On Sept. 11, 2001, my older son was 5, and some mornings played video games on my computer. So I wasn’t plugged into the world that morning. I didn’t know that American Airlines Flight 11 had struck the North Tower at 7:46 a.m. Chicago time. I did not own a cell phone.
At the Northbrook Metra station, stepping onto the 8:17 Downtown, I heard a woman down the platform say something about the World Trade Center being hit by a plane.
At Union Station, knots of people stood around, talking. I asked one: what kind of plane hit the Twin Towers?
“A 767,” he said. That startled me. I had assumed it would be a Cessna.
“That’s a big plane,” I said, dully.
At Wacker Drive, people were pouring out of the Sears Tower, fanning out in all directions. I noticed that, as they hurried along, they looked up, scanning the sky. As if they expected to see a plane go into the building at any moment.
There was a Billy Goat Tavern on Washington, open for breakfast. I stepped inside. Everyone was just standing there in silence, watching the North Tower collapse on TV. I joined them. You could hear the eggs sizzling on the grill.
The paper was still at 401 N. Wabash. I was on the editorial board and walked into editorial page editor Steve Huntley’s office.
“How do you spell ‘Osama bin Laden?'” he asked. I’d never heard the name but went to my office to find out.
I used to say there were two shocks about Sept. 11 — the first was that it happened, that four planes were hijacked by 19 men wielding box cutters. Two crashed into New York’s World Trade Center, toppling the towers. A third hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers stormed the cockpit; 2,973 men, women and children died that day.
There was a time when I wouldn’t feel obligated to spell out the details. But more than a third of Americans have no living memory of Sept. 11, 2001, and it would not be surprising if 9/11 is news to some — just another crumb of dusty history they didn’t learn in school.
Leading to the second shock of 9/11: that it went away, or at least ebbed. Because for days and weeks and months, it seemed that 9/11 was a permanent condition, a radiating, bottomless shock, sorrow and stupefaction. But ebb it did, slowly receding, like a tide going out. And now 25 years have gone by, and attention must be paid again.
We put out “Extras” in those days — special editions to update breaking news stories, hawked at newsstands downtown. Our first was headlined “UNSPEAKABLE HORROR” — I remember looking at “Unspeakable” and thinking, “Really? ‘Cause we’re trying to flippin’ speak it.” The second was better: “TERROR!”
I filed an insert to our editorial, then asked the City Desk what I could do to help. Go into the Loop, see what’s up. So I went back to the Sears Tower and interviewed disappointed tourists who had planned to visit the Sky Deck. At 111 W. Washington, I watched an employee, ex-Marine Johnny Washington, lower the building’s flags to half-mast.
“This is terrible,” he said.
Back at the newsroom, our publisher John Cruickshank, a smart and decent Canadian, made a little speech. This was the biggest story of our lives, yes, but it is also an enormous human tragedy. We should pray. So we all bowed our head and uttered a little silent prayer, then went back to work. I’m not generally a fan of public displays of piety, but it seemed the right thing to do, and I was grateful.
I won’t attempt to summarize all the bad that came from those attacks. Two needless wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Over 7,000 U.S. military deaths — twice the loss of 9/11 — not to forget over 200,000 civilian deaths. I don’t recall that being called a genocide. The sweeping, intrusive Patriot Act. George W. Bush tried not to demonize Muslims, but others were not so scrupulous — anti-Islamic hate was a major leg of Donald Trump’s winning campaigns, and he barred immigration wholesale from Muslim countries.
On Sept. 12, 2001, I showed my older boy the front page of the New York Times, its photo of an explosion boiling out of the World Trade Center, and asked him what he thought about the picture, worried how he was processing 9/11’s enormity. He said it looked beautiful — he thought it was a flower, a red rose, and I didn’t correct him. The horror was very hard to wrap your mind around. It still is.