A Decade of Hope

by Dennis Smith

  ROBERT: Twenty-five readers and about a hundred and fifty kids, I’d say. We also do a five-K run in the Oyster Bay area. And our friends come out and help us every year.

  BARBARA: And that’s grown. One hundred and fifty people this year.

  ROBERT: We have a fun run for the little kids and then a five-K race for the adults.

  ROBERT: You know, when you go back to that day, I remember being in the office, and Brooke called. And some guy picked up the phone and said, “It sounds like your daughter.” I picked it up and there was no sound. And then, next thing I saw on the screen was the tower going down. And you just can’t believe that your child’s there. I think of the days that we spent going around the city and not admitting to ourselves the worst. I’m just amazed we were able to get through it. You know, you’re not supposed to have to give the eulogy for your child. That’s not supposed to happen.

  Regarding 9/11: The only thing I think about is that somewhere one hand wasn’t telling the other what the hell was going on, and it should have been preventable. Those guys should have been caught or stopped. But, you know, these things have happened, and I’m sure maybe there will be more stories about what this group knew and didn’t tell that group. Because that’s the way the world goes around.

  BARBARA: I attend a support group that my daughter Erin suggested. One of the facilitators lives in Chappaqua, near President Clinton, and he wanted to come down and talk to us, but the group voted for him not to come, because as a whole it felt that he didn’t do enough, that he could have prevented it. So in the back of my mind, the question is always there: What if he had done more? With the embassy or the Achille Lauro or—I don’t know. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if he’d taken a stronger stand. But to blame the rest, al Qaeda, it’s like a blur to me. You can’t even put a face to it. I don’t know about blame for this whole thing, because I don’t think I’ve given it that much thought. I just go forward and do what we can do to change. And for me, change comes from education. That’s what I hope.

  ROBERT: I am not a hater, but who knows what else will come? Someone else will be unhappy with the world because of the way it is. They want a bigger share for themselves. It’s been going on for centuries. I guess we are all trying to take our hate and make it positive.

  BARBARA: I don’t think it’s hate. We just want to make something positive of this situation. I can’t say that I’ve ever hated anyone. Bob was in Vietnam, and he wrote a book that was published after he was home, letters he had written to his sister in an elementary school class. He wrote to them that he was in Vietnam to make the world safe for them. That’s how he perceived it. It’s ironic what happened with us.

  ROBERT: Since 9/11, I think I’ve gotten a little more spiritual. Our kids and my wife have not. They find no solace in organized religion. They feel that organized religion or God or whatever you want to call it has left them. Because if there was a God, Brooke would be here.

  BARBARA: Brooke and all the other people that were there.

  ROBERT: Our rabbi was new to the temple at the time this happened, and he did a yeoman’s job. He didn’t even know us, but he was very comforting in the beginning, and still is to this day. I wouldn’t say he’s extremely religious, but he is extremely learned, and a mensch.

  BARBARA: You know, I never thought I would be able to laugh again, because the ache you always feel is there, but you learn to cope, and I think that we are trying to do more than just cope. We want to show our grandchildren that it is a good world, it is a positive world.

  ROBERT: Now that they’re seven and five they’re starting to ask a lot of questions about 9/11.

  BARBARA: And their aunt Brooke.

  ROBERT: The aunt that they never met. They always talk about her as if she’s in the room, which is a little hard sometimes. I hope that as they get older they’ll be helping out to raise money for the foundation, with lemonade sales and whatever. I really want them to know what happened, and maybe my analysis of it will help them down the road.

  BARBARA: We want people to remember Brooke and everyone else who lost their lives that day. I have been looking at the designs of the 9/11 memorial. You know, I have a few questions about it. I don’t like how the names are being placed. I don’t know if I like it placed underneath, as it’s going to be. But this is what we have, and hopefully it will come out as beautiful as they are telling us it will.

