by Dennis Smith
I was born in 1944 in Manhattan and grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, on Forty-fourth Street between Skillman and Forty-third. Both of my parents were Irish Catholic, and two of my four grandparents were born in Ireland. One was born here but raised in Ireland, and my mother’s father was actually Welsh and Episcopalian, but converted to Catholicism.
My father was a city cop. He was promoted to lieutenant and was the director of physical training at the police academy. I knew he had a job at the academy, but no one ever told me until recently that after he retired they put his picture on the wall down there.
We lived just two doors down from the Celtic Cafe, a block and a half from Lynch’s Funeral Home, a block and a half from Sunnyside Gardens, where they had the Golden Gloves fights, and a half block from Robert Halls, which was the highest level of clothes that anyone in the neighborhood bought. We had the usual stereotypes for that time. The bar owner was Irish, the delicatessen guy was German, the candy store guy, Jewish. I went to St. Teresa’s Grammar School. The nuns had a tough job with over seventy kids in the classroom, and we went to school in shifts of four hours a day.
I always thought it was a really safe neighborhood, but looking back at it now, the brother of the guy who sat in front of me at school went to the electric chair, along with a guy whose father owned a bicycle store. They had killed a guy when a stickup went bad. The neighborhood also had a lot of guys who were locked up, but with all that, it wasn’t dangerous. Unless you bothered somebody else, nobody bothered you, and I don’t ever remember anyone getting jumped.
We lived almost twelve years in Sunnyside, and then moved to St. Albans on Long Island. I went to Brooklyn Prep High School and looking back on it, I found it tougher than college or law school. Jesuits are totally unforgiving when it comes to your studies. I then went to St. Francis College in Brooklyn. I worked full time during my last two years there, to help pay the bills, while also going to college full time. I saved some money and ended up going to law school at Notre Dame. I graduated in 1969, and right out of law school went into the Sixty-ninth Regiment, U.S. Army. I did almost six months on active duty and four and a half years on reserve duty. A lot of cops and firemen were in the unit.
When I returned, I practiced law in Manhattan for a while. Then I went out to Nassau County, which was not as expensive as the city. I developed a small law firm, got into politics, was elected councilman, and then county comptroller in 1981. In 1992 I was elected to Congress, and I’ve been there ever since.
I began being absorbed by security matters in our country with the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Even then, I didn’t pay as much attention to it as I should have. Both parties have a retreat at the beginning of each congressional session, and it was while I was at the Republican retreat in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1993 that they announced that a bomb had gone off in the World Trade Center. One of the congressmen in a flat joke attempt said, Any time New Yorkers get killed, that’s a good sign. It didn’t create a sense of urgency in America or in Congress.
In the early seventies the Croatian freedom fighters set off a bomb occasionally or the Puerto Rican nationals would be involved in a serious shooting or a bombing. These were very tragic events, and usually a few people were killed, but they didn’t have consequences beyond. Looking back at the Trade Center bombing now, my initial reaction was that this was a similar incident. I came back to Washington a day or two later, and it wasn’t even that big of a thing in the newspaper. My recollection is that Bill Clinton never came to New York to visit the site, and I don’t think [Mayor David] Dinkins came back from wherever he was. Ray Kelly basically took over the operation. It just did not register how significant that bombing was, and many concluded it was just some crazy Muslim extremist who was mad at the world. And New York had experienced that before, dating back to the J.P. Morgan Wall Street bombing in 1920.
From February of 1993 through September of 2001, I wasn’t on the intelligence committee, so I didn’t know of any secret briefings that might have been given, but I never heard the ’93 bombing discussed by anyone. It was just out of sight, out of mind.
The evening of September 11, 2001, was supposed to be the annual White House barbecue, which the president hosts for the members of Congress and their families. Both my kids were finally just getting out of school, and my daughter was married, so, rather than paying a bunch of rent every month I had bought a condominium across from the Watergate. My wife, Rosemary, had planned to fly down the night before, but her flight was canceled because of massive thunderstorms, so she was taking the 8:30 A.M. Delta shuttle out of LaGuardia. My chief of staff picked me up that morning right around 8:30 A.M., and as we were driving to the office my daughter called me on my cell phone. Her husband worked about three blocks north of the World Trade Center, and his office looked out at the towers. She told me, before it had been reported on the news or anything else, that he could see out the window that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, and she said it was a giant plane. Now my concern was—and it may have been very self-centered, but again, I wasn’t even thinking of a terrorist attack—of nothing other than the fact that my wife was on an 8:30 flight that would have been coming up the Hudson at the same time. Right away I was afraid it was my wife’s plane, so I called my office, and they called Delta, and all Delta would say was that there had been an accident but couldn’t tell us anything else, wouldn’t confirm anything. My assistant dropped me off at the Cannon [House] Office Building, where everyone was walking down the hallway, laughing and drinking their coffee, cops were very relaxed, and there was no sense of tension at all. I went into my office, where the TV was on, and just as I walked in I saw the plane hitting the World Trade Center and said, “Oh, they have it on tape.” I didn’t realize then that it was the second plane hitting. I was still concerned about my wife, and then I turned on my television and learned that the second tower had been hit. Of course, I said to myself at that moment, this is a terrorist attack.
