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NPR Remembers
Journalists Recall the Events, Feelings of Sept. 11
From hosts on the air and reporters in the field to professionals throughout the publc radio system, the people who put NPR on the air were as transfixed as the rest of America by the events of Sept. 11. Here, some of their personal recollections of the day.
Ken Barcus, Midwestern Bureau Chief
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PHOTO: Cade Martin 2000
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I was at my desk reading story pitches in my email when an editor in Washington, D.C. called me and said to turn on the TV -- that a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Towers. Then another phone call, and another, telling me more details bit by bit as I sat transfixed by the images of what I was seeing broadcast. The architects in a nearby office came in and we huddled around the small television in my office. There was lots of talk about the likelihood, from a design standpoint, that the building could withstand such a crash without being damaged beyond repair. Nobody was predicting that a building would collapse from such a hit -- and then the first building crumbled into dust.
That was soon followed by frantic phone calls from D.C. telling me to get in my car and head East -- little more, just that a plane had crashed somewhere in Pennsylvania and I was the closest NPR staffer to the site. I packed some recording equipment and ran out the door. Repeated calls to D.C. on my cell phone went unanswered, as cells were jam-packed by all the phone traffic. Listening to NPR's coverage while speeding on the turnpike, I was able to pull out a map and figure out where I was actually supposed to be heading.
When I arrived at Shanksville, Pa., nearly four hours later, I did a lot of hollering out the window at locals, asking for directions to the crash site. When I arrived, it was already a mini-camp of local satellite TV trucks and reporters, all seeking some kind of information, anything at all. It was a beautiful Fall day, sunny with low humidity. We were in what felt like the middle of nowhere, on a hilltop overlooking reclaimed strip mining land. I rushed to get on a small bus shuttling reporters to the site -- and saw a huge black smoldering hole in a field,with rescue workers dressed in haz-mat suits picking through the rubble. Just beyond the hole, the trees of the nearby woods were splintered where the plane continued to break up.
I finally got through to NPR on my cell phone and began to file stories for our live coverage. I remember telling Robert Siegel that this site was about as different from the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon as one could imagine -- that, if this was an attack, it was a thwarted one. Nobody would aim for this field in Shanksville. Soon after, John Ydstie arrived from Washington and we began to plan just how we should cover this sad event.
Jason Beaubien, NPR contributor, formerly of member station WBUR
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PHOTO: Liz Bulkley
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September 11th for me will always be tied to my wedding.
I was off from work because I was supposed to be getting married that weekend. When the second plane hit the World Trade Center I called in to the newsroom at WBUR and they sent me straight to Logan airport.
The cell phone networks were overloaded and it was impossible on my phone to place a call. When I got to Logan all I knew was what I'd heard on the radio. Airport officials also seemed to have very little information. The head of security summed up the situation in an odd way saying that all of Logan's airplanes were accounted for except two. It was as if the two missing planes might be adrift out over the continent somewhere or one of them might come crashing down on us at any minute. Only later did they tell us that it was the two planes from Boston that hit the Trade Center Towers.
The airport had been evacuated. In the bright mid-morning sunshine a strange stillness hung over the usually bustling terminals. The calm was broken only by unmarked police cars which screamed through, blue lights popping in their grills, and fighter jets which occasionally buzzed the runways.
Even among the press corps, which is usually a pretty hardened lot, there was a sense of unease and concern that we may have only just seen the beginning of an all out attack on the United States.
The next morning my fiancé and I decided that it didn't matter no one could fly to our wedding, we were getting married anyway.
Melissa Block, New York Correspondent
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PHOTO: Antony Nagelmann
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In hindsight, it's painful to think back to how innocuously Sept. 11 began. The day started for me with a one-line news item on our local NPR station's morning broadcast -- an alert about a fire at the World Trade Center. I made a quick phone call to my editors, letting them know that I'd be on my way there -- no way to know how significant this was, but you never know. Within minutes, an update from TV: a plane had hit the north tower. Still, the mind tries to shrink from the worst-case scenario. It must have been a pilot veering accidentally off course. Another call to my editor, in retrospect, stunning in its naïveté: "You know, you should probably send another reporter down there to back me up." By the time I was out the door of our New York bureau, the second plane had attacked the south tower. By the time I was two blocks away, workers evacuating the Chrysler Building were reporting that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon.
