We go on. We have work to do.
Our (then biweekly) editorial conference was Monday, September 10. In those days, conferences were in person, in New York, at our offices which were in a characterless modern building on Lexington Avenue between 33rd and 32nd streets. Tuesday all the copy was due, to be edited and sent to the printer.
Tuesday was also primary day (Republicans had a choice of Michael Bloomberg and Herman Badillo for mayor). Up early for breakfast at a coffee shop a block from our apartment, I heard first that a plane had crashed in Union Square (I went to look; nothing there, but from there you could see a plume of smoke from the North Tower). A B-25 flew into the Empire State Building in 1945; another accident. Then someone came in to say the South Tower had been hit. No accident.
The office was in a frenzied lull. There was a continuous buzz from a television, and we tried processing the news, without yet being able to do anything. The towers burned, then fell, like stockings peeling down a leg though there weren’t any legs left. Then we came to order.
Rich helmed the print magazine then. He asked Ramesh, Jay Nordlinger, and me if this was a war. That was obvious. We yanked the cover and replaced it with big-font type: AT WAR. The lead editorial began on the cover and continued inside. There were one-page pieces by various editors. David Pryce-Jones managed to call from England; I believe we contacted Andy McCarthy and John Derbyshire, who were at their homes.
My piece tried to acknowledge everything bad the city had ever done — blackbirders, piracy, crime, and corruption — but assert that it was on net a product of desire and work, most of it lawful and just, and therefore worthy of its place at the head of the world.
Then came the problem of how to get the copy to the printer in Virginia. Usual communications were down, but we managed to send our files via a fax line to a friend in Wisconsin who had functioning T1 service. I didn’t know what that meant then, and I still don’t, but it worked. Cabs had disappeared by the time work ended, though the walk home for me was only a mile.
In those immediate hours there was a near leadership vacuum. President Bush, whisked to Barksdale Air Force Base, was worthless, until several days later when he got to Manhattan. Cardinal Egan was worthless (how we missed feisty demotic O’Connor). The pope was useless. Platitudes, boilerplate, slogans as vivid as sun-bleached bumper stickers.
The man who stepped up was Mayor Giuliani. It is hard to imagine now, but he went to the scene, he went on camera, he admitted dismay and suffering, he embodied determination.
Our mayor now is Zohran Mamdani, who will no doubt squirt a crocodile tear for the lost (“died”), while hopefully not reminding us that his Aunty feared to wear her hijab. As Norm Macdonald said, imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims.
New York has lived through worse: occupation, cholera, draft riots; the death of the South Bronx, the many deaths of the subway. But we go on. We have work to do.