By Jim Heath
Many anchors and reporters who have been on the job the past two decades have worked on stories revolving around the events of September 11, 2001. For me, it started at the anchor desk in Yuma, Arizona the night of the attack. Yuma is the home of a major U.S. Marine base, and it had been placed on high-alert. Our small Arizona community, snuggled up to the Mexican border, was on edge.
For days after the Tuesday attack we reported on military developments that would effect so many in Yuma and nearby communities. By our Friday night broadcast, the enormity of the terrorist attack finally hit me on a personal level, and you can read about the single most difficult day of my television career here.
One year later, I traveled to New York City to report on the progress being made at Ground Zero. Life had gone on in America’s largest city, but there were reminders everywhere of the scar the attack had left. I stood and looked at the giant hole in the ground, where the tallest buildings I had ever been in had collapsed, and felt ill. After five or ten minutes, I told my friend Peter Barden (a proud New Yorker who was acting as my cameraman) I’d had enough. Instead of focusing on the giant pit left behind from the fallen towers, my story instead focused on the buildings nearby that were still being repaired because of falling debris.
A fence around the property still had thousands of tribute items on it. The faces a reminder of the humanity lost in a single morning. Church groups regularly performed there, so I interviewed a few people about that.
New York City police and firefighters would stop and take pictures with the endless tourists. Who could ever forget the faces from photographs of those first responders who were running into the burning buildings as many tried to exit? Some of them spoke to me about their experiences— most had been on duty on 9/11.
There were the businesses near Ground Zero still struggling after reopening. I remember one Brooks Brothers clothing store in particular that I had shopped at when visiting Manhattan, and spending time at the World Trade Center, in 2000. Now in 2002 there were no customers. Tourists wanted to see Ground Zero but not shop for clothes.
There were some signs that New York City was recovering—it had to with millions of people living and working there. I reported on a parade honoring Polish Americans that happened on 5th Avenue. There was the Italian festival, which drew quite the crowd in Little Italy. And a street fair along Broadway from 47th to 57th Avenues was packed.
Still, conversation after conversation I had with New Yorkers revealed lingering disappointment, mixed with anger, that our government had yet to bring al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to justice.
We now know, from the 9/11 Commission Report, thirty-six days before the terrorist attack, President George W. Bush received a Central Intelligence Agency briefing paper called “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.” The brief warned of terrorism threats from bin Laden and his supporters:
“Al-Qaeda members—including some who are U.S. citizens—have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.”
The CIA memo pointed out bin Laden’s history of aggression during the Clinton presidency including the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the bombing of the USS Cole, which left seventeen American sailors dead. The brief also stated the CIA had not been able to corroborate the “sensational threat” that bin Laden planned to hijack a U.S. aircraft.
Thirty-six days later, a total of nineteen hijackers attacked America. Ten flew two commercial jets into the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in Manhattan—both 110-story towers crumbled to the ground in less than two hours. One jet with five hijackers crashed and blew a huge hole into the Pentagon in Washington, DC—the symbol of America’s military might. A third jet with four hijackers was set to target either the White House or U.S. Capitol but it was courageously brought down over rural Pennsylvania by the passengers on board.
Osama bin Laden, as he later publicly admitted, personally directed all nineteen hijackers.
In the end, 2,973 innocent people were killed in a single morning, making it the worst terrorist attack on American soil in history.
Despite the long-held view that bin Laden’s hatred of America started during the Gulf War in 1991, in a speech in 2004, he said his plans for the attack started shortly after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 during the Reagan administration: “As I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children… So with these images and their like as their background, the events of September 11th came as a reply to those great wrongs.”
One thing is certain: bin Laden had left the American government plenty of clues through several administrations
Despite a Tomahawk cruise missile attack by President Bill Clinton on bin Laden’s suspected training camps in Afghanistan in 1998, he had alluded capture or death until it was too late.
During a State of the Union address in the late 90’s, I left the media center in the U.S. Capitol, walked up the stairs and then out the front doors on the west side. As I stood there on the balcony, on a chilly January night, looking out at the Washington Monument, I could hear the faint applause coming from inside the well of Congress as the President of the United States delivered his speech. It was quite a moment for a political geek who loves presidential history. It saddens me to this day to think in the aftermath of 9/11, no one will ever have that much freedom to roam around our Capitol, and most of our public monuments and buildings, again.
In the days following the September 11th attack Bush said about bin Laden, “I want him, I want justice. And there’s an old poster out West as I recall that said, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’”
Six years later, with wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq ongoing, the question on the minds of many voters was, “where is bin Laden?” The lack of an acceptable answer promised to be an issue in the upcoming 2008 campaign.
Immediately following the attack on 9/11, one of the first people Bush spoke with was New York governor George Pataki. A fellow Republican, Pataki had shocked the political world in 1994 when, seemingly out of nowhere, he defeated incumbent governor Mario Cuomo.
In mid-2007, Pataki was eyeing a potential presidential bid and that’s what brought him to South Carolina. I interviewed him in a three-camera shoot outside on a beautiful day with the Atlantic Ocean as our backdrop. “How quickly did you speak with the president that day?” I started.
