Never Forget
The smoke continued to suffocate, the fires still smoldered, and bodies continued to be located and counted as President George W. Bush, seated at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, took a deep breath and addressed the nation at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, September 11, 2001—hours after he had been told, in a whispering voice, “America is under attack.”
It had been a day unlike any other. Two hijacked planes had flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. A third struck the Pentagon. A fourth, intended for the White House or the Capitol, crashed instead into a field in Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania, after passengers revolted and attempted to retake the plane.
In the towers, those trapped on upper floors called loved ones to say goodbye. Firefighters ran toward the buildings as bodies fell around them. Thick clouds of smoke and dust swallowed lower Manhattan. “Fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances were flattened,” one volunteer recalled. “Smoke from the fires made it hard to breathe.” R. W. Apple, Jr. wrote in The New York Times the following morning that “mere words were inadequate vessels to contain the sense of shock and horror that people felt.”
Now the president spoke to a nation under the siege of terror, fear, and profound uncertainty.
“Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack,” Bush began. “Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.” He added, with patriotic resolve: “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.”
The president then quoted Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.”
Nine days later, standing before a joint session of Congress, Bush held up the badge of police officer George Howard, who had perished in the flames of the Twin Towers trying to save others. “This is my reminder of lives that ended, and a task that does not end,” he said, his voice breaking. “Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war—and we know that God is not neutral between them.”
Some remember only the planes, others the terrorists or the geopolitical aftermath. But some, like volunteer firefighter David Battat, remember the American spirit—animating countless nameless individuals who worked in the rubble alongside “tourists who rolled up their sleeves” and firefighters who knew the air they breathed would shorten their lives. “That’s the memory I keep in the forefront,” Battat recalled. “Thousands of strangers trying to help others.”
Twenty years later, at the Flight 93 Memorial, Bush gave those memories their fullest expression. “We saw that Americans were vulnerable, but not fragile—that they possess a core of strength that survives the worst that life can bring,” he said. “We learned that bravery is more common than we imagined, emerging with sudden splendor in the face of death.
“On America’s day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor’s hand and rally to the cause of one another. That is the America I know.”
Yet, as in other times of strain, America was torn between its better and worse selves. Terrorism opened the doors of patriotism and unity—but simultaneously of discrimination and division, suspicion and anger.
The attacks led to two controversial wars, hundreds of thousands of casualties spanning more than twenty years, waged by a nation whose responding impulse was a mixture of rashness and restraint, hatred and benevolence, unity and distrust.
Despite what followed, America endured—sustained not by uniformity of thought or action, but by the power of its ideals, which, though withered and battered, survived the fire and smoke, the pain and death, of September 11, 2001, and call us even today to a depth of self we perhaps never knew we had, yet which dwells deep within every beating American heart, able to carry us through the unimaginable.