  ROBERT: The first time you go down to that open pit, it’s heartbreaking, like getting hit in the chest. A stabbing in the heart. And you walk around, and you say, This is where she is. We got a couple of fragments back [and] actually had a burial.

  BARBARA: And then we had to open the casket again. And that was the worst. She’s at the cemetery, but she’s not really there.

  ROBERT: We put up a headstone because it gives us a place to go. It’s very hard.

  BARBARA: Brooke’s birthday was August 28. So the month of August, leading up to September 11, I feel washed out. It’s a terrible time. Sometimes I really don’t know why she went to Wall Street. When she graduated she went for book publishing, but she was bored with that. And then she went on the Columbia Web site and saw this opening that she applied for at Cantor Fitzgerald.

  She never even had a finance course.

  ROBERT: She went, interviewed, and was one of two out of a hundred who got hired. It was never in her makeup to be a trader or to do that type of thing. And I don’t know why she took that job. I keep thinking, Did she go there because I was there? Because my son was there? Why would she do that?

  BARBARA: It was so tragic for so many Cantor Fitzgerald families.

  ROBERT: I think Howard [Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a firm that lost 657 employees in addition to Brooke Jackman] did a superb job. He was in a tough position. His brother on the agency desk died. I must have seen the guy eight to ten times over the next two years. He would fly to New York to see all the families whose loved ones worked there, and was always sending little notes and stuff about people to us. In the beginning Howard got very bad publicity, and in the end I think he did an enormous job. I think he did the best he could, and he didn’t know what was going to happen to that firm. But he made a promise to everyone, and he stuck to it. Families who lost their sole support got health benefits for five or six years. They took care of their people, more so than any other firm I ever heard of. And now the firm is doing very well. I would never take anything away from the guy.

  BARBARA: I just keep wanting to do more. So where do we see the future ? Hopefully we will grow. We did three thousand seven hundred backpacks this year, and we will get to ten thousand. Hopefully we’ll open more libraries, more literacy programs, more read-a-thons. We just want to grow.

  ERIN: A lot of families created named efforts and said they would do them for five years or ten years. We always had a forever outlook. To grow it as big as we possibly could.

  BARBARA: I remember that Erin told me about the Susan Komen Foundation, which was started by her sister. And look how it’s grown. We said that someday we’re going to get ours to grow like that.

  ERIN: We can evolve it as the world evolves. We have a library at a domestic abuse center. Children and mothers who are victims of abuse are cared for, and there’s a whole system of support for them. While they are there, there’s the Brooke Jackman library. And we also started one of our family literacy programs there for the mothers and their children. They come back to utilize it. When they first get there, after they’ve left their homes in the middle of the night and taken almost no possessions—one mother was with her two traumatized sons in the library, and our backpacks had just arrived, and they were the first two to get them last year. They were just amazed. They saw books, the backpack, the MP3 players, and they were, like, “How did they know? How did they know I need this?” We get to experience many stories like this, and they all inspire us to reach more and more children with Brooke’s love of books.

  Cameron and Ann MacRae

&nb
sp; Cameron MacRae is of counsel to a major New York law firm. His wife, Ann, besides being a wife and a mother, is a natural volunteer and, together with her husband and others, created a foundation that improves the lives of young people, the Cat MacRae Memorial Fund. Their daughter Catherine—Cat—was working as a financial analyst with Fred Alger Management, and on 9/11 she was in her office on the ninety-third floor of the North Tower.

  ANN: Both of my daughters grew up right here on the Upper East Side of New York. We lived on Eighty-first Street until Cat was nine, and then moved here, to Seventy-second Street. Her sister Annie was five at the time. They went to the Brearley School on Eighty-fourth Street. And they did have a wonderful New York City life.

