by Nick Bryant
The following day, having rehearsed it so many times on the campaign trail, W finally got to recite the oath of office for real. All Al Gore got to deliver, meanwhile, was a rueful one-liner: ‘You win some, you lose some, and then there’s that little-known third category.’
August could hardly have done more that year to cement its reputation as the red-letter month of the journalistic silly season. Washington was engrossed by a B-grade sex scandal involving a C-grade congressman, a Californian non-entity called Gary Condit who came with that Beltway blend of an over-sized ego, over-active libido and blow-dried hair.
He was alleged to have had an affair with a young staffer, Chandra Levy, an intern, no less, which gave the story a Lewinskylite allure. What turned it into round-the-clock news, however, was the more sobering fact that she had not been seen for weeks and might even have been pregnant at the time of her disappearance. With little else vying for airtime, the cable news channels performed their usual alchemy of turning a mini-imbroglio into a mega-scandal. There were the banner logos, ‘The Search for Chandra’, and the mandatory chorus of bloviators and talking heads – perma-tanned LA trial attorneys, ranting ideologues, under-employed political consultants, the latest right-wing pinup, and sanctimonious virtue tsars all shouting over themselves.
Congressman Condit also performed his duty by agreeing to sit for a prime-time confessional. ‘Did you murder Chandra Levy?’ asked the interviewer Connie Chung. Throughout the summer of 2001, it was Washington’s most burning question and guiltiest pleasure.
President Bush was out of town, having decided to spend August on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, or the Western White House, as his aides preferred to call it in the hope – forlorn as it turned out – that people would not think him a slacker. There, he cleared brush, challenged his Secret Service detail to race him in the hundred-degree heat, went mountain-bike riding and pondered whether America should allow scientists to perform research using stem cells. Unbeknown to us at the time, on 6 August 2001 Mr Bush was also presented with a presidential briefing item entitled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US’. It did not appear to unduly trouble him. ‘All right,’ he reportedly told his CIA briefer, ‘you’ve covered your ass now.’
Oblivious to the heightened terrorist alerts, most of us thought the president had picked a perfect time to be out of the capital. That year, August brought not only its customary humidity but also the worst floods since the Second World War. An eruption of exploding manhole covers also terrorised shoppers in the streets of Georgetown. In a frivolous dispatch, penned during lulls in the Condit scandal, I described my heroic efforts in holding back the invading waters from my basement apartment by forming a flood barrier with back issues of The New York Times, and reported how visits to Barnes & Noble on M Street had never been more treacherous. ‘Twin disasters struck Washington DC last weekend,’ I wrote at the time, offering further proof that in the absence of any real great drama that summer we had to invent our own.
Devoid of much of its normal thrusting energy, America muddled along – revisiting its heroic past as much as dwelling too often on its tawdry and unadventurous present. At the movies, the summer blockbuster was Pearl Harbor. On television, it was HBO’s Band of Brothers. Both were part of the Second World War revivalism, now bordering on idolatry, that followed the publication of Tom Brokaw’s surprise bestseller The Greatest Generation and Steven Spielberg’s wartime epic Saving Private Ryan. As if to prove the point, The Wild Blue, a book by the Second World War historian Stephen Ambrose about the young Americans who flew B-24s over Europe, topped the New York Times bestseller list. On Broadway, it was ‘Springtime for Hitler’, and the most pressing matter on the minds of many New Yorkers was how to get a ticket for the smash-hit musical The Producers.
On Condit duty throughout August, I planned to go on vacation in early September. Before heading off, I filed a story out of New York relevant now only for its utter triviality. Scandal had rocked the world of Little League baseball. It centred on a phenomenal 11-year-old pitcher from the Bronx who had been the standout star of the recent World Championships. At five foot eight inches tall, he towered over not only his fellow Little Leaguers but some of his adult coaches as well, which raised inevitable doubts about his eligibility. Predictably enough, when reporters examined his birth records, they discovered he was actually two years older than he should have been – another story that was turned into a modern-day morality tale to fill a few column inches in New York. Did I mention that the silly season had rarely been sillier?
September is such a perfect time to holiday in North America – or so I used to think. I headed off to visit friends in Calgary, Canada’s take on Dallas, and then drove through the Rockies, where the turning trees were a blaze of bronze and tangerine, and on to Vancouver, that haven of liveability. Then I followed the Pacific coast down to Seattle.
On 10 September 2001, I remember enjoying the most blissful of days. I wandered through the Pike Place Fish Market, overlooking the harbour. I had a latte at the original branch of Starbucks, a heritage site for some, a pilgrimage site for others. I enjoyed the architecture of Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project, a futuristic building whose curvaceous, shining metal skin looked like an early prototype for his opus in Bilbao. In a second-hand bookstore, I even came across a book I had been hunting down for years, Mr Kennedy and the Negroes.
Work seemed a million miles away. I did not know yet, but the distance the next morning would feel greater. Pondering the giant strides being made in American brewing, I drank a few Sierra Nevada pale ales and spent the evening in the company of Mr Kennedy and the Negroes. Before turning in, I flicked through the news channels, as holidaying correspondents are prone to do, to reassure myself that nothing of any great significance was happening in my absence. Then I fell asleep.
