by Dennis Smith
I was still a firefighter, even after all those thirty-three years, having risen through the ranks: lieutenant, captain, battalion chief, deputy chief, assistant chief, chief of operations, chief of department. I don’t know if I was still on full duty, or even legal, but I was going out the way I came in. I found that what I missed when I got promoted through the ranks is what I liked about the job in the first place: the actual firefighting with people I trusted. So it was kind of like going full circle for me, and I left the job in a pair of jeans, a pair of work boots, and a T-shirt. Fortunately, there were no memorable fires that night, and I thank the people of Brooklyn for that. I was an older version of the guy who came on the job in 1969, and rode the back steps of many different fire trucks. It was a lot of fun with the firefighters in the kitchen, and so it was a nice way, a good way, to end my career.
It did not come the way I wanted it at the time, as I had planned to stay in the job practically until they threw me out. But again, things don’t always happen the way you think they are going to happen, so you make the best of how it goes. It was quite a year, and I have trouble remembering other parts of my life in the Fire Department because of that last year. I was once asked in an interview if, other than the World Trade Center, I could name some other fires I had been at that were memorable. And I couldn’t. Because once those buildings collapsed, it was like the hard drive in my mind took up all the memory, and there was no room for other recorded events. Sometimes they come back to me now, but at the time I couldn’t even think of things that hadn’t occurred in that twelve-month period, from September 11, 2001, to September 9, 2002, when I retired.
If you were a survivor of Pearl Harbor, I think that would always be the defining event of your life, no matter what else happened to you. Certainly because I am a survivor of September 11, and was chief during that time, my life subsequent to that has become centered around 9/11. That’s all I think about. But it had such an impact on my life that I think I’m a better person now. I’m more apt to think about people’s feelings. I’ve become more in touch with the importance of everything that I do every day, and how nice it is to have these days. To have a life, even the parts of it that aren’t so much fun, is still something to experience. If I get delayed at an airport—the kind of minor inconvenience that used to drive me crazy—it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Such things have much less impact now, because all of us who were there were impacted by something so big that all else seems pretty small in comparison. Some people, unfortunately, have never gotten over it enough to function. Some, maybe many, lost the way they used to be, the way they enjoyed their life, because it hurt them so badly. They weren’t able to get to the point where they could compartmentalize that hurt, and live with it. Not everyone can simply say, You know, it’s time to move on. That’s unrealistic—you don’t move on to a place where this is no longer a part of you. It’s always a part of you. I’m lucky enough to have been able to have a life after 9/11 that’s been wonderful. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have pain, but I can still see beauty, and enjoy each day.
I think some of us knew that the World Trade Center was built outside of the building code in New York. I can’t speak for people there that day who were knowledgeable about the details. I knew about it because it was Port Authority, and the authority is exempt from local building codes. I don’t know if any of our department leadership was on the job when it was being built, but maybe we were just at the beginning of our careers. Were any of us aware that those trusses might have rendered the building less strong than others that we’d been in? Probably not. We were probably not as aware of the skeletal structure as we should have been. And that speaks to some ofof the inadequacies I felt afterward. Here I was, in a very high position in the department, and I didn’t know this. We all should have known more, maybe. But I can only speak for myself. I have always considered myself to be knowledgeable, but I wasn’t as knowledgeable as I thought I was.
I’ve seen one of the chief structural engineers of the Trade Center [Leslie Robertson] on TV since, and he doesn’t feel that way, but I’ll let him deal with whatever demons are in his head. And I’m sure they’re there, each and every day. I have enough of them in my own head to deal with. Here we had the biggest buildings in New York, and I don’t remember ever seeing a fire-load analysis of those structures. We probably were just creatures of experience. In the New York City Fire Department most everything we do is based on our experiences. Overseas a lot of the chiefs have to have degrees in engineering to reach the highest levels in their departments. In New York we’ve always had a guy who has been to five thousand fires leading us. It did work, for the most part, but it didn’t work very well that day.
So we have the firefighting issues, the construction issues, and the issues of the attackers. I’m always shocked by how casual people remain in this country about the whole issue of Islam, that they are willing to believe that these nineteen people who hijacked the planes were an aberration, that everyone else in the Muslim world is just peace and love. There’s no way we have to be nice, that we have to be kind, that we must consider it could be our fault that this happened. Because we’re not nice to others around the world, it’s our fault? I’m not willing to buy that; I think it’s crap. I think people who want us to believe in the “it’s a few radicals” idea have some nerve. They want to sacrifice another few thousand people, another 343 firefighters, with this stupidity.
We’re a country built on individual rights; I hear this all the time. How far do we extend that? How far? Should we stop searching people going onto planes? Why do we have to ask politely when we want to question these criminals about their behavior? Let’s not worry about our society, some politicians seem to be saying, but let’s worry about them. Let’s not worry about the people they are going to kill. Let’s worry about the well-being of the killers. And it’s going to happen again. The firefighters still think about it every day. Their families think about it. My two daughters think about it, with their firefighter husbands, that firefighters are out there and could be sacrificed again.
