In honor of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we're sharing this excerpt from Katie's memoir, Going There, in which she recalls the moments just before the world changed forever and what it was like being the one to deliver the news to the world.
At the last minute, Tom had decided to fly down from Boston to New York City for a visit. He was spending more and more time back East because he was negotiating with a group to buy the Red Sox.
Yeah, I know. That was what it was like dating Tom Werner. Later that morning, he’d be flying to LA. I jumped in the shower, picked out a black cotton summer-to-fall shirtdress, kissed him goodbye, and headed out the door.
Matt opened the show that morning with an airplane analogy: “Good morning, Air Jordan is taxiing for takeoff. Legendary basketball great Michael Jordan is getting ready to return to the game he loves today, Tuesday, September 11th, 2001.”
We rolled through the day’s stories: A U.S. drone had been shot down over Iraq. President Bush was in Florida, promoting his education plan — on the agenda was reading a book called The Pet Goat to first-graders in Longboat Key. Tim Russert analyzed the administration’s controversial proposal to slash social programs while cutting the capital gains tax, and Tracey Ullman hawked her new talk show, Visible Panty Lines. We discussed thongs for a good portion of the interview.
The 8:30 half hour unfolded in the usual way, with people jammed up against the barricades on the plaza waving signs (HUG A NURSE TODAY!, FIRST TIME IN NEW YORK!, MY NAME IS AL TOO!). Al called it “a perfect fall morning, even though technically it isn’t fall yet.” The kind that makes you happy to be alive.
While Matt interviewed the author of a new Howard Hughes biography, I was goofing around in the production area, where the mood was relaxed, as usual, unlike in the studio, where you had to tiptoe and whisper. Suddenly everyone was staring up at a monitor displaying a startling sight: a giant gash in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, belching black smoke.
“What the hell?” said one of the news writers. “What the hell?”
At 8:51 a producer was in Matt’s earpiece telling him to wrap up the interview — that something was going on downtown. Matt said, “We want to go live right now and show you a picture of the World Trade Center where I understand...do we have it? No, we do not...we have a breaking story, though we’re going to come back with that in just a moment. First, this is TODAY on NBC.”
Matt, Al, and I hurried to our seats in the sofa area. Back from commercial, Matt shared what we thought we knew — that there’d been an accident involving a small commuter plane. Then he handed off to me. “It happened just a few moments ago,” I said. “We have very little information available at this time, but right now on the phone we do have Jennifer Oberstein, who apparently witnessed this event.”
“It’s quite terrifying. I’m in shock right now...I heard a boom,” she stammered. “The pieces of the building were flying down. It’s horrible, I can’t even describe it.”
Then we went live with one of our producers, Elliott Walker, who lived in lower Manhattan and had been walking her young daughter to school. Her voice quavered as she described seeing “an enormous fireball 300 feet across.”
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion wrote, “It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.” That morning, my magical thinking went like this: That poor pilot must have had a heart attack and lost control of the plane. One of the first wire stories I was handed cited an accident in 1945 when a military plane crashed into the Empire State Building in heavy fog, killing 14. That explains it. As I glanced at the red digits below the camera screen — 8:53 — I thought, Thank God this happened before 9:00 a.m. People probably aren’t even at work yet.
“Elliott,” I said, “have you seen any evidence of people being taken out of the building...of course, the major concern is human loss. ...Do you know if there were many people in the building —”
“Oh my goodness...ohhhhhhhh! Another one just hit, something else just hit, a very large plane just flew directly over my building and there’s been another collision. Can you see it?”
We could.
With orange flames ballooning from the facade, we watched in horror as the second plane came into view from the right side of the screen and tore into the South Tower. It was one of the most sickening things I’d ever witnessed, this massive jet barreling headlong into an office building.
Holding a pen, I noticed my hand shaking uncontrollably.
Matt mouthed a single word to me: Terrorism.
We were lucky Al was with us. He had covered the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 when he worked in local news and knew a lot about the structure. He explained that the towers were built with a 2-degree sway to withstand the wind and stress, but this was likely more than they were designed for.
My mind raced to Ellie and Carrie. I was on the air, so I couldn’t call the school or Lori Beth. Were they safe? Were they worried about me? If parents were fetching their kids, would they wonder where I was? But I also knew that Lori Beth was on it. (She’d manually part traffic for those girls. As it turned out, she ran-walked from NYU to Spence, 49 blocks.)
