Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. suffered the worst terrorist attack in its history. Today, roughly 40% of Americans are too young to remember the events of 9/11. Journalist Garrett Graff shares an oral history of 9/11, how that day unfolded and how it changed America forever.

Guests

Garrett Graff, journalist, historian and author covering politics, technology and national security. Author of “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11.”

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I 

(LISTENER MONTAGE)

ANGE COULOMBE: So I got home at probably about 8:30 in the morning. And then my neighbor called me and said, “Put the TV on. America is under attack.”

STEVE FORE: The TV was on tuned to CNN, and what I saw was the first burning tower. And I sat down on the bed, my mouth pretty much open, and then the plane hit the second tower.

JESSICA VALLEJO:  I remember my teacher rolling in the TV cart for us to watch the news, and unfortunately, when she did so, we also witnessed the individuals who were jumping from the towers. At the time, we didn’t understand why.

DOUG SIMMONS: I said, “Guys, the world as we know it has just changed. Everything is going to change.” And the looks on those middle schoolers’ faces, you know, 12, 13, 14 years old, they were so innocent. I don’t know that they understood the words that I was saying, and quite frankly, I don’t know that I understood the words that I was saying.

CATHY KASKA: And I remember thinking he was exaggerating. How could we be under attack? It seemed impossible.

KATI BROWN: I was thinking, “What does he mean we are under attack and that planes hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon? How can planes hit a building?”

LAUREN THACKER:  It was unbelievable. It was horrific. It was scary, and I just remember everything shutting down. Nobody really knew what to do, where to go, where was safe, who was next.

CLAUDIA NUNEZ: One of our dear neighbors, Mary, driving herself to work, just pulled up to the curb and rolled down her window … “How can this be happening in our country? How?” And of course, neither of us had an answer.

CHERYL FIELDS: And what struck me was it was such a beautiful day. The Chesapeake Bay was calm. The sky was blue and clear. And I just wept.

TAMIKA GROOMS: I remember watching the news with my one-year-old in my hand, in my arms, and knowing, knowing that everything had changed at that point and nothing would be the same.    

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Point listeners from around the country remembering September 11th, 2001. Garrett Graff joins us now. Garrett, welcome back to the show.

GARRETT GRAFF: Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: I should say that Garrett has spent years reporting on 9/11. He is an award-winning journalist, historian, and author who covers politics, technology, and national security, and he’s author of The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, which has just been revised and expanded for this 25th anniversary.

Garrett, what’s your most powerful memory, your most powerful memory of that day?

GRAFF: I remember as so many of the voices you just heard from, the surprise and the confusion of that day. And I have a lot of sort of individual memories of not understanding how the towers fell, not understanding who this Osama bin Laden person and this Al-Qaeda person that everyone on TV seemed so sure was the force behind the attacks.

A person and a group that I had never heard of. I was a college student at the time. And to me, though, the part of the day, and a couple of your callers that just referenced it here, a couple of those voices that I keep coming back to is the 17 minutes at the start of the day.

The time between 8:46, the first crash, and 9:03, the second crash. Because at this moment where 40% of the country is too young to remember the 9/11 attacks. And the story that they hear, the history textbook version of the of 9/11 says, the attacks began at 8:46, and that’s factually true.

But that’s not the way that America experienced those first 17 minutes of the attack. That from the sort of lowest ground level of the commuters in Manhattan all the way up to the President of the United States, those first 17 minutes are this jumble of hearing that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center, seeing the television video of one of the towers smoking, and having this jumble of sort of bewildering thoughts.

“Oh, it was probably a small plane. Oh, maybe the pilot had a heart attack. Maybe there was a mechanical problem. Maybe it was a navigation error.” And in those 17 minutes just how innocent America actually was that morning. Because almost no one immediately thinks we’re under attack. And you see everyone, see the news, be befuddled, have that jumble of reactions, and then go on about their day.

Because for those 17 minutes, September 11th, 2001, is not yet 9/11. And there’s this incredibly haunting quote in my book. It’s one that has haunted me for almost the 10 years since I first came across it from Peter Johansson, who was one of the New York Waterways commuter ferry captains that morning.

And he talks about how from his ferry, he and all of his passengers saw that first crash coming across New York Harbor from New Jersey. And in a few minutes, they pull into Wall Street Terminal at the base of Lower Manhattan, at the tip there. And there is paper and debris fluttering down around them from that crash and that fire.

