On September 6, 2001, I flew to Australia for three speeches. I really like Australia, which Hillary and I had visited right after my reelection in 1996. After speeches in Sydney and Melbourne, I flew to Port Douglas, a great little town on the beach near both the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree Rainforest.
On the evening of the eleventh, as we were finishing a late dinner fourteen hours ahead of the East Coast of the U.S., we learned about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. I rushed back to my hotel room and turned on the TV. Hillary was in Washington, frantically trying to call Chelsea, who had been visiting a friend in lower Manhattan and had joined the thousands of other people in walking north, away from the carnage. Eventually they got in touch and Hillary, and I, could breathe.
When we saw the second plane hit the second tower, I was on the phone with Bruce Lindsey, my longtime friend and counselor who was president of our foundation, and Cheryl Mills, a former White House lawyer who represented me brilliantly during the impeachment proceedings. They were in Cheryl’s office in lower Manhattan and saw the whole thing up close. When the second plane struck, I said, “Bin Laden did this.” They asked how I knew and I replied that the attack was clearly the result of months of careful planning that required mastery of complex logistics and training, and that only the Iranians and al-Qaeda had the capacity to pull it off. I thought the Iranians wouldn’t do it, because our retaliation would wipe them out, but bin Laden was living in a cave in Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan; he and his network were more elusive targets.
It was an awful day for America and the world, but especially for New Yorkers, who were proud of their rich racial, ethnic, and religious diversity and their open welcome to the world. They knew when the smoke cleared from the worst attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor, people they knew and loved would be gone.
I wanted to go home. Thankfully, President Bush wanted all the former presidents and vice presidents in the United States, both for security reasons and to show national unity. So the next morning our small group flew on a C-130 transport plane from Australia to Guam, then took another plane to New York’s Stewart Air National Guard Base, about an hour’s drive from our house. On the way to the airport in Australia, the road was filled with signs supporting the U.S., part of a global outpouring of sympathy for and solidarity with the United States that lasted until the start of the Iraq War. The feeling was embodied by a simple declaration at the top of the French newspaper Le Monde: “We are all Americans.”
Back in Chappaqua, I got word that Al Gore had tried to fly back to the U.S. from overseas but was stopped in Canada, as all private aircraft were. So he was driving back to Washington from there, and I invited him to spend the night with me. He got to my house after 2 a.m. When Al came up the driveway, I was waiting on the front porch of our old wooden farmhouse, standing next to my refrigerator. We’d had to move it there while renovating the kitchen. As we shook hands, Al looked at the fridge, and cracked, “I know you wanted to bring your Ozarks culture to New York, but this is going too far.” After the last forty-eight hours, it was good to have a brief laugh. I missed Al’s wry sense of humor as our lives diverged after the White House years. He’s built a large clean energy investment fund and continues to speak out for the changes we need to make to avert climate catastrophe. I’m grateful that he has attended a few of our Clinton Global Initiative meetings, where he’s always been very effective and well received.
Meanwhile, Hillary was still in Washington, working with the White House and other members of the New York congressional delegation to develop a package of support for the city’s work to clean up and rebuild, and for the victims’ families. Four hundred twelve members of the police, fire, and emergency departments of New York and New Jersey had been killed, and many others were bound to have long-term physical and mental health problems.
Chelsea and I wanted to show our support, so we went down to the missing persons center at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan, where people had posted hundreds of pictures of missing loved ones in the hope that they might still be alive and that someone had seen them. They were praying for miracles. We all were.
The impact of the photo wall, with the still smoking ruins just blocks away, was gut-wrenching. I found myself staring at the faces next to a very tall man with an olive complexion and hair going gray. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. When I asked him if he’d lost somebody, he answered in a breaking voice: “No, but I am an Egyptian Muslim American. I hate what these people did. And I’m so afraid my fellow Americans will never trust me again.”
The man’s anger, tears, and fears reflected the new reality we were facing: we had to take care of the families of the killed or disabled, rebuild New York, and do more to prevent and punish terror. And we had to do it in a way that didn’t compromise the inclusive character of our country or the future of our children by making a world of more enemies and fewer friends.
