Adventures in Correspondentland (17 page)

The then dean of the Washington press corps, David Broder, compared the president's speech to Lincoln's – the highest of oratorical accolades. It sounded rather like a courtier shouting ‘The king is dead. Long live the king!' and offered more proof of the deferential mood among journalists at the time. A year afterwards, the former CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour spoke of reporters self-muzzling, but that implied they wanted still to play the role of attack dogs. Alas, they were far more supine.

I fear, too, that some of this jingoism and fealty crept into our own coverage. The spirit of
Le Monde
's famous headline on 12 September, ‘
Nous Sommes Tous Américains
', certainly found an echo among the foreign press corps. No doubt, we were more dispassionate than our US colleagues, but neither were we without passion. As I said at the outset, most of us were lovers of America and completely enamoured of New York.

In the week after 9/11, I remember being irritated by an editor in London who suggested, sarcastically, that there were other ways to start a television piece than with the slushy sentimentalism of
baseball fans joining in the singing of the national anthem, a flag being hoisted, or any other patriotic ritual, such as the singing of ‘America the Beautiful'. Looking back, however, I suspect she was doing her job rather better than I.

Aware that the press was in such close alignment, the Bush administration even felt confident enough to start singling out miscreant broadcasters from the podium of the White House briefing room. Most notoriously, the comedian Bill Maher, the host of
Politically Incorrect
, came under fire for suggesting it was ‘cowardly' to fire cruise missiles from 2000 miles away and, more controversially, that the suicidal hijackers could not be described as cowards. Rounding on Maher from his lectern in the White House briefing room, the president's press spokesman, Ari Fleischer, reminded Americans that they needed to ‘watch what they say, watch what they do', which appeared to turn the First Amendment on its head.

Rather than defend Maher, ABC, the network that broadcast his late-night show, took heed and decided against renewing his contract. After that, there was not much need for further censorship, because the mainstream media censored itself by banishing such subversive thoughts. On at least one occasion, the White House even targeted a dissident reporter, Dana Milbank of
The Washington Post
, having taken an intense dislike to his wounding wit and disrespectful tone, along with an article he went on to write in October 2002 under the headline ‘For Bush, facts are malleable'. It was suggested to
The Post
's management that another reporter might do a better job of covering the presidency – a recommendation they thankfully ignored.

Few things better illustrated the absence of reproach in the media coverage post-9/11 than the blithe acceptance of the Bush
administration's standard line that nobody could have foreseen such a calamity. Condoleezza Rice, the then national security adviser, stated it most boldly in May 2002: ‘I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would use a plane as a missile.'

Alas, it required no great leap of imagination. A cursory glance at Tom Clancy's
Executive Orders
would have sufficed – an airport novel that came up with precisely that kind of scenario, with a plane obliterating Capitol Hill just as the president is delivering a speech. The White House had also come under a kamikaze-style attack during the Clinton administration, when a suicidal aircraft mechanic crashed a Cessna 150 into the South Lawn. By strange coincidence, he stole the plane on the night of 11 September 1994.

Then there were the warnings. In January 2001, just days after George W. Bush took office, the former senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, of
Monkey Business
fame, published the report of the US Commission on National Security/21st Century. Its key finding was that a combination of ‘unconventional weapons proliferation with the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the US homeland to catastrophic attack.'

There was also that security briefing at his ranch in Crawford on 6 August talking up the possibility of an attack orchestrated by Osama bin Laden, the existence of which was suppressed until April 2004. Among various other alerts, there was the famed Phoenix memo from an FBI agent in Arizona warning that bin Laden had sent students to attend civil aviation schools. Despite these lapses, no high-ranking administration figure lost his or her
job in the aftermath. Nor did the American press demand any scalps.

Rather, leading lights in the administration became overnight sensations. Such was the star power of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the one-time college wrestler who helped pull bodies from the rubble of the Pentagon, that fans wanted to know the brand of his rimless glasses and what grooming oil he used to slick back his silver hair. The president took to calling him ‘Rumstud'. Spouting his ‘known knowns', ‘known unknowns' and ‘unknown unknowns', his press conferences became command performances, and were by far the best theatre that post-9/11 Washington could muster. Unfortunately, the Pentagon press pack often served as his stooges and seemed almost hypnotised by his epistemological wordplay. In the view of a BBC colleague, Justin Webb, the press conferences looked like ‘spanking sessions for a generation of defence nerds'.

Typical of the fawning coverage was Bob Woodward's fly-on-the-wall book
Bush at War
. Consider his description of the president's reaction at being told that a second plane had ploughed into the World Trade Center. ‘Bush remembers exactly what he was thinking,' Woodward recounts, before delivering a self-serving quote from the president. ‘“They had declared war on us, and I made up my mind at that moment that we were going to war.”' Then Woodward takes up the story, in a manner that reinforces the impression that the president was fully in command. ‘Bush decided that he needed to say something to the public.'

And that is it. Inexplicably, Woodward failed to describe
The Pet Goat
episode in that Sarasota classroom, used to merciless effect by the film-maker Michael Moore in
Fahrenheit 9/11
, and which still makes for excruciating viewing. Even after
Card had whispered in his ear, Bush continued to listen to the children reading the book. A minute later, he actually picked up the book himself from the shelf, started to look at it in complete puzzlement, and then cracked a lame gag, like the jester of old. When the children had finished, he thanked them for showing him their reading skills and congratulated them on spending more time reading than watching television. Then he expressed gratitude for making him feel so welcome.

