Twenty-five years ago, nearly 3,000 innocent people were murdered by the Islamist terrorists of al-Qaeda.

Tonight, we remember that day and those who lost their lives, and we examine the continued fallout from one of the most terrible and terrifying events in our nation’s history.

Next.

♪ Announcer: This is "Washington Week with The Atlantic."

Corporate funding provided by... Female announcer: In 1995, two friends set out to make wireless coverage accessible to all... with no long-term contracts, nationwide coverage, and 100% U.S.-based customer support.

Consumer Cellular.

Freedom calls.

Additional Funding has been provided by Friends of "Washington Week with The Atlantic," including... ...and of his brother, Jay Hanby... ...and the following individuals: And by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

From the David M. Rubenstein Studio at WETA in Washington, D.C., Editor-in-Chief of "The Atlantic" and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good evening, and welcome to "Washington Week."

The Pentagon is only a short distance from where we broadcast, and as I drive by it on my way home, I almost always think about-- apart from how evil the attacks were-- just how improbable they were.

I’m sure most of you remember that feeling of disbelief watching the planes hit the Twin Towers, that first question, "How did they force the pilots to do that?"

that was followed by the terrible realization, "Good God, the terrorists flew the planes themselves."

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a quarter century since that day.

There are adults among us today who weren’t yet born.

And some of these now adults, as we’ll soon discuss, are members of the New York City Fire Department and the U.S.

military.

Very few events in the history of the modern world have had the impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and I’ve invited a fascinating group of journalists to discuss all of this with me.

Ann Compton is a former White House correspondent for ABC News.

She was on Air Force One that day with President George W. Bush.

John Lemire, staff writer at "The Atlantic" and co-host of "Morning Joe" on MS NOW was a 21-year-old reporter for the New York "Daily News" at Ground Zero.

Graeme Wood is a staff writer at "The Atlantic" and the author of "The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State."

And Sally Jenkins is a staff writer at "The Atlantic" and author of a new feature story about the tragedy that struck the New York City Fire Department.

Thank you all for being with me today.

And I want to start with you.

You were a witness to history.

You were on pool duty that day, on a pretty banal presidential trip.

You were with the president.

I want you to try to remember what it felt like in those first hours, the not knowing of it all.

You had no idea what was happening, what was coming at us.

Give us a sense of that day from the moment the president found out in the classroom that a second plane had hit.

It was the look on President Bush’s face that gave it away to those of us, the pool in the back of the room with the children listening.

The look on his face, because he had been asking in the whole seven, almost eight months that he had been president, what could al-Qaeda do on American soil?

And I think the minute that he heard White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card say, "A second plane has hit the second tower.

America is under attack," everything changed for George Bush.

And he got out of the classroom, made a very quick statement.

But at that moment, the Secret Service also swoops in.

And if there is a disaster anywhere-- anywhere in the world-- they think, "That’s a diversion.

The real target’s the president."

So, they needed to get him out of Florida to an undisclosed location at 44,000 feet over the... The president had had a national security briefing that morning.

Never came up.

No al-Qaeda, no mention of it.

But one week earlier, his Presidential Daily Brief, the PDB, had a footnote to it that was later... later made public.

It said, "European sources believe al-Qaeda wants to use aircraft to hit Americans."

For the president, the frustration that day-- on an aircraft, even one as fancy as that, the communications didn’t work.

He couldn’t reach anybody in Washington.

He didn’t know-- other than a hazy picture on the TV screens we could see-- he didn’t know what was happening.

We made two pit stops, one to refuel.

Jeffrey: They would not bring him to Washington, because -the Pentagon had just... -He insisted.

He said, "I’m going back to Washington."

And for six hours, the White House chief of staff said, "You don’t want to make that decision right now."

And the commander of the plane, Colonel Tillman, who was piloting this-- As we left Florida, as we took off, the Pentagon was hit.

He wasn’t going to take that jet through the airspace of Washington.

When we finally got to the last stop, it was the first time of all the six, seven hours that the president of the United States got what he wanted.

