Cliff’s Note:
I have written about September 11 before, in pieces. I had never told it all the way through, and this morning, twenty-five years on, I decided to, on camera, for whoever showed up. Nearly three hundred of you did, without an email, and I am grateful.
This is not a rant. It is what I saw from a street corner on the Lower East Side, what a stranger said to me while we watched, the call I was on when the phones went down, and what the day did to me for years afterward, which I did not have the words for at the time. I get into the politics only at the end, because the politics came at the end.
If you were there, or you lost someone, I hope this is worth your half hour. If you weren’t, I hope it helps you understand the people who were. Either way, it is free, and it always will be.
—Cliff
Cliff has written about September 11 before. He had never sat down and told it straight through, so on the twenty-fifth anniversary he did, from a porch in Cincinnati in a Yankees cap, for the nearly three hundred people who found the stream without an email. He was working a city council primary in lower Manhattan that morning and was on his way to the World Trade Center on a campaign errand when the phone rang.
What follows is not a rant. It is what he saw from the corner of Delancey and Ridge, what a stranger beside him said, the call he was on when every phone in New York went dead, and the years it took before he could hear the date on the radio without going somewhere dark. Near the end he turns to what the day did to the country, and to the Republicans he says used it.
Five Things You Will Hear
The sky that morning, and why he still cannot decide whether he noticed it at the time or only afterward (02:58).
Delancey and Ridge, the second plane coming in “like slow motion,” and the seven words a stranger said next to him (06:50).
Why he started running toward the towers, why he stopped, and the twenty minutes that separated him from being underneath them (10:25).
The ten-minute phone call with his father that the network cut off, and why the date now belongs to his dad too (12:53).
The bus that backfired in Washington three weeks later, and the decision that eventually landed him in Cincinnati (25:23).