And every single person on the ferry gets off and walks into Lower Manhattan. There’s not a single person on the ferry who’s like, the day’s vibes just seem off. I think I’ll turn around and go home and work from New Jersey. That even in that moment of seeing that first crash in Lower Manhattan, people were like, it’s Tuesday.

I’ve still got to get to work. I’ve still got to make that 9:00 call. I’ve gotta get my coffee. I’ve got to get the day underway. Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: And of course, why would they have thought any differently, right? There was the, as you write, it’s the end of one America and the beginning of another.

So let’s stay in that 17-minute window, Garrett, for a moment, because I actually just want to kind of stay in there in terms of your experience and mine, because I will fully admit I’m quite surprised by how powerfully this anniversary is really landing with me. I was 25 in 2001, and my memory of the day, I was at home as a grad student and just had a little tiny television with rabbit ears.

And like many people you just heard, and by the way, those On Point listeners, we just asked them to share your memories of 9/11. That’s all. And as you pointed out, what is remarkable is almost everyone zeroed in on those first two planes in New York, because of course, the Pentagon was also attacked, and a plane went down in Pennsylvania.

But without having to ask specifics, those are the moments that live in people’s hearts and minds. And for me, I remember exactly what everyone else said. I was sitting in my living room watching my little TV, and I was old enough to realize that something major had happened. I didn’t know what it was.

But I was cognitively old enough to say, “Okay, this is probably a big event.” But then as folks have been saying, I also just remember looking out the window and thinking, “What a beautiful day.” Everyone says that.

GRAFF: Yep. And there’s a specific reason for that which is there was a unique meteorological phenomenon that morning called severe clear. And there was this large set of thunderstorms that come through the northeast on the evening of September 10th. And what they did was they washed out the humidity, the clouds. And the next morning, the sky was literally as visible as it can be. Aviators call it a clear and a million day, that effectively, visibility is unlimited. And that in some ways, made the day so much more confusing for people. And coming back to that sense of innocence, that sense of befuddlement, FBI Director Robert Mueller was actually, he had just started his second week on the job. He started as FBI director on September 4th, 2001.

He was at FBI headquarters in Washington, and he was sitting literally in a briefing on Al-Qaeda. The FBI was walking him through the major cases that the FBI had underway. Of course, Osama Bin Laden had actually been on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list at that moment since June 1999, more than two years before the September 11th attacks.

And Mueller’s briefing is interrupted by news that a plane has hit the World Trade Center, and Mueller looks out the window and says, “How could a plane have hit the World Trade Center on such a clear day?”

CHAKRABARTI: It seems so wildly incongruous with the beauty of that morning. So you were a college student?

GRAFF: Yes. And coming back to that television moment that you were talking about, I remember hearing about the attacks at breakfast. It’s a very boring memory, but I could still tell you 25 years later, I could walk into that dining hall and tell you exactly where I was sitting, everyone that I was with. And I went back to my room and watched it on TV for a little while, and then I ran down to the college paper. I was a reporter on the college paper. And this was 2001. We didn’t have the instant access that everyone has. And so I arrived some point after the first tower collapsed, and had not heard that, not seen that.

And I remember walking into the newsroom that morning and just seeing the one tower and not being able to wrap my head around what TV angle I was looking at that one of the towers was being totally blocked by the other one.

CHAKRABARTI: You make a really good point, Garrett, because I only was alerted to what was happening when a friend of mine from London called.

She just called me and said, “Turn on your TV.” And I was like, “Why?” So the immediacy that we have come to expect with thinking that we know exactly what’s going on was not there at all. Completely different world, and it’s a world in which I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s hard to remember just not only how much we didn’t know, but how long that confusion, as you said, really lasted.

So we’ll come back with more. This is On Point.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: We’re going to be playing lots of tape of voices from that day. It’ll be familiar to some of you, and for others, this will be the first time you have ever heard it. It’s all very intense. Just want to let you guys know that. So the first voice we’re going to hear today is of Betty Ann Ong. She was an American Airlines flight attendant who was on board American Airlines Flight 11.

Now, Flight 11 took off from Boston and was headed to Los Angeles, and at 8:46 a.m., it ended up, because it had been hijacked, crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. But just before that, Betty was the first person to alert authorities that hijackings were taking place, and here is a clip of a call she made from Flight 11 to the American Airlines Operations Center.

BETTY ONG: The cockpit’s not answering. Somebody’s stabbed in business class, and I think there’s mace. That we can’t breathe. I don’t know. I think we’re getting hijacked.