He went into a bunker underneath the U.S.

Strategic Command.

He could finally see the PEOC, the President’s Emergency Operations Center that’s under what used to be the East Wing.

He could see the Pentagon.

He could see the CIA.

And he found out they had the manifests from the plane that hit the Pentagon, three al-Qaeda names, no-- The president finally was ready to go back to Washington.

But even then, because there was such chaos and planes were landing, and people were scared, he looked into the camera in the bunker, and he said, "Okay, I’m coming home."

And Condi Rice said, "We advise you not to do that."

He said, "Fine.

I’m coming," And that’s when he finally got home.

And for you, it must have been... You had even less information than the president.

America’s under attack.

You have no idea what’s going on.

You’re at the very center of the storm, but you have no idea what’s happening.

When Andy Card whispered to him in the classroom-- We had heard that there was a plane, and Andy stepped back, and I made-- He looked over at the press, and I made a sign of a plane going down.

And he put up two fingers.

That’s the only information we had in that room.

Jeffrey: Wow, that’s amazing.

And the frustration of covering that-- but, again, the frustration of the president, who over and over and over again on the plane asked Mike Morrell, his CIA guy, "Who did this?"

And Mike finally said, "When we get to the end of the trail, it will be bin Laden’s footstep."

And he’d bet his children’s future on that.

Right.

John, you were-- On the 11th, you were down in the hospitals and the morgue, and then, starting the 12th, you were just at Ground Zero.

The hospitals are interesting that day, because they didn’t receive many wounded.

Yeah, the most harrowing image from that day for me was that you could look in-- our position just outside the hospital-- at the beds lined up, ready to go, and they stayed empty.

There weren’t the survivors that people thought would be-- that could be rushed and saved.

They were all, you know-- killed instantly when the tower collapsed.

Yeah, I was a 21-year-old intern at the New York "Daily News."

I was, you know, in between apartments, sleeping on a friend’s couch.

You know, it was primary day, so I was starting late.

It was elections in New York that day.

And when word happened, we saw the second plane had hit-- you just start walking, because subways were out.

I remember just going south as fast as I could, and eventually getting through to the assignment editor, who sent me to the hospital.

And then the morgue, where people were gathering for information.

It took a few days for those sort of famous and very sad "missing" posters to go up everywhere.

"Have you seen this person?"

"Have you seen my loved one?"

But people even then didn’t know what to think.

This was a tragedy-- it was such-- beyond anyone could compare.

You know, Rudy Giuliani, we were just saying, the mayor of New York at the time-- while the president was largely MIA publicly, because he was being rushed around, safety, the mayor stepped up and said that, you know-- and it was very visible, the face of grief-- and said that this is gonna be-- the loss is even more than we can bear, but we must-- we must do so.

And then to move that day, next day, down to the-- to Ground Zero, and you’d still see people covered in soot, you’d see people-- The smell was something I’ll never forget.

And the fire burned for a very long time.

And you got down there, and you just tried your best to chronicle what was happening, you know, while navigating various security checkpoints, when they didn’t really want any reporters there.

Right.

One of the most shocking aspects of this, even 25 years later, for me, is the sheer number of deaths in the New York City Fire Department.

No fire department in history has ever suffered-- not in-- except in wartime, I suppose, in wartime London, perhaps-- suffered the way the fire department suffered.

Sally, I want to read something you wrote in "The Atlantic" for a September 11th commemoration, just to capture-- it captures this feeling.

"Rescue 4"-- this is the unit you wrote about-- "arrived at a scene that was too much for the senses.

A torrent of debris fell from the buildings-- shredded metal and insulation, chunks of concrete, shivering glass shards-- amid an earsplitting clamor of sirens and screaming.

Torsos, luggage, and aluminum scraps of 767s were strewn on the sidewalks.

What looked like splashes of red paint on the plazas were the remains of jumpers who had pinwheeled from the upper floors of the North Tower.