President Bush got us off to a good start with a stirring speech to those still sifting through the rubble to find anything that might identify the people who had perished there. He also went to the Islamic Center of Washington six days after the attacks, and in his remarks there reminded us that our enemy was terror, not Islam. Yes, the terrorists were Muslim, but so were several dozen of the victims. Senator Schumer and Hillary met with the president and she asked him directly for $20 billion to help New York recover. President Bush pledged his support. And he kept his word.
Since 9/11, I’ve tried to take every opportunity to thank the police and firefighters I’ve encountered and to never forget what they did on that fateful day. Not long after the attacks, I was given the opportunity to do something more. The late tech entrepreneur Andy McKelvey asked me to support his efforts to help pay for the college costs of children and spouses of all those killed or disabled. There were a lot of them—the families of the Trade Center workers and visitors and those in the Pentagon; the crew and passengers of the planes that crashed in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania; and those who would die prematurely or become disabled because of their exposure to toxic substances during the recovery operations.
McKelvey wanted the effort to be bipartisan and someone, I don’t recall who, suggested that I cochair the fund with my 1996 opponent, Bob Dole. I thought that was a good idea. I had my differences with Dole, but I respected him and marveled at the guts he showed in a political career that, because of the severe injury to his arm in World War II, required him to spend fifty minutes every morning just getting dressed. I thought Dole would be a highly credible, strong partner in a worthy endeavor. On September 29, he and I announced the Families of Freedom Scholarship Fund and asked Americans to contribute.
The fund quickly raised $100 million from more than 20,000 individuals, corporations, universities, and philanthropic organizations. Over the next seventeen years, that money, plus investment income and additional donations, has enabled the fund to distribute $152 million to 3,500 students. The fund began by covering 65 percent of college costs, but was forced to reduce the percentage, mostly because the premature death or disability of a large number of the recovery workers increased the number of people eligible for help by about 3,000. The Families of Freedom Fund would like to raise a few million dollars more to cover all the eligible people and cover a higher percentage of the costs. Hopefully they’ll be able to do it. I’ll always be grateful to the dedicated people who’ve served on the board of the fund, many of them in honor of lost loved ones, and to Scholarship America, which has administered the fund all these years without charging any fees and will do so until the fund sunsets in 2030.
While I was doing what I could, Hillary was going back and forth between New York and Washington, meeting with survivors, families who’d lost loved ones and businesses, and leaders of police and fire departments that had suffered a heavy toll. We both attended memorial services and fundraising events, and visited with first responders to thank them. Hillary was physically exhausted and emotionally drained for weeks as she encountered more and more people who were hurting and needed help. She was by turns heartbroken and angry, and determined to do all she could to help them recover and begin again. She saw immediately that those involved in the cleanup would have health problems arising from their efforts and introduced legislation to help them. After all our years together, I was still in awe of watching what she called her “extra responsibility gene” in overdrive. Still, I was worried about her, and tried to get her to rest on the weekends so that the energy powering that responsibility gene didn’t burn out.
There were a lot of people in tough shape. Two financial firms, Cantor Fitzgerald and Sandler O’Neill incurred staggering losses. Cantor Fitzgerald, a large global investment firm, lost 658 of its 960 New York employees. Its chairman, Howard Lutnick, made sure the families got the assistance they needed, and in 2002 he started an annual Charity Day that raises millions of dollars a year by donating the firm’s entire trading revenues from that day’s transactions. I try to go every year. In 2011, President George W. Bush and I both went up and down the aisle talking to the traders and thanking them. They raised over $11 million. Howard Lutnick is still doing the Charity Day, having expanded it in recent years to include charitable causes around the world.
Sandler O’Neill was a smaller investment firm, with eighty-three employees in the office atop World Trade Center’s South Tower. Sixty-six of them were killed, including two of the firm’s three leaders, one the mentor and the other the best friend of the third principal, Jimmy Dunne, who survived because he was out of the office that day. Dunne, who also lost his personal assistant, absorbed his grief and did his duty. He spoke at twenty of his colleagues’ funerals, made sure all the affected families got their loved ones’ pay, bonuses, and healthcare coverage, and set up a college fund for the children. Then he went to work rebuilding the company.