CHAKRABARTI: Garrett, what do you think?

GRAFF: Yeah, this is a moment where, again, you get a glimpse of just how innocent the country was that morning. Because for those first three hijacked flights, the two that crash into the World Trade Center and then the third that crashes into the Pentagon at 9:37 that morning, there is very little sense that these planes are going to be used as missiles.

That just wasn’t in the frame of reference that people had. A lot of people had experience with airplane hijackings in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. There was a time, actually, in American life where they were very common. And they all had roughly the same arc to them of, someone would try to hijack a plane and fly to Cuba to flee to Cuba or try to hold the passengers at ransom on the ground for a period of time.

And so all of the aviation community was basically trained at that point to cooperate with a hijacking. Don’t escalate things, don’t put passengers’ lives at risk, don’t put the crew’s life at risk. And the one flight that is different that day ends up being United Airlines Flight 93, the fourth and final plane hijacked that morning.

And that’s because it takes off from Newark Airport outside New York City, and like anyone who has ever flown through any New York City airport, Flight 93 has exactly the same problem as everyone else. It gets delayed taking off. And so it takes off about 40 minutes late.

And so the telephone calls back and forth from that plane, the passengers and crew are able to learn about what has happened at the World Trade Center, what has happened at the Pentagon, and they realize that their plane is a missile and that they have the opportunity, unlike the passengers on the other three planes, to take action, and that their fate is already sealed, but that they have the opportunity, one hopes, they hoped to save the lives of others.

And so starting at about 9:57, 9:59 that morning, the passengers and crew, the 44 passengers and crew that morning, storm the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93. And fight the hijackers, and the hijackers end up crashing the plane into an abandoned coal field outside Stoystown, Pennsylvania, near Shanksville, which is where we now shorthand that attack as happening.

CHAKRABARTI: Here is the voice of CeeCee Lyles, who was aboard Flight 93. She was a United Airlines flight attendant serving that day. Now you’re about to hear what she told her husband because she called him right before the passengers, as you said, took control of the flight from the hijackers or tried to take control of the flight from the hijackers.

But here is the message. Here’s part of the message that CeeCee left for her husband.

CEECEE LYLES: Baby, you have to listen to me carefully. I’m on a plane that’s been hijacked. I’m on the plane. I’m calling from the plane. I want to tell you I love you. Please tell my children that I love them very much, and I’m so sorry, babe. I don’t know what to say. There’s three guys. They’ve hijacked the plane. I’m trying to be calm. We’re turned around, and I’ve heard that there’s planes that’s been flown into the World Trade Center. I hope to be able to see your face again, baby. I love you. Goodbye.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s United Airlines flight attendant CeeCee Lyles. Garrett, for just a moment, in hearing CeeCee talk about her children, and we had listeners at the top who remember, the last listener, remember she was holding her one-year-old. And we had several call in who said they were in elementary or middle school, right?

And their teachers dragged TVs into the room. Can you talk to me a little bit more about your thoughts about that, that we’re far enough away from this horrific moment in U.S. history that, as you said, 40% of Americans, this is just, it’s not something that they feel viscerally because they remember seeing that blue sky.

But yet that moment has also shaped the nation and in fact the entire world that they grew up in.

GRAFF: Yeah. And that to me was actually a big part of why I tried to write this book and write it as an oral history. Because one of the powers of oral history is it helps put you back in the moment of these huge historic events at a time when people didn’t know the outcome.

They didn’t know what they were living through at the time. They didn’t know, none of us knew what came next. Was this the start of even more attacks that would come in the afternoon of September 11th? Was there a second wave of attacks that would come on September 12th or in October or in 2002?

And if all you do is you read the facts of 9/11, that story that sort of you see in the history textbooks of the attacks begin at 8:46 in the morning, the whole thing is over 102 minutes later with the collapse of the second tower at 10:28. Four hijacked planes, four attacks, and 3,000 people die.

That’s all factually true, but it’s not an accurate representation of what that day was like to live through as an American. And if none of us knew when the attacks began, we didn’t know when the attacks were over, we didn’t know for much of the day how many attacks there actually had been.

As late as 1:00 that afternoon, the U.S. government still believes that there are 12 hijacked planes up in the sky over the United States. And there was no sense that day, and a couple of your callers touched on this, that the attacks were confined to only New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.

