Exactly fifteen years ago today I was settled into my seat on a British Airways flight 178, scheduled to head from JFK to London in a few minutes. It was not to be. My cell phone rang: It was my wife, Cita, telling me that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, and that the day was too clear for that to be an accident. Within minutes, she was proved right. We returned from the tarmac to the airport, and a world in which air travel would never be the same. Large black clouds were visible from Manhattan. Cita, who was in my firm’s Washington office a few blocks from the Pentagon, rang again to say she was headed home. For some reason and unlike most others, my two phones were operating as if the World Trade Center complex that housed such equipment was not in ruins, so I passed them around to other passengers desperate to call relatives and, in one case, to find out the fate of her husband aboard a Boston-bound flight.
A few days later the New York cops invited Cita and me down to view the horror—I was writing for the New York Post at the time—the only rule being to turn our backs whenever a body part was being extracted from the wreckage—out of respect, not to spare our feelings. My reaction to the smoldering debris and the stench of smoke and burning flesh was multiplied by the fact that I had only recently moved my firm’s offices out of the World Trade Center complex. And that New York City, now wounded, perhaps permanently, was THE place where a Jewish kid born of an immigrant father could make his way, the place where, sooner than most, hard work would trump discrimination.
