9/11 Plus 15

Fifteen years ago today, I was sitting in my D.C. studio apartment reading the Washington Post and sipping my morning coffee. The day's headlines were about a big budget fight on Capitol Hill. For most, a big bag of snores and business as usual in Washington.

Lower Manhattan Pre-9/11

Around 9:45am, the phone rang. It was my sister in Salt Lake City. It was a strange time of day to be calling, but she wanted to know if I was okay? I said "sure, why?" She proceeded to scold me and said: "don't you know what's going on?"

The fact was, I didn't know what was going on. I was a graduate student-- which by default meant I sometimes didn't know what was going on. In a bid to save money (and short-circuit distractions) I didn't have a T.V. and my Internet service was bare-bones. I did have a radio, though, and flicked it on to discover that two planes had already crashed into the World Trade Center. My family had just seen television reports of a plane crashing near downtown, D.C. It looked to them as though it might be pretty close to where I worked.

"I'm okay. Gotta go."
I scrambled out the door of my building headed for SAIS where I new a large screen television in the lobby broadcast CNN 24/7. I stepped outside to a scene of complete bedlam in the streets. Washington, D.C. is a little high-strung at the best of times. Indeed, even rumors of snow generate a semi-panicked exodus out of town, gridlock throughout the metropolitan area, and shortages of bread, milk, and batteries at grocery stores. However, this was different, and on a scale no one had ever seen.

Lower Manhattan Today

I lived just a few blocks from SAIS. To get there, I had to cross 16th Street NW at Scott Circle with it's direct view of the North Portal of the White House. I crossed that street every day while I lived there and frequently stopped to have a look-- if you are a political junkie, why wouldn't you? In the distance beyond the White House, Ellipse, and Washington Monument, I could see thick, black smoke rising from the area near the Pentagon. My pace quickened as I weaved among harried pedestrians and cars that were going nowhere on my way up to SAIS. When I got there, the Kenney Auditorium was packed with students and professors, transfixed on the big screen and CNN.

On the east coast of the United States, SAIS is the well-known international affairs school of the Johns Hopkins University, one of the best (I am biased) international relations schools in the world. Yet, what struck me as I stood there watching the powerful image on the screen was just how quiet things were. Experts in international affairs were as stunned by what was happening as everyone else. Yet, perhaps unlike the rest of the country, everyone in that room also appreciated that we were watching something profound in international affairs.

I actually had a 10am appointment that day with one of my professors, Fred Holborn. He was an expert on the function of the U.S. Congress and had actually be a part of John F. Kennedy's legislative, and then White House, staff starting in 1959. He was a tremendous source of knowledge about so many different parts of the U.S. government. In fact, my meeting with him that day was to chat about the evolution of House and Senate rules in governing the legislative process (pretty exciting, huh?). On the surface, he was as curmudgeonly a professor as you could find, often seen with a cigarette hanging from his lips, at least two newspapers under his arm, and perhaps a magazine in one of his jacket pockets (yes, there were professor patches on the elbows too). There was never anywhere to sit in his office except for the chair he occupied. There were books piled on top of piles of other books and waist-high stacks of newspapers everywhere.

Pentagon 9/11 Memorial

I walked into his office a few minutes before 10am. He was watching the news coverage of the terrorist attacks on a small television on his desk. He said hello, welcomed me, and then even more of the unthinkable happened yet again; the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. We watched his little TV together for most of the next hour, including the collapse of the North Tower. It was one of those weird "where were you?" moments that will always stick with me.

He always remembered that I had watched it all along side him in his office that day. I got a chance to talk with him about it at some length during one of my many visits to DC (I moved away in mid-2002). I asked him if what we watched and how he felt that day was in any way comparable to how he felt as he in November 1963 when JFK was assassinated in Dallas. For him, both were traumatic turning points in American history. The main difference was the deeply personal aspect of JFK's death.

Anxious Days....

The next weeks and months were full of tension and fear as the entire country reeled from the attacks. No one seemed to know if it was over or not? Big chunks of Lower Manhattan were in ruins. Washington was in lock-down. Land borders were shut. Airports were closed. Within a few days, airports around the country re-opened. But everyone was skittish about flying. There were near-nightly reports of planes being stopped on the tarmac, offloaded and searched, because of unspecified threats.

National 9/11 Memorial

Moreover, Washington's Reagan National airport remained shuttered for three more weeks. As anyone who has flown through there knows, the flight path into Reagan National takes a course right down the Potomac River (for noise abatement) and past the heart of Washington. Beautiful, but not cool given what had just transpired. In fact, it almost never re-opened at all. Even after it opened, it felt like a facility under siege. For the next several years, passengers were not permitted to leave their seats inside 30min of take-off or landing-- presumably under penalty of possibly being shot by an undercover Air Marshal. If you happened to be flying from Toronto on Air Canada, there were multiple layers of security put in place at Pearson International Airport, the plane was located at the furthest point on the airport property, well away from anything else. By the time you boarded, a sense of foreboding had set in; it was like we were headed to Area 51 or something.

Reagan National remains a changed airport, distinct from any other in the country. However, as we all know, aviation has been forever changed by 9/11. Air travel was already becoming much more like riding the Greyhound, but in the years since 9/11 layer upon layer of security have compounded the indignities of flying (see 2014 post on this topic).

Piling on the Anxiety...

New Yorkers and Washingtonians were scarred by 9/11 in different ways. New York had a giant hole at the southern tip of the city. Washington had a hole in a building. But one difference was that most of Washington was in charge of crafting a policy response. It was equally hard to get away from it all.