Wherever you were across the country, you felt fear and anxiety. Skyscrapers were evacuated in every major city in the United States. Disney World closes in Florida. The Toronto subway is closed and evacuated that day in Canada. And if you only learn the textbook version of 9/11, you miss the fear, the chaos, the confusion, and the trauma that it was to live through the day.

And if you miss the fear, the chaos, the confusion, and the trauma, you misunderstand, and frankly can’t understand, why America ends up reacting in the way that we do as a culture, as a people, as a government, and as a military. And growing up in the shadow of 9/11, in a world that has been reshaped in almost every way in our domestic politics and our international geopolitics by the events and the fear and anxiety that followed 9/11 and all of the downstream consequences that it unleashed, you know, from the invasion of Iraq to the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim nativism that we see roiling our streets, and the immigration enforcement and crackdown of ICE and CBP and DHS in the Trump administration.

Again, all agencies created in that fear and anxiety after 9/11. I think you really have to ground your understanding of 9/11 not in the facts, but in the emotion of the humans who lived through that day.

CHAKRABARTI: This is so important, Garrett. I want to come back to it in just a minute, but simultaneously I want to continue to honor and listen to the voices who were central, who experienced 9/11 in a much, much more profound way than I did, just watching it on TV. But here’s a little bit of tape from Ben Sliney.

This is such an interesting story. He was the national operations manager for the FAA. 9/11 was his first day on the job, and here’s a clip from a recent interview of him recounting his 9/11.

BEN SLINEY: When United 175 struck the tower that was when we ordered a national ground stop. At that point, no aircraft could take off. That left some 4,500 planes still in the air, and it was at the juncture where American 77 crashed into the Pentagon that I ordered everyone to land at the nearest airport. A ground stop technically is an order that prevents anyone from taking off.

This was a tool that we did not have, but we adopted, which was to land everybody in the air, and whoever was left, we would deal with.

CHAKRABARTI: Garrett, is Ben saying there that before 9/11, the FAA never even had any reason to consider that they would have to ground every single plane flying on any particular day in the United States?

GRAFF: Yeah. As you said, Ben Sliney is on his first day on the job as the national operations manager, and he gives two orders in what is basically his first hour in that first day on the job that no American has ever given, that first, that nationwide ground stop, which was a policy that they had. And then after the third crash, Sliney gives this order, “Land everything. Land everything now.” And that all 4,500 planes that are in the sky over the United States or inbound to the United States will be forced to land at the closest available airport regardless of the plane’s destination and regardless of whether the airport is in any way prepared to receive those incoming planes.

And so in the first 10 minutes after that order is given, air traffic controllers across the country land 700 planes unexpectedly at various airports around the country. And minute by minute, hour by hour, they begin to zero in on the planes that for one reason or another are out of communication.

And as late as noon that day, or 1:00 that day, as I said a few minutes ago they still had a dozen planes that were up in the sky that they thought were unaccounted for. And this nationwide landing, the closing of the American airspace ripples out in all sorts of ways across the country and across the continent.

And there’s sort of this one very famous thread of this story where 38 transatlantic flights inbound to the United States are all forced to land at Gander, Newfoundland in Canada, dropping 7,000 passengers into a town with just 9,000 residents. And that town is suddenly responsible with less than an hour’s notice for 7,000 passengers and crew from 38 planes who will live there through basically the end of the week of 9/11 before the U.S. reopens its national airspace.

CHAKRABARTI: Unbelievable. It’s incredible. And I think the reason that story breaks my heart now, again, America then and America now is, I have to say it, look at how our current leadership is treating the nation of Canada. It’s almost as if we’re somehow in 25 years we have formed a kind of selective amnesia of the things that maybe are, that I don’t know why, that we wouldn’t want to remember from that day, Garrett.

I’m grasping here, but it’s so different. American leadership is so different now than it was in that moment where … I guess here’s what I’m trying to say. It’s been a long time, 25 years I’d say, since it felt like the United States was so singularly unique and valued in the world, that the entire world could rally around American need.

GRAFF: Yes. And I think you said early on that this anniversary is hitting you hard this year. And I think one of the reasons that feels so true to so many people is the extent to which we look around at the state of America today, at our domestic politics, at our standing in the world and feel that there was a moment squandered as a country and a people.

That in the wake of 9/11, we have this immense moment of unity and patriotism here at home. George Bush, his approval ratings hit 90%. Flags everywhere. “United we stand” posters in the window of seemingly every business in America.