Kevin--" Dowdell, the firefighter you write about-- "...ran into a stunned fellow lieutenant named Robert LaRocco, from Ladder 9, who had seen a severed forearm with a perfectly manicured hand.

LaRocco managed to get a call through to his wife.

He told her, ’It’s raining people.’" Talk about the fire department, and talk about what you discovered in revisiting the New York Fire Department 25 years after this.

You know, the first casualty-- firefighter casualty that day-- was actually killed by a falling body from the towers.

It was dangerous just trying to cross the street and get from the temporary command posts into the towers themselves.

Kevin Dowdell, who was the lieutenant of Rescue 4-- The rescue units are the really elite units.

There’s one for every borough, 25 men in them, and they actually specialize-- when the fire department is overwhelmed, they call Rescue, right?

And they open elevator doors, they pry open-- you know, burning trains.

They can open anything, and they can get anywhere and extract people.

Their job was to get up into those towers, try to get elevator doors open, try to pry open doors that had been jammed by the impact.

And so, Kevin Dowdell led his men into that tower, but literally just getting across the street into that tower was incredibly dangerous.

You know, he did-- The last people who saw him and his men saw them taking a line across the street where he was trying to protect his men as much as possible from just this hellfire that was coming down.

Right.

And he died in the tower.

His body was never recovered.

There was no-- There are no remains.

There are no remains of Kevin Dowdell or about 1,400 other people, not just firefighters.

I mean, people don’t realize that of the 3,000-some souls who died on that day, almost half of them are still unidentified.

The families that had burials are, in some ways, fortunate.

The Dowdells had to have a memorial service rather than a funeral, because they still don’t have Kevin’s body.

Tell us about his family, which is part of the after effect of this.

So, the genesis of the story, which was your idea, was, let’s find a legacy firefighter.

Of the 363 firefighters who died that day, there’s probably a hundred and fo-- I think it’s about 145 now-- families who have children that have gone into the fire department, who are now firefighters themselves.

It’s an extraordinary culture.

I compare them to, like, NASCAR families.

These are families that live within a certain ethic and treat danger in a certain way.

And so, the idea was to find a firefighter’s kid who is now a firefighter himself.

And so, the Dowdell family is one of those families.

There are many, many others in the fire department.

Some families have multiple children who’ve become New York City firefighters.

Right.

The fire department leadership was almost wiped out that day.

-It was one of the most... -It was decapitated.

Yeah.

I mean, the people killed were the most... The firefighters weren’t just rank and file, ladder company, engine company men.

They were captains, lieutenants, the highest-- you know, from literally the fire chief on down.

The literal command structure of the fire department died that day.

And James Dowdell, Kevin Dowdell’s son, is now a captain in the fire department.

And there’s been a whole-- The command structure now of the fire department is made up of some deeply experienced people who really trace their ethic and experience back to 9/11.

It’s an amazing story.

Graeme, I want to talk to you about the perpetrators.

We’ll have a broader discussion in a second about the longer-term effect, impact of 9/11 on our country and the world.

What did al-Qaeda think it was going to accomplish?

And what did it accomplish?

Yeah.

So, we actually have a lot of information about this, because bin Laden, when he was killed, his hard drive was taken, so we know what he was thinking right afterward.

And he also was-- he was a chatterbox.

He liked to talk to people about what he was planning to do.

And it turns out his theory of 9/11 was actually quite weird.

He thought 9/11 was going to cause the United States just to leave the Middle East.

It was going to cause popular uprisings in the United States against George W. Bush, against the government, and that, within a few years, there would be no more America in the Middle East, no more American bases.

So, it didn’t work out that way.

I believe over the last 25 years, there’s been a pretty continuous American presence.

Jeffrey: That’s an understatement.

It’s gotten larger, not smaller.

And so, the theory that bin Laden had, it didn’t work out that way at all.

And, in fact, in the remaining years of his life, he just continually was expressing frustration that, "That did not go as planned.

And, by the way, nobody’s listening to me in my own organization.

The organization’s in tatters."

It was a failure.

