Remember how everyone thought the tone of the everyday world had changed forever? Strangers started behaving politely to one another and being on the lookout to provide help. Estranged families got back in touch. Couples who had been unsure of each other craved permanence and got married. Young people decided to go into public service. Police and firefighters were applauded on the streets. Politicians worked together for the common good. Producers of popular culture started questioning whether what they did was in the best of taste. Abroad, foreigners put up American flags and treated American tourists gently. It was a beautiful example of how we could live if only we decided to. And it lasted about two weeks.

I was at the office early that gorgeous September morning. My assistant at ABC was also there. She had a young friend who worked near the Trade Center who called her and said to turn on the television, something weird was going on. I immediately called our news desk and headed downtown with a satellite truck. We were clearly going in the wrong direction. Waves of people, vacant-eyed people walked by us heading north. The truck got stopped by the police but my producer and I continued on foot. Within an hour or so of the first plane hitting the Trade Center, we’d talked our way into the command center. It was totally silent. A horrible deadly silence. I found a payphone — our cells weren’t working — and talked to Peter Jennings live on the air. I told him that, so far, no survivors had made it to the trauma center on the East Side.

We walked through the dusty, silent corridors of New York west to Chelsea Piers. I remember running into Lesley Stahl and her crew. Thousands of doctors and nurses had assembled at the Pier to receive the injured. By midnight not one patient had shown up. A nurse waved me over: "Cynthia, you won’t remember me but I was in the delivery room when your baby was born. Off the record," she continued, "people either made it out, or they didn’t. There are not going to be any wounded coming here."

I called Jennings and asked to speak to him privately. "Peter," I said, "sources down here say that people either made it out or they didn’t. The survivors are safely out now. No one is going to come here." Remember that at this point no one knew for sure how many people were in the towers that morning, but some estimates were that as many as 30,000 people could have been inside when the planes hit. Peter said, "Cynthia, it’s too early for this. When I come to you on the air, don’t report this. People won’t be able to absorb it yet." It was such a human judgment, such a correct one. Jennings was at his best throughout. Wise, calm, insightful. I was proud to be a small part of ABC’s coverage of 9/11 for which I am happy to say we won a DuPont Award.

What else do I remember?

The dozens and dozens of people who came up to me when they’d see the camera, begging me to help them find their loved ones. One young woman stands out. She was 17 and had a ten-year-old and a seven-year-old with her. It was September 12. Her mother was in the first tower. High up. Their father was not in their lives. She pushed through the barriers as we were live on "Good Morning America," sobbing, "What am I supposed to do? She was all we have." As I struggled not to speak, Charlie Gibson said quietly, a catch in his voice, "It’s OK to cry Cynthia, hug her for us."

The cop who hugged me at Ground Zero and said, "None of us must ever forget this."

Going to the home of a firefighter who wasn’t supposed to be working that day, but insisted on going to the scene. Keeping his mass card on our refrigerator. Spencer, then three, calling him "our fireman." The sad eyes of his widow and children.

What do I remember?

Staggering home after several days to find Spencer standing on the living-room sofa with a towel serving as a cape, "Mommy, I am Superman and I am going to save those people."

What I carry in my heart is remembering watching out my windows on East 38th Street, looking downtown as the first tower smoked and burned, as the second tower was struck before my very eyes and as both crumbled and fell. And then the ghostly hordes of people covered with ash trudging uptown below me on Third Avenue. I don’t need them to build any memorial to 9/11. It remains omnipresent every day of my life, the day America lost its innocence.

Click here on this text to read my New York Post column.

 

Standing in the living room of my neighbor’s house in Santa Fe, watching the planes over and over again, trying to believe it has happened. Was happening. Impossible. And then Pennsylvania? The Pentagon? Watching until the sight turned into pornography — again and again the planes going into the towers, then the white smoke, the death, the helplessness. The bottom falling out of certainty. Remembering Sandy Berger at a conference that March, as he sat on the stage, telling us: “There will be a terrorist attack on the United States.” And we all shivered a little and thought he was being dramatic. It was impossible. Who knew then that those words were not so much dramatic as irresponsible? If he had known, others knew. And why had no fighters intercepted the planes? Why was no one protecting us? And the strange feeling of being so far away from all that, just a watcher.

After hours of watching the impossible nightmare, sitting at a table in a hotel garden with one of my oldest friends when the cell rings. It’s my second oldest friend, to say “Berry was on the first plane.” Berry, the happiest person anyone ever knew. Mind going to Berry’s last hour on earth, in the sky, in — as I later learned and will never forget — seat 19A. What did she see, feel, live through as that plane screeched over Manhattan? How ultimate the fear, how total the dread? What can that have been like? Were they screaming? Did she stay calm? I know she must have prayed. Hard. She wore a ring with a crucifix on it. Many weeks later, that ring was found in the rubble. Because I knew her and loved her, it is Berry — sitting in 19A in circumstances of total horror — that I will never forget. Ever.