At this point, he could easily have left the classroom to get an update from his aides, but instead he allowed the school principal to step in and thank him for coming. Though Woodward did not touch on any of this, Bush's performance in Sarasota suggested that he was not even in charge of the classroom, still less the country. The contrast with Woodward's work, alongside Carl Bernstein, on Watergate almost 30 years earlier could not have been starker. Then, he had helped demolish a Republican president. Now, like so many other Washington-based reporters, he provided buttressing when Bush wobbled badly.

In those months after 9/11, Washington became a far more dismal city in which to live and work. Inelegant concrete barriers soon encircled every single major government building and landmark, giving some of L'Enfant's boulevards the look of freeway entrances. Even at the Lincoln Memorial, a monument as solid as a fortress, ugly security barriers fell within the Great Emancipator's brooding stare. Batteries of surface-to-air missiles were even positioned within sight of the Capitol's dome.

For weeks afterwards, it was impossible to watch a plane land at National Airport on the banks of the Potomac, a few seconds' flying time from the White House, without wondering if it might suddenly change direction at the very last moment and spear into
a building. Years on, I still caught myself peering into the sky to check if incoming aircraft had lowered their landing gear.

Flying into Washington, passengers made sure they had visited the toilet well before coming in to land. To do so during the final approach was to risk having your arm or jaw broken by an air marshal. Washington now had even less of the feel of
The West Wing
. Instead, it mirrored
24
, the new Fox show that premiered in November 2001, where an anti-terrorism agent played by Kiefer Sutherland tried each week to save America from prime-time Armageddon.

Still more depressing was New York. Usually, I travelled there by train from Washington, partly to enjoy the invigorating sight of the spires of Manhattan's skyline as you rumbled through the industrial swampland of northern New Jersey. The first time I made the journey after 9/11, however, Lower Manhattan was unrecognisable. Peering through the smokestacks, freeway overpasses and rusting pylons, I mistook it for an outlying suburb of Newark.

With no shortage of heart-rending stories to tell, or images to shoot – jagged and cindery, the remains at Ground Zero smouldered for months afterwards – the main challenge for journalists was literary. Words seemed not only inadequate in describing the attacks but also superfluous up against the instant iconography of the planes darting into the Twin Towers. Anyone with access to a television or the internet had such a visual association with 9/11 that it was hard to come up with any commentary, other than the repetition of simple facts, that added much to their experience.

What could one say, for instance, about the crackly tape recordings of victims making 9/11 emergency calls or telephoning their relatives while the towers were aflame, in the certain
knowledge that they were saying their last goodbyes? All that was needed were short biographies of the office workers making the calls. That is perhaps why ‘The Portraits of Grief',
The New York Times
's brief pen portraits of the victims, were so compelling. We knew what had happened. What we wanted to find out was to whom it had happened.

‘The Portraits of Grief', which fleshed out a victim's personality from small illustrative details, provided this human mosaic. We heard of Leon Smith Jnr, the big-hearted fire-truck driver; Dianne Bullis Snyder, a wife, a mother, a doer; John F. Ginley, a quiet family man; Mohammad Salman Hamdani, the all-American Jedi; and Todd Isaac, a jolly snowboarder.

Even when
The New Yorker
drew upon its vast literary resources to provide short prose poems, they felt meagre. John Updike, who had been ‘summoned' to the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building to ‘witness something great and horrendous', spoke of how ‘the south tower dropped from the screen of our viewing; it fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air.' More convincing was his description of ‘the mundane duties of survivors – to pick up the pieces, to bury the dead, to take more precautions, to go on living'.

In the same pages, the novelist Jonathan Franzen tried to capture the convolutions of the New York mind. ‘Besides the horror and sadness of what you were watching,' he wrote, ‘you might also have felt a childish disappointment over the disruption of your day; or a selfish worry about the impact on your finances, or admiration for an attack so brilliantly conceived and so flawlessly executed, or, worst of all, an awed appreciation of the visual spectacle it produced.'

Updike had spoken of the ‘false intimacy of television', but, whether false or not, it made much of what was written in the aftermath of 9/11 redundant. The familiarity with these terrible events was visual, visceral and unspoken. However erudite, literary renderings tended only to provide fresh perspectives rather than adding more emotional depth. Strangely, perhaps the most apposite words came from a dead poet, W. H. Auden, and his poem ‘September 1, 1939':

Likewise, there were surprisingly few champions in the literary sport of encapsulating 9/11 in novels. In
Underworld
, a stupendous tour de force that seemed almost to foreshadow the 9/11 attacks by featuring the Twin Towers shrouded in cloud on its fly-jacket, Don DeLillo captured America's Cold War paranoia better than any other novelist. Yet
Falling Man
, which filtered the aftermath of 9/11 through a lawyer working that day in the World Trade Center who sought solace by screwing a fellow survivor and disappearing into the windowless poker rooms of Las Vegas, was a disappointment.

Similarly, John Updike's
Terrorist
, which offered a twist to the canon by approaching 9/11 from the perspective of a radicalised young American Muslim rather than a victim of the attacks, was far from his best work.

In Philip Roth's
Everyman
, the main protagonist had moved away from Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11, a metaphor perhaps for the author's apparent squeamishness at tackling the subject himself.

Just as the authors of the great American novels have not yet produced the great 9/11 novel, nor has anyone else. Jonathan Safran Foer's
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
, which told the story of a nine-year-old boy who lost his father in the Twin Towers, was heart-rending and fantastical, and it captured not only the depthless anguish of September's bereavement but its randomness as well. Joseph O'Neill's
Netherland
encased the melancholy and desolation that hung in the still-putrid air of Manhattan. But I have not yet completed a post-9/11 novel with complete contentment. It was not so much a failure of imagination. Instead, the problem for novelists is that no new stories were needed when there were more than enough from the day itself.