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On 9/11, I was serving as Press Secretary to a Congressional Candidate on a special election in Arkansas. We didn't have a TV set up in the campaign office yet, so when I heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, I assumed it was a small plane that had gotten lost in bad weather. Campaign offices get enough calls on a regular day, but on this day, we could barely handle the deluge of calls from people trying to give us information and advice.
Needless to say, my entire press schedule for the day went right out the window. Our campaign manager had previously been a high ranking Clinton administration official. Someone e-mailed her a picture of the Pentagon taken from her old office in DC -- it looked like the photos of the Pentagon we later saw on television.
We had to pull the candidate from his schedule and get him into the office to regroup. And in a situation like that, you really have no idea what is going on, so it's hard to know exactly what sort of response someone will expect from your candidate.
As all of this was going on, I was thinking about my good friend from high school who was in Manhattan working in the fashion industry. Was she okay? Had she been anywhere near the World Trade Centers? No one could get any calls into NY.... My campaign manager and good friend was in a panic over her friends who were in Washington She couldn't get calls into DC either, so she sent out a "roll call" e-mail asking all of her friends to let her know if they were okay. Not everyone responded. We heard from one gentleman who had been a high ranking military official. His former office was destroyed in the attack on the Pentagon. He told us that he assumed his former secretary had died when the plane hit the building.
Several of us attended an impromptu church service that evening with the candidate. It was a very sobering day for everyone involved. For me personally, it was the first time that the true weight and responsibility of political office really touched me in such a profound way.
I am now working in the private sector. Interestingly enough, my current boss and the CEO of the company where I now work was on his way to a meeting in the World Trade Center on September 11th. He was running late and drove up towards the building in time to watch the first plane crash.
I must admit that this is the first time I have ever really tried to write anything about my own perceptions and experience of September 11th. What I am posting is really only a superficial version of what I saw and thought and did. I don't know if I will ever be able to really capture the way I experienced that day in words. I had a feeling that morning as I was fielding calls from the press and from others that I was not really there... I felt like I was out of my body somehow and watching the entire situation unfold, and it wasn't really real.
I'm going to stop now, because this is already really long, and if I keep typing I risk becoming REALLY overly-emotional. But I've answered the original question of "where were you?" So... where was everyone else that day?
M&M
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