These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  The Republican who did win the nomination that year was George W. Bush, the governor of Texas and former president’s son. With the younger Bush, a Yale graduate and a devout born-again Christian, conservatism got a new face, a new voice, and a new slogan: “compassionate conservatism.” “Big government is not the answer,” Bush said at the Republican convention. “But the alternative to bureaucracy is not indifference. It is to put conservative values and conservative ideas into the thick of the fight for justice and opportunity.” Republican speechwriter David Frum proved skeptical, joking: “Love conservatism but hate arguing about abortion? Try our new compassionate conservatism—great ideological taste, now with less controversy.”188

  Less controversy there would not be. The nation, long divided, turned out to be divided quite evenly. The 2000 election was a nail-biter to end all nail-biters. After it was all over, it was by no means clear that the voters had decided the outcome. Instead, the two most dauntingly powerful forces on the battleground of American politics—cable television and the Supreme Court—made the first and eventually the final call.

  Just before 8:00 p.m. on Election Night, the networks announced that Gore had won Florida in a very close vote. Later that night, Fox News countermanded the networks’ prediction of a Gore victory. Ailes had hired John Ellis, Bush’s first cousin, to head Fox News’s “decision desk.” Shortly after 2:00 a.m., after getting off the phone with Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, Ellis cried out, “Jebbie says we got it!” (Later, before a House committee, Ailes said that there had not been anything inappropriate in his employing Ellis. “Quite the contrary,” he said. “I see this as a good journalist talking to his very high-level sources on election night.”)189 Fox News then called the election for Bush.

  Four minutes later, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN followed Fox’s lead, naming Bush the next president. A crestfallen Gore conceded, but then, in yet another twist of a tale as tangled as seaweed, Gore un-conceded, telling Bush, in a second phone call, “Your little brother is not the ultimate authority on this.” A report commissioned by CNN damned the television coverage that night as a “news disaster that damaged democracy and journalism” and “played an important part in creating the ensuing climate of rancor and bitterness.”190 The report missed the point. Television coverage of American politics had helped create that climate, for sure, but years before Bush faced Gore.

  A battle over a recount in the election of 2000 left the outcome in doubt for weeks. Gore contested the election. No one disputed that he had won the popular vote by more than half a million ballots. That meant that the election turned on a handful of votes needed to capture the electoral vote in Florida. The Florida Supreme Court supported Gore’s demand for a manual recount in four counties. There followed thirty-six days of doubt about the outcome of the election—and of the American presidency itself—while a recount was held. Then, astonishingly, on December 12, the Supreme Court called off the recount, overruling the lower court in a bitterly argued 5–4 decision.

  In September of 1787, when Americans were first asked to debate the Constitution, many had wondered at the power granted to the Supreme Court. Many wondered, again, in December of 2000, when the court exercised a power never before known. The five justices that formed the majority had all been named by Reagan or Bush. They rested their decision on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, an amendment that had been written and ratified to guarantee the rights of African Americans.191 “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear,” Justice John Paul Stevens, eighty, and a Ford appointee, wrote, in a blistering dissent. “It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”192

  On the final day of his presidency, Clinton made one last deal in which, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, he admitted to having lied under oath. He and his wife left the White House with more than $190,000 in gifts. An editorial in the Washington Post urged George W. and Laura Bush to count the White House spoons and described the Clintons as having “no capacity for embarrassment.” Hillary got an $8 million book deal; she and Bill bought two multimillion-dollar homes.193

  “Our nation must rise above a house divided,” the new president said, after Gore conceded.194 But the nation, its houses newly wired for the Internet, was about to come apart, two towers collapsing.

  Sixteen

  AMERICA, DISRUPTED

  Firefighters searched Ground Zero long after the collapse of both towers.

  THE FIRST PLANE CRASHED INTO THE TOP FLOORS OF the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York at 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001. CNN broke into a commercial to show live footage of the tower, gray smoke billowing out of a black gash in the steel and glass against a nearly cloudless blue sky. On an ordinary day, some fifty thousand people worked in the Twin Towers, more than one hundred stories high; by a quarter to nine on that particular Tuesday, nearly twenty thousand people had already shown up, wearing hats and pumps, carrying laptops and briefcases. Orders to evacuate or not to evacuate, and whether to go up or go down, conflicted; most people decided to leave, and headed down. As more than a thousand firefighters, EMTs, and police officers raced to the scene and began rescue efforts, some people trapped on the upper floors, facing insufferable heat and unable to breathe, leapt to their deaths rather than be burned alive. One couple held hands as they fell. From far away, they looked like paper dolls.

  At 8:52 a.m., Peter Hanson, a passenger on another plane, United Airlines Flight 175, was able to call his father. He asked him to report to authorities that his flight had been hijacked. Hanson, thirty-two, was flying with his wife and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter: they were going to Disneyland. “I think they’ve taken over the cockpit,” Hanson whispered to his father. The passengers were thinking about trying to gain control of the plane from the terrorists, who’d used knives and Mace and said they had a bomb and appeared to have killed the pilots. At 9:00, Hanson called his father again. “I think we are going down,” he said. “My God, my God,” he gasped. Three minutes later, United 175 crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center.

