Copyright © 2020 Virginia Buckingham
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Cavan Bridge Press, New York, NY
https://cavanbridgepress.com
http://www.virginiabuckingham.com
Edited and designed by Girl Friday Productions
www.girlfridayproductions.com
Cover design: Emily Mahon
ISBN (paperback): 978-0-9987493-2-7
ISBN (ebook): 978-0-9987493-5-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019917943
To my loves, David, Jack, and Maddy Lowy
Author’s Note
The events related in this book are true and are reconstructed to the best of my memory. If I made mistakes in time or depiction, it is unintentional.
The names of some 9/11 victims and family members, whom I never personally interacted with, have been changed to protect their privacy.
Contents
Prologue: Letter to Readers
Part I
Chapter One: Witness
Chapter Two: Before
Chapter Three: The Day
Chapter Four: Shut Down
Chapter Five: Blamed
Chapter Six: Tide
Chapter Seven: Haunted
Chapter Eight: Questions
Chapter Nine: Marianne and Anne
Chapter Ten: Words
Chapter Eleven: Lost
Part II
Chapter Twelve: Missing
Chapter Thirteen: “A Complete Comeback”
Chapter Fourteen: A Duty to Warn
Chapter Fifteen: The Rising
Chapter Sixteen: A Promise
Part III
Chapter Seventeen: “They Found Marianne”
Chapter Eighteen: Maybe God Cried, Too
Chapter Nineteen: A Warning
Chapter Twenty: “Apologize”
Chapter Twenty-one: Ganesh
Chapter Twenty-two: Footnote #1
Chapter Twenty-three: “The Little Chapel That Stood”
Part IV
Chapter Twenty-four: Twenty Seconds and the Thirty-Minute Rule
Chapter Twenty-five: A Swim on New Year’s Day
Chapter Twenty-six: Subpoena
Chapter Twenty-seven: “We Share a Pain”
Part V
Chapter Twenty-eight: New York
Chapter Twenty-nine: “Blameless”
Chapter Thirty: An Elevator and a Trampoline
Chapter Thirty-one: I Am Other
Chapter Thirty-two: The Resilience of Sea Glass
Epilogue: Letter to Readers
Acknowledgments: With Gratitude
About the Author
Prologue
Letter to Readers
Dear Readers,
There have been many stories told about the September 11 terrorist attacks, and I know you have your own. You know where you were when you first heard. You remember who you called after seeing the TV image of the plane striking the second tower. Our stories of 9/11 are the things that unite us still, like the sense of unity we felt in those first days and months after the attacks.
Except I never felt that way. I was the head of Boston’s Logan Airport on September 11, 2001. On my watch, American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 were hijacked after leaving Logan and then flown into the World Trade Center. The first news story suggesting I might be fired in response to the hijackings appeared on September 13. A media frenzy followed. Six weeks after 9/11, Massachusetts’s governor forced me to resign. I was later notified that a 9/11 family had sued me, holding me personally responsible for the wrongful death of their loved one. For many years, I feared that the blame directed at me was deserved.
I was broken by being blamed for the hijackings. Not instantly, not shattered like handblown glass, but over time. Like a bottle tossed into the sea, tumbled apart bit by bit by the movement of the waves.
Some have scoffed at the notion that I was really blamed. “It’s just politics,” they’d say. Others would shrug and note, “Everyone needs a scapegoat.”
Do we? What purpose does a scapegoat serve? And, beyond the obvious personal toll, is there a societal toll to assigning blame?
I have asked myself many times whether this story is worth telling. No one I knew personally died that day. I wasn’t part of the New York recovery effort, the federal response. I do recount the events of that day and the rebuilding of a broken confidence in aviation from my perspective at Logan. More so, though, I recount the rebuilding of a broken life.
As the years passed, I came to understand how being blamed and blaming myself come from the same human impulse—life is fragile, yet we unconsciously deny its fragility. Our culture, political and societal, turns to blame to help appease our fear and anger, allowing us to avoid wrestling with the harder questions.
Nothing I write in the following pages can adequately capture the devastation of the families whose loved ones died on 9/11. Their stories are their own, and I wouldn’t presume to tell them here. In some cases, I changed the names of victims or their families to maintain their privacy. In the passing years, though, I have had the privilege of contact, even friendship, with some 9/11 families. That they let me share in their grieving and allowed me to share my own grief is one of the greatest gifts I will ever receive. Their embrace helped me to move forward.
In its final report, the 9/11 Commission decreed we were a nation “unprepared” for the attacks and ascribed our nation’s inability to detect the 9/11 plot as a “failure of imagination.” As for Logan Airport’s role, the Commission found no evidence that the terrorists specifically targeted Logan or that there was any difference in checkpoint screening there versus at any other US airport. Finally, in 2011, a federal judge dismissed Logan from the one remaining wrongful death case slated to go to trial.
