“We looked down at the fireworks,” Tom recalls. “That was the whole point. We saw fireworks from the top down.”
“The top down!” JoAnn says.
Colleen got married and her husband worked in the city too, and they bought a car. Some days they would drive together into work, and some days they would take the train. Fifty-fifty. If they took the train, they got in early, and if they took the car, they got in late.
So that whole crystal-blue Tuesday morning of September 11, 2001, with all the phones in the region down, and the electricity out in the Carteret, New Jersey, neighborhood where they lived then, and her one neighbor running down the street with that TV from her camper that ran on batteries, JoAnn was pacing on the porch saying, “Please tell me you took the car, please tell me you took the car, please tell me you took the car.”
But Colleen had taken the train that day.
Seeing the footage on TV of the smoke, over and over the way they showed it—that alone drove a lot of the families into madness.
“A lot of people forget,” Tom says.
The first seventy-two hours was calling hospitals. Nobody knew anything. Nobody had her. By the end of the week, it was evident that she was gone. JoAnn took off work at the school for three months after that. They were extremely understanding, and when she got back, they adapted her position to one-on-one assistance rather than teaching a whole class. She was having bleeding ulcers, and they would get exacerbated by the sight of turbans, which some people did wear at the school.
“Even though they were lovely, nice people,” JoAnn says.
“They were Sikhs,” Tom says.
“They had nothing to do with 9/11,” she says. “Nothing whatsoever.”
She would get violently ill when she saw turbans. It wasn’t something you could put logic to.
They met other families. A lot of the conversation in the beginning was just about body parts. What you got back. One woman received part of her husband’s scalp; the other received a testicle. Some people didn’t get anything back; some got a finger. People might say it’s gruesome to talk that way. But if it becomes part of your everyday…People who got body parts back felt lucky, and people who didn’t kept hoping, and so the people who did felt guilt. When they found Colleen’s torso, it was among the debris from the north side of the building. The cafeteria was on the north side.
“I think Colleen was in the cafeteria,” JoAnn says.
* * *
—
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island was full; it had been officially closed a few months before 9/11, but then the state reopened a section for the sorting of the Twin Tower rubble. Hills 1 and 9 where they did the sorting were adjacent to the neighborhood where Tom and JoAnn lived, just over the river. The mound was like fifty acres. They brought in conveyor belts. And the trucks started coming. For weeks after the attack, the trucks would keep Tom and JoAnn up at night, the engine roars, the backup beeps, the clumping sounds of dumping.
“And the seagulls would attack it, and they would move the body parts,” JoAnn says.
“So they put up tents,” Tom says.
“The machines would sift it and remove whatever they could, and what was left was bulldozed into the landfill,” JoAnn says. “And then on top of that is the fill.”
“Industrial.”
“Construction fill. Computers. Computer parts. Wires. Concrete.”
“I’m sure people would debate, why are you arguing about minuscule elements?” Tom says. “What we are really talking about are bone fragments less than a quarter inch. But for me it doesn’t matter the size.”
When the sifting was done and they closed Hills 1 and 9 as a crime scene, the people at the sanitation department who ran the landfill would let people in if they wanted to come look, which a lot of families still did. You signed a paper, and a guy would take you to the dump site in a garbage truck.
Eventually, they put up a flagpole.
JoAnn finished out her thirty years with the district, and then she and Tom moved down here to Toms River to be near Daryl and the grandbabies. Daryl is the oldest; then JoAnn had another son who survived only one day, and then she had Colleen. One time when Colleen was two, she was in her crib for a nap, and JoAnn was outside shoveling snow, and suddenly here comes Colleen, fully dressed in her snow gear, out to help.
“I was like, ‘What are you doing!’ ” JoAnn says. “She put all that gear on and figured all that out by herself.” Colleen always had pigtails. She would put everything in her mouth. Their house was the one all the kids came to. Sleeping all over the rec room. You never knew who you’d bump into.
Anyway, Tom would like to get back to the letter he wrote to the navy. He says he also wrote to President George W. Bush. Actually, that might have been before the navy.
“No, definitely after,” JoAnn says.
It’s such a jumble.
Tom wrote to President Bush in anger, asking why he had not sent a note of condolence about Colleen. He figured something like that should have come. Tom got a letter back from the White House explaining that New York kept the list of victims’ names, not the White House.
Tom starts wheezing.
“Who was in charge was a big question in the aftermath,” JoAnn says, adding that later they did get a sympathy card from Vice President Dick Cheney.
“We have it somewhere here,” Tom says. Wheezing is a symptom of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which he has, along with diabetes. His computer and the Internet were the keys to his sanity in the aftermath. That was how he managed. He wrote so many letters. The letter to the navy was the first one, definitely among the first. This was, gosh, within days. He was angry and he wanted somebody to do something immediately to get the people who had done this. So he googled, you know, “navy.” He picked a ship that was deployed in the Far East. He picked the USS Carl Vinson, and he found an email address, and he wrote about Colleen. Within weeks he heard back. Who expects to hear back? The email was from a lieutenant who talked about not forgetting the victims, and he included an attachment. Tom opened the attachment, and it was a photo of a guy in a flight suit leaning over a bomb. “LASER,” it said on the bomb. The guy had a pen, and he was writing something on the nose. “COLLEEN ANN MEE—” He was working on the second E.