  Cat was a really great child and always excelled at everything, even in the first grade. All the students who didn’t know how to read went downstairs to reading lessons, and all of those who knew how to read stayed upstairs. Of course Cat didn’t know how to read, but Brearley made her feel like she was a genius and kept her upstairs the whole time. She thrived there. Both girls loved Brearley, and it was a lovely childhood, with weekends in Southampton. Cameron and I both went to boarding school, and neither one of us liked it, and so we did not send them away to high school. After Brearley Cat went to Princeton, where she really grew. Those were the happiest four years of her life. Because she died at twenty-three we don’t have too much to compare to, but she was the happiest at Princeton, where she graduated with honors in economics.

  CAMERON: Magna cum laude. She was a very beautiful young lady, and so is Annie. They were both very dynamic and captivating growing up. I speak of Cat as if she’s still around, not because I’m delusional, but because she is somewhat very much with us. She loved Princeton, and one of the things that was extraordinarily fun for her was sophomore year. There was a little house next to the dorm called 99 Alexandra, where she’d been assigned to live with nine other girls. That was just a wonderful time for Cat, and she ended up joining the Ivy Club.

  ANN: Where there’s a portrait of her now.

  CAMERON: Yes. If you go into Ivy now, which is probably the most traditional of all the clubs, in the foyer there’s a gallery of extraordinary Ivy Club members. The portraits are all men, but they did put a beautiful oil painting of Cat with us. She looks so beautiful.

  ANN: Cat met a chap named Andrew Caspersen there. They fell in love and were clearly going to be married. He fell for Cat’s interesting combination of being attractive, very nice, and funny—very funny. Great sense of humor. One of the things I remember the most about Cat is, if she’d heard something funny, and if she was eating, she would almost choke. She would just collapse in laughter. She was great on a level plane, and then on the unusual, too. For instance, she was very good in both English and mathematics. She had a perfect little life, and she worked very hard to get everything she achieved. She was naturally smart and naturally athletic and naturally nice, but she was also a hard worker. And that’s one of the things that broke our hearts—that she had worked so hard to get to Princeton. She always wanted to go there and had gone to Cameron’s reunions because Cameron had gone to Princeton. Since she was six, she had said, “I’m going to go to Princeton,” and in 1996 she got an early admission, which was quite a feat. While there she excelled at mathematics and got a math prize.

  CAMERON: I sometimes wonder, though, What if she had not gone directly from college to Goldman Sachs? I actually had urged her not to immediately go to Goldman, because even though it is the best investment bank, it’s certainly not the nicest place to work.

  She did leave Goldman, and the final straw was that the previous year she got an assignment the Thursday before Labor Day weekend with a “request” that it be on her boss’s desk the following workday. She knew there was no urgency whatsoever for this report, and she’d planned a weekend with Andrew, as they hadn’t had much time off during that summer. She eventually allowed herself to be lured away by David Alger, who ran Fred Alger, a fairly prominent money management firm, and she was very happy there, working as an analyst. They manage mutual funds and things like that, strictly in the high-tech area. Unfortunately, David selected the ninety-third floor of the WTC as their office site.

  ANN: Well, we all thought it was safe.

  CAMERON: It made me a little queasy because when I was a member of the Council of the Banking Commission in 1970–1972, I was in one of the World Trade Center buildings, on the thirty-second floor. I always knew that it was quite a job to get up to the top. You had to go up to the sky lobby, and then change over, and it made me nervous that Cat would be up that high. In retrospect, thinking of the first bombing in 1993, it’s now very clear to me that these people kept going after the same target. Which is a worrisome thing in New York City. Cat got a little nervous herself after she began working on the ninety-third floor, so high up.

  ANN: She did worry about terrorism. I remember her saying, “I just don’t like that building”—and she was aware of the ’93 bombing. We are very protective parents. And it’s funny, a number of the mothers of victims of the attack whom I’ve met have all said that safety was a top priority in bringing up their kids. It just did not occur to us. It’s absurd that we didn’t realize that the World Trade Center would be a target. The ’93 bombing should have been enough warning. And Richard Clarke was telling everybody. [Clarke, a counterterrorism adviser, warned the George W. Bush administration about al Qaeda before 9/11.]