I still couldn’t get in touch with my wife. After the second plane hit my son-in-law had taken off from his building, but he didn’t have a cell phone. And then my son, who worked in the Commerce Department, called, but after a false report that a bomb had gone off at the State Department—though then they said it was at the Commerce Department—all the phones went dead there for about fifteen minutes. So I had no indication where my wife, my son, or my son-in-law were. At about 9:21 A.M. my wife called and said, “I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know how I’m going to get to the White House tonight. They say there are no flights going out today.” She had no idea what had happened; they had stopped the planes on the runway, and the pilot announced that all flights had been canceled. I said to her, “Do you know what’s happened?” and she said no. I said, “We are at war.” It was the first time I heard myself say that. And then they announced it on the plane, and I heard people screaming all around her. I sent someone from my staff to pick up my wife, and then my son called, and my son-in-law called from a cab on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Within a half hour we knew everyone in my family was safe, and as far as I was concerned the whole world was safe for that solitary, brief moment.
Then the Pentagon was hit, and so I ordered everyone to leave. My chief of staff was renting a house near the White House, so I suggested we operate there until we could find out what was going on. As I was going out the door Channel 12, a cable station on Long Island, called and asked to do a one-minute interview. Cops were ordering everybody out, and as I was standing there describing the evacuation, the TV announcer suddenly said, “I can’t believe it.” I turned around, and over my shoulder on the television I saw the [first] tower was coming down. It was so hard to comprehend. People talking in New York had a split screen of me speaking and the tower collapsing, and I had no idea what would be next.
Where we were going was normally about a fifteen-minute ride, but it actually took nearly two hours to get there. At 10:28 we heard that a plane
had gone down in Pennsylvania. I said to myself, This is too bad, yet with everything else going on—it’s just another tragic plane crash. It never dawned on me that it was part of a bigger situation, or that the plane was aiming for the Capitol. If the plane had hit its target, I would’ve been less than two blocks away. None of us really associated where we were with what happened, except perhaps the president, and the highway we were stalled on was a highway of American political decision makers. We probably had most of the Congress, Senate, and senior Washington officials locked up in total gridlock.
We got to the chief of staff’s house, where my son had planned to meet us. He decided to grab some food first, so that delayed him, and I began to wonder where he was. There was another report that a bomb had gone off at the State Department, which is only about two miles from where I live. But there was no bomb. From the chief of staff’s house we could see convoys of National Guard troops going to the White House. That was sort of a scary thing—combat troops going through Washington and literally racing to the White House. Seeing our troops on the streets was the first thing that really gave me the sense of being in a war zone.
I did not think about the president at that time. I was talking to family and reporters back in New York. The reporters were calling me trying to find out what I knew, and I was asking them what they knew. Around 1:00 P.M. we heard that there was to be a briefing given by the Capitol police in their headquarters next to the Monocle Restaurant. We had no official communication; all of official Washington was shut down, and we were having a briefing in the basement of a small headquarters building next to a restaurant. There was no plan in place to contact members of Congress if Washington or the country was attacked. All of us were on our own that day. There was no central way of communicating with everybody. There were no BlackBerrys. There was no place to call, and it just became a matter of word of mouth.
There’s so much that’s obvious now, but at the time I was just concerned with suicide bombers. A congressman from Connecticut, Rob Simmons, who is a former CIA guy, said we really had to worry about chemical and biological attacks, which he figured would be the next thing. If this were really synchronized, there would be some chemical bomb going off somewhere or some biological attack, which would really cause the nation to panic.
Inside Capitol police headquarters the police gave us a briefing, and about half of Congress was there. We could see smoke up in the air from the Pentagon. The briefers were asking everyone to stay away from the Capitol, as they didn’t know what was going to happen next, and they didn’t want to overextend the police. I remember some congressmen insisting they had to go back to the Capitol, so that the country could see them. I know it looked good later on, when they all sang “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps, but I thought at the time that such demands were really irresponsible. First of all, the country was not necessarily looking to us for protection, and secondly, we shouldn’t be making the cops’ job tougher.
I was really disappointed with all the shouting going on at that briefing. Denny Hastert, the then speaker, and Minority Leader Dick Gephardt had been evacuated somewhere—to this day, I don’t know where—and were addressing us on loudspeakers, and people were yelling at them, “No one is going to keep us from the Capitol.”
That evening I went to dinner at the Dubliner—trying to eat, talk, get collected somehow. A congressman at the briefing had said, “We have to kill these guys. We have to go to war right away.” Another congressman, sitting with me at the Dubliner, said, “Oh, how about all the people we kill?”
I should have known that the unity that everyone said was there really wasn’t as much there as we thought it was. That night we had another briefing, but half didn’t come back for that. We heard Bush’s speech on television, and I did a few radio interviews. Then I heard about the people, how many people at Cantor Fitzgerald had been killed, so many hundreds—that was the first that I had learned of it. I took a sleeping pill that night to get to sleep.