People in New York remember this sort of incredible moment of kindness that follows in the weeks after the attack, as everyone is traumatized and feels raw and in need of comforting. And there was a degree to which that was true on the international stage as well. In the wake of 9/11, NATO activates its Article 5 responsibility, the sort of an attack on one is an attack on all.

For the first and only time in its history, and it is to come to the defense and aid of the United States. And you have countries like Canada, countries like Britain, countries like Denmark, then come and fight with us, alongside us, and die alongside Americans in Afghanistan and as part of this war on terror.

And here we are, 25 years later, and we have seen the squandering of a lot of that goodwill on the international stage. We are in very tense and fraught moments with Denmark over its territory of Greenland, in very tense moments with Canada.

And here at home in the United States, if you go out to many communities and populations across the country, they will tell you today they are more afraid of the agencies created to stop the next 9/11 than they are the fear of foreign terrorists.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s listen to another voice from that day. This is Michael Lomonaco. He was the executive chef at Windows on the World, which was a restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. And Michael was actually on his way to work on the morning of 9/11 when all of a sudden, he took an unexpected detour.

MICHAEL LOMONACO: So when I showed up that morning around 8:10, I walked through the door into the concourse level, and I was about to go to the elevator when I thought, “Let me see if I can get my glasses fixed. It’s 8:00 in the morning. Maybe they’ll be able to help me.” I thought they would do it right then and there. But they did take me into the shop, and they said, “Sure, we can do that.”

They took my glasses. They examined my eyes. So really, I was sitting there finishing up at around 8:40, when all of a sudden, I felt the building shake. The lights flickered. They went out. They went back on. And within 90 seconds, they were evacuating the concourse level. And someone rushed into the examining room and said we’ve got to get out of the building, and they’re evacuating the building.

Something’s happened. They’re evacuating the building.

CHAKRABARTI: 79 employees and 91 guests died in the North Tower restaurant on 9/11. Garrett, another thing, thinking back to that, that 17-minute window in which I think you’re very right to say there was an America before and an America after. The other thing I keep coming back to is not just in, on 9/11, but in fact, for I think for several days it was the first time in my life that I felt like everyone in America was collectively experiencing the same emotion.

We were collectively shocked, collectively confused. We were all then devastated and angry together. And the tragedy actually allowed us to empathize with one another more than I have ever felt since. Do you think that the America that came after 9/11 would ever be capable again of that sort of collective emotional bond that was formed on that day?

GRAFF: I don’t think so, and I’ll come back and I’ll tell you a little bit more about that, but let me back up and explain a little bit about I think why that happened, and it has to do with the specific time period that the attacks unfold during. You mentioned hearing from a friend in London.

Part of what makes those attacks so impactful is that 9 a.m., 10 a.m. window on the East Coast of the United States meant almost everyone across the world was awake to watch the attacks unfold. It was middle of the workday in Europe. In across much of Asia, it was evening, but not quite bedtime.

And then, of course, on the West Coast, it was people waking up to some period of the attacks still unfolding. And what that meant was that everyone across these time zones had the same sort of visceral set of reactions of watching this tragedy unfold, trying to process it in real time, experiencing that same chaos and confusion.

That the TV anchors were in many cases. And to me, part of the challenge of how we will never have that moment again is just how poisoned and different our information environment now is. That if you think about how pervasive conspiracy theories around 9/11 have come to be in the months and years afterward, those conspiracies would be unfolding on social media within minutes of a crisis or catastrophe in our modern moment.

Trust in government is a lot lower, trust in authority is a lot lower, trust in institutions is a lot lower. And to me, one of the things that I actually really worry about is how different those first couple of hours of our next collective catastrophe will feel as information consumers and news viewers.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, will we be able to come together? I think that’s a really open question. And I want to remind, again, for the 40% who grew up after 9/11, that it’s not as if I’m looking back on an America of the late ’90s as this perfect place of unending national unity. There was quite a bit of political polarization.

We had just come through the 2000 election, right? And the Bush v. Gore race, which culminated in what many people will still look at as the Supreme Court’s, if not its most consequential decisions, one of its most consequential decisions. That was a very hotly contested presidential race that I think showed that the divides in America were getting deeper.

But even with that, when 9/11 comes just a little bit later, there is this moment where, again, in my very simple experience of it, the other thing I remember is leaving my apartment later that afternoon, and the streets of Boston are usually filled with drivers in a hurry to get somewhere, and people are yelling at each other and honking a lot.