Tom would like to show you the picture.
The Carl Vinson had been headed east around the tip of India on September 11, 2001, when, in response to the attacks back home, it abruptly changed course and advanced toward the Arabian Sea. On October 11, 2001, it launched the bomb with Colleen’s name on it, one among hundreds the navy dropped in the first air strikes over Afghanistan targeting al-Qaeda and the Taliban in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Tom puts the picture of the bomb away and then folds his hands like an obedient schoolboy. JoAnn thinks Chewy is being remarkably quiet. Usually he’s bouncing off the walls by now. He’s still a puppy.
At the landfill, investigators were able to identify just 300 people (2,753 died in the attacks) out of the 4,257 human remains they recovered. The rest, the remains of more than a thousand victims, have not been identified. “You remember seeing the funerals on television with all those caskets,” JoAnn says. “But they were all empty. There was nothing in those caskets.”
“People don’t remember,” Tom says.
People don’t know about the way they just covered everything up when they were done. They did not consult the families. They just put dirt and construction debris on top. They did put that flagpole in.
“I know there are parts of my daughter there,” JoAnn says.
Tom: “You can argue till doomsday about the legal rights, but the simple fact that they didn’t acknowledge it to the families—”
The Ground Zero memorial is a love-hate thing for Tom and JoAnn. It took ten years and $700 million to build. You would think ther
e would be resources set aside for asking the families what they wanted done with the remains of their loved ones. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York had more than eight thousand body parts they couldn’t identify, couldn’t complete the DNA on. Somehow the decision had been made to put the body parts in plastic pouches—and then put the pouches in the basement of the museum.
A museum is not a memorial site.
“It costs twenty-four dollars to get into the museum,” Tom says.
“Families get in for free,” JoAnn says.
“Families are allowed to look in the basement.”
“You look through a glass wall. It’s a storage facility. It’s lockers in rows.”
Tom and JoAnn got involved in a lot of activist things with the other families. They got involved with WTC Families for Proper Burial Inc. They got involved in public remembrances, and there were so many nice things people did. Quilts, presents, like this slab of marble and this piece of window from the first responders. In the first few months, Tom wore a badge with Colleen’s picture on it. He was in a gift shop, and a woman saw the badge, and she bought him a glass angel in remembrance of Colleen. It’s an example. There were poems people wrote. Jewelry people made. Rosaries. Pictures of Colleen people drew. A CD with a song someone wrote. The Flag of Remembrance. Mountains of gifts. “I could start my own minimuseum,” JoAnn says. They had to rent a unit at one of those storage places. It’s so nice what everyone did.
Every year on the anniversary they have a ceremony at Ground Zero, and they read out the name of every victim. There’s a lottery to pick who gets to read. If you get picked, you read twenty names. One year Daryl got picked, and then JoAnn got picked. It’s the highest honor to get picked. Now they’re talking about doing away with the name reading.
Tom is particularly upset about that one. The whole issue with memory. Tom says there’s a saying he’s heard veterans use: People die twice. “Once when they leave their physical form and the second time when their name is spoken for the last time.”
Now Chewy is acting more like himself. He’s skittering around and around the table, and his feet are so tiny the pitter-patter sounds like rain.
“Okay, Chewy,” Tom says.
JoAnn is stuck back on a few points she made earlier. “The thought of going to visit where your daughter is buried and you have to call the sanitation department to get an appointment to ride on a garbage truck,” she says.
“The issue of the remains and all of that—it’s the best kept secret of 9/11,” Tom says. “So to speak.”
“I do think Colleen was in the cafeteria,” JoAnn says.
“People not directly involved in the event have a certain view from the outside of what the families have endured,” Tom says.
One day here at the local library, they were putting together a little exhibit, and they asked Tom and JoAnn to contribute mementos of Colleen, and so Tom and JoAnn were arranging the items in the glass cabinet.
Two women walked by. “Can’t these people just get over it?” the one said.
Clear as day. Tom was ready to pounce. JoAnn gave him the look that said, Ignore it.
Tom couldn’t.
He came home and wrote a letter. Obama had just gotten elected, so he wrote to him. When he sat down, he thought about what he wanted to say to the new president, and it was the same thing he wanted to say to the lady in the library. In a way the letter was for both. For everybody. Tom wanted everybody to know some of what the families went through. He wanted to say the issue wasn’t whether or not the families ever got over it. “The issue was that you don’t get over it,” Tom says.
“But I digress.”
“Just the thought of, you have to ride on a garbage truck,” JoAnn says.
JoAnn did the proofreading, and Tom mailed the letter, and they were surprised when they heard back just a few weeks later.