The next day, again realizing that this was war, I was trying to go back and think about how would we have done at Pearl Harbor. We got a briefing on the House floor that afternoon by [John] McLaughlin, the number two guy at the CIA. [Attorney General John] Ashcroft was there. I saw FBI director [Robert] Mueller there; he’d just been released from the hospital, back from prostate cancer [surgery] the week before. The head of FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] was there, and I thought that on the whole it was basically a good briefing. But then again some congressman accused them of covering up, of not giving us all the facts. Then all the yelling really started—it was just so wrong. Another congressman was talking about this terrible disaster, and the members around him were screaming, making partisan points, and I finally just walked out. When you go into these briefings you have to leave your cell phone outside, so I picked mine up and got a voice mail that Jimmy Boyle’s son had died. Jimmy Boyle is a former president of the New York City firefighters’ union. That was really tough. I called Jimmy, and he said, “My son Michael was killed.” Michael Boyle was the first person who died whom I really knew well, so that made me feel even more disgusted with all the screaming going on in Congress. Then I heard about Father Mychal Judge, the Fire Department chaplain, whom I also knew. It was all feeling very real.
On Thursday we went down to the White House for a briefing, and that was interesting. They had gathered all the members of Congress from close to the regions that had been attacked: downstate New York, northern New Jersey, and Virginia. Bush came in, and we all applauded. Outside the room we could see troops with camouflage and the sort of heavy-duty weapons that you never thought you’d see at the White House. The first thing the president announced was that the vice president of the United States had been evacuated, and then he told us that they thought there could be more attacks. He’d been in contact with [Russian president Vladimir] Putin, and with [Pervez] Musharraf from Pakistan, and announced that NATO had gone to DefCon 5, or whatever the top level of alert is. Then he told us that he had agreed to give New York $20 billion. [New York senator Chuck] Schumer said, “Mr. President, I am so startled. I was all set to give long speeches about why we needed the $20 billion. I don’t know what to say.” Then Bush said, “The only reason I gave it to you was to keep you quiet, Chuck. I didn’t want to hear your speeches.”
That was good, because everybody laughed, even if it wasn’t really that funny. There was so much tension in the room that we truly needed some lightness, so people chose to laugh. And then there was some pontificating. [Republican senator] John Warner from Virginia said, “I sat here when your father was the president during the first Gulf War, and you have my support.” It became more about themselves again. Hillary was good; she said, “I’m backing the White House,” for the first time, and “I’ll support you in any way.”
Bush had said in the meeting, please, he didn’t want anything to be known about Cheney’s being evacuated and asked that nothing be shared outside of the meeting—which was actually a designation of making the meeting classified, so that Congress did not broadcast what we were doing in our government. When I returned to my office I got a call from a reporter I knew at CNN, who asked, “Can you tell us what went on?” And I said, “No, I really can’t, this is serious stuff.” As I was talking they were announcing Cheney’s evacuation on television. Within twenty minutes of a meeting where the president basically swore us to secrecy because we were at war, someone at the meeting had leaked to the press what was considered classified information.
President Bush announced that he was going to New York the next day, and that night I got a call from the White House saying I would be going up with the delegation. On Friday morning, after watching Bush’s speech on television from the National Cathedral, we took off from Andrews Air Force Base on an Air Force jet. We landed at LaGuardia and took buses in from there. The streets were strangely empty, especially as we got into the city. People were walking around, but it was an apprehensive
walk, a walk of pending doom. We parked about a quarter of a mile north of Ground Zero, and I saw all that white stuff from the buildings, mud on the streets, demolished fire trucks and chief ’s cars. People were cheering along the way as police, fire, and official cars passed. I saw the Sixty-ninth Regiment guys on duty, and I thought, Wow. That hit me: There at the corner of Vesey and West streets were armed troops.
Cardinal [Edward] Egan and Mayors Dinkins and Ed Koch were there. I saw some cops I knew, who told me how bad it was. On television, the reporters were talking about finding survivors. But I spoke to cops, who said that’s all bullshit; no one’s alive. There were still rumors about hundreds being rescued, and these cops said that there was no chance that anyone was alive. The president arrived and we heard this massive cheering, apparently when Bush got on top of a battered fire truck with Bob Beckwith, a retired NYC firefighter. I spoke to the president briefly, and to Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani. It was a memorable and patriotic time.
The congressional delegation was flying back to Washington, because we had a vote that night—a resolution to take action in Afghanistan. But the next morning was Pete Ganci’s funeral, the chief of the FDNY, who [had] lived about a mile or so from me, so I stayed in New York for the funeral. The Secret Service let me off at my car at LaGuardia Airport after being at Ground Zero. The airport was empty; all you saw were Port Authority cops at fifty-foot intervals. As I was driving home on the Grand Central Parkway, I heard many F16s overhead. It was so eerie and unusual for America.
At Pete Ganci’s funeral there was a tremendous turnout. The cops dropped off Mayor Rudy Giuliani about a block away from the church. He had just come from Father Judge’s funeral in the city, and the funeral of Chief Ray Downey, the famous catastrophe expert. They asked me to go greet him and bring him back to the front of the church. I’d known Rudy for decades, and we didn’t always get along, but we had worked things out over a breakfast one day. And I was glad we had resolved any differences.