On 9/11 and beyond, Tribune editorials have invoked American resolve
On the morning of Sept.
11, 2001, the south and north towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed, respectively, at 8:59 a.m. and 9:28 a.m. Chicago time. Between those catastrophes, Tribune editors knew they had a terrible story to tell.
The United States was under attack. Even as some readers were digesting that morning’s newspaper, the Tribune would produce an extra edition for rapid distribution. Printing presses would roll at 11:30 a.m. Nothing that happened next in a Chicago newsroom would be remotely comparable to the strife and horror enveloping thousands of Americans in lower Manhattan, in rural Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.
Yet for more than 56,000 mornings — since June 10, 1847 — readers across the Midwest had relied on the Tribune for urgent news of tragedy and triumph. With many of those readers still unaccustomed to absorbing news online, a special print edition still made sense. That edition — it turned out to be the first of two extras the Tribune would publish that Tuesday — would include a minimalist editorial page: one trenchant editorial and one stark photograph from New York. R. Bruce Dold, then the editorial page editor and a future Tribune editor and publisher, told his team they had 55 minutes to complete that editorial. He then would have 15 minutes to edit it.
What should the Tribune Editorial Board say? Long experience, meet sudden obligation: Over 154 years, Tribune editorials often sought to help readers process seismic events still surrounded by question marks: Who? Why? How? In moments of conflict or confusion, the editorial board’s mission was to give readers context for the information already available and the rush yet to come.
In 55 minutes, then, collaborating board members would seek to tell readers not what to think, but rather how to think, about unfolding events. The editorial would explain that the goal of terrorists is as much to frighten innocents as it is to harm victims. It would suggest that the attackers had overplayed their hand. Much as a Tribune editorial after the Great Fire of 1871 reassured readers that Chicago would rise again, this editorial would remind them that life is long and that, whoever the perpetrators were, justice would be served.
Reduced to a phrase, the editorial would try to project — and call for — quiet resolve: “This nation has known 225 years of challenges and surmounted the lot.”
Hence the unequivocal headline: “From the dust will
come justice.” The editorial made it into the extra edition that was delivered midday to retailers and newspaper boxes across Chicagoland. That evening, an armada of distribution trucks and newspaper carriers delivered a second extra to subscribers’ homes. It included updated versions of news reports and this editorial.
In such haste, we sometimes make errors. Note that the editorial predicts a death toll exceeding the 2,400 military personnel and 1,200 civilians who died in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In fact, the events of Sept. 11 would kill 2,977 people (plus 19 hijackers) and injure some 6,000 others. This first editorial had set a direction for the editorial page and
its readers.
On Wednesday morning, Sept. 12, and beyond, the Tribune Editorial Board offered readers more context on how to understand the unprecedented. More assurance that Americans and their nation would recover. More resolve.
That imperative to move Chicagoans and Americans forward has been a hallmark of Tribune editorials throughout these first 175 years. We trust that our successors will do the same for another 175 and more.
From the dust will come justice
There is an instant, before the grief sets in, when shock carries us from one moment to the next. It is our bridge, our momentary defense against the unimaginable.This time the shock must carry us further than usual. The unfolding events of a sunny Tuesday morning will touch thousands and thousands of American families.The grief will be as widespread as it is deep. It may be days before friends and acquaintances of the innocents realize their losses. Not since our wars — most recently Vietnam, and World Wars I and II and Korea before that — will so many be touched by the taking of lives.The urge for a complete and instant explanation is as understandable as it is fruitless. No doubt that day will arrive, though even then it will not satisfy.The events of Tuesday, shocking though they may be, aren’t entirely a surprise. In recent years, terrorism experts have warned of this nation’s vulnerability to sneak attacks, via biological weaponry, suitcase bombs or the kind of suicide attack from which modern transportation can’t protect itself.And yet we had grown complacent. Security had become routine, even a joke to many air travelers: Yes, yes, I packed my own bags.Our carefree moments are over, buried in the gray dust that coated the dazed onlookers on streets of lower Manhattan after the first of the day’s many tragedies. From this day forward, our lives and our institutions will not be the same. This nation’s sense of relative isolation from the kinds of disputes that have put the civilians of other lands squarely in harm’s way — from the Middle East to the Congo to Northern Ireland to Sri Lanka to Colombia — now vanishes. If, as suspected, the assaults of Tuesday are in fact the work of murderers with international agendas, then our comparative indifference to world affairs likely will vanish with it.Suddenly, with so many lives having tumbled like dominos, many of our most earnest concerns and obsessions — Did you see that hit on Monday Night Football? Do you think the lake will still be warm this weekend? — seem petty beyond belief. If a slowing economy already had brought pause to what, in retrospect, felt like a carefree era, this well-planned attack jars us into what passes, too sadly, for the modern world.Often it is foolhardy to speculate on the American psyche. But we have just become a more serious people. The bombing of Pearl Harbor ended the lives of some 2,400 U.S. military personnel and 1,200 civilians. Tuesday’s conflagrations claimed many more lives.On this day, someone set out to frighten us. And succeeded. That we must admit.Yet it would be dangerous to succumb in ways that would hearten the terrorists responsible for these acts. That term, terrorist, comes not so much from the strength of the perpetrator, but rather from his ability to destroy the confidence of those he targets. As Tuesday blossomed so tragically, most Americans were left to stare at screens filled with smoke, sprays of water from fire hoses — and expressions of fear for those who had suffered as well as those who would suffer next.The fear, like the shock, is abundantly sensible. But not if we as a nation let those be our destinations. That would please those whose cowardice expresses itself in the capture of commercial airliners and the targeting of American landmarks.For all that we as a people are feeling, this is a moment for quiet resolve. This nation has known 225 years of challenges and surmounted the lot.It is reasonable to expect that America will change. Our losses will exceed this day’s realization.And yet the terror should not rest here. It should, and, in all likelihood, eventually will be turned back at those who today celebrate this broad river of American blood. In their twisted minds, this must be some mission of revenge.But if our response is rooted in nothing more noble than vengeance, then that, too, cannot fully satisfy us.The point here must be justice, the principle that inexactly has guided this country throughout its history.That justice may not be swift. It is important, though, that it be sure.For those who on Tuesday tore a part of America’s heart, there must be one uneasy assurance: Life is long. We are not finished. And it is now they who must feel the terror.