Then it hit me: Oh my God — Tom.
Had he gone directly from Boston to LA as planned, Tom would have been on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the North Tower. Instead, he’d switched his flight and departed JFK at 8:00 a.m.
But at the time, I had no idea how many other planes had been hijacked and converted into missiles. For all I knew, the skies were full of them, like something out of War of the Worlds. I was panicking — but I couldn’t reveal that to the millions of equally panicked viewers.
At 9:39, Matt and I threw to Jim Miklaszewski — Mik, as we all called him. Reporting from inside the Pentagon, he said, “I don’t want to alarm anybody right now but apparently there was — it felt just a few moments ago — like there was an explosion of some kind here at the Pentagon...It felt like a small blast of some kind. The building shook, the windows rattled... ” A 757 had slammed into the first floor, collapsing a large section of the E-ring, my old stomping grounds. How many people were killed? How many did I know?
Tom Brokaw appeared like a vision in the studio. He was so adept at stories of historic import — no one was better at weaving together the analytical and emotional aspects. Tom’s perspective and stature were exactly what the moment called for.
The latest: The White House was being evacuated; the State Department was being evacuated; the Capitol was being evacuated. Sirens screamed; loudspeakers blared, “Take cover immediately.”
My parents lived 15 minutes from the Pentagon.
I slipped out of my chair, ran to the production area, and picked up a landline. “Mom, Dad,” I blurted into the receiver, “please get down to the basement.” I still couldn’t get through to Tom.
And then we saw it: The South Tower disintegrating — that sky-high pillar of glass and steel crashing to the ground, generating tidal waves of smoke and debris that thundered through the concrete canyons downtown as terrified pedestrians tried to outrun them. At the North Tower, something unthinkable was happening: People were breaking windows and jumping to their deaths to avoid being burned alive. Then that tower imploded too, its iconic antenna, 360 feet tall, sinking into the wreckage.
CNBC’s Ron Insana rushed into the studio and debriefed us at the anchor desk, his bald head and dark suit covered in a ghostly layer of soot.
Someone handed me some wire copy. Flight 93 had crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. We would later hear of the brave passengers who stormed the cockpit with “Let’s roll!” as their battle cry.
TODAY went off the air at 1:00 p.m. Afterward, I retreated to my office, shut the door, and wept. All those people on those planes — did they know what was happening? Did they feel the aircraft change course? And everyone in the towers...did the people on the floors above the gaping holes in the buildings realize they were going to die too? What was it like, falling a thousand feet through the air, moments from death?
Never before had I felt such an overwhelming sense of responsibility to stay calm and get it right, as an audience of millions watched, desperate for any new shred of information. When I look at the replay, my composure seems utterly incongruous with how I felt.
Outside, I was assaulted by the sharp smell of burning plastic and metal wafting up from what forevermore would be known as Ground Zero. I stared out the car window at the shell-shocked city — people looking dazed, wandering the sidewalks holding candles. In the coming
weeks, Frank Campbell, the funeral home that took care of Jay, would become a hotbed of perpetual mourning — hearses, flowers, swelling crowds spilling onto Madison Avenue.
I finally heard from Tom: His plane had made an emergency landing in Kansas City; he and his seatmate were driving the 23 hours to LA.
But relief would never come for so many — all those whose loved ones perished that day: Tall, 20-something Annelise — so excited about her future — who lost both her fiancé and brother. Ten-year-old Kevin Hickey, who came on the show to talk about his father, Brian, a fire-
fighter from Queens; I’ll never forget his sweet face crumpling in grief and Matt comforting him. The widows whose husbands kept Flight 93 from crashing into the Capitol.
Some were spared by the capriciousness of fate: The father, heading to Logan Airport, who turned around at the last minute so he could take his daughter to preschool. The secretary who walked to work, just to change things up — her tardiness saved her life. Michael Lomonaco,
who’d become the chef at Windows on the World (who’d laughed a decade earlier when I joked about Velveeta during his cooking segment), getting his glasses fixed in the lobby when his restaurant on the 107th floor was incinerated, along with his employees and every last diner.
When I got home, Lori Beth was at the kitchen table with the girls, who were happily digging into their mac and cheese — I envied how oblivious they were. I hugged them extra-tight, knowing how many children would never experience that kind of hug again, their parents’ faces peering out of HAVE YOU SEEN...flyers hanging on chain-link fences across the city.
