IN MY SHOES II: Eyewitnesses To History
This is a portion of the transcript from "The Journal Editorial Report," which aired on September 9th:
Gigot: The anniversary of September 11 carries great personal meaning for the staff of The Wall Street Journal because the attack occurred just 200 yards from our offices. Dan Henninger, Mary O'Grady, John Fund and I were all eyewitnesses to the devastating event. And this is what we remember:
Gigot: The plane went right overhead like a "shoop-boom." And at first I didn't know what it was. And it is New York, and there are all kinds of crazy sounds. And nobody was showing any extraordinary reaction until about 60 seconds later, my cabdriver started shouting. He had seen something in the rearview mirror. He immediately pulled over. And he said--whipped open the car door and said, "Look what's happened." And we got out, and there it was, the whole--with the smoke and the fire in the north face of the north tower.
Henninger: I glanced up and the thought that went through the back of my mind was, That plane's too low. Now, I always had thought that the airliners flew too low over Manhattan. And my first thought was, One of them has finally lost altitude. And then I looked up again and there was no plane. It was inside the building. I thought I'd see the fuselage or something fall off the back but, no, there was just this long gash.
Then, there was another sound from the other side of the other tower, and you saw an explosion. But we couldn't tell what it was standing over there. We didn't see anything going into that building until some guy came running up the street screaming that another plane had flown into the other tower. At that point, we knew what had happened.
O'Grady: I was standing right on the corner of Fulton Street and thinking about whether I would go back to the office. I was thinking about how we would get the paper out. And I thought the bigger risk was to go over the bridge and the less risk would be go back to the office. Because I was convinced that they would go after the bridge next. But something told me to go on the bridge. And I started up the bridge and to go in the car lane, where the cars were. I was walking, and that's when the first tower collapsed. And I'm sure that, if I had gone back, I would have been hit by the collapse.
Fund: I was with a security guard who had injured his foot, and he was limping; he couldn't run. And we had been talking. And I remember thinking to myself, Well, this thing is falling apart and all of this cloud of debris and dust is coming. But I can't leave this guy behind. So I took his hand and we walked away. So as we walked, the full force of the debris hit us. And it was like being in a windstorm, a wind tunnel. But I wasn't scared. I just knew somehow that this debris wasn't big enough to hit us or kill us. I just had that confidence. And when it finally subsided, we were both alive, and we looked like ghosts, of course. But we were ghosts who were walking and alive.
Gigot: We had to get out a paper that day because it was almost a kind of act of a patriotic duty to not let them shut us down.
Henninger: It was undoubtedly the hardest piece of journalism I have ever produced in my life. I had to stop twice because I did--and I'm not given to tears--but I simply broke down thinking about the event. And I guess I must have finished it in about 90 minutes, sent it down there to South Brunswick. And miraculously, we got a paper out that day, and ultimately, the Journal won a Pulitzer Prize for it.
O'Grady: It was hard to come back. But now, I think it's just become sort of, in my conscious mind, a construction site, and I try not to think about it much more than that. What inspires me or keeps me going about it is just knowing how many courageous people, you know, came back downtown to rebuild and to live here and to sort through the rubble and all of that. And so we're part of that story.
Fund: You cannot go through a day like that, seeing things like I did--I not only saw people jump from the top of the building; I saw a couple jump holding hands. I still don't know who they were. But you don't see those kind of things without having both a deep appreciation for the tragedy and all of the hurt that people went through, but also with much deeper appreciation of what life means and how precious and valuable it is.
Gigot: When it hit you, and you thought, The United States homeland is under attack 200, yards from my office. And you realize that in this kind of a conflict we're in, everybody has the potential to be casualties. American civilians have the potential to be casualties. And that will never leave me, and I think most Americans should never forget that. All Americans should never forget that.
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