The As It Happens Files (21 page)

This was more or less the tenor of most of our on-air conversations about the U.S. election. What really made it fun, I think, was the delicious irony of it: the world’s only superpower, the greatest democracy, the epitome of know-how and fairness and the rule of law, couldn’t figure out how to count votes. People from places like Guatemala and Ukraine were offering to send observers to help the Americans exercise democracy at home.

And it went on and on. Months and even years later, we were still getting reports on the vote result in several Florida counties because some media organizations had got hold of the ballots and were determined to conduct the re-count that the U.S. Supreme Court had halted. We also started to take a look at the sorts of voting machines and systems in use around the country, and we were surprised to learn how many of them were prone to giving inaccurate results. The
worst system of all, of course, is one that is entirely electronic, in which there is no paper record to be examined in case of a challenge, and which is susceptible to tampering. Believe it or not, this is the system Florida installed
after
the 2000 election. Maybe they just don’t approve of democracy in Florida.

Not only in Florida. I read in the
New York Times
not long ago that about 30 percent of American voters were confronted with paperless electronic voting machines in 2006. Now some Congressmen are working to see that every jurisdiction has some form of paper voting record
before
the 2008 presidential elections. A few American commentators have pointed out that up in Canada, in federal elections, they still use a pencil to mark an “X” on a piece of paper, which they stick in a cardboard box, and this seems to work pretty well. So we do and so it does, but I have no confidence in its lasting: it’s too easy and too cheap. It’s only a matter of time before someone insists that we replace our simple, inexpensive, accurate system with a fancy, pricey one that doesn’t work as well.

When the media did their re-counts in Florida in 2003, Bush did squeeze out a narrow victory—at least, in some cases—which was also the official result when the Supreme Court (stacked with Republican sympathizers, by the way) decided in December 2000 that they would not overrule the Florida Legislature (also Republican, plus the Governor was George Bush’s brother Jeb!). This wonderful roller-coaster ride then came to an end. But as Jeff Greenfield had predicted, by that time, neither side was prepared to believe that the other guy could have won fair and square, and it would be some time before Bush’s opponents would stop thinking of him as an impostor in the White House. It would be nearly ten months, actually.

By the time I got to the CBC building on September 11
,
2001, all regular programming had been suspended and Michael Enright was anchoring the radio network coverage from the news studio, having just taken over from Shelagh Rogers, who had been holding the fort up to that time. Shelagh had been on the air, hosting her own network programme,
This Morning,
when the planes hit the World Trade Center. To everyone’s embarrassment, CBC Radio continued with regular programming for more than an hour, although there were brief news bulletins. As I drove downtown to the studio, I was getting all my radio news from a private Toronto station that was carrying the audio feed from CNN. This was how I learned that a third plane had crashed into the Pentagon and there might be another on its way to Washington.

It sounded as if Armageddon was happening and CBC Radio was asleep at the switch. We were told later that the reason for our sluggish response that morning was that Master Control rooms in some parts of the country had been automated to save money, making it difficult for network managers to take control of their stations from coast to coast. Whether this was the root of the problem or not I don’t know because several years later when the shuttle
Columbia
disintegrated over Texas, after the problems with Master Control had supposedly been cleared up, we were back in the same fix: private radio beat us to the punch again.

That said, there weren’t many facts to report when Radio News finally did take over on September 11th, apart from what you could see with your own eyes—on TV. The burning buildings in New York, the crumpled Pentagon. There were rumours of a fourth plane heading for Capitol Hill or the White House, of buildings on fire in Washington, of a plane
crash in Pennsylvania. There were TV images of President Bush being given the news while he was visiting an elementary school in Texas. He spoke a few words into a microphone, then vanished aboard Air Force One, headed for an unnamed destination.