So, in that sense, things did not go very well for the al-Qaeda as it existed in the sort of bin Laden vision board of 2001.

Right.

What is it now?

So, the bad news is that there’s a different al-Qaeda.

So, al-Qaeda had its core group whose plans didn’t work out so well, but it also spawned all these affiliates, people who are basically flat flying the al-Qaeda flag and have been very successful in different places in Africa, in the Arabian Peninsula, and those al-Qaedas which may or may not really have allegiance to the remnants of the core, they control, in some cases, pretty much whole countries, in the case of Somalia.

They threaten whole governments in West Africa.

And they’re not going anywhere.

We’ve got tens of thousands of people who call themselves al-Qaeda but have more local concerns than bin Laden had, who was always really mostly concerned about his own native country, Saudi Arabia, and America.

Was the assassination of bin Laden, apart from the obvious... revenge satisfaction, justice delivered to bin Laden-- did that have a policy implication?

Did that have a national security implication beyond President Obama saying, "Justice has been served"?

Which 99% of Americans agree with.

What we know about what he was actually doing was, he was plotting.

He was giving ideas to people who had allegiance to him.

But, really, he was a guy in an isolated compound.

He had spent years of the period after 9//11 not even in contact with his own organization.

So, by the time he was killed, he was having some really interesting ideas, one of which, by the way, was shutting down the Strait of Hormuz.

So, some of those ideas, it would be unfortunate if they came to pass.

This is interesting that you mention this, because, you know, if you look at the impact of 9/11-- If George W. Bush had not... chosen a second war, Iraq, you might not have had a Barack Obama rise-- become president.

If you didn’t have a Barack Obama, you might not have had the rise of Donald Trump.

I mean, I’m not saying bin Laden planned the polarization of American politics, but history goes in strange ways.

And you were there-- you were both watching the Bush administration at the time-- We look back now, and we think, "What were the--?"

We ask, "What were the biggest mistakes?"

And I’m curious to know-- you watched them so closely-- if they could have done something different now, with the benefit of hindsight, what would they have done?

20/20 hindsight, if only.

I think even those who participated-- in all of those successive presidencies knew that what happened in the war in Iraq, what happened with relations when President Obama-- first trip he took was to Cairo, Arab Spring-- The United States can’t pull those strings and can’t make those things happen.

And the continuum of presidents didn’t have a straight-line foreign policy.

Just made it up.

Each president had to make up his own policy.

Right.

John, bin Laden-- as Graeme said-- bin Laden’s goal was to drive the Americans from the Middle East.

The opposite-- it’s almost that "Godfather" cliché-- "Every time I think I’m out, they pull you back in."

Right now, we’re dealing with, in a way, the fallout from a decision by al-Qaeda to murder large numbers of Americans.

Yeah, I mean, no question.

Not only in the immediate aftermath, of course.

The U.S.

surged into not just Afghanistan, but then Iraq, and all of the ramifications thereof, straining alliances.

ISIS came of birth out of that.

Then, to your point earlier, I mean, Donald Trump was elected president.

I was there on the campaign trail in 2016.

It was a backlash to Barack Obama, to be sure, our nation’s first Black president.

But also, one of the underrated lines that really resonated with people on the campaign trail was, "I will not get into these sorts of wars."

America was so tired of being in Afghanistan and being in Iraq through the Bush years and through the Obama years, that Trump was saying, "This will never happen again."

And people believed him.

And, of course, we have now seen here in his second term, he has very much gone against that, broken that promise.

And, again, suddenly, the U.S.

finds itself in a conflict in the Middle East with no obvious way out.

Right.

Graeme, I mean, that seems like an interesting point.

In a way, have American policymakers walked into traps that extremists in the Middle East didn’t even know they were setting, in a kind of way?

Yeah, I think that’s the important part, that they had no idea that this is how it’s gonna go.

They didn’t predict the failures that we would have.

Instead, they thought we would fail in different ways.