The east-side subway that I rushed onto to get downtown quickly went nowhere. Announcements from the conductor first attributed the delay to an "incident" at the Trade Center. More than an hour later, when the train finally started moving, the "incident" had become an "attack." I finally got out of the subway at 14th Street, far from the Towers, figuring I'd walk -- or run -- the rest of the way. Another call to my editor, who sounded amazed I had gotten a cell call through. "Why? What's going on?" I asked. "Both towers have collapsed," she said. I turned my head south in disbelief, saw huge, dark clouds of smoke where the towers had stood, and burst into tears.
The rest of the day is a blur of heart-stopping images and conversations. The grizzled construction worker up from West Virginia whose voice grew strangled as he described hearing the first plane scream low over his head. The police lieutenant caked in dust and ash who told me of watching debris fall from the towers -- only to realize the pieces had arms and legs. A young National Guardsman, exhausted after a long night of hunting for survivors by flashlight, but finding only body parts. And finally, the woman I spoke with at 1 a.m. outside a family assistance and counseling center set up to help people find their loved ones. Katherine Munoz was trying to find her husband. His name wasn't on any of the lists of those who'd been accounted for. Ms. Munoz began weeping as we spoke, her voice a wail of utter misery and helplessness. She told me, "I wish I could just go there and dig myself if I could. It's just not knowing and waiting and thinking, 'Oh, my God, what if he's dying and I can't hold his hand? What if he's in pain and I can't help him?'"
I had gotten engaged just four days before the attacks, and as she said this, I thought of my husband-to-be. I still can't listen to that tape without getting choked up. Sept. 11 left us aching for that connection -- a primal need to assuage the pain, to somehow make it better.
Korva Coleman, newscaster, host of Weekend Performance Today and SymphonyCast
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PHOTO: Antony Nagelmann
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My first memory is of Greg Peppers (Newscast Executive Producer) striding by with a look on his face like a thundercloud. "What is it?" I hollered as he passed, seeing something was wrong. "A plane just flew into the World Trade Center," he growled and strode on. My television was off and the first alerts hadn't yet crossed the wires, so I leapt up to follow him. I had to run to catch up because Greg was already far ahead of me. I wondered what the hell had happened to the air traffic controllers. We reached the Newscast Unit minutes before the south tower was hit.
There's always some kind of ongoing activity within the Newscast Unit; even during our quiet times, there's at least a hum. And, of course, we truly come to life during breaking news. As we turned our heads toward the TV, the second plane struck the second tower. A silence crashed over the room.
Neal Conan, host, Talk of the Nation
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PHOTO: Antony Nagelmann
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Sept. 11 was my second day on the job as the host of Talk of the Nation, but I'd substituted many times before -- once, as it happened, on the day of the Oklahoma City bomb. By the time I arrived at work that day, the first plane had already hit, and there was a tremendous feeling of deja vu for me, a sense that what looked like a fire on a high floor of the World Trade Center was going to develop into something much bigger. I honestly don't remember what shows we had planned for that day, but we were debating how much to devote to the World Trade Center when we all saw the second plane hit on television. A few moments later, Bruce Drake, the Vice President for News, came over to say he wanted to go to rolling coverage and that the TOTN crew would be responsible for noon to 4 p.m. Later in the day, we were asked if we could also cover the time period after All Things Considered, from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., so that was the first in a series of very long days. Having only recently returned from working baseball play-by-play, I called them day-night doubleheaders.
Those first days were so intense, the work so absorbing and so demanding, that I didn't have time to reflect. It was a bit of a blur, scanning the wires constantly, watching TV out of the corner of my eye and trying to squeeze in some sleep between our two shows and maybe another four hours at night. I was so grateful to be that busy, to have something to do.
The first time I could slow down at all was on the second Saturday afterwards. I remember standing alone in my kitchen, a mug of coffee in my hand, listening to Scott Simon's eloquent story from New York, and the emotional barriers let go. I stood there and cried.
Bob Edwards, Host, Morning Edition
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PHOTO: Cable Risdon 1999
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I was preparing for an upcoming interview with Harry Belafonte, listening to CDs and making notes. I walked out the door of my office at 9 a.m. and everyone was gathered around the television set, looking at the World Trade Center with a hole in it -- and the notion was that some poor soul had mistakenly flown his small plane into the building. While we were looking at that, another plane comes along and flies into the other tower. Well, now it's a story -- it's not an accident, it's not a local New York story, this is huge. Two planes, two towers, no accident.