Tom would like to show you the letter they got back.
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
Dear Tom & JoAnn—
I am in receipt of your letter, and wanted to respond personally. Your story is heartbreaking, and we will do everything we can to ensure that the process of bringing all those involved in 9/11 is completed.
In the meantime, know that we will never forget Colleen, and that I spend every waking hour in search of ways to make the future brighter for your granddaughters and my daughters.
God Bless,
Barack Obama
CHAPTER 5
The Idea
When I asked President Obama how he came up with the idea of reading ten letters a day, he thought a moment, then said, “Pete Rouse.” He said it an offhand way, as if this was some easily recognized household name.
“Pete was almost maniacal about correspondence,” he went on. “When I first got to the Senate, I was, you know, green behind the ears, and he had been there for a long time. He kind of instilled in me the sense of the power of mail.
“Pete Rouse,” he said again.
I kept hearing the name in conversations about the early days of the Obama administration and the origins of its Office of Presidential Correspondence. Shailagh brought him up, and so did David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Fiona. “There are legions of people around my age who got their start in public service or politics by a conversation with Pete Rouse,” Fiona said.
They all talked about him the same way—you know, Pete!—more or less disregarding my blank stare.
I came to learn that Pete Rouse was a guy who famously shunned publicity, who never did interviews, who worked hard to stay behind the scenes, and so even though insiders knew him as Obama’s right-hand man who sat for years just two doors down from the Oval Office, to people outside the Beltway, he was a stranger.
* * *
—
“I’m not really good at anecdotes,” Pete said when I visited him at the Perkins Coie offices in downtown Washington, where he’d worked since retiring from his White House post in 2014. “I don’t remember a lot.” Then he told me that although he now worked at a law firm, he was not a lawyer, and—he was quick to point out—he was most definitely not a lobbyist, and although people regularly asked him if he’d ever write a book about his many years in the White House and on Capitol Hill, “there is not a chance in hell I’ll ever write a book.”
I wondered about a person choosing to define himself by what he was not and never would be. He was in his early seventies, soft-spoken, amiable, with thick white hair, and he moved like his back hurt, which he volunteered readily that it did. We then veered effortlessly into a discussion of my brother’s recent back surgery. I have no idea how we became so familiar so quickly, but within minutes we were talking like friends. Maybe this was why he didn’t do interviews. He seemed to have neither guard nor guile.
I told him Obama said he was the one who’d had the idea that the president should read ten constituent letters a day.
“No,” he said. “I give him credit for saying he wanted ten letters a day.”
I said Obama seemed to think it all went back to him somehow.
“I don’t want to sound arrogant,” he said. He told me he first met Obama on the 2004 campaign trail. He had already worked in Congress for more than three decades, starting in the 1970s; he had become such a fixture in Washington that people on Capitol Hill referred to him as the “101st senator” during his long tenure as former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s chief of staff. Daschle lost his seat in 2004, the same year Obama was voted into the Senate, leaving Pete, a Hill guru, out of a job. Obama asked Pete to come over to his team, become his chief of staff; Obama said he wanted to hit the ground running, and there was no one in Washington with the breadth of experience that Pete had.
“I said no,” Pete told me. “I was in my late fifties. I thought I’d take retirement, do something
else.”
Obama asked Pete a second time. He wanted the A team. He felt the urgency of the moment, of living up to the expectations he had set when, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, he delivered the speech that would catapult him into the national spotlight:
If there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child.
If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent.
If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.
It is that fundamental belief—it is that fundamental belief—I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper—that makes this country work.
It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family: E pluribus unum, out of many, one.
Pete said no. Anyone listening to that speech knew that Obama was destined, one day, for a presidential run. Pete was more interested in retirement.
Obama asked a third time. “He said, ‘You might have heard I’m thinking about running for president in 2008,’ ” Pete told me. “He said, ‘That is categorically untrue. Maybe at some point in the future, but my wife would never let me do it. My kids are too young. I have no intention of doing that; I just want to get established in the Senate.’
“I thought, This guy is extraordinarily impressive,” Pete told me.
Pete finally said yes, but only on a temporary basis. “I agreed to get him started, to set up his Senate operation, to get a good team in place, get a good strategic plan in place, get a good structure. I’ll lay that foundation. I thought, I don’t have anything else to do right now. I can help set this up for a year and a half. How hard can it be?”
Less than one year in, Obama, who had made a point to keep a low profile, focusing on local Illinois issues, found himself again in the national news. Hurricane Katrina had just hit, and after touring the devastated Gulf Coast, he made his first appearances on the Sunday morning shows, admonishing the federal government’s paltry response, emphasizing not only the racial bias it revealed but also the economic one. “It was a moment I thought I might add a useful perspective to the debate,” he told Time magazine. “If an issue of justice or equality is at stake,” he said, “I will speak out on it.” People clamored for more. Speaking invitations were coming in by the hundreds, and that was when Pete, a master strategist almost in spite of himself, drew up a memo:
To Obama Page 7