  Television stations had been covering the fire in the north tower live; announcers and reporters watched in horror as the plane hit the south tower and burst into a fireball. It looked impossible, something out of a 1950s Hollywood disaster film, props, models, wires, and tin, something that could not happen, King Kong swinging from the Empire State Building, Godzilla climbing the Statue of Liberty. “My God, my God,” said a host on ABC News. “Oh Lord.” Sirens shrieked, and from the streets there came a wailing.

  At 9:37 a.m., in Washington, DC, a third hijacked plane, traveling at 530 miles per hour, crashed into the Pentagon. The hijackers had intended to crash a fourth plane, United Flight 93, into the Capitol or the White House. This flight, unlike the first three, all of which had departed on time, was running more than half an hour late; it took off at 8:42 a.m. At 9:23, a United flight dispatcher sent out a message: “Beware any cockpit intrusion.” At 9:26, the pilot on Flight 93 responded with seeming disbelief: “Confirm latest mssg plz.” Two minutes later, the hijackers stormed the cockpit. In the moments that followed, ten of the flight’s thirty-three passengers and the two surviving members of the crew managed to make phone calls. They learned about the attacks on the World Trade Center; they decided to fight back. At 9:47, CeeCee Lyles, a flight attendant and mother of four, called her husband and left him a message. “I hope to be able to see your face again, baby,” she said, her voice breaking. “I love you.” Ten minutes later, the passengers and crew, having taken a vote about what to do, charged the cockpit. The plane began to roll. At 10:03, United Flight 93 plowed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, twenty minutes outside of Washington. Everyone on all four planes died.

  In New York, emergency workers had entered the towers, evacuating thousands of
people, but the burning jet fuel, at over a thousand degrees, was weakening the skyscrapers’ steel girders. At 9:58 a.m., the south tower collapsed into itself, falling straight to the ground like an elevator shaft, crushing everyone inside. CNN, which had been covering the crash at the Pentagon, cut back to New York, the TV screen showing nothing but cloud upon cloud; for a moment, watching the screen felt like looking out the window of a plane, flying through the white. The north tower fell at 10:28. CNN: “There are no words.”

  It seemed altogether possible that there were more attacks to come. “We have some planes,” one of the hijackers had said. Poor communication between the civilian aviation authority and the military’s aerospace command—and the lack of any experience with or protocol for a suicide hijacking—meant that the U.S. military had been unable to mount a defense. About 10:15, the vice president authorized the air force to shoot down United Flight 93, unaware that it had already met its horrible end. By noon, all flights from all U.S. airports were grounded, federal buildings were evacuated, embassies were shuttered, and millions of prayers were whispered. The vice president was moved from the White House to an underground bunker, and the president, who had been visiting an elementary school in Florida, was flown to a secure location in Omaha, Nebraska. Nearly three thousand people had been killed.1

  “America Under Attack,” ran the headline on CNN.com, whose coverage that day included videos, a photo gallery, a timeline, statements from leaders around the world, and emergency resources.2 NYTimes.com posted a slideshow, maps, a flight tracker, and a list of places to donate blood.3 The Drudge Report’s homepage displayed a pair of police sirens and the question “Who Did This?!”4 And Foxnews.com began an ongoing special report, “Terrorism Hits America.”5

  That night, a resolved president delivered a televised address. “A great people has been moved to defend a great nation,” George W. Bush said. Even before night had fallen, he committed the United States to waging a “war against terrorism.”6

  Nineteen men, trained by al Qaeda, an Islamic terrorist organization led by Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, had conducted the attacks. Bush’s rhetoric and that of the neoconservatives in his administration characterized the “war on terror” as an inevitable conflict that was part of a “clash of civilizations,” predicted by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in a 1993 article in Foreign Affairs. Once, there had been wars between kings, then wars between peoples, then wars between ideologies, Huntington argued, but those ages had passed, and the future would be characterized by clashes between the world’s great civilizations, first along the fault line between Western civilization and the Islamic world. Western dependence on Arab oil and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism had already led to the 1979 U.S. hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and, in 1990, to the First Persian Gulf War.7

  “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world,” Bush said.8 Barack Obama, an Illinois state senator and constitutional law professor, offered a different interpretation in a Chicago newspaper. “The essence of this tragedy,” he said, “derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers,” a deformation that “grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”9

