How horror of 9/11 unfolded on TV
Millions tuned in as network anchors brought news home
NEW YORK — “Turn on your television.”
Those words were repeated in millions of homes Sept. 11, 2001. Friends and relatives took to the telephone: Something awful was happening. You have to see.
Before social media and with online news in its infancy, the story of the day when terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people unfolded primarily on television. Even some people inside New York’s World Trade Center made the phone call. They felt a shudder, could smell smoke. Could someone watch the news and find out what was happening?
Most Americans were guided through the unimaginable by one of three men: Tom Brokaw of NBC News, Peter Jennings of ABC and Dan Rather of CBS.
“They were the closest thing that America had to national leaders on 9/11,” says Garrett Graff, author of “The Only Plane in the Sky,” an oral history of the attack. “They were the moral authority for the country on that first day, fulfilling a very historical role of basically counseling the country through this tragedy at a moment its political leadership was largely silent and largely absent from the conversation.”
Brokaw, Rather and Jennings were the kings of broadcast news in 2001. Each had anchored his network’s evening newscasts for roughly two decades at that point. Each had extensive reporting experience before that — Brokaw and Rather at the White House during Watergate, Jennings primarily as a foreign correspondent.
While they weren’t the only journalists on the air — CNN’s Aaron Brown memorably narrated the scene from a New York rooftop, for example — ABC, CBS or NBC were the first choices for news.
Unlike today, when a TV studio is likely to be stuffed with people when a big story breaks, back then it
was pretty clear who was in charge.
“The three of us were known because we had taken the country through other catastrophes and big events,” Brokaw recalled this summer. “The country didn’t have to, if you will, dial around to see who knew what.”
Each man was in New
York that morning. They rushed to their respective studios within an hour of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m.
Was it a terrible accident? The second plane bursting into the towers with a ball of flame, and scary reports from the Pentagon, answered that question but left many more.
Initial network reports were handled by journalists of considerable reputation: Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Bryant Gumbel, Charles Gibson, Diane Sawyer. Yet there was an unmistakable sense that the first string had arrived when Brokaw, Jennings and Rather took over.
“It was clear that it was an attack on America,” says Marcy McGinnis, who was in charge of breaking news at CBS that day. “You want the most experienced person in that chair because they bring so much. They bring all of their life experience, they bring all of their anchoring experience.”
It’s hard to convey the confusion and anxiety they stepped into.
Things were happening too quickly to keep up.
“The country needed some sort of stability, some sort of ground,” says David Westin, ABC News president at the time.
Those are usually duties handled by politicians who take to the airwaves at the first sign of a wildfire, hurricane, pandemic or some other disaster. Yet government leaders were kept out of sight for much of Sept. 11 until it was clear the attack was over.
Until late afternoon, President George W. Bush stayed in the air on Air Force One; then-primitive communications captured TV signals only intermittently, allowing the president to watch broadcast TV only when the plane flew over big cities.
Surprisingly few false reports slipped through in those early hours, most prominently that a car bomb had exploded at the State Department in Washington. One group falsely claimed responsibility for the attack. Speculation was kept largely in check, though in the shadow of the World Trade Center attack eight years earlier, Osama bin Laden’s name came up.
At first, talk of casualties was kept at a minimum. No one knew. That changed when the second tower imploded. The anchors prepared viewers for the worst.
“There are no words to describe this,” Rather said then.
It’s going to be horrendous, Brokaw told viewers. The damage is beyond what we can say.
That night, after more than a dozen hours on the air, Brokaw returned to an empty apartment, his wife and family out of town and unable to get back. He poured himself a drink and took a phone call with the news that a family friend had died, unrelated to the attacks.
For 40 minutes, he sat on the edge of his bed and cried.
Brokaw stepped down from “NBC Nightly News” after the 2004 election. Now 81 and ailing, he keeps busy writing books but seldom appears on television. Rather left CBS News after the fallout from a 2004 story about Bush’s National Guard service. Now 89, he’s an energetic tweeter about politics and the media. Jennings died in 2005.
“All three (anchors) were prepared on that day,” says Russ Mitchell, an anchor for WKYC-TV in Cleveland. Two decades ago, he was a stand-in for Rather if he needed help on Sept. 11. “All of their careers had led up to that point.”
There’s one other thing the men appeared to have in common.
Freed Jennings said she doesn’t believe her husband ever looked at tapes of his performance that day. “That wasn’t his way,” she said.
Brokaw said he hasn’t, mostly because he’s afraid he’d spot a mistake that would eat at him.
Rather hasn’t either, and his reason is simplest. Living through the day once was enough.