In 2019, Sandler O’Neill was acquired by Piper Jaffray and renamed Piper Sandler Companies. And Jimmy Dunne, now living in Florida, is still working. Before his passionate efforts to care for his people and rebuild his company, Jimmy was perhaps best known as one of America’s finest amateur golfers. I had the honor of playing a couple of rounds with him and he’s terrific (I should have been his caddie instead of slowing him down). I also paid a visit to Sandler O’Neill a few years later and saw it reborn.
Of course, those two firms were far from the only ones who lost people that day. I was just fortunate enough to get to know them.
In 2009, George W. Bush and I were asked to help raise the funds to finish a memorial to the people killed when Flight 93 crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania, near Shanksville. It was the fourth plane in the terrorists’ plan. The first three hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon; the fourth aimed to hit the Capitol. It failed, thanks to the courage and sacrifice of the passengers who attacked the hijackers, fought for control of the plane, and brought it to the ground, upside down, in that Pennsylvania field. I’m glad we were able to help finish the memorial.
The park was dedicated on September 10, 2011, one day shy of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, with Vice President Biden, President Bush, Speaker John Boehner, and me participating. In my remarks, I compared the heroism of the citizens of Flight 93 to that of the soldiers at the Alamo and the three hundred Spartans who fought a massive Persian army at Thermopylae almost 2,500 years before. At the Alamo, the defenders knew they were going to die, but the time they bought paved the way for Sam Houston’s victory. The Greek soldiers also knew they were going to die, but the time they bought saved the people and the city-state they served. The people on Flight 93 were civilians, taking what they assumed was a normal trip. They had to make a snap decision, one that prevented the plane from attacking the Capitol, saving many lives and denying the terrorists the symbolic victory of smashing into the center of American government. They, and those who put their lives on the line to save people in the burning towers, also gave us a chance to save the idea of America: to be able to fight terror and maintain liberty, while still welcoming people from all over the world, regardless of race, religion, and culture, as long as they shared our commitment to freedom and the rule of law.
On April 8, 2004, I met with the 9/11 Commission, a bipartisan group established in 2002 to answer important questions: How did it happen? Did my administration do all it could to strengthen our defenses against terrorist attacks? Did the Bush administration take the threat of an attack on the homeland seriously enough leading up to 9/11? Why did the administration believe Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks, even though all the intelligence agencies said there was no evidence of it?
By the time I testified, the commission had heard from both of my national security advisors, Tony Lake and Sandy Berger, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen, CIA director George Tenet, Attorney General Janet Reno, Richard Clarke, the coordinator for counterterrorism in the National Security Council, and several other members of my administration.
The commission itself was an impressive group, with five Democrats and five Republicans, chaired by former GOP governor Tom Kean of New Jersey. The vice chair was former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton of Indiana, who had retired in 1999 after thirty-four years in the House. I knew and admired them both. The staff was impressive, too, and they’d worked hard to answer the big questions. But I was concerned that with bin Laden still at large and the future of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq in doubt, the report might be too dense and too full of carefully qualifying language.
When I walked into the hearing room with no notes, accompanied only by Sandy Berger, I asked to give a brief opening statement. I told them we had done our best to prevent terrorist attacks and bring terrorists to justice, but in the security arena you don’t get credit for saves. “I’m not interested in covering my backside, so if you can find anything I did or didn’t do that contributed to 9/11, please say so.”
They seemed surprised, but it cleared the air and led to several hours of real conversation. At least they were listening carefully when I said I thought my biggest error of omission was in not ensuring the implementation of my 1995 order to have the CIA and FBI place one of their counterterrorism experts in each other’s offices so they could share intelligence and work together to prevent terrorist actions, both in the United States and in other countries. They did the staff transfers, but didn’t do much sharing, underestimating the value of doing so, especially when they knew there were threats to attack the homeland.