In addition to being a graduate student, I also worked part time for the federal government in a building situated between the White House and the IMF/World Bank. The sense of siege was palpable everywhere. I walked to work, but doing so frequently meant dealing with frequent flash-security gauntlets laid down by police. In the 6 months following 9/11, D.C. was in a near constant state of panic. Nearly anything could cause entire regions of the city to be shut down. D.C. is already choked with police, overwhelmed by the noise of sirens, and punctuated by the thump-thump of helicopters buzzing around overhead. After 9/11, there was more of it, now augmented by the sound of fighter jets patrolling the skies.

National 9/11 Memorial at night

Moreover, many people around the country forget that D.C. was also the target of a weaponized anthrax attack just a week after 9/11. Members of Congress receive thousands of pieces of mail every week. Two, one addressed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Since congressional mail was already screened off site, the letters never reached the Senators. However, the anthrax spores inside killed 5 and infected nearly 20 others. The spores were eventually traced to the U.S. Military's own bio-weapons lab in Maryland, but some doubt as to who did it remains to this day.

Buildings not already fitted with blast-proof glass after the Oklahoma City truck bombings in 1995 were hastily retrofitted again. Air intakes on most buildings were sealed or re-routed to prevent chemical or bio-agents from being tossed in.

Later that fall (2001), I returned to my apartment building and received in my mailbox a notice from the FBI. It was warning to be on the lookout for suspicious activity by residents in my building. Specifically, it referenced the September 1999 apartment bombings by Chechen separatists in several Russian cities, including Moscow. The FBI was warning everyone in the building to be watchful for unspecified bad guys stuffing apartments with explosives. Great. Bulls-eye on my back was already feeling pretty big.

The final straw for many people in D.C. came in the fall of 2002 with the "D.C. Sniper." I moved out of D.C. in the summer of 2002, but returned the following October to help teach a seminar. My timing sucked. The D.C. sniper shootings were really the final stage of a cross-country string of shootings that ultimately left 17 people dead. Yet, for three weeks in October, the D.C. area was again under siege and very jumpy. In all, 10 people were killed in the D.C. area (for a country-wide total of 17) before the perpetrators were caught at a highway rest area in late October. People were being shot at long-distances while they waited for buses, at Home Depot parking lots, and while filling up at gas stations.

The anthrax attacks and sniper incidents had nothing to do with 9/11, but accentuated the sense of anxiety among a lot of people in the D.C. area in ways not felt in the rest of the country. The Imperial Capital felt as though it was in a constant state of emergency.

Much Has Changed... and Not....

The implications of 9/11 range will be written about for a very long time. In fact, the implications seem to still be unfolding. There's no good way to go about comparing what has happened in the last 15 years to things like Pearl Harbor, either of the World Wars, Vietnam, or the Cold War. However, for much of the past 15yrs, America has been fighting a different kind of war, and doing so nearly everywhere. Have Americans had to sacrifice for this war as they did during World War I or II? Have more than 57,000 Americans been killed, as happened in Vietnam? Was 9/11 a modern Pearl Harbor? No. But, 15 years in, we don't seem any closer to a resolution. The World Wars were over after 4 years. Even Vietnam eventually came to an end after 10-ish years.

Wall of Names, Flight 93 National Memorial

But 9/11 was a searing event in modern American history. The changes wrought by the day have been profound. In addition to actual fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans have been engaged in bitter debates about surveillance (Edward Snowden), interrogation techniques (Gitmo, Black Sites), the drone war, and civil liberties. We've seen the reorganization of the entire federal government (Homeland Security), the entities of which have changed everything about how we travel, especially by air (TSAPre), enter the country (passports, US-VISIT, Global Entry), and our local police forces are increasingly indistinguishable from the military. At large public gatherings, we now expect such force to be on display and behind the scenes.

More importantly, after a little debate and resistance, a lot of this has faded into the woodwork, taken for granted as just a common place part of post-9/11 life.

D.C. itself has changed dramatically in the last 15yrs. The sense of imminent threat has receded, but the response to 9/11 has transformed the city. The D.C. area has a relatively diverse economy, including an important hi-tech corridor to the West of the city. However, the bread and butter of Washington remains federal spending, more so with the growth of the national security state. Indeed, whereas the financial crisis of 2008 crippled parts of the country, the growth in federal spending immunized Washington from the downturn. Parts of D.C. I used to consider a little dangerous now have shiny offices full of lobbyists, renovated row houses selling for $1million+, a Starbucks on every corner, and a Whole Foods a block away. Indeed, parts of the city that hadn't changed since the 1960s have been totally transformed.

9/11 and its immediate aftermath have been the searing geopolitical earthquake of my lifetime to this point. I acknowledge a tendency to think of the world in terms September 10th vs. September 12. I don't deny the myopic limitations of such a binary view, but it's an event that looms as large as ever.

I'll be thinking about 9/11 a bit more than usual because it's the 15th anniversary of an event, and all of those that followed, I found personally searing. Equally important, after 15 years,  I'm less certain than ever as to how or when it all ends, or what it will eventually cost. Some of America's response certainly looks as though it made things worse, but much had been simmering beneath the surface prior to 9/11 and wasn't going to stay that way forever (See Zakaria's excellent piece on this). Zakaria's view that the real problem unleashed by America's invasion of Iraq had been decades in the making-- autocratic governance that fueled the rise of political (and appeal of radical) Islam-- is ultimately depressing as well. It follows that a set of challenges decades in the making is going to be a work in progress for a long time to come.

One personal consequence of that day has been that I no longer rely on newspapers as the first source of information I go to in the morning. Every day for 15 years, my first act in the morning has been to reach for the television remote..... I did so again today.