I carry the sadness, the sense of enormous tragedy and loss and the stillness of that day and the days immediately following. Of course, there was a great amount of noise from fire engines and fighter planes overhead but it was still, nonetheless. My husband was abroad and was unable to get home. Oddly, I liked being alone, and sort of resented phone calls from outside New York that intruded on the trance-like state I was in. Peter Jennings on ABC News was my only company and that was the way I wanted it. On day two, I went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and for the first time in years, I lit a candle and prayed. All I could think about were the dead, especially the police and firefighters but, of course, all those trapped civilians too.

Finally I came to on Friday and called my friend Liz Smith and said, "We’re going out to lunch. I have a car." She protested that she looked terrible and wasn’t dressed. I practically shouted, "Get dressed; I’m on my way." At the restaurant we talked and talked about the horror that had happened and about what might be coming. But we also laughed for the first time since Tuesday morning. A few days later, I went to our fire station which had lost several men on 9/11 to make a donation and as I handed the envelope to a firefighter I burst into tears and said nothing.

I will never forget the perfection of the weather on that day. And then after the towers fell, the eerie silence of the city, punctuated only by sirens and the screech of fighter jets crisscrossing overhead. Otherwise, just a city holding its collective breath. Then that evening, the spontaneous memorials that appeared on the sidewalks outside of apartment buildings where a resident has perished. Candles and flowers and photos. The doormen holding candles in tribute. And the shift in spirit of people in the city. The reaching out, the connection, the sharing of emotions beyond any of our experience. The intensity of emotions. The intensity of patriotism. The heavy sense of threat that hung over Manhattan. The persistent dread of attending a large gathering of people. A sporting event, say, or the theater.

The realization that on this island we are fish in a barrel. Utterly trapped with no exit possibility. Then three weeks later, going down to Ground Zero to serve food with my daughter and husband as volunteers and seeing the fire still burning. The molten core. The eyes of the firemen and rescue teams that were hollow and haunted. And the constant surprise in seeing the depth of people’s nobility and courage and caring. Often from those from whom you would least expect it.

On 9/11, which is, alas, my birthday, I was in New York about to head to Nashville to attend a 70th birthday party for George Jones (which I figured would be better than any party I could throw for myself). Before I left, though, I had promised a close friend I’d have breakfast at the St. Regis with an older friend of hers in town from Mexico City. I was in a cab in the usual slow Fifth Avenue traffic, and at a light, both the driver and I saw the fireball at the top of the first tower. (I hadn’t realized until that moment how very visible both towers were from points all over Manhattan.) He rolled down his window and another driver told us he was hearing on the radio that a small plane had flown into it.

A bit rattled, I went into the hotel dining room and met this lovely genteel woman. Halfway through my second cup of coffee, a friend rang my cell to tell me about the Pentagon. At that point I knew we weren’t talking about a small plane anymore. I told my uncomprehending breakfast companion to go back to her room, that her husband would be watching CNN in Mexico and he would want to reach her.

When I got outside there was no traffic on Fifth Avenue, even that far up (53rd Street). Cars had pulled over, people were listening to their radios, pedestrians crowded the streets. I began walking, fast, back uptown, toward home. I was trying to dial my then-boyfriend, now-husband in New Orleans to find out what the hell was happening (I figured he’d know a lot more than I did from TV) when a man grabbed my arm and spun me around and the two of us stood there holding onto each other as the tower literally disappeared before our eyes.

Every time I think of that moment my heart is in my throat again. It’s that feeling of watching something so, so much bigger than you or anything you’ve ever seen before and somehow comprehending the urgency and sheer awfulness of it even though there are no words. I will never forget that man, my brief companion.

When I got back uptown, without even thinking I went straight to my butcher and bought two enormous tenderloins (this is my mother in me — when something horrible happens or somebody dies, she cooks a tenderloin). When I got home, friends began pouring in and we sat glued to the TV (it was Peter Jennings — as Cynthia said, he was pitch-perfect that day). At one point I left the apartment to get something — cigarettes probably, as all of us reformed smokers were suddenly puffing away — and the sidewalks were full of families with dogs and baby strollers spilling out of cafés. I realized that like me, they were desperate for communion with other folks, to cling to normalcy (even though nothing was remotely normal), to somehow reiterate the fact that they were still alive.

There were cops everywhere and at my corner, 78th and Third Avenue, a couple of them were stopping crosstown traffic so that a fire truck carrying a crew returning from the rubble could get through. The men were soot-covered and stone-faced and a huge flag flew from the top of the engine. Hundreds of people were suddenly quiet and it was the first time I really cried. That’s what stays with me: the flag, our flag, and the extraordinary heroism of ordinary Americans doing their jobs that day.