So I go back on the air, and talk first to a reporter at WNYC, Kerry Nolan, and then to (NPR Senior Correspondent) Jacki Lyden, who could see the towers from where she lived. By that time, the station in New York and the people here were lining up witnesses -- and this is where technology came in, because anyone with a cell phone now is a radio reporter, and for a story like this that is a magnificent thing. I go back so far, there was a time when this wasn't possible. And now everyone's a reporter, you can be right down in the street experiencing everything that's going on there and passing it on to us here in the studio and then out to all the listeners across the country.
Then President Bush made his statement and then I'm talking to (NPR National Security Correspondent) Tom Gjelten at the Pentagon about whether this has national security implications because we didn't know at the time. The President called it "an apparent act of terrorism" -- and I didn't use the word until he did because I didn't know what this was. And while I'm talking to Gjelten, a plane hits the Pentagon...
It was an extraordinary morning - it was just seat-of-the-pants radio, nothing planned. I remember saying that the towers, when they were still on fire, looked like flares. But I couldn't, I simply couldn't describe the collapse of a 110-story tower -- much less twice. I still can't quite get over what happened.
There's an understanding of conventional war, that this is what happens: There's an army here, there's an army there, there are air strikes, there are artillery barrages, there are ground troops … But this was hijacked airplanes being used as weapons on civilians and the commercial center of New York, and at the very headquarters of the mightiest army in the world. No one thinks that this is going to happen, so it's a complete surprise. I'm still surprised.
Jonathan Kern, Executive Producer, All Things Considered
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PHOTO: NPR
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I was scheduled to take over the job of All Things Considered Executive Producer on September 17th, 2001; the week of September 10th was to be my last as head of Training for NPR News. On Tuesday, the 11th, we were working with journalists from around the country who had come to NPR for a series of workshops and seminars. As we were preparing for the day's session, my colleague Sora Newman drew my attention to a TV set. We could see the billows of smoke arising from the World Trade Center; soon someone said that a plane had crashed into one of the towers. I mentally began composing something to say to my guests about how this would allow them to see how NPR handles breaking news. It quickly dawned on me that I would not have the luxury of observing that process along with them; I was going to be one of the people getting that news on the air. I rushed down to the ATC area, where the staff was transfixed by the horror of what was happening. It took a real effort of will for us to pull ourselves away from the TV set to plot out how we would begin to tell this story. The job was made easier because we, too, were so hungry to find out who the perpetrators were, what their motives were for attacking the U-S, how many people had died, how the government was going to respond -- in the end, we got through that first day by answering those basic who, what, when, where and why questions. And each piece of information we gathered seemed to raise more questions. So I started my new job at ATC with a six-hour live broadcast, and a 15-hour workday -- a pace we kept up all week. The rush of news each hour made it easier to keep the horror at arm's length. It was only after I'd gotten home that Friday, sitting by myself in the early hours of the morning, that the enormity of the tragedy broke through, and I let myself feel the grief that the rest of the country had been experiencing all week.
Jacki Lyden, senior correspondent
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PHOTO: Will O'Leary
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The World Trade Towers were the twin campaniles rising on the horizon, the view from my window, and talismanic. Though I couldn't really see them when the leaves were on the trees, I knew exactly where they were and I could see the smoke in the sky. My window was my frame, lens, and portal the morning of the Sept 11 attack. I'd been at my desk working when my brother called from Wisconsin to ask how close I lived, from Brooklyn, to the WTC. He'd heard a plane had hit one tower. I immediately suspected terrorism and started dialing Washington, getting through, if I remember rightly, just before the second attack. I was surprised to be put on the air live with Bob Edwards immediately because I didn't know much... for the next half hour or so, though, I could hear WNYC, which was right there...until they were evacuated. I stayed on with Bob and stayed at the window, but I couldn't wait to go to the scene of attack. In my last two-way with him I announced that I'd be riding my bike over the bridge into Manhattan, because I still couldn't get a phone line or internet line to DC. That's just what I did -- it was hard to get over the Manhattan Bridge, but I hid in the stream of people coming back from Manhattan. I mean that I went in the opposite direction; against the tide of humanity. I rode into crowds in Chinatown -- people still covered in ash; people telling horrible stories of other people jumping. I rode my bike as far into the site as possible because I knew it would be some time before I got that close again. I rode past several police checkpoints. I had my computer and my tape recorder and nothing else, really. Water. But there was soon no point in continuing to ride; because the bike tires were sinking in ash and I couldn't see my hands in front of my face and couldn't breathe so rode back. It was a long, long ride up Bowery to Second Avenue... there were policemen at every corner. What I remember thinking is that it was the most perfect day for fate to have been changed; for so many lives to have been atomized, for our very consciousness to have been altered forever.