That’s a normal part, as you know, of the background noise of living in a big American city, particularly in Boston. I just remember there was a lot of quiet, even hours later that day, as if we all recognized that we all had experienced a little bit of trauma, and we were all willing to give each other grace.

And that’s what I fear will be much more difficult to attain.

GRAFF: Yeah. And you’re right to emphasize that America was in no great place politically at 8:45 on Tuesday, September the 11th. And I actually have a very specific story to illustrate that, which is on the drive that morning to Emma Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, where President Bush is speaking, the motorcade goes past a group of protesters in Florida who are still angry about Bush v. Gore, which of course took place in Florida.

It was a court dispute about the Florida electoral count where the president is that day. And there was a very strong strain of certain corners of the Democratic Party and voters that morning who still viewed George W. Bush as an illegitimate president, and he faced protesters, even on the motorcade to Emma Booker Elementary School that morning.

The silence, though, that you mention. That in many ways is one of the defining memories that people have all across the country. And it is in part because of the stories that we were talking about with Ben Sliney forcing down all 4,500 planes, that what people remember all across the country, and this is another part of why the 9/11 attacks felt like they impacted people all across the country in every corner of the country, is people could feel that silence, that the sort of backdrop in urban and even rural places of planes flying overhead was gone.

And I have a quote in my book of a guy in North Dakota who goes outside his house that afternoon and realizes just how silent it is that there are no planes flying overhead. And again, if all you do is you learn the textbook version of 9/11, you miss how a guy in North Dakota feels the silence and the emptiness of the afternoon of September 12th, or September 11th.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And that how everyone else in America was feeling like that same thing. It’s just the collective shock was very powerful. I can’t come up with a better way of putting it. But so you reminded us, and I thank you for this, that President George W. Bush was in Florida on September 11th visiting a school. And we have some tape from Andy Card, who was White House Chief of Staff at the time, and folks might remember there’s very famous footage of Card going up to President George W. Bush, who was reading a book to young students and whispering into the president’s ear about the attacks.

Now, here is Card on the Today Show recounting exactly what he told the president in that moment.

ANDY CARD: When the president arrived at the school, we were told that it appears a small twin-engine prop plane crashed into one of the towers at the World Trade Center.

But the thinking was it was an accident.

CARD: Correct.

And then you got the word of the second one, and I wanna use the words. You told the president, you whisper in his ear, “A second plane has hit the second tower. America is under attack.” Why those words?

CARD: I tried to be very efficient with my words. I wanted to convey exactly what had happened, and I used two facts and made one obvious editorial comment, but I didn’t want to invite a question from the president.

I wanted just to say those words and then back away from him so he couldn’t ask me a question or start a dialogue in front of an audience of second graders or the press pool.

CHAKRABARTI: So that’s former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card. Now, in the years since, many people have criticized President George W. Bush by not, for not immediately standing up and walking away and attending to the needs of the nation. In fact, he continued reading to the children in that Florida classroom for seven minutes. Now, here is President Bush responding to that criticism in an interview with NBC.

PRESIDENT BUSH: I made the decision not to jump up and create a chaotic scene, and then all of a sudden, the cell phones are ringing. Now, the noise was —

ANCHOR: The press in the back of the room.

BUSH: But it clarified to me that people are going to be watching my reaction. The reaction of the leader is essential in the first stage of any crisis.

CHAKRABARTI: Garrett, talk about this. What do you think?

GRAFF: Yeah. President Bush gets an enormous amount of criticism for his behavior in those first eight hours or so of 9/11.

Both that moment in that classroom and then he’s evacuated into Air Force One. Air Force One spends the day hopscotching across the country to two different military bases in Louisiana and Nebraska before eventually returning to Washington that evening, where he gives an Oval Office address at around 8:30 that night.

I think actually, though, we get George W. Bush totally wrong that day. And what I mean by that is exactly as he says, if he understood he was on camera in a classroom, and him jumping up and fleeing the room and then that being broadcast to an already fearful and anxious country doesn’t help anything.

And I think actually would have made a lot of things worse in the national mood that day. And then all day long, news anchors are criticizing him for, where is the president? Why isn’t he back in Washington? And the reality, and the book that I ended up writing, The Only Plane in the Sky, grew out of a Politico article that I wrote about being aboard Air Force One with President Bush that was called, We’re the Only Plane in the Sky.

That actually President Bush spends that whole day really fighting his staff and fighting the military to come back to Washington at the first possible moment. And the military, the Secret Service, Andy Card, his other advisors, are all saying to him, Look, Mr. President under U.S. continuity of government plans and operations, your most important thing to do today is to stay alive.

