most about you is that you are so articulate,” she said.
The bubble over my head asked, “Articulate? Did she just say articulate? That’s it? That’s what you like most about me? Years of television reporting. And it’s not my body of work, my investigative pieces, my writing, or my reporting? You like that I can speak clearly and string a few coherent sentences together?”
For me, and for many people who look like me, the word articulate is code for “We presume most black people can’t speak, but you can.” I have always considered that one of the greatest insults, because it assumes that we would not be able to speak to be understood. I have heard people describe a Colin Powell or a Clarence Thomas as articulate. As if it’s a surprise that a secretary of state or a Supreme Court justice could express themselves. And they are the exception to the rule. I never heard anyone describe as articulate Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton or a single one of my white colleagues. It’s as if the greatest attribute for a person of color is that he can speak the English language.
Did this executive declare this because of some deep-rooted racism? Almost certainly not. Maybe she could not think of anything else to say. Or maybe her expectations for me were just that low. That the best I had to offer was that I could speak English. Granted, given my problems with stuttering, at one stage in my life if a person in a position of authority had labeled me articulate, that would have been a reason to shake their hand and shout Hallelujah. But she did not know about my history. That was not her point of reference. For a seasoned broadcast journalist, such a comment was ridiculous.
But in her office I smiled and nodded and thought to myself: She will set limits that I must overcome. Her expectations of me are so limited that she is just one more obstacle I need to remove from my path. From that day forward, I always outwardly respected her opinion but gave it no value.
At age thirty-eight, I finally knew that I was ready. I was hired to be a correspondent by CBS News to report the national news. I arrived at CBS with a mixture of gratitude and impatience. From day one on the job, I was already three years behind my own career schedule. But I quickly learned that just getting to the network was not enough to guarantee a successful career. Even though a correspondent has been hired, it is still at the discretion of each individual broadcast executive producer to decide if he or she wants to use that correspondent regularly on the broadcast. Executives have their favorites, who might appear five days a week, and then there are some correspondents who appear rarely. The criteria can be very subjective, ranging from writing skill to voice delivery. After being hired, one can experience a continual process of auditioning for work. It reminded me of Dr. Lewes’s lesson in college about learning the style of each professor and then working to please them. I needed to learn what each executive producer wanted if I was going to become a regular part of their broadcast.
Part of that process included establishing personal relationships with the executives. After a correspondent is hired, protocol requires that he or she pay a visit to New York for a sit-down meeting with each executive producer to discuss expectations and any special needs of their broadcasts, from the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather to Sunday Morning to the (then) CBS Morning News (now called The Early Show). Essentially, you are shopping your skills.
When I was first hired in 1998, I was in the process of relocating to work in the network’s Miami bureau. I was brought to New York for meetings with all the executives, and that visit led me to the office of a particular executive producer at CBS News whom I had never met. He had been running the morning program for a number of years. Apparently he was not impressed with what he had seen from me so far. On the day of the appointment, I had shown up at his office a few minutes early. His secretary told me to be seated. We could both hear him on the phone. He took at least three phone calls before finally calling me in to his office about thirty minutes after I had arrived.
“Please take a seat,” he said, with his feet hanging over the corner of his desk. “Just give me another moment,” he said as he made another phone call.
After a few minutes of cackling on the phone, he turned to me and said, “I don’t have much time, so let’s get right to it. I don’t think you’re very good. You don’t write well enough to be on my show, and I want only the best correspondents on my show, and that is not you,” he said, as he spent most of the time searching for something on his desk. He never made eye contact. He went on for a bit longer. When he finally looked up at me and said, “I hope this doesn’t hurt your feelings. I’m just giving it to you straight. Nothing personal,” he said with a smile. “If there’s nothing else, I have some work to do,” he said and stood up, gesturing me toward the door.
