17 Minutes

On how 9/11 started — and America's innocence

Garrett Graff
September 02, 2026 • Reading Time: 3 minutes

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Wendell Klein, the doorman at the Marriott Hotel nestled between the two twin towers of the World Trade Center, didn’t know what it was. Paramedic Juana Lomi in Lower Manhattan thought it was a rumbling truck. FDNY Chief of Operations Dan Nigro, in Brooklyn, thought someone had dropped something heavy in the office above him. The preschool students in Jillian Volk’s classroom, at the corner of Church and Thomas, thought it was thunder. New York Police Department Sgt. Bill Kennedy assumed it was a small plane. Peter Johansen, the captain of one of the New York Waterways commuter ferries crossing New York harbor, thought it was a navigation accident.

Next Friday, of course, marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and I’ve spent much of this summer working on a variety of projects related to the events and legacy of that Tuesday morning.

For one of those projects, which just posted online, I had the chance to pull from National Geographic’s amazing archives of interviews and stories it’s collected about that day to examine what to me has always been the most fascinating moment of 9/11.

If you’ve ever heard me talk about that day, you’ve probably heard me talk about the period from 8:46 a.m. to 9:03 a.m., when the first attack happened and the second. I’ve thought a lot about over the years how we teach and remember 9/11, and one of the reasons I approached writing about that day as an oral history is because it helps us understand not the facts of the day, but the experience of the day — what it was like to live for people before they knew what was unfolding and how the day would end. Because the way we summarize the day now — e.g., “the attacks begin at 8:46 a.m.” — is factually true, but not an accurate representation of how the day was lived.

The key to understanding that difference is examining the time before America realized it was under attack, when millions watched the second plane fly into the South Tower live on their morning television shows.

The period in between is just 17 minutes — 16 minutes and 31 seconds to be exact — and in that moment, you can glimpse an entirely different country than we know today, one far more innocent, less fearful, less anxious.

17 minutes.

It’s a brief interval of time that occurs 84 times a day and more than 30,500 times in a year. An all-but unmeasurable and unknowably brief blink-of-an-eye in a country even as young as we are. As long as it takes Bob Dylan to play “Murder Most Foul,” John Coltrane to riff through “My Favorite Things” live at the Newport Jazz Fest in 1963, or Pink Floyd to play “Dogs” on their album Animals. As long as it takes to listen to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” or a Beethoven piano concerto. Less than a single TED Talk or an NCAA basketball half. As long as Barack Obama’s 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention or John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address.

And yet in the space of just those 17 minutes, America was completely and deeply altered.

As I write:

Today some 40 percent of the country is too young to remember the events of 9/11. What they’ve learned from history books, documentaries, and museums is that the attack began at 8:46 a.m. And while this is accurate, it also isn’t quite true. It’s an example of how, as memory has coalesced into history, the 9/11 story we tell ourselves has become more and more defined by what we have learned and morphed into in the years since, slowly eroding what it meant to experience that day in real time. What we stand to lose—and what looking closely at these 17 precious minutes can remind us of—is what it meant to be an American before the term “9/11” ever entered our lexicon. Because for most Americans who can recall that morning, the attack didn’t begin at 8:46. The confusion did.

As I’ve learned from thousands of oral histories and hundreds of conversations over the last decade, effectively everyone — from Manhattan commuters to the President of the United States — had the same jumble of reactions in hearing that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Must’ve been a small plane. Maybe the pilot had a heart attack. Maybe there was a mechanical problem.

And then, amazingly, most people just went on about their day. Because September 11, 2001, was not yet “9/11.”

I hope you’ll have a moment to read the essay in the coming days, read how those 17 minutes unfolded and what they tell us, 25 years later, about our country and ourselves.

Woven throughout the piece are video accounts from names who will be familiar to any reader of THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY, including Joseph Pfeifer, Heather Penney, and Jay Jonas.

If you’re old enough to remember the attacks, you’ll likely see some of your experiences from that morning in the essay; and if you’re too young to remember it, you’ll understand how different the world is that you’ve grown up in ever since.

GMG

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