It wasn’t clear whether the U.S. Cabinet was in emergency session in the White House or in a bunker or had left the capital altogether. We were all scrambling to find someone who could tell us something of what was going on, and we were having a hard time of it. I don’t recall anyone mentioning al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden that day—names that wouldn’t have meant much to us anyway at the time. The pictures of the burning towers got worse and worse, and the worst of all were pictures of people, overcome by heat and smoke, jumping
out
of the World Trade Center and falling one hundred storeys to their deaths. In a documentary I saw later, a microphone at ground level had picked up the sound of bodies hitting the pavement.
Thud! Thud! Thud!

And then the twin towers collapsed.

Later, when she was recalling those terrible images, a friend of mine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said to me, “I have lived too long.” She would have preferred never to have seen such things. But didn’t we all feel that way?

Or what did we feel?

For myself, I remember only the shock—and some fear, since no one knew how many more attacks awaited us or where. But mainly I was focused on work. When Michael Enright was ready to be relieved, I moved into the anchor chair, and now it was my turn to talk to whomever the producers could get to a phone, picking up any scraps of information they could provide. Linda Perry and Louis Hammond were in the streets of New York with cellphones. Washington correspondent Frank Koller drove up to New York but
couldn’t get into Manhattan because all the tunnels and bridges had been closed. He described only what he could see from the Jersey shore. We heard clips from or did interviews with New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani, New York Governor George Pataki, New York fire chiefs and many others—but no one knew very much.

In Canada, meanwhile, thousands of unexpected visitors from around the world began arriving in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration closed American borders to incoming air traffic. The FAA also grounded all domestic flights, as did Canada, stranding Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his Cabinet all over the country. Canadian Transport Minister David Collenette was essentially acting alone when he gave the go-ahead to reroute North Atlantic passenger planes to Canada’s east coast. He spoke afterwards of his admiration for the air traffic controllers who got everyone turned around and safely brought into harbour.

The visitors, when they put down, also had to find somewhere to stay and something to eat and drink, and if they were Americans, extra sympathy and understanding. The people in Gander, Newfoundland, and elsewhere delivered. Many new friendships were forged that week, and years later Americans were still finding ways to show their gratitude for the comfort they had found on this darkest of days.

Ultimately, I can’t find the words even now to describe the turmoil, horror and grief we witnessed on that terrible day and in the days that followed. The sound of laughter was forgotten. I was shocked one morning as I headed into the Broadcasting Centre to hear two young women giggling merrily.
Who are these unfeeling creatures,
I wondered,
who could
laugh at a time like this?
Baseball games were cancelled; the comics on late-night TV were muted. Families clung to each other for security and comfort.

It soon became clear that there were no survivors to be found in the rubble of the twin towers. Pictures of missing fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, lovers and friends had been posted all over Lower Manhattan, but they weren’t coming home now. It was a heart-breaking story to cover, but working on the story was easier than
not
working on the story; it gave us an outlet. There was nothing else we could talk about anyway, nothing else we could think about; working for news, at least we didn’t have to pretend to be doing something else—we had a licence for our obsession.

When regular programming resumed at the end of the week, it still wasn’t
normal
programming; there still was really only one story. As more days passed, we did begin to ease back into something resembling our old habits, but the world
had
shifted, and we would begin to see the outlines of the new world very soon. There was a new emphasis on security, for example. People accustomed to their liberty had to start thinking about how much freedom they could trade off for security. Citizens and neighbours with a Middle Eastern cast were regarded with suspicion.

There was fresh panic when someone started mailing samples of deadly anthrax to news anchors and legislators in the United States, fearful speculation about whether this was a new terrorist attack. The anthrax sender has never been identified for certain, but there’s a consensus now that it was a disturbed individual—an American—acting alone. Another plane crashed in Rockaway, Long Island, on the outskirts of New York City, but that, too, it transpired, was unrelated to the terrorist attack.

Down at Ground Zero, the clean-up was getting under way. On October 26th, we had a chat with Bart Voorsanger, a New York City architect who was part of a group assembled by the Port Authority to identify and preserve things they might eventually want to include in a memorial before they all got carted off to Staten Island, to a landfill site bearing the eerily apt name Fresh Kills. As he described his grim task, we began to realize the scope of the damage visited on New York on 9/11.