C&B and the EIB Audience Remember Where They Were on 9/11

CLAY: Sobering interview there with Rudy Giuliani about nearly 20 years ago and what happened on 9/11 for his personal recollections. And it is wild to think about, Buck, not only 20 years ago and what everyone in our audience experienced who remembers that day, but also where we are 20 years later.

I think in this hour, it probably makes some sense to reflect upon the 20th anniversary of 9/11. But, Buck, you were I think in college but you had tons of friends who were in New York City. How did you become aware of what was happening that morning?

BUCK: I remember I walked into an English literature class, and the professor — guy’s name was Professor Sofield — and I always feel like when I tell this, your memory plays tricks on you, but there are some flashes that are just seared into my brain, right? The professor said, “Go back into your rooms. A plane has run into the building.

“We’re worried some of the faculty and family members of faculty and students who may have been affected in the World Trade Center,” and like everyone… Not everyone, but a lot of people had the same reaction which is in your mind you’re thinking, “Oh, gosh, aviation accident. Maybe a prop plane, maybe five or six people.” That was what we thought. And then I went back and flipped on the TV and saw what was going on, and you knew right away, this is not that. What about you?

CLAY: I was a first-year law student, and that morning I woke up, and the alarm went off, and when that alarm went off, there was a report on the radio, “Hey, a plane had flown into the World Trade Center.” I got in my car to drive to class, and at that time nobody really had substantial amounts of internet access in the classroom or anything else.

So I was in the classroom. And, you know, people kind of knew that there was an issue that had happened, but we weren’t aware of how significant it was. I’ll continue this story here in a moment, but first I want to play… Do we have the audio from Bush out on the rubble? I want you to hear this because Rudy Giuliani was just talking and telling us about that incident.

I want to you to be able to hear George W. Bush in the rubble, 9/11, Giuliani said he was right at his foot as he put his arm around that retired fire department employee. Here’s what that sounded like.

PRESIDENT BUSH: I can hear you!

FIREMEN: (cheers)

PRESIDENT BUSH: I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people…

FIREMEN: (cheers and applause)

PRESIDENT BUSH: and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

FIREMEN: (cheers and applause)

CLAY: That, an iconic moment, holding the megaphone

FIREMEN: (chanting) U! S! A!

CLAY: — which Rudy Giuliani said that he had passed up to George W. Bush at the time, almost exactly 20 years ago to this day.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

GIULIANI: People should remain calm. They should remain where they are, except if they are in southern Manhattan. If you’re below Canal Street, you should walk out in southern Manhattan and walk north like these people are doing right here.

REPORTER: Do you know anything?

GIULIANI: All that we know… All that we know right now is that two airplanes struck the two large towers of the World Trade Center. We spoke to the White House, there also was, apparently, an attack on the Pentagon. We asked that the airspace around the city of New York be sealed by military aircraft. We’ve been informed there have been, and we’ve seen military aircraft up in the air.

(jets roaring overhead)

GIULIANI: So, we’re hopeful that right now things are secure. We need all of the open space we can get to evacuate people, to get people up.

MAN: C’mon. You’ve gotta move!

GIULIANI: And we’re gonna have to move now and go north.

BUCK: That was then-mayor Rudy Giuliani speaking to reporters on 9/11, 2001. We have the 20th anniversary of it tomorrow. You can hear in the background there just some of the commotion, military fighter jets and everything that was going on that day in Lower Manhattan. Clay was in law school. I was in undergrad at the time. And we just thought we’d share with you some of our recollections from that day.

I told you that I heard about it, went to class, came back and I saw what had happened with the first plane, and then, to my memory, I was watching live as the second plane hit and I remember saying — at least this is what I remember from 20 years ago now — “Oh, my God. We’re going to war,” because at that point it was so clear that it was an attack. We didn’t know at that moment necessarily who it was but we knew that we were under attack.

That was clear, and then Clay I was up at the… I remember before the day’s events before the actual attack happened people are commenting on what a peaceful day it had been in New York City and it felt like up in central Massachusetts, until this happened as well. It was one of those almost impossibly — in terms of the weather — beautiful mornings and then disrupted by the most heinous kind of act imaginable.