“I called President Bush at that conference in Florida, and we spoke and I asked him to shut down the airspace over New York, and he said, ‘we’re already shutting down the airspace over America.’”
“How soon were you made aware that this wasn’t an accident but a terrorist attack?” I followed up.
“I’ll never forget that, Jim. I saw the plane had hit the first tower, and like everybody else, wasn’t sure what was happening, and then when the second plane hit I knew immediately that we were under attack.”
Pataki said he remembered how proud he was of the New Yorkers who remained in Manhattan to help.
“There was a line of people waiting out in the soot and the dust and the debris from the towers and they weren’t waiting to get the bus or a subway uptown—they were waiting to give blood.”
But the lingering question about bin Laden remained.
“As the governor of the state of New York what do you say to the families of all those victims, have they had justice yet?” I asked him.
“Jim, of course not. And I don’t know that you can ever have justice for a horrible barbaric attack like that. Certainly we’re going to have disappointments, like the fact we still have not gotten Osama bin Laden. Regardless of what it takes, the War on Terror is something we have to prevail in.”
Pataki decided not to enter the 2008 race, but former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani did.
Giuliani is forever linked in many Americans’ minds to that tragic day.
I interviewed Giuliani about 9/11 in early April 2007 in the baseball stands during a Myrtle Beach Pelicans game.
As the inning started, I began my conversation with Giuliani about the importance of America’s pastime in the aftermath of 9/11. Very few people can forget the sight of President Bush at Yankees Stadium in New York confidently walking out to the pitcher’s mound to throw the first pitch before Game 3 of the World Series. He threw a strike over home plate, sending a signal that America was getting back on track.
After he left office Bush told TIME, “It was the most nervous I had ever been. It was the most nervous moment of my presidency.”
“Baseball went a long way in helping America heal?” I asked the mayor.
“It sure did,” Giuliani responded. “It did a lot for me. I mean, baseball games and my son’s high school football games were the only things that got my mind off all the terrible things we were dealing with and the tremendous pressure of it. When I’d watch baseball it would remind me that life was going to go back to normal.”
I pointed out that Giuliani and his rival for the nomination, John McCain, had actually sat together during the 2001 World Series, which the Arizona Diamondbacks went on to win in seven games against the Yankees. Giuliani laughed and said, “We sure did! John continues to be a very good friend. We watched game six and game seven together. We had a bet on it and he won that bet.”
Our conversation then turned serious. I told Giuliani that America got to know him on 9/11. In the middle of chaos and destruction, the mayor of the nation’s largest city was seen on television walking the streets, his head and shoulders covered with ash. Fearless of the press, he answered reporters’ questions with the little facts he had in an attempt to portray a sense of calm.
“Every day of my life I remember it, I remember parts of it every day of my life,” Giuliani said.
“Sometimes it’s the very sad parts, the very tragic parts. Sometimes it’s the very brave and unbelievably wonderful things people did and tremendous spirit they had. So it’s a mixture of very bad memories and very good memories. Seeing people twenty minutes before they died, seeing some of the horrible things that happened to people when things were falling off the building or people jumping off the building. I’ve learned I’m going to think of it every day of my life.”
As for bringing bin Laden—the person who claimed responsibility for directing the attack that wreaked so much havoc on his city—to justice, Giuliani said:
“It’s also something I think about every day. I think it’s very, very important that in addition to everything else we’re doing on the war on terror, that we catch him. We need to crush al Qaeda because they were the ones responsible for it, but it really is important we don’t lose sight of the fact that we need to catch bin Laden and bring him to justice.”
That same year I interviewed New York Senator Hillary Clinton, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for president, about working with her GOP colleagues.
“I’m a senator from New York with a Republican president, a Republican governor and a Republican mayor. We couldn’t afford to attack each other. We worked with each other to protect our country and to rebuild our city.”
Still, Osama bin Laden, and the fact he was free, weighed heavily on her mind.
“It bothers me greatly and for the life of me, I can’t understand why bin Laden is basically at large,” Clinton told me.
“We have reports that he is still funding the training camps that are sending Taliban and al Qaeda fighters across the border to battle with our NATO forces. This is a very serious matter and I would have never diverted attention away from bin Laden until we had gotten the job done and I’d like to see it done now.”
Three years later, Hillary Clinton would see it done but in a role, at this point, she could have never imagined. As Secretary of State under President Barack Obama.
On May 2, 2011, after years of hiding in Pakistan, Osama bin Laden, the terrorist who had directed the 9/11 hijackers, had been found and a team of US Special Forces flew in from Afghanistan and killed him.
How many of the presidential candidates I’ve previously written about, including Pataki, Giuliani and Clinton, wanted to be the one to bring bin Laden to justice?
Barack Obama did. And for that, history will remember.
Jim Heath remembers more from his Front Row Seat at the Circus in coming weeks on JimHeath.TV!
Attribution: Front Row Seat at the Circus