Needless to say, the biggest story of my working life, the most consequential event a Washington correspondent could ever cover, the moment that the world changed forever, the instant my career was severed in two, struck while I was still comatose. Asleep in Seattle!
Switching on the television in the morning, still oblivious, my first glimpse of Lower Manhattan on 11 September was a tight close-up – an almost microscopically tight close-up – of the gash in a small section of one of the towers. In the slow motion of initial recognition, I recall thinking that a Cessna or other light plane must have ploughed into the tower. Big, but not that big, I remember thinking, inclined as journalists are to immediately assign a ranking to every event. Then the picture switched from a close-up to a panoramic view of Lower Manhattan. With manic suddenness, the usual currencies of news were completely worthless. What confronted us on our screens stretched the bounds of understanding.
I grabbed my mobile to check it for messages, but its crystal display registered my irrelevance. Just one missed call. From my mother. After trying repeatedly, I eventually managed to get through to the bureau in Washington, knowing that I was surplus to requirements and feeling almost apologetic for calling. My harried bureau chief was considerate enough to at least pretend that I could make some useful contribution. With dozens of planes still in the air, and some of them thought to be under the control of hijackers, he suggested I head for Los Angeles, where the next wave of attacks was expected to come. With airplanes already grounded, LA was a three-day drive away, and he knew as well as I did – although, again, he was generous enough to leave it unsaid – that I had completely missed the story.
I recount all of this with abject apologies, hoping that my passport from Correspondentland grants me a degree of diplomatic immunity. I know now, and knew then, that missing a story – even a story on the scale of 9/11 – did not merit even the tiniest of quivers on the gauge of human suffering. On that awful morning, I promise you that my first thoughts and tears were for the poor people in those towers. But I hope you will forgive me when I admit to feelings of self-pity as well: a combination of professional helplessness tinged with professional je
alousy, since I knew that my friends and colleagues in Washington were busy covering the defining story of our careers.
Still more shamefacedly, the only time that day when my spirits were briefly lifted was when I learnt that many of my colleagues were even further from Washington than I. One, the human megaphone from Rabin’s funeral, was in Nicaragua, where even his voice was out of range. Almost a decade on, I also discovered that Christopher Hitchens had been marooned in Washington state, which again raised my spirits. Yet, as you can no doubt detect from the use of the self-incriminatory phrase ‘almost a decade on’, the scar tissue from being absent from my post on 9/11 is still in the process of forming.
Over the years, I have concocted various consoling ex post facto rationalisations. I would have botched the story. I would not have immediately grasped its immensity. There were correspondents that day, after all, who did not acquit themselves brilliantly – though there were countless others whose coverage was riveting and heroic. Stephen Evans, our New York business correspondent, was even in the lobby of the World Trade Center when the first plane hit.
Perhaps I saved myself the hassle of becoming embroiled in some of the far-fetched conspiracy theories soon appearing on the web that claimed that the BBC and its correspondents were complicit because we apparently reported that one of the nearby towers, Tower 7, collapsed 20 minutes before it actually did. (Not that I suspect it will make much difference to our accusers, but I promise you that the BBC is far too bureaucratic, unwieldy, gossipy and downright honest to do conspiracies.) For a time, I tried to convince myself that it was actually a positive that I had missed 9/11, because it gave me a measure of detachment in covering the aftermath.
Instead of playing a central role on 9/11, I went through the motions of professionalism on the periphery. I set off for Los Angeles, but I made it only as far as Portland, Oregon, where I hired a local cameraman and started to gather material. Main Street reaction sort of stuff. Already, the city was bedecked in flags. Hand-painted patriotic signs of support hung from overpasses on the freeway. Long lines had already started to form outside blood-transfusion centres. Evening church services were packed.
Then, rather like a castaway stranded on a desert island who suddenly spots footprints in the sand, I also discovered that other Washington-based colleagues were also on the west coast. Immediately, we hatched plans for our speedy return and even had a Lear jet on standby in Los Angeles, ready to take off the minute that American airspace reopened. Just outside London, another chartered plane was also on standby, at Stansted Airport, ready to fly all the big-name correspondents and presenters from the BBC and its rivals over to New York. The passenger manifest included some of the most illustrious names in broadcast journalism, the most irrepressibly vain as well, so inevitably the plane soon came to be dubbed ‘Ego One’.
Eventually, after three interminably long days, hundreds of phone calls to my travel agent, dozens of bookings on planes that never left the runway and four cross-country flights that did eventually take off, I made it back to Washington. Leaving Portland, I can still recall rushing to the departure gate past a row of newspaper-vending machines and noticing that none of the front pages carried pictures of the towers aflame, the smouldering Pentagon or the grainy black-and-white CCTV footage of the hijackers about to board the planes. There was no sign of any flags at half-mast, candles, flowers, photocopied flyers with the faces of relatives under the word ‘MISSING’. The lightning – and lightening – sensation that the attacks had not happened lasted for all but a millisecond: the tiny slice of time that it took to realise the front pages were from the morning of 11 September. Yesterday’s newsprint had never been so out of date.
