08/31/11
The Best Responses to 9/11 -- And the Worst Martin Peretz
I was in bed at a New York hotel when my
stock trader called to say that one of the Twin Towers had been hit by an
airplane. “A horrible accident,” he surmised, adding “unprecedented” to the
presumption. He told me to turn on the “tube,” such nomenclature dating him as
middle-aged. The phone rang again: “The second tower is on its way down. And, of
course, this means it is no accident at all.” Which was my intuition as soon as
I’d heard the first terrible tidings. Moreover, I knew instinctively who’d done
the dreadful deed; and it wasn’t a new version of the Unabomber. Indeed, if
anybody had had time to poll the public on who was responsible for the death of
3,000 before they had been told, a vast majority would have concluded that it
was Muslim extremists. Everybody knew, although some of the discombobulated
newscasters were afraid to say unless or until it was “confirmed” by authority.
News of other related disasters began to filter in: the airplane that crashed
into the Pentagon and the one that slammed into the deserted field in
Pennsylvania.Where was my family? There was no horrible news from Boston, except, to be sure, that one of the fated airplanes had taken off from security-hapless Logan Airport with Mohamed Atta and his satanic comrades on board. (They had been on various “alert” lists. But nobody checked any of them.) I could make no contact with my wife until much later in the day. My son and his girlfriend (now married and the parents of two children) were in Paris and were kept there for days until the skies cleared, so to speak—even as James Baker was able to arrange a private jet flight for an exit from the United States for the many bin Laden kin who had settled in our country. My daughter, who then lived two blocks from the World Trade Center, was in a dentist’s chair somewhere on the Upper East Side, although we didn’t know this for several hours until cellular phone service was more or less restored. Before that, I’d spoken with my son-in-law, the first in the family to succeed in making contact. He’d gone in pursuit of his wife, having joined that seemingly endless trek of New Yorkers who were marching north, a bit dazed, to the Upper East and West Sides, while others were traipsing laterally to Brooklyn, Long Island, and New Jersey.
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