9/11, 2001
In the hours after the Twin Towers fell, Downtown Pittsburgh was depopulated and silent. The national news magazines had to scramble to cover the events of a day that changed America forever.
9/11 was obviously the biggest news event that happened during my newspaper career. As the country was in shock from the horrible events in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pa., my job at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review was to go out into the abandoned and strangely silent city of Pittsburgh and report what I saw. Here’s what I wrote:
As the sun finally sets on a day America will never forget, downtown Pittsburgh – its skyline intact and unbloodied by terror – is quieter than a Sunday.
From up on Grandview Avenue on Mt. Washington, the city’s usual loud evening hum of noise and traffic is glaringly absent.
Far below in the shadows, a few cars cross the Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt bridges. The fountain at the tip of Point State Park is off. PNC Park is dark. The sky – usually buzzing with the nonstop traffic of airplanes gliding toward Pittsburgh International Airport – is eerily empty.
It’s a gorgeous night, the end of a perfect blue day, but no pleasure boats cut the placid waters of the Three Rivers. It’s so quiet, you can hear distant crows cawing and the sound of a towboat pushing a pair of empty coal barges up the Ohio toward the Point.
On Sept. 11, 2001, downtown Pittsburgh was emptied of life, its office workers and shoppers chased home early by horrible events in New York and Washington, D.C.
Except for a few straggling commuters waiting at bus stops and the pigeons and street people of Market Square, Downtown’s streets and sidewalks were already virtually abandoned at 4 p.m.
‘Evening’ rush hour started at noon, when Downtown was thrown into severe gridlock by the voluntary evacuations of its buildings. Kaufmann’s closed. So did Lord & Taylor. So did all of the city’s McDonald’s restaurants.
At 4:15, nothing seemed open. The T had shut down. So had Amtrak. The only traffic of note on Smithfield Street was a train of empty Port Authority buses like the 63A to Edgewood that Michele McEvoy was waiting for.
Normally, there’d be hordes of bus patrons at her stop, the 29-year-old accountant said as she stood by herself in front of Barnes & Noble. ‘I’ve never seen it like this, except maybe at 9 at night.’
Grant Street was equally vacant. But outside the Omni William Penn Hotel’s bustling Tap Room bar, where most everyone was staring intently at CNN news reports, Betsy Bernhardy, 30, and her husband Don, 34, were taking full advantage of the unpeopled sidewalks.
Residents of the Washington Plaza apartments, they each were in their wheelchairs. Betsy, with 6-month-old Cameron sleeping on her lap, said they had come ‘to see what the city’s like when it’s empty. It’s like Sunday. It’s really a strange sight.’
Across the street stood the rusty USX Tower, the city’s tallest building and, therefore, the presumed target of any suicidal terrorists in control of a hijacked airliner.
At 4:45, the fountains in the plaza at its base were still spurting and its escalators were still running. But its only inhabitants were a few security guards like Jim Perez of Castle Shannon.
The only place open for business on Grant Street was First Lutheran Church. Normally, it closed at 4 p.m., said building operator John Lanyon, 71, of Lincoln Place. But today at 4:30 p.m., as the handmade sign on the side door said, the church was being kept ‘open for prayer.’ No one was inside.
Hotel bartenders were busy at the Tap Room and at the Pub in the Pittsburgh Hilton & Towers. But the only shopkeeper working late yesterday seemed to be Gabriel Fontana, the cigar-chewing owner of Gabriel Shoe Repair on Forbes Avenue.
At about 5:30, his door was locked, but his lights were on and he was still putting soles on the heels of men’s shoes.
9/13/2001
The Big Three newsmags scramble to cover a crisis
September 13, 2001
From 1989 to 2007 I wrote Magazine Watch, a nationally syndicated weekly column on magazines, for the LA Times (briefly), the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. It was a great way to stay in touch with current events and get free magazines.
I’d read the news magazines like Time and skim a bunch of smarty-pants magazines like the Atlantic, the New Republic or National Review and then write 600 words on what I thought was important or interesting. Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report -- now irrelevant or nonexistent in the national discourse — and magazines in general were far more influential and useful in those printy days.
Here’s the Magazine Watch column I wrote for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review two days after 9/11 shocked the world, followed by a second column on how the news magazines caught up.
Magazine Watch
9/11 sent the national news mags scrambling
Pittsburgh Trib
Sept. 13
Sad to say, but our mass news media obviously have something more important to fixate on than a slimy congressman and the disappearance of a Washington intern.
War.
It's going to be a long, grim fall for America. Saturation coverage of Tuesday's terrorism and its aftermath -- including the nasty U.S. military retaliation sure to come soon — has only started on TV and cable.
Meanwhile, as occasionally happens when big news strikes, the Big Three news magazines were caught with irrelevant issues sitting on newsstands.