And we were wandering around campus, and we just had no real idea what was going on. I remember the president of the college called me because I had a uncle through marriage, my mother’s sister’s husband worked for AEON Corporation and was very high up in the one of the towers. He happened to be late to work that day.

My uncle survived, though initially we did not think he did. And then we just started to think about all the other people we knew who are in the buildings, Cantor Fitzgerald, AEON, so many other companies that recruited from New York City. And I’ll just share this with you. And I want to hear what you remember from that day. They gathered…

It was the only all-school gathering that I can remember happening when I was in four years of undergrad college, and we were all just kind of wandering around in a daze. We were undergrads and didn’t really know what was going on and a professor stood up — and I will never forget this because it was formative for my view of the battles inside this country as well as outside.

A professor stood up and said — on the day when people are still finding out that they have relatives that are buried at 9/11 — “This is what happens when you make people angry with your foreign policy.” That was what a professor at my school said at an all-school assembly.

CLAY: Oh, my God.

BUCK: There was a flag burning on my campus about two or three weeks off a 9/11, in response to the surge of patriotism that made people from the various left-wing communities uncomfortable with the “surge of imperialism” and the death of people abroad that would occur. Clay, this is when I realized the left is actually insane, and there are elements of the left that truly want to bring down the country and root against the country.

CLAY: That’s wild. I didn’t experience anything like that. Now, I was in America’s heartland as we speak. I was in law school. I was into my torts class. Again, it’s a different world. For younger people out there, cell phone networks went down. Right?

It is the only real time that I can ever remember the cell phone networks going down, and people didn’t text yet, right? So you had a cell phone in ’01, but you would still call. And you couldn’t make a call, right? Like basically all cell phone networks were down for much of the country.

BUCK: I was using AOL instant messager to check in with family. I remember that.

CLAY: Yeah. So we were in class, and we came out of class, and the second building had been struck, and I stood in the foyer of Vanderbilt University of Law School with all the students there. They had televisions on, which was rare, and we watched the towers collapse.

The only thing that I remember from a person in position of authority was — in retrospect, this would not happen now. But the dean of the law school came out and said, “We’re not canceling any classes because terrorists want to disrupt our normal activities and so everybody’s just gonna continue to go to class for the rest of the day.”

Nowadays, you’d probably shut down for a week, right. In retrospect that kind of stiff upper lip, I remember sitting in class right after that watching the towers come down, and I was in a legal writing and research class, and I remember thinking, “How in the world are we asking questions and, you know, studying the law right now where the entire world has changed in an instant with what was going on there?” But we had class.

And the only real change — and I may be misremembering it afterwards but I don’t think I am — is some people had family and friends certainly who were in the towers, and usually in law school they were — at least then, the class is — run on the Socratic method so you don’t know when you’re gonna get called on and you just get grilled on whatever legal case that you were supposed to be studying at that point in time.

For several weeks, they did away with the Socratic method. They didn’t want to call on someone who might be dealing, grieving with 9/11-related issues. Remember, I was in D.C. so one for college. So one of my first thoughts was the Pentagon being hit, right, because I had just left D.C. like couple of weeks before to go back and start law school.

So I still had a ton of friends in D.C. who were panicked and could see the flames from the Pentagon from the rooftop near George Washington University where I had gone — and obviously the brave people in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. But the fear was that there was gonna be a plane go into the Capitol and also go into the White House. So it was absolute chaos in D.C.

BUCK: That was the plan.

CLAY: Yeah. That’s right.

BUCK: It wasn’t just the concern. That was what was going to happen. I believe it was Todd Beamer who led that charge behind the food service cart on that flight that went down in the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

CLAY: That’s right, which gets forgotten about by a lot of people but is an amazing heroism.

BUCK: Flight 93, right? Flight 93.

CLAY: Flight 93.

BUCK: That plane was heading right for the Capitol or the White House. It could have been either, but the Capitol they believe was the target. And it’s amazing in retrospect quite honestly, Clay, that they were able to stop that from happening.

CLAY: No doubt.