We should, must, remain vigilant against people who want to harm us. I don’t know how we can solve their problems. I don’t know what they want. What is it that they want? What is it that sent these people out to kill us? What is their goal? If the goal is the destruction of our culture, then the only answer for us can be to defend ourselves and our families to whatever extent we have to.
I think our intelligence community was persistent, for instance, in staying after bin Laden, and that persistence paid off. I was in no way gleeful when I received word of his death, but considering the life he chose, the life of a mass-murdering criminal, he certainly got what he deserved.
I don’t think the forces that brought us to 9/11 have disappeared or dissipated. We might have pushed some Taliban out of Afghanistan, but they’re still there, a force in that world that sees whatever we’re doing over here as evil. I’m offended when people think that anyone who took a stance against building a mosque near Ground Zero is a racist or a Muslim hater. Look at it this way: Muslims killed many of my friends, killed family members of some of the people who said I don’t like the idea of a mosque down by Ground Zero, and so I am sensitive to the subject. We have to be sensitive to those 9/11 families who think this. We owe it to them. They’re not saying that they believe there shouldn’t be Muslims in America or that Muslims don’t have a right to exist. The idea of building a mosque has now grown to that of building a great Muslim cultural center, and it is just too close to a place that’s considered sacred to many people. Why would one think these family members should get over it?
No one is saying that every Muslim in the world is to blame for 9/11, but it is undeniable that a battle exists between some segment of people who believe in the Muslim faith and what we would call the West. I think everyone can agree to that. It’s not just a few guys, and once we get rid of those guys who are locked up somewhere in a cave, it will all end. I don�
��t think anyone believes that. The world continues to be very dangerous, and I am afraid that the next attack could be even more heinous than 9/11.
I’m talking about a nuclear or radiological event that will affect many thousands of people for many years. I don’t have a security clearance, so I don’t know what intelligence we’re gathering around the world, but just the knowledge that there are people out there who are willing to put a bomb in their shoe or their underwear—that disturbs me. People danced in the streets after 9/11, and I know there would be people who would dance in the streets if a nuclear device were to be detonated in Times Square.
Can they be successful? I’m not so afraid of it that I’m living out in a cabin in Montana. My family and everyone else I know lives here in New York. We are still the biggest target. We are not running away from it, but certainly we know that it’s possible. In one way we in New York are very fortunate, because we have good leadership in our Police and Fire departments. We all benefit from that. For now, anyway.
Ray Kelly
Ray Kelly is the only official to hold the office of police commissioner of the city of New York under two mayors—David Dinkins and Michael Bloomberg—separated by eight years. He is a man who was molded by the caring and the personal motivations found within a close-knit Irish Catholic family. He is perhaps the most educated police commissioner who has ever served a major police department (a group that includes President Theodore Roosevelt). A former U.S. Marine, he brings to his leadership style the values of integrity, strength, and courage that were taught in his training and refined on the battlefields of Vietnam. He is known as a creator of innovative and important programs and policies designed to keep the public protected from the social hazards of crime and safe in the midst of New York City’s greatest challenge to the security of the homeland.
I was the youngest of five—three brothers and one sister—and my parents were loving, hardworking people. I always remember my mother working—she had a part-time job as a checker at Macy’s. My father was basically a milkman for a significant period of time, until there was a change in the law, brought about by [Mayor Fiorello] LaGuardia. LaGuardia was not a hero in our household. To the best of my knowledge, the milk regulations were changed so that you could now buy it in supermarkets, and so the price was lowered. As a result, the route deliverers basically went out of business. My father then worked on the docks, and then in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When the war was over, he was out of work. I remember him shaping up in the New York Times, and then he got a great job as a clerk in the Treasury Department in the IRS. In his fifties he would go to work wearing a suit and tie, something I had never seen previously.
When I was born we lived at Ninety-first Street and Columbus Avenue, in a five-story tenement that has since been torn down. I went to St. Gregory’s School, which is still on Ninetieth between Amsterdam and Columbus, and when the neighborhood became bad we moved to Queens, where I attended eighth grade at St. Theresa’s in Sunnyside. I then went to St. Ann’s Academy in Manhattan, which was moved to Queens and, though it had existed for over one hundred years, its name was changed to Archbishop Molloy. It’s still a good school today.
In college I majored in economics, within the School of Business at Manhattan College. In those days you had to have 144 credits to graduate, and so I took many diverse courses—Spanish and history, accounting, psychology—and found them to be interesting and insightful. But it was the School of Business, so statistics and those sorts of courses were in the core of the curriculum. And I also had a big dose of theology.
