TV anchors on the longest day
The horrors of Sept. 11, 2001, played out in real time on television screens everywhere. The word did not come via text or Twitter, there were no amber alerts sent to your flip phone. But the news travelled fast and the message was clear. Turn on your TV.
Even somebody as plugged in as CBC News anchor Peter Mansbridge — at his doctor’s office that morning for an 8 a.m. physical — didn’t know what was happening in New York City until his pager went off.
In 2001, viewers turned to news anchors in times of crisis, the trusted voices who had calmly walked them through many major news events over the decades: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Watergate, the Persian Gulf War, razor-thin referendum results and White Bronco getaways. This was a day when you needed to hear from Mansbridge, CTV’s Lloyd Robertson, Global’s Kevin Newman or Citytv’s Gord Martineau — or, stateside, from the “Big Three” of Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Toronto native Peter Jennings.
On this 20th anniversary of the terror attacks against the United States, Canada’s top national news anchors then and now are still trusted voices, and their memories of the longest day and week of their careers are still vivid.
“It wasn’t until the middle of the night that I really realized the impact it was having around the world,” recalls Mansbridge, CBC’s chief anchor from 1988 to 2017. He had ducked into his office during that endless day to take a quick shower. Next, there was a phone message from one of his daughters who was in Winnipeg.
“Watching, thinking of you, love you.”
That’s when it fully hit Mansbridge. “Children were phoning their parents; sons were phoning their mothers; fathers were phoning their wives, from wherever they were, in different parts of the world, to connect in a way they hadn’t done before; that no other story had driven them like that,” he recalls. “This was one where families reached out to each other, to connect and be together in a moment that scared the hell out of everybody.”
A morning like no other
It wasn’t just the main network anchors who were pulled into the story. Some, such as current CTV chief anchor Lisa LaFlamme, were already on the air. This was her second day as co-host of CTV’s “Canada AM”:
“It was around 8:45 in the morning. We were going to go to commercial break. Producer says, ‘OK, a plane, a small plane, has just hit a building in New York City. Just mention it when we come back; we’ll have more on it.’
“In seconds, we’ve got the live shot up. We’re seeing … what the hell is this? We’re watching live and you’re trying to interpret, and it’s always difficult to live interpret something of that magnitude. I don’t think any of us had ever, ever seen anything like that in real time.
“By 3 o’clock that day, I was in a van with a producer, driving to New York City.”
Toronto native Kevin Newman, fresh off a five-year stint working for ABC News in New York, was days into his new job as anchor of “Global National.” He was living in Vancouver and when his phone began to ring at 5:46 PT that morning, it was to share the news that the first plane had hit. He was in the shower when his wife yelled out that another plane had struck the second tower.
“I had just left New York, the city under attack, a month earlier. My commute from New Jersey would go through the Path station that was underneath those towers. I had friends who worked in those buildings from the financial community. I also knew that the first building housed the transmission towers that relayed all the reporting around Manhattan. I remember very clearly there was a deafening silence when that first tower went down and we were getting no pictures, no information and we couldn’t access any reporters, and that’s simply because all the communication throughout Manhattan went through the tower on top of that tower.”
“CTV National News” anchor Lloyd Robertson had been up late the night before, moving a story to the West Coast feed.
“I didn’t get home and to bed until well after 3 and the phone was ringing off the hook at 8:46 in the morning. It was (thenvice-president of CTV News) Dennis McIntosh, saying, ‘OK, get your pants on and get your television set on and get in here. You’ll see what’s going on fast — hurry, hurry, hurry.’
“So I flipped on the TV set and went to ABC because my old pal Peter Jennings was on there, and he was going on about planes hitting the towers and talking to a reporter on the scene. It was really dramatic stuff, and I could hardly believe my eyes and ears.”
Twenty years ago, Dawna Friesen — chief anchor since 2011 at “Global National” — was working in London as a foreign correspondent for NBC News. On Sept. 11, 2001, she was stationed in Israel.
“It was 3:46 p.m. in Tel Aviv when the first plane hit the first tower. I was in the bureau with my Israeli colleagues and we stood in front of the TV screen, stunned, like the rest of the world.
“In Israel, we thought we would be next; if terrorists are targeting the United States, their next target will be Israel. That was the fear in that country and the fighter jets were immediately scrambled, and I think they were in the air in rotation for days.
