A newsroom’s view of 9/11.
A newsroom’s view of 9/11
I was supposed to be in Manhattan on 9/11, but on the previous day my plane at Reagan National Airport was delayed so many times that my reason for going there — a political dinner invitation — was null and void. So I canceled my flight and returned to my Washington apartment for the night. To the best of my knowledge, that hitherto unexplained cancellation has never become part of any conspiracy theory. But it would be hard to make anything sinister of it because my D.C. apartment was even nearer to the White House than my New York apartment was to the Twin Towers.
What it did mean, however, was that I was between drinking coffee, making notes on morning papers that were about to become yesterday’s news metaphorically as well as actually, and shaving when my wife, watching television at home, rang about 8:47 a.m. to say that she thought she had seen a plane striking one of the towers. That was Flight 11 of American Airlines; at 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 flew into the South Tower. Not long afterward I was sprinting down Vermont Avenue — where are the cabs when you really need them? — to the offices of United Press International on H Street. As I approached Lafayette Park in front of the White House, the park suddenly came alive and started sprinting toward me. White House staffers had all been sent home, and for a few minutes I was The Man Who Knew Too Little in a Charles Addams cartoon going toward the fire rather than from it.
UPI’s newsroom was on fire, too. Tobin Beck, an experienced UPI hand and my deputy editor in chief, had already held an emergency newsroom conference and assigned tasks to all present. That wasn’t very many people. At this time UPI was a shrunken version of its distinguished self — the house joke was that UPI had fewer staff worldwide than AP had van drivers in D.C. — but it was still valiant for truth.
And it was in the early stages of a makeover. On being appointed its CEO, Arnaud de Borchgrave, the veteran Newsweek foreign correspondent whose Rolodex left The International Who’s Who at the gate, had hired me as editor in chief, and we brought in — as a special correspondent with a wide brief — Martin Walker, who had recently been passed over for the editorship of The Guardian, then starting its gradual descent into the billboard of the transnational new left. UPI already had on its small staff some remarkable journalistic talents, notably Martin J. Sieff, a favorite pupil of Isaiah Berlin, who could turn out a brilliant news analysis of any crisis anywhere while his rivals were still stuck at “Notwithstanding . . .’’; and Claude Salhani, a great photojournalist for Reuters who had helped rescue the survivors of the 1983 terrorist bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut (for which the Marines made Claude an honorary marine for life) and whose long coverage of Middle Eastern wars gave him an influential voice in editorial debates and in his own signed columns.
From earlier in 2001 all of these colleagues had been helping to recruit similarly talented people for a new UPI that — because it could not provide the full range of news coverage that was the traditional canvas of a news agency — would concentrate on offering the deepest coverage of the news events it judged most important. That judgment could never be accurately and fully made in advance. But Arnaud and Co. sought to construct a newsroom that would be able to pivot to the absolutely essential topic when it happened. For instance, Washington was full of journalists who had been forced to retire from top posts in order to make room for the thrusting young Ivy Leaguers that a new editor wanted to promote. We hired, among others, Roland Flamini, who had been bureau chief, foreign correspondent, and editor of the World section of Time magazine, and gave him the international desk and some thrusting young reporters to be directed by his extraordinarily broad experience. Then again, public opinion (even in Washington) was growing suspicious of the claims of political correspondents to be above partisanship. So we impartially hired two such correspondents: for coverage of the right, Peter Roff, who had previously been Newt Gingrich’s political director at GOPAC, and for his left counterpart, James Chapin, the scion of a distinguished New York Democratic family who had been a co-founder of the Democratic Socialists of America (but who had migrated to more moderate Democratic positions). Singly, each provided an insider’s coverage of his constituency; jointly, they drew on sympathetic but contrasting knowledge of both sides in their debates. And for informed coverage of domestic and global finance and economics, we brought in Martin Hutchinson, a former Wall Street banker and U.S. economic diplomat who on behalf of the State Department had been helping Central Europe to transition to market democracies. On a very modest budget, Martin soon built up a worldwide network of stringers with whom he pursued the finance industry with the merciless zeal of a gamekeeper combined with the knowledge of a poacher’s ways.
Indeed, this was a team in which, as a whole, real expertise and long experience were adapted to the limits of a modest budget. As yet it was untested. How would it function on the night? Well, 9/11 was the test that history imposed on it. And, as luck would have it, it was a test that we had already passed.
Earlier that summer, Arnaud had sent himself to Afghanistan in an attempt to interview Osama bin Laden, whom he had known since his childhood and whom he had identified as potentially the world’s first public enemy number one. At the age of 75 (and with a bad back), Arnaud had traveled the rocky roads of the country to the camp where bin Laden was staying as the guest of Mullah Omar, with the firm promise of meeting and speaking to him. Only at the last minute was he told that the interview couldn’t take place but offered the consolation of an interview with Mullah Omar himself, who as the first religious and political leader of Afghanistan since 1996 had taken the decision to cancel the bin Laden interview, perhaps because he knew that 9/11 lay just ahead, perhaps because he judged that even without 9/11, an interview with his guest (who was already responsible for direct terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies) would provoke a U.S. military response.
Arnaud returned extremely disappointed, but I reassured him that his consolation prize should really console him. Having read it, I told him that it was “an interview with a gathering storm.” We duly put it out to our subscribers. First reactions to it — essentially, “Mullah Who?” — justified Arnaud’s disappointment. But a short time after the Twin Towers were attacked, everybody wanted to read what Mullah Omar had said, including the CIA, as well they should. UPI and Arnaud had delivered a remarkable journalistic achievement: an advance scoop about 9/11.