I was also working in Macy’s part time. My mother had gotten me a job as a stock boy, but I saw an advertisement looking for college students to do part-time work in a path to become a police officer. Adam Walinsky in the Lindsay administration helped create the police cadet program, which was the first effort on the part of municipal police agencies to bring college graduates into police departments. I had no relatives in the police department, but this advertisement seemed to be a window into this mysterious organization—and I didn’t particularly want to continue as a stock boy. I was in the first class of police cadets, and we were looked at somewhat strangely by the uniformed members of the department, because we were all so young. We went to work in a variety of administrative units. I worked in the lost property section, and then in the communication division, where I would man the switchboard. And I worked alongside other college students doing that. And that’s how I took the test to be a police officer. You had to take the test, and pass it, to remain in the cadet program.
About a month after I graduated with a commission as a second lieutenant, I went on active duty in the marines. I had three older brothers, all of them in the Corps, so I sort of felt compelled to go into the marines as well. They would bring home Marine Corps paraphernalia and that sort of thing when I was young, so I was fascinated by it. While family environment was very important to me, and obviously, Catholic school provided a sound educational foundation, I think it’s fair to say that my experiences in the marines have also been important. Marine Corps values mean a lot to me, because those core values—honesty, determination, fairness, and courage—stay with you your whole life. You don’t realize it, and don’t consciously think about it every day, but they really do impact on how you approach life, approach problems, deal with people.
When I left the Marine Corps in late 1966–early 1967 I came back to the NYPD training school. Now I had just come from Vietnam, so chaotic situations were not unusual for me, but we were taken to the range, fired fifty rounds of ammunition, given blue uniforms and guns, and within three days put right out on the street on patrol with a more experienced uniformed officer. This was a highly unusual occurrence, and we would never do it today. I went to Brooklyn, where there were disturbances in East New York and Bedford-Stuyvesant—garbage cans being thrown off the roof and that sort of thing. So we were in the thick of it before we really had any training.
The sixties were very tumultuous. Most people today don’t remember, or they aren’t old enough to remember, that there was a lot of street disorder. The sixties and early seventies were fraught with civil unrest.
I started going to St. John’s law school at night, got promoted to sergeant, [and] began working in East Harlem, where I worked a lot of midnight tours on patrol. It was a very busy time, and a violent time. When we look at crime statistics today, they pale in comparison to those days. The job was a lot more dangerous back then, and a lot more uncertain in terms of what we might encounter. In 1971 or ’72, twelve police officers were killed. It was definitely dangerous work, but it was exciting too, and I loved it.
At the same time, we had police corruption, which was exposed by the Knapp Commission. Its findings were a major surprise to the average police officer—and might come as a surprise to many people today—as they were not aware of corruption in specialized units, like narcotics. The idea that police would be taking money from drug dealers was something that was considered by members of the department to be total anathema. It was a very hostile environment.
I became first deputy police commissioner under Commissioner Lee P. Brown in February of 1990. Because he was the president of the IACP [International Association of Chiefs of Police], he often had to speak at events in other parts of the country, so as acting commissioner, I gained much experience.
At that period of time we weren’t prepared for the development of organized terrorism. Should we have been? Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but the answer is yes. To the extent that there was some hum or buzz about terrorism, it was thought to be a federal problem, and the federal government was addressing that. We were not aware on a municipal level, where we were taking care of the traditional things that police agencies are supposed to. In those days we had a significant amount of crime, and obviously our focus was on suppressing it.
On February 26, 1993, we had the first World Trade Center attack. I remember going there and seeing the magnitude of the event. Of course, w
hat happened on September 11 dwarfs what took place then, but at the time it was a major, major incident. We were involved in rescue and recovery efforts, and then we had specialized units like the bomb squad assist in the investigation. But the assumption was that the federal government would be actively engaged, and we did not see ourselves in those days as having a kind of equal partnership with the FBI. It should have been a wake-up call for the city, and it also should have been a call for us to look behind the federal curtain and see what was going on. When you look back you see that relatively little was going on.
To a certain extent, one of the problems that emerged as a result of the first World Trade Center attack is that it supposedly was solved very quickly, and the individuals were seen as being somewhat inept. A detective in our auto crime division found the differential of the truck that was used and brought it to our police lab. It had a hidden VIN [vehicle identification number], which was traced very quickly to a rental facility in New Jersey. A few days after the attack the bombers came back to get their deposit, claiming that the truck had been stolen. The bombing took place on a Friday, and the following Thursday the arrests were made. When you think about it, the fact that they came back for their deposit wasn’t all that illogical, if they were taking the position that they didn’t know what happened to the truck, since it had been stolen, but instead they were painted as buffoons. As a result of that I think the attention of the investigative agencies was lowered, or shifted. And as far as the public was concerned, these people were in jail.
But not too long afterward there was another plot in which Jim Fox, who ran the New York office of the FBI, learned from an informant of plans to blow up 26 Federal Plaza, the UN, the Holland Tunnel, and other familiar sights throughout New York City. Suspects were arrested and were again considered to be some sort of buffoons, because they were so sloppy. So while there was a sense that there was a threat out there, it wasn’t well organized. Sheikh Rahman was discovered to be in the middle of it, and was ultimately taken into custody, and that was that. Life went on. I left city government then at the end of ninety-three, early ninety-four, and the police department didn’t particularly focus on the issue of terrorism.