  It became something of a national myth, later, to describe the American people, long divided, as newly united after 9/11. More accurate would be to say that, in those first days, politicians and writers who expressed views that strayed far from the mournful stoicism that characterized the response of both Bush, on an international stage, and Obama, in a neighborhood newspaper, were loudly denounced. These included Susan Sontag, who traced the origins of the attack to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East—the propping up of tyrants, the CIA toppling of Middle Eastern leaders, and the ongoing bombing of Iraq. “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” Sontag asked in The New Yorker. “In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.”10 In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer accused Sontag of “moral obtuseness.”11 From the right, Ann Coulter, a columnist who’d earlier worked for Paula Jones’s legal team, wrote in the National Review, in an article posted online on September 13, that drawing any distinctions between anyone in the Arab world was unnecessary, as was any investigation into the attacks. “This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack,” Coulter wrote. “We don’t need long investigations of the forensic evidence to determine with scientific accuracy the person or persons who ordered this specific attack. . . . We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”12 Two weeks later, the editor of the National Review announced that it regretted publishing Coulter’s piece, and stopped publishing her column.13 “I really believe the pagans and abortionists, and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen,’” Jerry Falwell said immediately after the attacks.14 But he, too, was condemned, including by the president.15

  Alex Jones, cluster-bomb radio host, flew in under the radar of this opprobrium. On the afternoon of the attacks, he broadcast across the country, live from Austin, to nearly a hundred affiliated stations, for five hours. He began, not with sympathy, not with grief, not with horror, but with gleeful self-congratulation: “Well, I’ve been warning you about it for at least five years, all terrorism that we’ve looked at from the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City to Waco, has been government actions,” Jones crowed. “They need this as a pretext to bring you and your family martial law. They’re either using provocateur Arabs and allowing them to do it or this is full complicity with the federal government: the evidence is overwhelming.” (Earlier that summer, Jones had issued a warning. “Please!” he’d screamed. “Call Congress. Tell ’em we know the government is planning terrorism.”) On September 11, he reported the morning’s events as if reading from an incidents log, adding details of his own—“dead bodies up to six blocks away, arms, legs, you name it”—interrupting with updates, and cutting to eyewitnesses, in coverage that sounded straight out of Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds. Like Welles, Jones asserted his own credibility by frequently sounding notes of caution—“we don’t know how many of these reports are accurate”—while making singularly outrageous and vicious claims, even as surgeons in New York were amputating limbs and nurses were cleaning burned skin and firefighters, falling down from exhaustion, were digging through rubble, looking for survivors. “I’ll tell you the bottom-line,” Jones growled. “Ninety-eight percent chance this was a government-orchestrated, controlled bombing.”16

  Between 2001 and 2016, the demise of the daily newspaper, following the spiraling decline of broadcast television, contributed to a dizzying political disequilibrium, as if the world of news were suddenly revealed to be contained within a bouncy castle at an amusement park. New sources of news and opinion appeared like so many whirling, vertiginous rides, neon-bright, with screams of fright and delight, from blogs and digital newspapers to news aggregators and social media, roller coasters and water slides and tea-cup-and-saucer spinners. Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, the iPhone in 2007. By 2008, Twitter had a million users, and one in six Americans had a smartphone. Six years later, those numbers had climbed teeteringly high: Twitter had 284 million users, and two out of three Americans owned smartphones. They clutched them in their hands as they rode and rolled, thrilled by the G-force drop and the eardrum-popping rise and the sound of their own shrieking.


  New sources of news tended to be unedited, their facts unverified, their politics unhinged. “Alternative” political communities took the 1990s culture wars online; Tumblr on the left and 4chan on the right, trafficking in hysteria and irony, hatred and contempt, Tumblr performing the denunciation of white privilege with pious call-outs and demanding trigger warnings and safe spaces, 4chan pronouncing white supremacy and antifeminism by way of ironic memes and murderous trolls.17 In a throwback to the political intrigues of the Cold War, Russia-sponsored hackers and trolls, posing as Americans, created fake Twitter and Facebook accounts whose purpose was to undermine the authority of the mainstream news, widen the American partisan divide, stoke racial and religious animosity, and incite civil strife. Under these circumstances, the fevered rants of deranged conspiracy theorists reached a new and newly receptive audience but, in a much broader and deeper sense, in an age of ceaseless online spectacle and massive corporate and government surveillance, nearly all political thinking became conspiratorial.

  Jones, in retrospect, was the least but also the worst of this, the amusement park’s deadly but absurd Stephen King clown. After 9/11, he briefly lost some of his affiliates, but he didn’t especially need a radio network. In 1999, he’d launched a website called Infowars, where he presented himself to the world as a citizen journalist, a fighter for the truth by way of the new, no-holds-barred medium of the Internet. On September 11, Infowars warned, of the federal government, “They Are Preparing to Radically Re-engineer Our Society Forever.” That day, Jones inaugurated what came to be called the truther movement, a faction of conspiracy theorists who believed that the United States government was behind the 9/11 attacks. The vice president, Jones would later elaborate, had been disappointed by the passenger revolt on United Flight 93. “If it would have hit its target,” Jones said, “the government would have been completely decapitated and the president could have declared total martial law.”18