  CAMERON: What we honestly didn’t know, living in New York, was how iconic our city and those buildings were. To the rest of the world the World Trade Center was the center of commerce and power. If we thought our city had a target, we would have thought it would be the Empire State Building.

  The thing that really appalled me—and I hold Bush and Cheney extremely responsible for this—was that terrorism was not a priority for Bush. Whatever the pros and cons of the Clinton administration, it was very clear that after the millennium they were very focused on terrorism. Clinton or Gore would attend meetings every day to discuss this kind of threat. When Bush and Cheney came in they rejected everything that Clinton had done. Terrorism was a very low priority. It wasn’t in the top ten, probably around number twenty-five. They just dropped the ball.

  ANN: The morning of 9/11, I was on the phone to my best friend and Cameron came in and said a plane had hit the World Trade Center. And I said, “Cameron, be quiet, I’m on the phone.” And then . . . We didn’t know. Cameron said it hit Tower 1, and we didn’t know which tower Cat was in. I remember picking up the phone book and looking up Fred Alger.

  CAMERON: We tried to call Cat.

  ANN: We never heard from her.

  CAMERON: And at that point I was watching CNBC. The thought was that maybe it was a private plane.

  We have trouble talking about that day because . . .

  ANN: I can talk about it. We had called Cat, but there was no answer—I think the call just didn’t go through. We went into total shock. Of course we did. Our best friends came over. And a lot of Cat’s friends, Princeton girls, came over. I remember going to the dining room window, and fighter jets went over all those little town houses down on the street, and I said, “Oh my God,” because when it happens to you, you’re not fully aware that it’s an international incident. Fighter jets—you can’t take it all in. But we knew the government was involved. There were a lot of young people here in our home, and every time the phone rang we thought, It might be Cat. I won’t use the profanity, but I said, If I don’t hear from her by four o’clock . . . I’m not sure I said it would mean she was dead, but it would be bad. And then at four I said, “Oh, it’s four o’clock.” And then the kids went to work and started calling hospitals.

  You know, when you grow up in an apartment building, all the doormen, the superintendent, the tenants, everybody together, it’s a village. Everybody knew Cat and was there to help within four hours.

  CAMERON: One of the doormen, with whom we were close, and who ultimately enlisted in
the marines, had an old jalopy, so he, Dennis the superintendent, and I tried to get down to the World Trade Center site. We couldn’t get past Fourteenth Street. We stopped, and I walked around in that area trying to get my cell phone working. I was hopeful, as I thought they all would have gathered in David Alger’s office, and he would have led them out.

  For the next few days I went to the hospitals—St. Vincent’s, Bellevue, even Lenox Hill—but didn’t find out anything. We had a little hope when we saw a list of survivors that had had something close to Cat’s name on it. And I had some hope that everyone would have gotten down into the subbasements.

  ANN: And you called people about that too, to find out how they were constructed.

  CAMERON: I don’t even like to go back there mentally. It’s just so awful, and it was beyond belief. I watched the collapse on TV.

  ANN: We both did. With our daughter inside.

  CAMERON: It’s a horrible thing.

  ANN: A friend of ours went to pick up Annie the next day from Amherst and brought her home. Chuck Scarborough [a local TV news anchor], who’s a friend of ours from Southampton, put up a picture of Cat on the TV news with our telephone number. We were all in our bedroom watching it, and the phone rang, and someone said, “I know where your daughter is.” It was some crank, but for a minute you believed him. You were desperate to believe him.

  We had a candlelight vigil in Central Park. Everyone came down to Seventy-second Street and lit candles. There was a picture of Cat on the door of our apartment building. People came up to me and said, I’m so sorry, and I remember saying, We don’t know.

  CAMERON: Needless to say, neither the city administration under [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani nor the national administration did anything to reach out, or try to coordinate, or to say, Here’s a master list. I think they were reasonably confused. It’s hard to tell how aggressive their efforts were.