And we don’t know about these other hijacked planes in the sky. We don’t know what follow-on attacks might be headed towards Washington. And we need to keep you safe until we can assure that you’re actually safe. And in fact, it’s about 3:00 that afternoon that the last plane that people are concerned about is turned back.

It was a U.S. Airways flight from Madrid. And then at that exact moment, basically President Bush stands up from his desk off at Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, and hops back aboard Air Force One, and they are flying back to Washington that afternoon, the only plane in the sky.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So Garrett, we only have a couple of minutes left, and I keep coming back to the America before these 17 minutes and the America after these 17 minutes.

And I love this country. I am at heart an American optimist. But I really struggle with, I don’t know if I can say with total honesty that I think the America after is actually better than the America that came before, because you talked about lost opportunities, and I think that’s exactly right. It’s the America after that brought us into a phase of forever wars.

The war on terror, introducing a world of wars without clear goals, and therefore no clear end. We’re doing it again now. This massive security state that you talked about, people being very fearful of DHS, which didn’t exist before 9/11. Polarized politics are concerns that we can’t actually give each other grace anymore.

But to, if we’re frank, we only have a minute left, Garrett, I’m sorry. Was any other outcome even possible?

GRAFF: I think so. I think that there are other alternate histories that America could have written. The war in Iraq, I can understand how that grew out of the war on terror, but that was very much a war of choice that has a lot of negative downstream consequences for us in the region and Europe and the Middle East beyond.

And I think, again, that’s why this anniversary feels so heavy for so many people, is looking around and realizing the true cost of these last 25 years since 9/11.

Book Excerpt

Author’s Note from “The Only Plane in the Sky” by Garrett Graff

Nearly every American above a certain age remembers precisely where they

were on September 11, 2001. What began as an ordinary day became the deadliest terrorist attack in world history and the deadliest attack on the United

States since Pearl Harbor, shocking and terrifying the global community,

exposing us to unimaginable tragedy and evil, while also reminding us of

the strength, bravery, and power of the human spirit. Heroes quite literally

emerged from the ashes, and the hours and decisions that followed defined

not just a generation but our modern era.

All told, 2,606 people died at the World Trade Center in New York

City and another 125 at the Pentagon; 206 people died when their planes—

American Airlines Flight 77, United Airlines Flight 175, American Airlines

Flight 11, flight numbers now permanently retired and part of history—were

hijacked and crashed into the centers of America’s financial and military

power; another 40 died in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, as brave passengers

and crew wrestled control of United Flight 93 back from the hijackers.

The 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City honors a precise tally of 2,983

casualties, including six killed in 1993, when the World Trade Center was

attacked for the first time by the forerunners of the terror group that would

ultimately bring these buildings down in just 102 minutes eight years later.

The 9/11 victims represented not merely Americans but citizens of more

than 90 nations.

The toll obviously stretched beyond the dead alone; more than 3,000

children lost a parent on 9/11, including some 100 children who were born

in the subsequent months and would never meet their fathers. Upwards of

6,000 people were injured, and many more would face injuries—some phys

ical, some psychological, some eventually fatal—stemming from the recovery

work. Far beyond the official numbers, however, the attacks affected nearly

every American alive that day—and hundreds of millions, if not billions,

beyond our shores, as news of the attacks was broadcast the world over.

I’ve spent three years collecting the stories of those who lived through

and experienced 9/11—where they were, what they remember, and how their

lives changed. The book that follows is based on more than 500 oral histories, conducted by me as well as dozens of other historians and journalists

over the last seventeen years. I’m deeply grateful for their work and their

understanding that history would want—and need—these stories recorded.

Collectively, these narratives help make sense of a day that we, as a country

and as a people, are still trying to process. In her oral history of the day, Eve

Butler-Gee, who on 9/11 was a clerk in the U.S. House of Representatives,

remarked on how fascinated Americans are by their own memories of that

day: “I’ve noticed we don’t listen to each other’s stories. We need to tell our

story. Someone will start saying, ‘Well, I was such-and-such,’ and the other

person will interrupt and talk over and say, ‘Well, I was so-and-so.’

The shock, in many ways, is still embedded in our memories that this thing happened on our shores, in the places where we felt the safest.” Her observation rang true to me throughout this project, as every mention of 9/11 to friends or

acquaintances immediately prompted people to pour out their own stories,

often with heart-wrenching intimacy. This book is an attempt to listen, to

hear others’ stories, to know what it was like to experience the day firsthand,

to wrestle with the confusion and the terror.