For its cover story, U.S. News & World Report is riding what's become its oldest, favorite and some say lamest horse -- how to help rich kids get into the best colleges.
Time's cover is another installment of its America's Best series, this time profiling the folks who make our culture and society so rich and diverse. And Newsweek returns to the 2000 presidential election, using an excerpt from a new book, 'The Accidental President,' to expose 'the secret vote that made Bush president.'
The Big Three are not sleeping in this time of national crisis, however. As we write, they are scrambling to do what they do better than anyone in the world — quickly create massive, high-quality packages of news and analysis.
U.S. News probably will keep to its usual production schedule. But Time and Newsweek, whose normal weekly deadlines are late Saturday night, can each be counted on to launch special editions by today or tomorrow. (Neither magazine would provide any specifics Wednesday afternoon.)
Until then, the magazines are keeping up with events on their Web sites. U.S. News provides only the barest of basics on usnews.com. Time.com is better, offering a few of its own stories and links to reports at CNN.
But Newsweek's Web site, which is located at msnbc.com, is the best and deepest. Yesterday afternoon, it contained about 20 items, including news reports, first-person accounts, essays and commentaries from around the world.
The best offering is courtesy of Howard Fineman, the Pittsburgh native and Taylor Alderdice grad who covers national politics for Newsweek. In 'End of Innocence,' he wonders aloud whether President Bush has the 'guts and determination — and the vision -- to lead us in this war.'
And in a nice bit of writing, he reminds us that the freedoms of citizens invariably suffer when their governments — even democratic ones -- go to war:
Remember Sept. 11, he writes, 'for on this day, life in America changed forever, and not for better. We are at war, and the war may never end. The death toll is unimaginable, the worst (and almost the only) domestic war casualties in our history.
'But we've lost more than lives. We've lost what's left of our innocence. Remember what life was like before today: freedom to travel, the right to privacy, a sense of ease and security in our homes and in our cities and towns.
'All these freedoms are diminished now. We can and will get them back. We will win this war as we have won the others, including World War II. But victory will not be easy, and we may have to give up some measure of freedom to preserve what's best of the rest.'
*****
9/18/2001
A great day to fly out of Pittsburgh
September 18, 2001
It's a great day to fly out of Pittsburgh International Airport.
There are no plastic knives at the food court. But that's the only major inconvenience I've experienced during my three-hour visit to this former small city unto itself that is now an exceptionally well-policed ghost town.
It's early Tuesday afternoon, 9/18/2001, exactly one week after terrorists bloodied America's nose, scared its traveling masses from the skies and crippled it airline industry.
The airport's ticket counters, flight gates and baggage carousels are deserted. Its nationally heralded Air Mall, usually crawling with US Airways passengers making their connecting flights, has more store employees than customers.
It's true you can no longer check your bags at curbside and must haul them from the long-term parking lot by the Hyatt hotel. And without airplane tickets of their own your friends and loved ones can no longer escort you all the way to your gate. You have to exchange your final goodbye kisses and hugs before you go through the metal detectors.
But at the airport today there are no traffic jams. Plenty of parking. Plenty of skycaps ready to help. Everyone is extra polite and friendly. As for the new and improved steps to tighten airport security, they are easy to spot but suitably subtle for a democratic republic headed for war.
No surly submachine gun-toting soldiers, just a pair of Allegheny County cops watching the luggage drop-off area. The metal detectors are manned by the same low-paid, under-trained folks they always are – just lots more of them. If they are tense and testy because they are looking for terrorists with box cutters or cork-screws, they don't show it.
Here too, there is nothing sinister or vaguely totalitarian. Just more trays for the things in your pockets that go beep. Just more chance of your carry-on stuff being re-sent through the scanner or opened and inspected by hand at a cafeteria table.
If this is what the coming maximum security state is going to look like in post-Sept. 11 America, we won't have much to worry about.
It's a great day to fly out of Pittsburgh International Airport.
I walk up to the empty US Airways counter at 12:40 p.m. and buy a roundtrip flight to New York at 2 p.m. for $406. Nothing is different. Window seat as usual. No extra hoops to go through regarding ID. No suspicious looks or alarms going off because I have no baggage to check.
If I had paid with cash, bought a one-way ticket or looked less Germanic, maybe it'd have been different.
What few lines there are move quickly. A feeble old couple on their way home to India has to wait in a long line at the United Airlines ticket counter. But they make it from baggage drop-off to metal-detector portal in less than an hour – and they are in wheelchairs.
It takes a little longer for a trio of Kuwaitis to get to their US Airways gate. It's not because they are receiving special scrutiny because they are Arabs. It's because they are packing enough luggage for a Navy Seal underwater demolition team – four large U-haul boxes and at least eight suitcases, all of which are run through the fat CTX 5500 InVision scanner.