Like a kid educated in Catholic school, I jumped to my feet and said, “Thank you, sir. I appreciate your honesty and your time.” On the inside I wanted to punch him in the nose. Then just before I turned for the door, I stopped, looked back at him, and said something I had never said to any human being before. “I respect what you’ve said and I respect your position, but please know this: When I’m on my knees praying in my room at night, not once have I ever called your name. My destiny is not in your hands, not now, not ever. Thank you for your time. I’ll see you down the road.”
He cocked his head to one side and gave me a curious look. I walked out of his office and never appeared on his broadcast again. Perhaps he had won the day, but I was not defeated. Funny thing about God, He apparently has a great sense of humor. Less than one year later, the executive was no longer at the helm of the morning program. There’s an old Chinese proverb that I have always remembered. “If you stand by the river long enough, you will see the bodies of your enemies float by.” It was my intention to stand at the shoreline of CBS for many years to come.
What I have lacked in talent, God has always made up for with His grace. He has fought my battles, protected me in good times and bad. He has given me an optimistic spirit. Optimism is a great gift. It can sustain you when everything around you is falling apart, and when you cannot read, when you are deemed a failure, or when you are considered second best. I have leaned on that optimism more than might have seemed reasonable, and it has always helped me. I needed every bit of my optimism on September 11, 2001.
“Get down to the World Trade Center. There’s been an accident,” yelled Marty Gill. I had just moved to New York from the South and had never been to the World Trade Center. I had no idea where it was. But since Marty was not normally a yeller, I knew right away something serious had happened. Martin Gill worked the assignment desk for CBS News. For years he had been responsible for handing out assignments in the Southern region. When I was based in Miami and later Atlanta for CBS, Marty’s was often the voice on the other end of the phone sending me to hurricanes, tornadoes, or any other kind of spot news event. Probably just a few years older than me, he carried himself like a wise old man. Marty knew everything there was to know about satellite trucks and satellite truck drivers, feed points, which local stations had the best photographers, and where his people could get a steak in almost every city and small town in the South, Midwest, and along the eastern seaboard. Born and raised in Michigan, Marty brought Midwestern values and sensibilities to the New York office. He was not flashy or loud. He was just solid.
That morning I could hear the excitement in Marty’s voice and see it in his eyes when he leaned into my office. “I need you down at the World Trade Center now, brother,” he said with an increasing sense of urgency. I had not moved the first time he called me.
I had come to work early, before the crowds, intent on finishing up the script for another project. It was a profile of actor Harry Belafonte for the CBS broadcast Sunday Morning. I was not really up for chasing a spot news story.
“What happened?” I asked, with sarcasm hanging from every word.
“A plane hit the World Trade Center. You need to go,” Marty said as he stormed out of my office and back to the national desk. With that, I grabbed my work bag and suit coat and walked outside.
“Can you get me to the World Trade Center?” I asked the yellow cab driver. Without turning around (New York cab drivers never do), he said, “Yeah! Did you hear what happened? A plane just hit one of the Twin Towers.”
At this point, I was thinking that a novice pilot in a small plane must have gone off course and hit the building. But the closer we got, the more obvious it became that I was wrong. This was big. Fire trucks and ambulances rushed past the cab, and in the distance flames and billowing smoke were visible from both towers.
We were both stunned at what we were seeing. “I can’t get you any closer. You gotta walk from here,” the cabbie said when we got about twenty blocks from the epicenter of the disaster. He never asked for the fare. I never offered to pay. I just got out of the cab and started walking. People were in the street, running away from the buildings. Police officers had already set up barricades and were directing emergency vehicles in. It was loud and chaotic. There wasn’t as much a sense of fear in the air as there was confusion. Word was spreading that it was two commercial planes that hit the buildings. Reality was sinking in. This was not an accident. This was terrorism. Any question of who did it and the why seemed irrelevant at the time. I finally was close enough to the buildings to talk with a group of police officers. One plainclothesman, the others in uniform. They were looking straight up.