In this book, I do not revisit the investigation, nor tread the well-worn path of what might have been different had political leaders, the CIA, FBI, FAA, airlines, airport operators, or any number of individuals, me included, put together the pieces of the 9/11 plot before that day. The following pages are an investigation of my heart, my mind, my soul. It is not about who knew what but about the acceptance of simply not knowing what I did not know.
I hope that my story will have some resonance with others trying to navigate deeply painful experiences, who, like me, do not meet society’s expectations of how to “move on” by resolutely putting their trauma and loss behind them, who are admired for their strength, while knowing inside they are utterly broken. My story does not end neatly wrapped in a bow. I’ve not slammed some metaphorical door shut on the past. Instead, I have found a different sense of what resilience in the face of trauma and loss can look like and discovered that there is an important difference between moving forward and moving on.
Thank you for reading,
Ginny
Part I
Chapter One
Witness
December 15, 2006—101 Federal Street, Boston, Massachusetts
Deposition of Virginia Buckingham in Bavis v. UAL Corp. et al.
I looked down the long polished conference table. Dozens of lawyers leaned forward expectantly. They were all staring at me. I sat alone at the head of the table.
Except for the rustling of papers, the room was silent, tense. A video camera was set up at the far end, its lens trained o
n my face. There was a time when I would have turned a scarlet shade of pink if I became the center of attention, in class or at a social gathering. I never grew out of this painful shyness exactly; it just became subsumed into an intense focus on doing an increasingly public job well.
I felt the familiar anxiety creeping up the back of my neck as my lawyer leaned over and whispered that my testimony was being taped so it could be shown in court if there was a trial. The word “trial” jolted me even though I knew it was a possibility. I’d been dreading this deposition, but the idea that the wrongful death cases could end up before a judge and jury was too much to bear. Even though the personal case against me had been dropped, I knew that didn’t make a difference. If Logan Airport was found liable, then so was I.
The attorney who was to be my chief questioner represented about twenty-five of the passengers who went through Logan checkpoints on September 11 and their families. He sat directly to my right and introduced himself. After a few formalities, he wasted no time in going for the jugular.
Before 9/11 did you know who al Qaeda was?
Did you know who Osama bin Laden was?
Did you know terrorists had issued fatwas against the US?
I answered each question quietly. “No.”
I knew that most Americans before 9/11 would have answered the same way I did. Yet inside, the despair that had been my closest companion in the years since 9/11 immediately enveloped me in response to the lawyer’s insinuation: I should have known.
I clutched my hands tightly together and resisted the desire to stand and flee. The stares from the dozens of lawyers now seemed to reflect the questioner’s accusations.
The lawyer went on to ask me about my upbringing and education and professional career up until the time I was appointed to head Logan Airport. His point was to try to show I was unqualified for the position, to paint a picture of a woman ill equipped to lead the nation’s eighteenth-busiest airport in its most fundamental duty—to keep the people who traveled through it safe from harm.
I answered in the affirmative when he asked if I was born in Connecticut and first came to Boston to attend Boston College. I told him how I worked my way up in state government. But there was no opportunity to really share the story, however unremarkable, that ended with me in this seat answering for the wrongful deaths of thousands of people.
***
“BUCKINGHAM—Seventh child, fourth daughter, Virginia Beth, Sept. 14 in St. Mary’s Hospital to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Buckingham (Florence Andes), Beach Avenue.”
The faded square of newsprint from 1965 was tucked among a few other mementos my mother had given me after one clutter-shedding spree long after I’d moved to Boston. It was taped to what appeared to be a page ripped out of a sibling’s baby book.
“It must have been fun to grow up in such a large family,” friends and acquaintances have commented when they learned I was one of eight siblings. “What was it like?”
“It was quiet,” I wanted to answer. “So quiet.”
“But how can that be?” I knew they would ask incredulously. So I always simply answered, “It was fun.”
And it often was—sledding down our long, steep hill, Wiffle ball and home run derby in the backyard, games of H-O-R-S-E at the hoop on the street in front of our house, bicycle riding, excursions for ice-cream cones and penny candy. Still, an understandable and palpable exhaustion, emotional and financial, covered our family like so much dust on an end table. A voracious reader, I remember reacting in wonder at the recounting in the book Cheaper by the Dozen of the cacophony of a family of twelve children, their dinner table conversations a rotating clamor for attention. Our dinner table was mostly silent, my dad often taking his meal on a tray in the living room. To earn extra money, he rose immediately after finishing to go to his second job as an umpire or a referee depending on the season. He left most mornings by five o’clock to load first his milk truck and later his Hostess delivery truck with the products he “peddled,” as he liked to say. He’d take me with him sometimes on Saturdays to check the mom-and-pop stores he’d been to that week. Even though he wasn’t being paid, he wanted to make sure the displays of goods were still neat and attractive. As we entered each store, he greeted the clerk and paused to straighten the racks. Some lessons, I intuited, could be taught even when delivered in the most quiet of ways. “Work hard and take pride in your work, Virginia Beth,” my dad seemed to be teaching me.
