Three men guided millions through horror of Sept. 11, 2001
NEW YORK >> “Turn on your television.”
Those words were repeated in millions of homes on 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 suicide terrorists killed 2,996 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.”
On that day, when America faced the worst of humanity, it had three newsmen at the peak of their powers.
They were far from the only journalists on the air. But Brokaw, Rather and Jennings were the kings of broadcast news on Sept. 11, 2001. Each had anchored his network’s evening newscasts for roughly two decades at that point. Each had extensive reporting experience before that.
“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 and rushed to their respective studios within an hour of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m.
“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.”
“The country needed some sort of stability, some sort of ground,” says David Westin, ABC News president at the time. “Where are we? What’s going on? How bad can this get? It needed some sense of ‘there’s some things we do know and some things we don’t know. But this is how we go forward from here.’”
Each anchor exhibited particular strengths that day.
Brokaw, author of the just-published “The Greatest Generation,” about those who fought World War II, was instantly able to put the event into context: We were witnessing history, he explained, and not just news.
He called it a declaration of war on the United States and said day-to-day life had changed forever.
Rather would tap his foot on the brakes, reminding those watching to distinguish between fact and speculation. He told viewers that “the word of the day is steady, steady.”