As History Unfolded By Peter Applebome

photo:John Hicks/Corbis

s I headed toward Manhattan on a lovely crystalline morning in September, two unexpected problems loomed. First, Armageddon seemed to be at hand. Second, I couldn't get to work.

I was perfectly aware that Item 1 was of far greater import than Item 2. But journalism routinely operates on two tracks--the sausage-making process of reporting, writing, editing, and production that makes a newspaper come out every day, and the coverage of extraordinary events. So part of me was experiencing the same sickened sense of horror and dread that everyone else felt on September 11 when two hijacked planes destroyed the World Trade Center and a third plowed into the Pentagon. And another part of me was focused on a more banal thought--it was going to be a hell of a day at the office, and I'd better find a way to get there.

In the end, what was most memorable professionally about the biggest and the worst news event I ever hope to be a part of was how hard it was to keep the two tracks separate. Journalists spend a lifetime learning to compartmentalize, but this was the one event where no one could forget for a second that the story was so much more horrific and profound than the news.

On most other days, I would have been at work in a largely empty New York Times newsroom, watching the disaster unfold on overhead televisions that in the morning usually beam out, soundless and unwatched, Regis and whoever the new Kathie Lee is or local cable reports on auto accidents in the Bronx. But it was the day of the New York primary election, and I figured to be at work until midnight. So for perhaps the third or fourth time in my three years of working for The Times in New York (after working for ten as a national correspondent in Houston and Atlanta) I decided to leave a little late and drive to work instead of taking the train.

Bad decision. I heard the first confused reports of some vague but ominous accident at the World Trade Center a few minutes after I left home, and then listened to the story unfold bit by horrific bit as I drove toward the city. I made it about twenty-eight of the thirty-mile drive down the Saw Mill Parkway toward New York before traffic stopped dead at police roadblocks north of Manhattan. I managed to head back north, hoping that the trains might be running, but got to my local train station in suburban Chappaqua in time only to find dazed commuters returning home at 11:30 in the morning, like bit players in Escape from New York. All southbound trains, were, of course, halted.

Figuring I had nothing to lose, I turned back and headed toward Manhattan, feeling like I used to when I was the only one driving toward an arriving hurricane while thousands of cars would be heading in the opposite direction. The sergeant at the check point said only emergency crews, not journalists, could get through. But I hung around for a while and before long he let a CBS-TV news truck through. I began pleading my case again, and he cut me off: "Sir, I don't have time to spend my day arguing with you," he said. I figured he'd order me to leave or threaten to arrest me. "You can go through." With that, I drove alone into Manhattan on a highway as empty as a west Texas interstate, and then through the black and Latino neighborhoods of Harlem and Washington Heights into Midtown toward my office in Times Square.

I spent the day and most of the next few weeks helping to coordinate the local coverage--assigning and editing stories on the disaster, the rescue efforts, the dead and missing, on security, the suspects, and the aftermath on the city and the region. Journalists, of course, were not the heroes in this story. We never are. Still, there were Times reporters who did amazing things in the face of terrible danger or loss. Andy Jacobs, one of our best young reporters, had to be shooed away from the base of Tower 2 moments before it collapsed. Sonny Kleinfield turned out dazzling front-page stories in those first two days, despite being forced out of his apartment in the shadow of the towers and not knowing when or if he'd get home. Others spent days and nights at Ground Zero amid the asbestos dust and stench. I just went to work, feeling the walking-on-eggshells unease that everyone in New York felt, not knowing what shoe might fall next, but never getting anywhere near Lower Manhattan.

Read Richard W. Grey's Account of his trip to Manhattan in Called To Witness.

photos: Greg Altman '95

Still, even as a bit player and noncombatant, this was a situation that went straight to the core of what we do as journalists. The silly clichÈs about hard-bitten, two-fisted reporters are just that, and most journalists have no more emotional padding than people who've found a different way to make a living. But, in fact, there is a distance that becomes part of what we do. You're not oblivious to tragedy, you're just too busy for it. For most reporters covering disasters large and small, the work is a mad dash to find a narrative in chaos, so every thread, no matter how doleful, is just raw data--a good quote, a telling anecdote, a vivid description.

This was different. It was different because of the scale of the carnage. It was different because it felt not like news, but history. It was different because it was in our backyard, not far away, and most of us knew someone working down there. It was different because, even if we tried to reduce tragedy to data, there was no way to reduce this tragedy to its component parts. It was different because, unlike the ephemeral cavalcade of news events that, large or small, sooner or later fade away, this story would linger forever.

It was so different that perhaps the most memorable journalism The Times has done since the tragedy are the daily 150-word profiles of the missing and dead. They are the opposite of what most of us in journalism usually get rewarded for--tiny, anonymously written, and emotionally draining miniatures that offer the writer no glory. But they've become like our little sacrament. No one can do them for too long, but everyone has taken pride in doing them. They're our version of leaving flowers at the Vietnam Memorial.

Another great journalism clichÈ is the transforming event, something that in our breathless telling seems to happen almost daily. Chances are--short of a continuing series of plagues--that in the end, the only people who truly will be transformed by September 11 are those who suffered personal losses that can't be erased. But in the short run, this was the rare event that does change the look and feel and tenor of everything.

Much of it, of course, has been for the worse. New York can jangle your nerves even in good times, and the world of anthrax scares and free-form paranoia just gets magnified when every time you walk outside the first thing you see is the electronic news tickers blasting across Times Square or some of the anthrax scares are at your own office. After living with the story non-stop for two months, the biggest peril most of us dealt with every day wasn't physical harm. It was mental exhaustion.

But not all the changes were bad.

I grew up in New York and spent most of my adult life away from it. I came back three years ago with mixed feelings and have maintained them. I like the lovely, green suburb where I live, but have found New York both stereotypically exciting and just too much--too rich, too Darwinian, too Noo Yawk. The days after September 11 are the first since I've been back that I've been able to buy into the idea that what animates New York can be not just grandiose but noble. Now almost everything in New York's cacophonous clatter--the Middle Eastern family selling rice curry on a busy corner, the amazing diversity of the faces on the street, the bombast of Broadway, or the regal hush of Lincoln Center--stands as an emblem of what is good about this country and what separates us from the psychopathic zealots who attacked the World Trade Center.

I have a twelve-minute walk to work every day from Grand Central Station to The Times. About midway through my walk, on 43rd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, is Engine Station 65. Like most of the firehouses in the city, it has been turned into a shrine, with flowers and candles, kids' drawings, and spontaneous letters of thanks filling up the front of firehouse and spilling into the street. Before September 11, I barely noticed it. But now, every day when I walk by, I have to fight back the urge to choke up. And each time, in a way that wasn't true before the attack, New York feels like home.

Applebome '71, deputy metropolitan editor of The New York Times, is a member of Duke Magazine's Editorial Advisory Board.

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