Simmons views 1/6 with a 9/11 perspective
Even on the phone, state Rep. Caroline Simmons, D-Stamford, has a lousy poker face.
She’s recalling how her youthful dream of becoming a CIA agent evaporated in the first interview.
“They told me I didn’t have the best poker face.”
I mildly challenge if that really happened. She folds. “No, I’m kind of joking. You’re supposed to have the ability to be discreet and conceal things, and I knew I just blew that.”
Simmons laughs. Anyone who has met her knows she laughs with ease. But the CIA recruiter lost the hand. She could easily be underestimated because of her affability, but Simmons has been wielding a big stick since her days as captain of the Greenwich Academy field hockey team.
It’s Thursday, a day after she was sworn in for her fourth term in a Hartford ceremony forced outdoors by COVID-19, made even more surreal a few hours later when rioters breached the U.S. Capitol in a street mugging of America. It’s one of the few moments when she is able to laugh. Our conversation is brief, but transverses dark world events of the past 20 years, starting with the 9/11 attacks that sparked 15-year-old Simmons’ passion for foreign affairs (and supplanted a previous aspiration to become an astronaut).
“I didn’t really understand what terrorism was. I remember being angry, but also feeling confused how people could do this to us, how lives could be lost like that.”
She studied government at Harvard University and the Middle East at George Washington University, learning Arabic along the way. While studying in Cairo, Egypt, security interrogated her in a dark room for several hours. She interned for the State Department.
Such was the path to working, fittingly, for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the agency formed in the wake of 9/11. On paper, her duties included emergency preparedness, infrastructure protection and gun safety. During her tenure from 2009-13, the agency responded to events such as Hurricane Sandy, the H1N1 virus, the Boston Marathon bombing and the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Another infamous day in U.S. history, Dec. 14, 2012, left her crying at her desk.
She spent her final two years with DHS focused on counterterrorism initiatives before heading back to Connecticut and claiming her seat in the state House in 2014.
That work, to enhance state and local law enforcement, to leverage “the eyes and ears on the ground,” gives her a perspective on Wednesday’s events through a unique lens, to feel even more frustration that the nation’s vulnerability was exposed.
“It’s disheartening to see those failures we worked so hard on since 9/11 come to light in terms of the inability to predict and estimate the threat of the
pro-Trump rally so close to the Capitol. That was a big failure.”
Simmons’ words start to come more quickly, like a pulse elevated during a run. Maybe this is what she means about lacking the discretion of a CIA agent. She vents about “the failure of the Capitol police to defend the Capitol from invasion” explaining that her office conducted exercises to avert precisely the kind of catastrophe that unfolded at the crucible of American democracy Wednesday.
She’s trying to connect dots that have become as scattered as the rain. As we discuss September of 2001, I’m stuck on the point that the average person could not see 9/11 coming, while so many casual onlookers predicted violence Wednesday, like townspeople pointing to bandits arriving on the horizon in a western.
Law enforcement just didn’t listen.
It brings her right back to
Greenwich
Academy on
Sept. 11, 2001. “We failed on 9/11 to protect the Pentagon, to protect the World Trade Center, to protect our air space. I thought we had made such progress and this brought to light how much needs to be done.”
There aren’t many politicians like Simmons. She’s a Democrat who considers herself a moderate. She’s the daughter of a Jewish Republican father and a Catholic Democrat mother. She’s married to a Republican, former state Sen. Art Linares (he proposed to her in a full-page ad in the Stamford Advocate). Time will tell whether their 2-year-old, Teddy, and 4month-old, Jack, will tilt to left, the right, or in opposite directions.
In search of ground somewhere in the middle, she again reaches back two decades, to a different day of infamy that nevertheless yielded “a moment of unity.”
“Partisan politics was out of the window for at least a moment of time and we came together,” she says. “Everyone put country first. People lined up to give blood, volunteered (at Ground Zero), signed up for the military in droves. That moment of unity and call to service.”
Of course, there was no need for poker faces then. Americans were on the same side.
She vents about “the failure of the Capitol police to defend the Capitol from invasion” explaining that her office conducted exercises to avert precisely the kind of catastrophe that unfolded at the crucible of American democracy Wednesday.