By Frederic J. Frommer
I remember coming to work on the morning of September 11, 2001, in a bad mood. It was a beautiful day, but I was still angry at misplaying a fly ball in left field at the Ellipse the night before, costing our team the game.
Life-altering events quickly changed my perspective.
Back then, I was a reporter for The Associated Press, and I logged on to my computer in the section of the Washington bureau called the Solarium, so named because it faced a wall of windows that flooded the room with sunlight. Soon, our bureau chief came by and told us to turn on the TV — a plane had crashed into the Twin Towers.
We gathered around the TV, more in a state of curiosity than alarm, figuring it was a tragic accident. But when a second jet hit the towers, we all knew what we were seeing, in real time. As more reporters filed in, they joined us in front of the chunky TV set, and when the North Tower collapsed, it was too much for one of my friends.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.
I grew up in Queens and Long Island, and the World Trade Center had always been an important landmark. I can still remember the drive into the city (that’s what we called Manhattan, even though Queens is part of NYC), coming around a bend on the Long Island Expressway, and seeing the Twin Towers suddenly rise in the distance. Seeing them felled on TV in one breathtaking attack was staggering, even before I had any sense of the death toll that day.
At the time, my sister and her husband lived in Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan, right near Ground Zero. I couldn’t reach either of them for a while — cellphone networks were down because of the barrage of calls like mine. My sister, as it turned out, was fortunately in a cab heading uptown. But my brother-in-law was in their apartment, and he and other residents of the building were quickly evacuated and sent on a ferry to New Jersey. He grabbed what he could, including the cat, and headed across the Hudson River to safety.
My focus was initially on my hometown, but when a third plane slammed into the Pentagon, the scope of the largest terror attack in American history became much clearer. There was a report that the State Department had been hit, too, but it was quickly retracted. Still, it added to the sense of confusion and foreboding — what would come next?
I had biked to work that day, and I suggested to my editor that I ride around the city to gather details on how the nation’s capital was responding. The streets were gridlocked because many people were frantically trying to leave the city, but my mountain bike was able to get around nimbly.
It was striking to see D.C. on a war footing. National Guard members began showing up in the hundreds to patrol the city, and Secret Service agents were wielding heavy weapons near the White House.
A couple of days later, I interviewed Eugene McCarthy, the former Minnesota Democratic senator whose 1968 insurgent antiwar candidacy had helped force President Lyndon Johnson to drop his bid for re-election.
McCarthy, who by 2001 was 85, offered an unusual take. Rather than talk about how America needed to retaliate with overwhelming force or overhaul its security, as many politicians did, he identified what he called a main cause.
“The neglect of the Palestinian refugees is the principal consideration,” he said. “You let a thing like that fester for 45 years, you have to expect something like this to happen. No one at the White House has shown any concern for the Palestinians.”
He also argued that the attack did not constitute an act of war, as many were saying.
“Once you use that language, anything you do is justified as war,” he told me.
The morning of 9/11, four planes were hijacked in all, including Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pa., after its passengers fought back against the terrorists. Mostly forgotten today, 25 years later, is the fear that more attacks could be in the offing.
One friend refused to take the Metro to work for several weeks, choosing instead to walk the 1 ½ miles plus each way, because he was afraid the subway system could be the next target. On my way to work downtown, I’d pass Humvees at several intersections, and for a while, I could see smoke still rising from the Pentagon from my apartment in the D.C. neighborhood of Kalorama.
You’ll hear many people who lived through 9/11 comment that they can’t believe it’s been 25 years. One interesting thought exercise is to think about how much had changed in the 25 years before that, which takes us to September 1976. Back then, Jimmy Carter was mounting his successful presidential bid against President Gerald Ford, and the New York Yankees were on their way to their first pennant since 1964.
On Sept. 11, 2001, historian David McCullough told the Washington Post that the attacks marked “a dividing point in history.”
“If they still teach history 100 years from now, children will still be reading about this day,” he said.
Frederic J. Frommer, a sports and politics historian who has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic and other national publications, is working on a book on ‘70s baseball.