The trio -– father, mother and daughter (who are wearing black scarves) – is returning to Kuwait after one of their periodic trips to Pittsburgh for medical care. They are being shepherded by a fourth Kuwaiti, a young man with a cell phone and a pager and a handful of ticket vouchers.
After the homeward-bound Kuwaitis disappear into the doors of the almost empty transit train, I talk to the fourth Kuwaiti. For understandable reasons, he will not divulge his name and his address. Let's say he looks in his mid-30s and isn't a gas-station attendant.
He says he's a Muslim. He's married to an American woman – a Muslim. 'I love this country,' he says. 'The flag, the way we are treated, the freedom. You feel free and you walk around and no one bothers you. It feels like home to me.'
As for the evil the terrorists did, he is outraged. Islam is not about killing innocents, it's about peace. He wants to see the individual responsible captured and brought to justice. 'I'd like for the government to catch the son of a bitch,' he says as he leaves, proving that after 12 years as a U.S. citizen he is getting the hang of being an American.
In Concourse D, except for the Romeo family of Sacramento, Ca., the long, wide corridor is empty as far as the eye can see. At 3:30 Steve and Debra Romeo are slowly walking behind Jeffrey, their antic 21-month-old, who is throwing a yellow ball far ahead of him, chasing it down and throwing it ahead again.
The Romeos were on the subway near the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., when the suicide plane hit. After skipping their planned tour of Washington, renting a car and visiting relatives in West Virginia, they can't wait to get back home. Their American Airlines flight leaves at 4.
It's a great day to fly out of Pittsburgh International Airport.
9/27/2001
Newsweeklies seek answers for terrorism
They were caught with stale issues on the newsstands but Howard Fineman of Newsweek (and Pittsburgh) issued his prescient warnings about the high cost of the coming war terror on the infant Internet.
September 27, 2001
Last week was a time for flag waving, national unity and powerful photos of the horrors of 9/11/01.
This week, as we continue our war studies, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report each put Osama bin Laden's evil mug on their covers (he has become the Official Face of Islamic Terrorism).
By now, thanks to things such as Newsweek's fabulous four-page pullout map, every isolationist in America should know where Afghanistan is (over there, under those new, unpronouncable -stans that emerged from the rubble of the Soviet Union).
Everyone also should know Afghanistan's size (Texas) and what a basket case its Stone-Age economy is (if it didn't lead the world in illicit opium production, its chief exports would be, in order, Islamic terrorism and dry dirt).
But there's more to learn about our 'War on Terror' this week than geography lessons, as the news magazines, the New Yorker, Forbes, the Economist and even Entertainment Weekly show.
One of Newsweek's best offerings is from Fareed Zakaria, who says the real source of the fundamentalist Muslims who are willing to fly airplanes into buildings is not in the caves of Afghanistan.
They come from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where 'moderate' governments have allowed a fanatical, puritanical brand of Islam called Wahhabism to grow and export itself throughout the Middle East.
Bin Laden, the Taliban and most of the suicide bombers all are Wahhabis. And Zakaria says America is going to have to lean on its Arab allies 'to change their ways and actively fight the virulent currents that are capturing Arab culture.'
Time, meanwhile, distinguishes itself with 'Roots of Rage,' which gingerly seeks to explain to the geopolitcally naive demographic of America why fanatical Arab terrorists might want to suddenly attack us so savagely.
Yes, it's partly because they hate modern liberal Western culture or think America is a true enemy of God. But Lisa Beyer says that 'the proximate source of this brand of hatred toward America is U.S. foreign policy (read: meddling) in the Middle East.'
The greatest single source of Arab displeasure with the United States is its 'stalwart support of Israel,' says Beyer, daring to speak a political truth that too seldom gets mentioned in mainstream American publications or on the TV news.
Time's honest search for the elephant-sized 'why' behind the terrorists' attack essentially raises the same points career America-hater Susan Sontag made in her tirade in the New Yorker last week. But without the hate rhetoric, Time is much more persuasive.
This week, the New Yorker's offerings add more light than heat. One piece notes what should be obvious but isn't yet: Islam is not monolithic. Joe Klein nicely explains how America's military-intelligence complex is going to have to change if it wants to defeat terrorism.
And Malcolm Gladwell, in his nifty mini-history of airline security, shows, paradoxically, how the hijackings of Sept. 11 'did not simply reflect a failure of our security measures; it reflected their success.'
Finally, to show how little we know about terrorism, Islam and Arabs, get a load of these facts from Time: Most of America's 7 million Muslims (30 to 40 percent) are African Americans, and most of the Arab Americans living in the United States (52 percent) are Christian.