American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  Heavily involved in these demonstrations was a group, small but vocal, that organized a campaign to have the book withdrawn and destroyed. Among others, its members included civilians who in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks had volunteered at the site, or in other ways had come into close contact with the firefighters, and had embraced their humanity and grief. They called themselves the WTC Living History Project, and announced their ambition to record and publish the oral history of this important event in the national experience. First, though, they fought against what they perceived as the injustice of American Ground. They organized e-mail campaigns against the book, disrupted public events, impugned my motivations, accused me of plagiarism, and pored over the text for factual errors. They found of course people from the site who were willing to dispute some of my observations and perspectives, and they called into question some of my information. They circulated to the press a long electronic document in itemized form, in which they attempted to lay out their case. Predictably, they had a more heroic “united we stand” view of the Trade Center site than did I. Again all this generated publicity, especially of the local television and tabloid kind.

  It was reassuring to know that before publication American Ground had been heavily vetted by The Atlantic’s rigorous fact-checking department. For five months, two veteran checkers had gone over the text full time, verifying statements and descriptions, reading and rereading primary documents, and cross-checking details, often with multiple independent sources. Typically, with the campaign against American Ground under way, The Atlantic did not retreat into a hostile posture but called its readers’ attention to the Living History Project’s compendium (which was posted on the Internet) and published angry and critical letters, along with some of the admiring ones. With an eye on the specific points raised in the various accusatory documents, it also undertook an extensive review of the earlier fact-checking.

  I was very sure about the essence of what I had written. But despite the enormous effort that had gone into getting the details right, it was not unlikely that factual errors had slipped in. American Ground is a tight book, but a long and complicated piece of reporting. The paperback edition has offered the opportunity to make a few corrections. For example, the office into which Peter Rinaldi and Frank Lombardi escaped after the 1993 bombing was not associated with Brown & Root, as I had written, but rather with what was then the independent law firm of Brown & Wood. But the really striking result of the fact-checking review was that on item after item the accusations proved to be incorrect.

  As might be expected, there were gray areas. The emotional state of American Airlines flight attendant Betty Ong was described one way in initial press accounts and another way in some later ones; tapes of Ong’s phone call have not been made public. In this edition, I have omitted any reference to her emotional state. Often the discrepancies involved not just sources and perceptions, but time frames. I was accused, for example, of underestimating the size of the Fire Department. Well, the Fire Department when? We stuck with the obviously approximate number (14,000) that the department itself had given to us as the most relevant count for the period in question.

  Time and again there were fundamental misunderstandings by the book’s critics, either of the site or of the text. In a passage about Mike Burton’s difficulty in ceding power as the work matured, I had written that “by the spring” the construction company Bovis had taken over day-to-day management of the job. The critics countered with a January 1 date, confusing the moment when Bovis became the sole “prime” contractor (initially a paperwork and billing rearrangement) with the much slower process of gaining significant operational control.

  One of the peripheral points of contention by the Living History Project was that there had never been, as I had written, an attempt (presumably by workers with a cutting torch and heavy tools) to break into a huge Bank of Nova Scotia vault containing gold and silver, underground in the old H&M Railroad station at the site. I knew that the bank had denied an attempted theft at the time, even as the bullion was being urgently transferred to another location; police thought otherwise, and said so to the press. Now in the Living History Project document, a Port Authority police lieutenant was cited as saying that there had been no sign of an attempted break-in. Later, to the press, he wondered why no one had spoken to him. I was in the vault several times, and heard about a break-in attempt firsthand from the police and others standing guard there, some of them with shotguns. I was also told about it by an independent engineer who had a supervisory role in helping with the removal of the bullion, and by city and Port Authority officials who were directly involved. Contemporary newspaper reports in The New York Times and elsewhere refer to an attempted break-in. In the end there seemed to be no good reason to change the text.

  As noted, these criticisms and more were posted by the Living History Project on the Internet, and some were offered up at the public demonstrations and to the press. I responded repeatedly to the more important points, but tried to avoid sinking into the swamp of confused allegations and misinterpretations, many of them based on erroneous and perhaps naïve assumptions. Some of American Ground’s critics seemed to be unacquainted with the concept of “spin,” or with the notion that people in nominal positions of authority might not know what was actually transpiring on the ground. In the free-for-all of the pile, the titular authorities often didn’t even know that they didn’t know. In such circumstances, there were frequent discrepancies between official reports and reality.

  One genuine error that did emerge pertained to the early dispute between Port Authority police officers and firemen over whether to free a dead Port Authority policeman’s body by expeditiously amputating his leg. Though the book’s description supports the firemen’s view that amputation was the right thing to do, I wrote, “The police pointed out—correctly—that no dead fireman would have had his leg cut off.” Information received later suggested that there were cases I was unaware of in which firemen’s bodies had indeed been freed through amputation. As a result, in this new edition the sentence now reads, “The police maintained that no dead fireman . . .” The rest of the passage is unchanged, however. The Port Authority police officers were indeed angry because they believed that the firemen were interested only in searching for their own. The officers’ view was too crude to be fair, and I described it as such. But there is no doubt that for an astonishingly long time (months), the various categories of the dead were treated with different levels of ceremony and respect. The denial of this pattern was among the more audacious criticisms of American Ground. The differential treatment of the dead constituted one of the most glaring realities of the Trade Center site, and it exacerbated the tribal resentments that occasionally erupted into fights.