“Then I began calling my sister in New York. She was working for the mayor (Rudy Giuliani) at the time. She was on her way into the office when this happened and I was unable to contact her for 24 hours. I knew that the train that she took went under the Twin Towers. On a personal level and on a professional level, it felt like everything changed as to how we were going to be living our lives; and, in fact, that was the case.”
Telling the story of a lifetime while keeping calm
Gord Martineau, for decades the anchor of Citytv’s “CityPulse” (now “CityNews”), was in the car running errands when he first heard reports on the radio. He was in the newsroom by the time the second plane hit.
“When the second tower came down, you’re just as flummoxed as everyone else and, at the same time, your brain has to be in gear to describe what you’re seeing, and the enormity of it and the devastation of it and the shock. It’s a slow process. It’s kind of like a tea bag steeping. It’s happening while you’re working. It’s happening while you’re doing it, while you’re broadcasting or writing about it and, at the end of the day, there’s the hard reality, you know, my God, this did happen. Where do we go from this?”
Mansbridge took over anchor duties from then-morning host Mark Kelley around 10 a.m., just as the South Tower of the World Trade Center started to collapse. He recalls video had already started coming in of people jumping from the towers.
“We ended up seeing some of them jumping. It was just a horror show. We were trying to walk people through a story that was going to change all our lives. And it did. We’re not in the death game, however. You knew that people could not survive a jump of 100 floors. We stopped running those pictures.”
Reaching Ground Zero
With all air transportation grounded, LaFlamme and a producer were asked to drive to Manhattan and report from the scene.
“I’ll never forget, we crossed the border at Alexandria near Kingston. And the border guard guy says, ‘Where are you girls going?’ ‘We’re journalists. We’re going to New York City to cover the attack.’ And he just said, ‘Take the I-90 and basically turn left at the Hudson Bridge.’ We drove empty highways for 10 hours to New York City and got to 14th Street, which is as close as we could get.
“And the air was still filled with smoke. We didn’t have anything like PPE as we now have learned to call it. Basically, I had a sweater over my face walking down as close as we could get to the financial district.
“I remember picking stuff (out) on the ground, shoes, watches. Cops telling us go back, you’re not supposed to be down here. It was a surreal night. We didn’t sleep. We did the show at 5 a.m. right there at 14th Street. It was really the first time ‘Canada AM’ had ever done something as live breaking as this. I spent eight days in New York City. It changed my life as a journalist.”
Martineau was in constant communication with Citytv camera supervisor Steve Boorne, who was on the ground in New York City.
“He spoke with a U.S. Marine standing guard in Washington Square. The marine told Steve that he and his mother were immigrants and that he joined the marine corps to pay back the United States. With tears in his eyes, he told Steve he had just learned that his mother had been killed in Tower One.”
The emotional impact
Robertson had “been through it twice by that point.” In 1963, he was a young CBC newsman when he reported that U.S. president John Kennedy had been shot and rushed to hospital in Dallas.
“This was even more dramatic because it was coming at you from all corners, all day, and you were sifting and trying to make the right decisions. You’re listening all the time to producers in your ear. You’re monitoring the American nets. You’re trying to get all the information sourced properly, get it on the air accurately. You’re so busy trying to think that what you’re feeling about all of this only hits you afterwards. We are only allowed an absence of emotions because you’re so busy.”
Robertson watched veteran CBS newsman Dan Rather tear up a week after the attacks on “The Late Show With David Letterman.”
“A lot of us said, ‘You know, it’s Dan. Those are crocodile tears.’ I had a sense, however, that maybe he was holding all this inside and it just came out.”
Martineau saw the devastation and had his own thoughts.
“This was a story that was never going to stop. It was going to roll on forever because it completely changed the pace and effectiveness of terrorism. It devastated the United States and told them they could be as victimized as anyone in the world, and they were. I think it blew away the naïveté that we lived in a bubble where no one could hurt us to that extent.”
After his own all-day, middle-of-thenight shift, Newman says he was driving home on the Coquitlam highway when the enormity of the situation hit him.
“It was a beautiful day on Sept. 11 in Vancouver; blue skies, mountains were shining. It was so beautiful, and I had just witnessed and experienced from a distance such horror of what was happening in New York that I pulled over to the side and I cried uncontrollably for about half an hour — and then I didn’t cry for a year.”