By the time I returned to Washington, shiny enamel flag-pins were affixed already to reporters’ lapels. Graphic renderings of the Stars and Stripes fluttered in the corners of the screens. NBC’s famed peacock even took on the colours of Old Glory. In the mood of ultra-patriotism that instantly prevailed, some US reporters seemed to think they should be flag-wavers first and journalists second – although, for many, the feeling of being participants in this great drama rather than spectators was not entirely unforgivable.
On the morning of the attacks, members of the White House press corps had sprinted from the West Wing, fearing it was about to come under aerial attack. The tight pool of reporters accompanying George W. Bush on a trip to Florida found themselves being flown aboard Air Force One from one military installation to the next, as the Secret Service weighed whether it was safe to return to Washington.
One sensed from the outset that much of the American media, and especially the White House press corps, were clamorous for the president to rise to the occasion. To begin with, however, he fell embarrassingly short. In Sarasota that Tuesday morning, before a class of second-graders, he finished listening to The Pet Goat – all seven minutes of it – even after Andrew Card, his chief of staff, reported that a second plane had flown into the South Tower and that ‘America is under attack’.
Twenty minutes later came his first presidential statement, when he spoke with a lazy informality about ‘those folks who carried out this attack’. Even when addressing the nation from the Oval Office that night, the president struggled to find the apposite words, even though he could now call on his team of speech-writers. ‘These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of America’ sounded like a line from a first draft, perhaps even a second, that should have been culled before it reached the third.
It was days before he grew into the role assigned to him by the press, of the strong national leader. This transformation started in the wreckage of Ground Zero, bullhorn in hand, with an adlibbed speech that came to be likened to the eloquence of King Henry on St Crispin’s Day. Then it continued with an address before a joint session of Congress nine days after the attack in which he claimed, with still more self-and national certainty, that America had found ‘our mission and our moment’.
The then dean of the Washington press corps, David Broder, compared the president’s speech to Lincoln’s – the highest of oratorical accolades. It sounded rather like a courtier shouting ‘The king is dead. Long live the king!’ and offered more proof of the deferential mood among journalists at the time. A year afterwards, the former CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour spoke of reporters self-muzzling, but that implied they wanted still to play the role of attack dogs. Alas, they were far more supine.
I fear, too, that some of this jingoism and fealty crept into our own coverage. The spirit of Le Monde’s famous headline on 12 September, ‘Nous Sommes Tous Américains’, certainly found an echo among the foreign press corps. No doubt, we were more dispassionate than our US colleagues, but neither were we without passion. As I said at the outset, most of us were lovers of America and completely enamoured of New York.
In the week after 9/11, I remember being irritated by an editor in London who suggested, sarcastically, that there were other ways to start a television piece than with the slushy sentimentalism of baseball fans joining in the singing of the national anthem, a flag being hoisted, or any other patriotic ritual, such as the singing of ‘America the Beautiful’. Looking back, however, I suspect she was doing her job rather better than I.
Aware that the press was in such close alignment, the Bush administration even felt confident enough to start singling out miscreant broadcasters from the podium of the White House briefing room. Most notoriously, the comedian Bill Maher, the host of Politically Incorrect, came under fire for suggesting it was ‘cowardly’ to fire cruise missiles from 2000 miles away and, more controversially, that the suicidal hijackers could not be described as cowards. Rounding on Maher from his lectern in the White House briefing room, the president’s press spokesman, Ari Fleischer, reminded Americans that they needed to ‘watch what they say, watch what they do’, which appeared to turn the First Amendment on its head.
Rather than defend Maher, ABC, the network that broadcast his late-night show, took heed and
decided against renewing his contract. After that, there was not much need for further censorship, because the mainstream media censored itself by banishing such subversive thoughts. On at least one occasion, the White House even targeted a dissident reporter, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, having taken an intense dislike to his wounding wit and disrespectful tone, along with an article he went on to write in October 2002 under the headline ‘For Bush, facts are malleable’. It was suggested to The Post’s management that another reporter might do a better job of covering the presidency – a recommendation they thankfully ignored.
Few things better illustrated the absence of reproach in the media coverage post-9/11 than the blithe acceptance of the Bush administration’s standard line that nobody could have foreseen such a calamity. Condoleezza Rice, the then national security adviser, stated it most boldly in May 2002: ‘I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would use a plane as a missile.’
Alas, it required no great leap of imagination. A cursory glance at Tom Clancy’s Executive Orders would have sufficed – an airport novel that came up with precisely that kind of scenario, with a plane obliterating Capitol Hill just as the president is delivering a speech. The White House had also come under a kamikaze-style attack during the Clinton administration, when a suicidal aircraft mechanic crashed a Cessna 150 into the South Lawn. By strange coincidence, he stole the plane on the night of 11 September 1994.
Then there were the warnings. In January 2001, just days after George W. Bush took office, the former senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, of Monkey Business fame, published the report of the US Commission on National Security/21st Century. Its key finding was that a combination of ‘unconventional weapons proliferation with the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the US homeland to catastrophic attack.’