  I wrote about looting at the site in a few passages. I was told about it first by policemen on the pile soon after I arrived. The looting started before the South Tower fell, as I wrote, “with the innocuous filching of cigarettes and soda pop,” and it rapidly spread and became more ambitious in the hours and weeks afterward. It involved firemen as well as other groups at the site. This was an open secret on the pile, well known to people there, as well as to more distant police and city officials, and to some reporters. After the campaign against American Ground began, a number of eyewitnesses came forward (including police officers, city officials, construction workers, and reporters) and privately offered me their moral support. A few went further and offered, if need be, though tentatively and with trepidation, to go public in the book’s defense with personal accounts of the acts that they had seen. I thanked them, but because I still hoped that the book would not become the carrying horse for this particular topic, I turned them down.

  I included what little I wrote about looting because the looting was pervasive, and it affected working relations on the pile. To have glossed over it would have been dishonest, and would have required me to omit descriptions of some of the most significant social challenges that fac
ed the project. It’s obvious that only a small number of people engaged in the looting. But their actions greatly exacerbated the frictions on the pile, and for that reason became a necessary part of the story. As for the specific misdeeds, I never felt they were pertinent to my subject. In the story of the deconstruction it was the tribal perceptions of the misdeeds that counted, whether right or wrong. But that point was lost in the din of controversy. In tabloid reduction, American Ground became simply “the book that accuses the firemen of looting.”

  The most controversial passage turned out to be the description of an argument that broke out on the pile when jeans from a retail store were found in a fire truck that had been crushed and buried under the pile. One of the book’s critics, a professional writer independent of the Living History Project but with ties to firefighters, put considerable effort into reconstructing that fire truck’s final moments on September 11, to make the case that jeans from a retail store (apparently the brand was Structure, not Gap, as I had been told) had essentially become enmeshed with the truck as it was hammered down through shopping arcades rather than having been placed in the truck before it was buried. A reconstruction of the truck’s fate had no bearing, however, on the story I was telling in American Ground. That story was strictly related to the emotional and divisive social dynamics of a day in late fall, three months after the towers came down. It was not an account of whatever happened or did not happen on September 11, and it was certainly not intended as an exposé of the last moments of the fire truck’s crew. Nor was it the report of a rumor: detailed descriptions of the argument, and the immediate context in which it took place, were provided to me shortly afterward by multiple independent eyewitnesses. These were people well known to me, who for months had proved to be reliable and steady sources, and who held important jobs on the pile. The reactions of the construction workers seemed to me to be unnecessarily provocative—as my description sought to make clear. But the argument over the jeans did not come out of nowhere. It occurred against the background of differential treatment of the dead, as well as of extensive looting in which firemen were known to have been involved. By placing the episode after these subjects had been explored, casting it in the past tense, and deliberately suppressing the identities of those involved, I tried to keep narrative attention focused on what mattered: a growing threat to the social order on the pile, which seemed to me to be a more important subject than looting, and certainly more pertinent to the unbuilding. I made that point explicitly a few sentences later: “The site would never stand united, as sloganeers said it should.”

  That said, it is clear that the passage has been misinterpreted by some of the public, including people beyond the book’s critics, as an accusation. One reason is that in the course of the campaign against the book, pieces of the episode were frequently torn from context and acquired a life of their own as printed snippets and disembodied sound bites. But misinterpretation may also be due to my unintentionally ambiguous choice of wording. The construction “It was hard to avoid the conclusion that . . . while hundreds of doomed firemen had climbed through the wounded buildings, this particular crew had been engaged in something else entirely” can be read as my own assessment, rather than, as was intended, the explanation of an assessment by others who were preconditioned to construe it that way. Therefore in this edition I have added at the start of the sentence the phrase “In their eyes” to clarify my meaning.

  The World Trade Center site was an extremely complex place, loaded with emotion and political symbolism, full of action and confusion, with many interpretations possible. Having restricted my view to the engineering and deconstruction process, I wrote about it with complete candor, expressing my opinions openly, as I always do. I realized that the approach I took might offend a certain number of people who subscribed to different views—including the essentially two-dimensional one that has received so much publicity, and depicts the Trade Center project in maudlin and “heroic” terms. I do not perceive the project that way—and did not when I was there. More impressive, I felt, was another sort of American greatness that emerged at the site—a complex weave that included diverse acts and motivations, and also a culture of improvisational genius that seemed enormously encouraging about the future. There was no need to engage in propaganda. I wrote about the Trade Center with the assumption that candid descriptions would serve the subject best.