Kerry Nolan, of member station WNYC
Listening back to my first report on Morning Edition, I sound so naïve. I couldn't wrap my brain around the obvious - we were under attack. There was a danger in assumption, but assumption was all we had. Oddly, I only became afraid of what was happening when I thought of my colleagues, some of whom I knew were running toward the towers from the WNYC studios only 5 blocks away. There were no phone connections into the city and the only way I knew anyone was safe was when I heard their voices on the air. I live on the Jersey shore, within eyesight of lower Manhattan. The city was shut down, but my small fishing town was gearing up to receive boatloads of people at the marina. No one knew whether those arriving would simply be injured or whether the dead would be aboard as well.
I remember watching a couple of women get off one of the commuter ferries - dazed, silent, their suits covered in ash. They were interviewed by emergency medical technicians and brought to a decontamination tent, where they were literally hosed down to remove asbestos and who knows what else from their clothing. These women walked away dripping wet, carrying their shoes, still silent. There was no context to any of the reporting we did that day; all we could do was tell what we saw. There was no time for fear or for crying; just for absorbing the scenes and attempting to tell anyone near a radio just how incomprehensible it all was. That night, I looked across the water to the city. I felt a fierce love and a fierce anger. Behind the smoke, the normally sparkling lights looked as if someone had dragged a filthy thumb across the skyline.
Scott Simon, host, Weekend Edition Saturday
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PHOTO: Lisa Berg 1999
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I was having my hair cut and my wife came down to get me because my cell phone didn't work in the hair salon. And she told me that a plane had crashed in the World Trade Center. And, strange thing, but when I was kid, I remember there was a small private aircraft that had crashed into one of the residential skyscrapers along Lake Michigan in Chicago -- and I assumed that that was this. I did not think that it was anything more serious than that.
My wife and I love the World Trade Center. When we were courting, we used to ride the Staten Island ferry back and forth and of course you would come into the World Trade Center. The towers always struck me as the upright prongs of a magnet that would kind of draw the ferry in. So at first, it was inconceivable to me that the buildings would actually be destroyed by the attack… And then somebody began to talk in a horrified voice and say "Oh my god, somebody has just bombed the Pentagon." As soon as somebody said that, three people wearing the black smocks that you wear at a hair salon just got up and walked out. I have no idea to this day who they were, if duty called or what.
I'm still emotionally touched by events of those days and expect I will be for the rest of my life. I don't know how people who are shoe salesmen get through a period like this, because I'm just so glad that we've had the work. I'm just so glad that we could do something that we felt was useful to a fair number of people under the circumstances, on Sept. 11 and in the days that followed. We heard from people who were listening to our coverage, people who would get up in the middle of the night just because what had happened was so overwhelming, and they reached out and we were there as familiar voices. And the work that we had to do was able, in a sense, to uplift us and help us through that time.
Ellen Weiss, Senior Editor, National Desk
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PHOTO: Ali Ettili
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I was in the supermarket. Specifically, I was standing in front of the brisket section in the meat department, when my husband David called me on the morning of September 11th. I was in between jobs at NPR, having left my position as Executive Producer of ATC in mid-August and not returning to my new position as Senior Editor of the National Desk until September 19th. I was being a mom - I had dropped the kids off at school and was working my way through a long "to do" list-- food shopping for the up-coming Jewish holidays, finding piano teachers, getting carpets cleaned---and then my cell phone rang. "A plane just went into the World Trade Center" - I didn't understand - "What kind of plane? Big, little? Was it an accident? Call me back." As I worked my way up and down the aisles, there were more phone calls, more planes crashing, until finally, David simply held the phone up to CNN and let me listen. Other shoppers were getting phone calls, and a slow recognition began to creep into the store. By the time I got to the check out counter, two planes had crashed in New York, one at the Pentagon and another in Pennsylvania. I reviewed the details with the woman scanning my items, and she burst into tears. "I'm so scared," she said, "How could this be happening?" I made a mad dash for home, left the food on the kitchen floor and drove into work. There was absolutely no traffic headed downtown; everything and everyone was moving away from the city, a mass evacuation.
I walked into NPR around 11:15 -- and left at 4:30 the next morning.
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