Since Watergate, when the Nixon administration sought to use the Justice Department, the IRS, and other federal agencies for political purposes, presidents and senior White House advisors of both parties had adopted a largely hands-off approach to the FBI and the Justice Department, even giving the FBI director a ten-year term, which could be shortened only for good cause. I followed past policy because I believed the White House shouldn’t interfere with the Justice Department on legal matters, though Kenneth Starr’s office had used FBI agents to keep pursuing the Whitewater matter, even after Hillary and I were cleared of any wrongdoing by the Resolution Trust Corporation investigation in 1995.
I made the same mistake with the CIA for the opposite reason. We were in constant contact with the CIA director, George Tenet, and he knew I wanted to know everything about our counterterrorism efforts. But before 9/11, I didn’t know there was still too little sharing and too much hoarding of information, or about all the management shortcomings in the main FBI headquarters. I didn’t know that the CIA didn’t tell the FBI or the attorney general about the presence of suspected terrorists in the United States before 9/11, or that the FBI had no system in place to investigate the terrorism warnings of its own agents.
That came back to bite us in 2001, when the CIA included in the Presidential Daily Brief in August that it had picked up chatter that there would be terrorist attacks in the United States using airplanes, a warning made real when FBI agents from Arizona and Minnesota reported to FBI headquarters in Washington that there were men from the Middle East who took flight training at local airports, but didn’t practice takeoffs and landings. Those reports not only weren’t shared with the CIA, they never even made it up the FBI chain of command, apparently because they were just written down and put in a file.
There were about 2,200 flight schools in the United States. Quick calls or emails to them could have revealed men in other flight training programs doing the same thing. Although that happened after I left office, there were enough red flags about FBI management issues when I was there, including the loss of lab tests and of substantial cash recovered in criminal operations. If we had pushed the attorney general to exert greater oversight and order more intelligence cooperation, it’s possible that would have at least brought the local FBI agents’ warnings to light and led the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration to order defensive measures on flights into New York and Washington and a nationwide search for those who had used the flight schools.
Another mistake I flagged at the hearing was our decision not to retaliate against al-Qaeda after the attack on the USS Cole on October 12, 2000. I thought it was an al-Qaeda operation from the beginning, but couldn’t get agreement from the FBI and other intelligence agencies before I left office. It wasn’t until April of 2001 that they all agreed that it was an al-Qaeda attack. For whatever reason, no retaliation occurred.
Then I said I’d welcome the commission’s questions. All the members asked good ones, but the first exchange was the most memorable. John Lehman, President Reagan’s navy secretary and a strong pro-defense conservative, thanked me for being candid and open to criticism. Then he said something hard to imagine in today’s polarized political climate: “Since you’ve been so open, I want to start by saying I owe you an apology. I’m a Republican and I believed everything my party’s critics said about you. I have now reviewed about a thousand pages of terrorism-related security documents you received. Your handwritten comments and questions are all over them. You cared a lot about this, learned a lot, and wanted to make the right decisions. You also wanted to do more against al-Qaeda. But you were poorly served by an unintended consequence of the Goldwater-Nichols Act.”
He said the act, a bipartisan effort passed in 1986, was designed to improve efficient decision-making in the military and reduce interservice rivalries, and had succeeded in doing both by developing a more organized, inclusive decision-making process in the Pentagon, which enabled the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to brief the president on military leaders’ consensus recommendations. He said I had followed those recommendations in launching cruise missiles against al-Qaeda targets after the 1998 African embassy bombings, which had killed several Americans and more than two hundred Kenyan and Tanzanian citizens. “But you didn’t send ground troops into Afghanistan because you were told the probability of getting bin Laden and destroying al-Qaeda’s core leadership was low and the likelihood of significant civilian casualties, and the loss of a lot of our forces, was high.” I agreed.
He then explained the Goldwater-Nichols angle: he had learned that the Special Forces commander strongly disagreed with the consensus and felt his troops had a reasonable chance to achieve the mission of severely weakening al-Qaeda and capturing or killing bin Laden and other leaders without large civilian casualties, but I wasn’t told that. He asked if I had specifically asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs whether the Special Forces commander agreed with the recommendations. I said I hadn’t. Lehman said I shouldn’t have had to, but over time, the Pentagon had grown so comfortable with the new system, they’d stopped considering its potential downside: depriving the president of informed dissenting opinions that deserved to be heard. Lehman said if I’d been told, I might have made the same decision, but at least it would have been a better-informed one.
