“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.