In 1982, I pored over college catalogs. At that time, only three of my seven siblings had gone to college and none to so expensive or well known a school as Boston College. The soaring stone tower of BC on the cover of its catalog seemed like something out of a fairy tale. I was enamored with the idea of attending school in Boston simply based on one visit there as a child. My mom had taken me to famed Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market on a town-sponsored bus trip when I was about ten. I stared in delight at the street performers, flower carts, and cobblestones. The smells and sounds and jostle of people vying for attention at the food stalls in the center aisle were both frightening and thrilling.
As we wandered through the crowds in the outer covered aisles, I remember being drawn to a slanted wooden stand. It was packed with ice, and perfectly laid out on it, as if painted with an artist’s brush, were row after row of clear plastic cups. Each was filled to the rim with cantaloupe as deep orange as the setting sun and watermelon dripping with sugary pink juice and shiny black seeds, finished like a masterpiece with glistening strawberries and blueberries. In that moment, I think I understood, subconsciously, that Boston was the most beautiful, magical, almost mystical place in the world, and someday it would be my home.
With the flimsy reasoning of a sixteen-year-old, I vowed I would apply to Boston College, and with a stubbornness I didn’t know I possessed, I declared that if I didn’t get in, I wasn’t going to college at all.
The early acceptance letter I received in December 1982 made me want to skate across the linoleum-tiled floor of my upstairs bedroom like I used to do as a young girl in my stocking feet, pretending to be Dorothy Hamill. I could hardly contain my joy.
My mother navigated the financial assistance forms, and in the fall of 1983 I moved to Boston. I quickly found my place at Boston College, despite its size, making a couple of close friends and securing a job on campus paid for with a federal work-study grant. I immediately felt comfortable working among other students who came from more modest backgrounds. I still had plenty of time to study and have fun—nights at the library, sunny afternoons cheering BC Eagles football. But throughout college, I also spent nights and weekends behind the register at a nearby convenience store, waitressing at a local restaurant, and delivering audiovisual equipment to classrooms across campus. I worked hard, as if the lessons my dad taught me were hardwired.
In my junior year, I was required to find an internship related to my communications major, so I went to the college career center and flipped through a three-ring binder for opportunities that accepted work-study grant students. I read an entry for the Governor’s Press Office requiring strong writing skills.
Well, I can write, I thought. So I climbed on the T, as the Boston subway was called, and rode the Green Line into Park Street station on the corner of the Boston Common. I walked up the path to the steep stairs ascending into the grand marble halls of the State House and slowly opened the wooden door to room 259. I was accepted for the internship even after the office manager gently pointed out a typo in my résumé, a lesson of thoroughness I have never forgotten, and at nineteen I had my first job in politics. I was hooked.
If I was lucky, I got to be the intern who taped the remarks of the governor, then Michael Dukakis, at an event and cut them into tiny sound bites to feed into an ancient audio machine that radio stations could access for their local broadcasts. Or I would watch the governor hold a press availability outside his office and later that night see it on the new
s. It was exciting, but I also learned that politics matters. Government matters in people’s lives. And I wanted to be part of it.
After graduation I interviewed by phone for a role in Dukakis’s presidential campaign with his Iowa state director but decided to stay in the Boston area. I answered a blind help-wanted ad in the Boston Globe and was hired by a trade association to work on public affairs for small building contractors. I wore a “Dukakis for President” pin on my off-the-rack suits and dived into what turned out to be a wholly different job than advertised. The organization was sponsoring a ballot question that fall asking voters to repeal a decades-old law requiring union-level wages be paid on any public construction project. I was to be a field organizer, helping to gather the necessary signatures to get the question on the ballot, and then work with the advertising and media team to execute the campaign. I was skeptical about the so-called prevailing wage issue at first and an offhand comment by my father, a loyal member of the Teamsters Union, passed on by my mother gave me pause, too. “Just remind her that the only reason she went to college was because of the union,” he said.
Yet, the more I got to know the small contractors who made up our membership, the more I came to agree that being forced to pay union-scale wages, especially in small towns, was unfair and that their workforce deserved a chance to compete for publicly funded jobs, too. Some months into the campaign, I was sent up to the Merrimack Valley, a northern area of the state bordering New Hampshire, to represent our side in a League of Women Voters debate. It was to be aired on a local cable station, and it was my first debate. I was still innately shy, and I battled my nerves as I fiddled with the edge of my cardigan while seated onstage waiting for the event to begin. I noticed the organizers nervously checking the door. There was a moderator but the opponent’s chair was empty. “We may have to do it with just one side,” I heard an organizer say. Just then, the door flung open and a number of burly-looking construction workers came in, some accompanied by their girlfriends, and filled the front row. The moderator asked me a few questions but then asked if I minded taking questions from the audience.
On My Watch Page 1