I’m telling you this to make a larger point. No matter how smart and on the level you are, if you make enough decisions, some of them will look wrong in light of subsequent events, and these errors will happen more often when you base decisions on unwarranted assumptions or fail to follow up on troubling leads. That’s a big reason why, if they share a common goal, diverse groups with different backgrounds and knowledge make better decisions than homogenous ones or lone geniuses. On that day, John Lehman was a patriot in recognizing we shared a common goal—no more 9/11s—and making his contribution to it.
Both the 9/11 report and a supplemental book containing excerpts from the House-Senate joint inquiry and testimony from fourteen witnesses make interesting reading twenty years later, especially the testimony of Richard Clarke, who worked for our government on national security issues from 1973 until 2003. During my terms, he was our point man on terrorism, and in 1998 I made him the National Security Council’s coordinator for security, infrastructure protection, and counterterrorism, with “cabinet-level” access. He was smart, tough, and appropriately impatient when he thought our government was too slow in dealing with agile, creative terrorist groups. Dick stayed on for three years under President Bush, assuming leadership of U.S. cybersecurity affairs. He’s still doing work in cybersecurity today, identifying vulnerabilities, developing defenses, and sounding alerts. He’s a walking alarm bell, always on guard. I wouldn’t want to be in a fight without him. There are more people like Dick out there trying to keep us safe than you know—a “deep state” committed to preserving our freedom, not taking it away.
Before meeting with the 9/11 Commission in 2004, I had spoken at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Qatar, home of Al Jazeera, Education City, an impressive group of colleges run by American universities, and an important U.S. military base. There were representatives from across the Islamic world, eager to grasp the benefits of modernity and peace without losing their faith or their cultures, and wondering how to proceed in the aftermath of 9/11.
In my remarks I told them that what they wanted was possible only if we were willing to listen to and learn from one another without preconceptions; to improve our capacity for self-criticism; to identify common interests; and to accept that no one can possess the whole truth, even if they believe their faith embodies it. That’s what Saint Paul was saying when he compared our short lives on earth with the promise of eternal life in Paradise: “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face-to-face; now we know in part, but then we shall know even as we are known.” Paul’s insight led him to the conclusion that of the abiding virtues—faith, hope, and love—“the greatest of these is love.” Not romantic love, but agape, love of your fellow human beings. The problem with my argument was that in times full of fear and insecurity, rage and resentment, we crave the clarity and certainty of blaming the other and belonging to a group in possession of the whole truth. That creates a lot of opportunities for “true believers” to exploit.
The speech was well received, perhaps because I admitted that no absolutist, faith-based ideology is free of error. After all, the first thing the Christian soldiers did in laying siege to Jerusalem in the First Crusade in 1096 was not to kill the Muslim defenders, but to burn a synagogue full of Jewish families. The important point was that no one has the whole truth. To my surprise, an Islamist member of the Pakistani parliament joined in the standing ovation.
I had no idea whether my remarks would have any impact, but since 9/11, I’d made an effort to get the message out in the United States and across the world, especially to Muslim groups. I kept trying, delivering the message the next week at the Jeddah Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia, the next month at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles (now the American Jewish University), and in April at Tel Aviv University, at a dinner sponsored by my longtime friend and passionate peace activist Danny Abraham.
On every September 11, as many New Yorkers do, I relive that terrible day. I think of those who still grieve the lost, those who ran toward danger to care for others, and those who have labored to keep our city and our nation safe since then. I think of my daughter, walking away from the towers, not knowing what would happen next. I think of Hillary, knowing her job as a senator from New York would be dominated by a duty and a passion no one had even considered when she campaigned.
And I think of the Egyptian American at the wall. If he’s still in New York, it’s a good bet that he is still welcomed in a city more vibrant and diverse than ever. But out in the country, where the pot of resentment boils, fueled by economic dislocation, cultural anxiety, and fear of political disempowerment in the face of so much demographic and social change, we’re still a work in progress. Remembering how we came together in response to 9/11 is a good place to start.