A Day That Stands Alone
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Family members visited the south memorial pool at the World Trade Center site. More Photos »
Ten years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a special report on the decade’s costs and consequences, measured in thousands of lives, trillions of dollars and countless challenges to the human spirit.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
President Obama and the first lady, Michelle Obama, walked past the north fountain at the World Trade Center complex on Sunday. More Photos »
Once more, the families gathered at ground zero, where 2,749 died, and in Washington and in Pennsylvania, paying tribute to the 224 who died there.
Once more, there was an outpouring of grief. And there were fresh jitters about security as President Obama’s top counterterrorism official, John O. Brennan, appeared on television news shows to say that the administration would “leave no stone unturned” in pursuing a still-unconfirmed intelligence tip that Al Qaeda was plotting to disrupt the anniversary.
“It’s not confirmed,” he said, “but we are not relaxing at all. This is a 24/7, round-the-clock effort by all elements of the U.S. counterterrorism community.”
The ceremony at ground zero brought together the officials who were in office 10 years ago — President George W. Bush, Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco of New Jersey and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani — with their successors: President Obama, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who said that the attacks had turned “a perfect blue-sky morning” into “the blackest of nights.”
“We can never unsee what happened here,” the mayor said.
President Obama read Psalm 46, which talks about God as “our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble,” and Mr. Cuomo read from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, the “four freedoms” speech — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear “anywhere in the world.”
Mr. Bush quoted Abraham Lincoln on the casualties in the Civil War as he commemorated the casualties of Sept. 11. “I pray that our heavenly father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement,” Mr. Bush read, from a letter Lincoln had written in 1864 to a mother whose five sons had died in the war.
“President Lincoln not only understood the heartbreak of his country,” Mr. Bush said, “he also understood the cost to sacrifice and reached out to console those in sorrow.”
There were also long moments of silence, first at 8:46 a.m., the time American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower, and again at 9:03 a.m., when United Airlines Flight 175 smashed into the other tower. Another silence — at ground zero and at the Pentagon — came at 9:37 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into what had been considered the unshakable nerve center of the world’s most powerful military.
“There are no words to ease the pain that you still feel,” Leon E. Panetta, the secretary of defense, told relatives of the 184 people who died there.
Another moment of silence, at 10:03 a.m., marked the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa. — the plane on which passengers tried to fight back, storming the cockpit and attempting to take control of the plane from the terrorists who had hijacked it. “There is nothing with which to compare the passenger uprising of 10 years ago,” said Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania. “It has no companion in history in my mind.” He added: “Their uprising marks the moment in history when Americans showed what makes us different. We refuse to be victims. We refuse to settle for the term ‘survivor.’ Captivity will not suit us.”
The silver bell at ground zero was rung to remember those passengers, as it had been rung through the morning to remember the passengers on the other hijacked airliners and the people inside the twin towers — office workers, custodians, people having at breakfast in the restaurant a quarter-mile above the street.
The bell tolled again at 10:28 a.m. “North Tower falls,” read large letters on video monitors — three short words that described the destruction of one of the world’s largest buildings, one that had taken some six years to complete.
That silence was the longest, and was the last scheduled at ground zero. But the vigilant did not pause. On a construction scaffold of One World Trade Center, on a deck of the World Financial Center, on the post office building across from the site, police officers with binoculars scanned the crowd below and the sky above.
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