BUCK: And Al-Qaeda, when we think about how easy it was for them to hijack all those planes and how — just from a security perspective — we were just sleepwalking.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: As a country we weren’t ready for it at all, as horrific as it was, I know a lot of people that analyzed secure and, you know, the possibilities of this, they could have seized 20 planes. That would not have been that difficult for them to do.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUK: And obviously we have a very different feeling now. It’s been the case I think for a long time that if anyone hijacks a plane now, they know that they’re gonna have… The assumption used to be, because of the old terrorism, the plane might land somewhere; there’d be negotiations —

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: — and that’s what had happened in some of these Islamist liberation groups and other terrorist entities. Now we all know… I mean, it changed our thinking dramatically and now we all know that if it comes down to it, you have to storm the cockpit.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: Every man and woman on that plane has to storm the cockpit. It’s kind of a lesson for life I think now in the world that we live in, that’s what we face. If any of you have reflections that you want to share, please do call.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Let’s get to Reuben in Tulare, California, is that right?

CALLER: Yeah, buddy.

BUCK: There we go. What’s up?

CALLER: Well, I was talking to your other helper there and I told him I was in New England when that happened, and there was a television. I was making a delivery — I’m a truck driver — and I got out there to that office and we’re watching it on the television and it was sad. It was really sad, and then they shut down the highway. I had to wait about a day and a half and reopen it. I had to go to California.

I stop in Iowa 49 and there was a guy there at the truck stop and he gave me an American flag. It was sad. It was a somber day. Everybody was still in shock, and he told me, “Put this flag up outside your truck.” I told him, “Sure, man.” I said thank you. And I went back to California, and I got some waves and some smiles and kind of… I guess it kind of helped a little, maybe. It was a little bit of something, but you know what? I’m gonna stop at a hardware store and I’m gonna put that flag on. Even though it’s a different time, different day, but I’m gonna do that.

CLAY: Thank you for the call.

CALLER: If there are any truck drivers out there, please do it.

CLAY: Thank you for the call, Reuben. The number of people, by the way, Buck, who were on airplanes that got scrambled and relocated and had to spend days. They took a lot of ’em in I think up in basically Newfoundland — I’m mispronouncing that, I think — but Come from Away, the play they did on Broadway that was based on that. They brought all these people who were in the air ’cause they didn’t know which airplanes might potentially be terrorist attacks.

BUCK: Right. At any moment, another Al-Qaeda cell with box cutters could have seized control of another plane in the air and done the same thing. We had no idea how many of these people were out there.

CLAY: No idea. Flying blind and so —

BUCK: I remember my parents talking to them on the phone, I think it was the night of so the night after the first night after the planes hit in the morning, and there were those F-15s. Man, if you were living in New York City you were just hearing F-15s roaring around the sky, ready in case…? There was this concern that there would be another hijacked plane. I mean, they were ready to shoot down or at least that was the idea that that he had shoot down a plane if it came.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Dave in Wilson, North Carolina, Dave, what do you got?

CALLER: I’m just going to relate my story about 9/11. I was a purchasing expediter for Midway Airlines in Raleigh where we were based out of Mooresville, which is at the airport. I had gone down to flight ops to talk to a pilot who was in flight at the time to see if his airplane was okay — and the first plane hit the tower.

Everybody stood there for a few seconds in disbelief, and then it was like an explosion. Okay, now we have to find all of our airplanes, ’cause we had 66 airplanes in the air at that time. So a bunch of us started grabbing our telephones. We had a bank of phones, and all you had to do was dial the tail number of the aircraft and you could talk to the pilots just like we’re talking now.

And so we had to locate each one of our pilots. Well, when the second one hit, we were all standing there looking at the TV, and we just kind of silently looked at one another, and it was the eeriest thing you can imagine, the panic and bewilderment that just went over everybody’s face ’cause now we have all these people in the air.

We’ve got our aircraft in the air, and now we’ve got to get ’em on the ground because the FAA guy said, “Come in,” and locked us down, basically sequestered us. Wte’re just sanding there trying to locate our people in a panic, and then they gave us the ultimatum of, “Get your airplanes on the ground,” within, I believe it was, “30 minutes or we will take ’em out.” They didn’t say “we might, we could.” They said, “We will take ’em out. Put ’em on the ground.”

BUCK: Wow. Wow, Dave, thank you for sharing that remembrance from 9/11. Man, we could do a whole show just hearing from folks across the country. Please, everyone, have a restful and reflective weekend. It is the 20th anniversary of 9/11 tomorrow. Spend some time with loved ones, spend some time with people who matter to you and rest up and Clay and I will be back with you on Monday.