25 Years

Today makes the 25th anniversary of September 11th, a day profoundly changed our country and world — in ways we are still wrestling with — and that has become a central focus of my own career and writing, as you readers certainly know. It is a key part of two of my books, THE THREAT MATRIX and RAVEN ROCK, and the focus of what is probably the most important piece of work I will do in my life, THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY: AN ORAL HISTORY OF 9/11, which of course grew out of my oral history a decade ago for the 15th anniversary about being aboard Air Force One with George W. Bush, “We’re the Only Plane in the Sky.” More than that, though, it is also the backdrop of basically every piece of reporting I’ve done in the last twenty years about federal law enforcement, intelligence, and national security.

It is impossible to fully capture the day’s legacy. One of my themes in all sorts of talks and media appearances over this last month has been that if you scratch any domestic political story or even almost anything in geopolitics, I can show you its 9/11 roots — from Donald Trump at home to the recent success of the far-right AfD in Germany, the rise of which has been driven there by anti-immigrant politics unleashed by the European refugee crisis that unfolded following the rise of ISIS and the the Syrian civil war.

I have three more stories today to share about three different — and indeed very different — aspects of the legacy of 9/11:

First, a story of unity and patriotism. For this weekend’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, I wrote an oral history of what to me has always been the most interesting moment AFTER 9/11, President Bush’s first pitch at Game Three of the World Series on October 30, 2001, which probably represented the peak of the nation’s unity and patriotism after the attacks. It’s hard to remember now, amid such polarization and division, but we experienced a unique — and many remember special — moment of unity and patriotism in the hours, days, and weeks that followed the attacks. “United We Stand” signs and American flags sprouted on seemingly every corner.

Acts of defiant patriotism were on display throughout the World Series. The son of the fire commissioner sang the national anthem, police officers sang “America the Beautiful,” and a B-2 bomber — still a rare sight in America at that time — did a flyover at Yankee Stadium before Game 7, just days after those B-2 bombers had led the first strikes on Afghanistan. The president’s approval rating was at 90 percent.

A grieving New York rallied behind him, and that fall saw what seemed like a destiny-driven postseason run by the hometown Yankees that became a vehicle of optimism even as the World Trade Center site continued to burn.

This was a monumental piece to research — I tracked down and interviewed a total of 44 people, from Yankee Tino Martinez to the Secret Service agent who went undercover on the field as an umpire during Bush’s first pitch, and amassed about 600 pages and 200,000 words, of interview transcripts, including from players, fans, rescue workers, President Bush’s staff, those B-2 bomber pilots, and Rudy Giuliani’s son, Andrew, who was one of my favorite voices in the story, as well as Oakland’s current mayor, Barbara Lee, who back in 2001 was the sole Member of Congress who voted against the “Authorization of the Use of Military Force” that touched off a two decades of “forever wars,” a fear that she worried about and voiced just four days after 9/11. It is surely the only time in my life that I will speak to both President Bush and actor Billy Crystal for the same project.

The unity of that time might be unimaginable today to the nearly 40 percent of Americans who are too young to remember the attacks. So for this 25th anniversary, I wanted to hear about the unique expression of fellowship, resilience and politics at the games from the people who were there to experience it.

Second, a story for POLITICO about what we got wrong after 9/11 — the creation of DHS. I looked back at the mistakes that doomed the Department, and interviewed former DHS secretary Jeh Johnson, who is now calling for the abolition of the very department he once led. As I wrote, the dark legacy of DHS is such that “with the wind-down of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the longest-running of the ‘9/11 forever wars’ appears to be the one we launched here at home, against ourselves.”

Third, how 9/11 poisoned our relationship to facts and truth. In WIRED, I traced how the rise of 9/11 conspiracies — what we now call the “9/11 Truth” Movement really represented a turning point in our society’s understanding of reality. It’s a story that I’ve come to understand really through my work on my “Long Shadow” podcast, about the rise of the far-right, and, unexpectedly, my books on Watergate and UFOs, where the modern wave of American conspiracism began:

“The events and aftermath of 9/11 altered almost every aspect of American society: from the ever-present security theater of daily life—the 3.4-ounce liquid bottles at airports, the defensive bollards that now dominate so many urban landscapes—to the expansion of the surveillance state, to 20 years of war in Afghanistan, to the backdrop of fear and anxiety that permeates the culture. Few, though, rightly recognize one of the most important and pernicious impacts of 9/11: how it changed our society’s very understanding and relationship to facts and truth.

“It’s a story that not many people fully understand, one with roots in the UFO conspiracies of the 1980s and with tentacles that stretch to the National Mall on January 6, 2021—and one that helps in particular to explain the transformation of Alex Jones from a fringe Austin, Texas, talk show host to one of the most important (and disruptive) political forces of the 21st century. This transformation began in the first minutes after the September 11 attacks.”

GMG