And it’s funny to look back in the years immediately after 9/11, when bin Laden, as an evil genius, as a twirling-mustache genius who had these traps set for us, that’s kind of how it looked.

But now, in retrospect, now that we know a bit more about what he was thinking, it’s more like he had no idea what was going to happen.

And he had no idea how foolishly we would ourselves react to some of the things that happened.

Well, let me flip that a little bit and ask you this.

It’s been 25 years.

We haven’t had a successful large-scale Islamist terror attack on the United States.

We make fun of the TSA, but there hasn’t been an airplane hijacking.

We have done, as a country, some things right.

-Is that fair?

-Oh, yeah.

I mean, it’s important to see exactly what al-Qaeda has managed to do in the last 25 years.

And just as on the day, we didn’t know whether they were gonna do a lot more, we probably thought in the next 25 years they would do something.

And, in fact, they’ve had only one al-Qaeda-operated attack.

It was 2019, killed three people.

So, we’ve done a pretty good job of stopping them, mostly by disrupting their networks in the places where they’ve operated.

And then, in the few plots that they’ve actually operationalized, they have literally fizzled, except in that one case in 2019.

Right.

I-- Sally, I want-- and maybe we could end on this point, because I do want to bring it back to the-- to the victims, but also, the heroes, fire department heroes.

Obviously, they’ve been heroes through the 25 years of wars in the-- in the Middle East, American heroes risking life and limb for their fellow soldiers.

You look at that day, not just the firefighters, the people on the United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania, prevented some terrible catastrophe from happening.

Talk a little bit about resilience and-- the resilience of New York City, the resilience of the fire department, the resilience of the survivor families-- Pennsylvania, the Pentagon, and New York, of course.

It’s a good time to remember how many people behaved in the most exemplary fashion possible.

Yeah, I mean, the crime rate fell.

Remember that in New York City after 9/11?

Let me talk about hindsight for one minute, though, because the New York City Fire Department engaged in a lot of really tormenting second-guessing of itself.

Should they have pulled the firefighters out of both towers earlier?

You know, what was their response?

What were their failures?

Their radios were horrible.

And Liam Flaherty, who’s now a captain of one of the rescue units, said, "You know," he said, "one of the things that we sat around talking about was the fact that, okay, let’s say we had pulled units out of the buildings sooner."

He said, "Now the fire department is doing what?

Standing across the street, watching those buildings burn and fall?"

He said, "That would have been the worst day in the history of the New York Fire Department from another perspective."

And so, hindsight really is such a complicated thing, and that quote stayed with me as much as anything I reported on this story.

But to the resilience of New York, the regrowth of the New York City Fire Department and people like Liam Flaherty, who was a young firefighter tormented by self-doubt, who’s now a leader in the department, Kevin Dowdell’s kids, the same, one of the great things about the fire department is it has a culture of taking care of its own.

They take care of each other.

Kevin Dowdell’s sons were... The job of raising them was finished by New York City firefighters.

They had hundreds of fathers driving them to school, cleaning their gutters.

Much better than the U.S.

military takes care of its own.

-Much by a mile.

-Jeffrey: Right.

The U.S.

military could learn a lot from the New York City Fire Department and how they were able to survive 9/11, rebuild, and re-raise a generation of leaders.

Right.

Well, thank you for that, and thank you to everyone for participating in this.

I wanted this discussion to focus on geopolitics to some degree, but I didn’t want to neglect the horrible human cost and the stories of heroism.

Almost 3,000 innocent people were murdered that day, and as far as I’m concerned, we can never talk about them enough.

I hope we’ve succeeded in remembering these innocent people-- mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, wives, and husbands-- who were stolen from us a quarter century ago.

Their memory should be a blessing for all of us.

I’m Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.

Announcer: Corporate funding for "Washington Week with The Atlantic" is provided by... Consumer Cellular.

Additional funding has been provided by Friends of "Washington Week with The Atlantic," including... ...and of his brother, Jay Hanby... ...and the following individuals: And by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

♪ ♪ Announcer: You’re watching PBS.