“What is that?” one of them yelled as he pointed. We all looked. It resembled a large sheet of paper floating to the ground. I thought maybe it was someone from one of the upper floors sending a message, à la the Columbine High School massacre. Perhaps it was someone pleading for help. As this object dropped faster and closer to us, we realized it wasn’t paper. It was a woman wearing a dress. She was falling. There were at least a handful of people falling. The officers and I watched in stunned silence.
“Look up there,” another one of the officers yelled. High above, we saw what looked like two people standing on a window ledge. They took hands and jumped. They held on to each other for a short distance and then let go. We followed their fall. It was more horrifying than the first. One of the officers vomited. We all turned away.
As I was trying to keep it together, and beginning to think about what part of the story I would work on, I spotted my colleague CBS News correspondent Mika Brzezinski. By this time every reporter in New York was dispatched to lower Manhattan. Not long after Mika and I exchanged hellos, the story was about to change.
“It’s coming down,” someone yelled. Chunks of the World Trade Center’s south tower were falling to the ground. In that moment, any sense of confusion turned to sheer panic. Every person was running, and that included Mika and me. Mika quickly kicked off her shoes and grabbed them; I grasped her hand and we ran as fast as we could. We made it to an elementary school that was being evacuated. The students were all but gone. We crowded inside with police, firefighters, and every other straggler who sprinted in. Chased up the street by thick black smoke, we all waited inside in dead silence. There was a rumbling that sounded like an earthquake. As suddenly as it started, it stopped. One of the firefighters walked out first, and then a few more were joined by police officers. Mika and I had found a phone in the school and managed to contact the national desk. All the networks were live on the air. Mika and I agreed that she would give the first account by phone while I walked outside to get more information. The air was so thick with dust and debris that it was difficult to breathe. I have long carried a handkerchief in my pocket for no good reason. I finally had a good reason. It felt like I was wandering around the surface of the moon. Everything was covered in white. A powdery soft dust covered the ground, cars, buildings, and most of the people.
I would later describe the day on the air this way: “Except for a few sirens, I have never heard New York City this quiet. Graveyard quiet.” That is what it felt like those early moments after the first tower fell. It felt like I was standing in a graveyard or on the moon. Minutes later, the second tower collapsed, and once again everyone who could ran for cover. During the next hours I would see acts of bravery and kindness we do not spend enough time talking about in our country. Most people were so dusty it was hard to tell a person’s race or even sometimes their sex. People of all description were helping the injured reach safety. I watched business people in suits and dresses tearing at their clothing to make a bandage or a brace. I watched one man kneel and pray in the middle of the street.
We interviewed a firefighter covered in dust from head to toe. He had brown eyes. I could see only a streak of his skin, revealed as tears rolled down from his eyes. “I lost my men,” he told me. How many, I asked. “All of them,” he said. With that, he turned away and walked back toward the pile. Within a few days, ordinary New Yorkers had formed a gauntlet down the West Side highway. At night they would applaud the emergency teams and construction workers as they changed shifts. People brought their children, and they carried food and water. This was rough, tough New York City, and for those first few days after the towers fell, I never heard a single word of profanity. There was a sense of peace and purpose and strength at Ground Zero that is hard to fathom except for those of us who were there.
The world was upside down. I had witnessed the end of a life more than a few times in my career—a man put to death in Virginia’s electric chair, a stabbing victim who bled to death in an Atlanta hospital. None of that prepared me for what I was seeing. But there wasn’t much time to dwell on it or mourn. On September 11, 2001, and on many days like it, I found it best to hide behind my job. Reporters are supposed to keep some detachment from the people and the subjects in their reporting. It was that professional distance that kept me grounded in the notion that I was placed in this moment to cover history not get caught up in it. It was not about me or particularly what I was feeling, it was about the people around me and reporting on their experiences, their emotions, and not my own.
History will recall the horrors of that time, and there were many. As an optimist, I choose to also remember the good and decent people of that day.