The Only Plane in the Sky is not meant to be a precise account of how

and why September 11 occurred; groups like the 9/11 Commission devoted

years of work and millions of dollars to provide those answers. Instead this

book intends to capture how Americans lived that day, how the attacks in

New York City, at the Pentagon, and in the skies over Somerset County,

Pennsylvania, rippled across lives from coast to coast, from the Twin Towers

to an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, and how government and mil

itary officials on Capitol Hill, at the White House, in mountain bunkers, at

air traffic control centers, and in the cockpit of fighter planes responded in

an unprecedented moment to unimaginable horrors.

To construct this book, I worked for two years with Jenny Pachucki,

an oral historian who has dedicated her career to stories of September 11

and who located for me about 5,000 relevant oral histories collected and

archived around the country. We closely read or listened to about 2,000 of

those stories to identify the voices and memories featured here.

As part of that, I’ve drawn upon interviews and exhaustive work from the National

September 11 Memorial & Museum and the 9/11 Tribute Museum (New York City), the Flight 93 National Memorial (near Shanksville, Pennsylvania), the

September 11th Education Trust, the U.S. House of Representatives Historian’s

Office, C-SPAN, the Arlington County (Virginia) Public Library, the Fire

Department of the City of New York, the Historical Office of the Office

of the Secretary of Defense, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Coast Guard, the

9/11 Commission, the Museum of Chinese in America (New York City),

Columbia University, Stony Brook University, and other repositories, as

well as a host of snippets and transcripts culled from news articles, magazine

profiles, pamphlets, videos, documentaries, collections ranging from the trial

exhibits of 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui to a compilation published

by America Online of its users’ thoughts, posts, and memories of 9/11, and

countless other books, including three that deserve specific mention for their

usefulness: Mitchell Fink and Lois Mathias’s terrific 2002 collection of oral

histories, Never Forget, as well as two works focused on the 9/11 New York

maritime boatlift, Mike Magee’s All Available Boats and Jessica DuLong’s

Dust to Deliverance. To supplement those existing archival primary sources,

I’ve also collected several hundred interviews, personal reflections, and stories

myself, about 75 of which are featured here. I’m grateful to all who shared

their stories.

Among these hundreds of memories collected as early as September

2001 and as recently as the spring of 2019, the chronologies and stories

don’t always line up neatly; perspectives differ, and images blur with time.

Traumatic memories especially are fallible. I’ve done my best to line things

up according to the facts and timelines available. All interviews have been

condensed and edited for clarity. Throughout the book, all titles, occupations,

locations, and ranks are accurate to that moment.

Additionally, for ease of reading and historical accuracy, I’ve edited some quotations to make verb tenses consistent and made minor factual corrections—for instance, where a speaker misremembered a name or title, such as calling the speaker pro tem the “president pro tem,” or misstating what floor the sky lobbies in the Trade Center were on—and standardized some place names, code words, and other references that would otherwise be more confusing than illuminating.

While The Only Plane in the Sky is comprehensive, it is not complete.

These stories capture only a single moment in time, and part of what makes

9/11 so poignant is learning how people fared in the days, weeks, months,

and years thereafter. (Two key players on that day—Bernard Kerik, com

missioner of the New York Police Department, and Speaker of the House

Dennis Hastert—would both end up in prison, for instance.) As the nation

united in solidarity after the attacks, it also descended into two wars that

continue to this day and reshaped multiple corners of the world; thus 9/11

remains a daily presence in our national politics and our international geo

politics, and it fundamentally changed the way we live, travel, and interact

with one another. As Rosemary Dillard, an American Airlines manager in

D.C. whose husband, Eddie, was aboard one of the hijacked flights, said, “I

still think that we all walk on eggshells. I don’t think that the young people

who will be [reading] this will know the same freedom I knew growing up.”

Today, that new generation Dillard mentions barely remembers the

day itself; 2018 marked the first year military recruits born after 9/11 were

deployed to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fall of 2019 marked

the entrance of the first college class born after the attacks. That passage of

time makes remembering 9/11 all the more important. Indeed, to under

stand all that came after, we must first understand what it was like to live

through the drama and tragedy that began under the crisp, clear blue skies

of Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

Excerpt from “Only Plane in the Sky” by Garrett Graff. Not to be reprinted without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.