That buoyed us all up. The rest of that day and the following days in the UPI newsroom passed as a kind of speeded-up movie, at least in my memory, in which my colleagues all performed well, and UPI put out strong, disciplined, and full coverage. We didn’t have someone at Ground Zero, and getting someone there was no easy task. Almost all of our known stringers and friends we approached were either exclusively attached to others or not responding to their phones. And the police were tightening a security perimeter around the area to enable first responders to do their essential work unhampered. I can’t recall if I prayed, but anyway my phone rang.
The caller was John Bloom, whose nom de plume in show business reporting was “Joe Bob Briggs, Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas,” and who wrote a New York Times–syndicated column that specialized in reviews of slasher and sexploitation movies and had built up an international following for its blend of satire, sex, and real reporting of its unknown Hollywood world. I knew John because he had written the back-page humorous column in National Review for a while after the great Florence King surrendered it. WFB had a particular fondness for that column and didn’t take to Joe Bob’s version of it. But I loved it, and I remained in touch with John after he left and I moved on from NR to UPI.
I now got my reward. John lived in New York in an apartment with an unobstructed view of the Twin Towers. He had been working on an article when out of the corner of his eye, he saw American Airlines Flight 11 strike the North Tower. Paying attention now, he watched United’s Flight 175 approach the South Tower:
“As I watched,” he told me over the phone, “I could see exactly how the pilot’s mind was working. There was nothing accidental or improvised about it. He wanted to strike that tower at a particular point, and he guided the plane unerringly to that point. He fully intended to kill all his passengers, and he didn’t mind killing himself in the process. It was cold-blooded mass murder and suicide. But there’s no doubt it took courage too.”
I thought that’s the balance — and the warning — we need. I asked a lot of questions. Will you write this up? Can you get out and about? Are you within the security perimeter? Etc., etc. John agreed to a send us eyewitness reports less about the crime than about its victims. For the next week he sent us a series of articles about how New Yorkers were handling 9/11 and its multiple tragedies — the “gray” people on the subway who he realized were rescue workers coated in ashes composed of the towers and of their inhabitants, the Franciscan monks next door to his apartment whom he never saw socializing until he ran into them in the next-door bar joining other Samaritans in a post-rescue late-night drink, the subdued camaraderie of New Yorkers helping their neighbors trace missing family members through messages and photographs posted on walls and lampposts.
It was the necessary background to all the rest of our reporting and analysis that we sent out that day and the following days. It gave me as editor in chief the sense that we must always keep in our minds the human loss that 9/11 meant in the midst of providing a steady output of analyses, reports, and commentaries. We were doing our duty in those matters, and I hope doing it well, but we shouldn’t congratulate ourselves — at least until the award ceremony for the Pulitzer prizes we would never get.
* * *
In my recollection of that day, everyone performed at their best, and all those mentioned above ultimately went on to better things.
Tobin Beck, after serving 30 years at journalism’s coal face, was welcomed by Concordia University in Nebraska as chairman of the English, Communication, and Theatre Arts Department while vamping as assistant professor of journalism and political science with his left hand.
Claude Salhani, after surviving any number of near misses from bombs and accidents in Middle East wars, still active as an editor and commentator in numerous publications, eventually died peacefully in Paris in 2022.
Roland Flamini remains today an ornament of Washington journalism and international media with an extraordinary range of books to his credit covering the Vatican, the royal family, Soviet politics, Hollywood both today and during its great age, and ten or 20 other diverse topics. Like Arnaud, he knows everybody, including some people who don’t know anybody.
Martin J. Sieff writes informed commentary on international affairs for newspapers, websites, academic journals, and weeklies on all the known continents. His many books include The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East, and he is now writing his autobiography.
Peter Roff remained in Washington journalism, moving from UPI to U.S. News & World Report and then to Newsweek as a columnist and contributing editor. He now serves as chairman of the Transatlantic Leadership Network’s Freedom of the Media Initiative promoting the free press internationally. His debating partner, James Chapin, died suddenly while still at UPI almost exactly a year after 9/11.
Martin Hutchinson moved on from UPI to become an independent writer on financial, economic, and historical topics both as the custodian of the weekly economic commentary, The Bear’s Lair, and as the author of books on economic policy, finance, and political history.
John Bloom remained at UPI for some years writing two weekly columns on movie criticism and the gaming industry under his pseudonym, Joe Bob Briggs, and a third under his real name covering a wide range of Americana. Since then he has continued his iconic career as Joe Bob Briggs as a writer, a critic, an actor, and in particular as the host of several series on cable television in which he presents and discusses horror or sexploitation movies in a unique style, part satire, part cultural history. He is an American phenomenon, nothing less.
Martin Walker remained in senior positions at UPI for several years; indeed, he retains links with it today as editor in chief emeritus. When the second Gulf War broke out, he embedded with British troops for the campaign, and he subsequently compiled, edited, and wrote a history of the conflict for UPI. He is the author of histories of the Cold War and America in the 20th century; studies of Gorbachev and Clinton; and the popular Bruno novels about a detective in the Perigord region of France, which have become an equally popular television series in Germany.
Arnaud de Borchgrave died in 2019, still working, after an extraordinarily brilliant career in journalism that is too well-known to bear repetition here — except to say that he gave us all the chance to show what we could do in a crisis. And we’re still grateful.
As for UPI, well, it’s still here, and according to Grok, providing continuous news of the U.S. and the world, business, science, and entertainment, while being generally regarded as reliable. In this changing world of journalism, that counts as success.