The Tribune

FOR Americans of a certain age, there was for decades one singular, defining question:  “Where were you when JFK was shot?”

US President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. It was American Thanksgiving time, and the entire nation was turned on its head. Polls show that most Americans still believe that Kennedy’s death was part of a complex conspiracy, notwithstanding the fact that several blue-ribbon government panels have found that the killer acted alone.

Now, though, there is not so much general focus on the JFK shooting. These days, it’s more like “Where were you on 9/11?”

Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of a significant moment in American history. It could have been a defining, even transformative moment. It was not. That’s a shame, and there is lots of blame to go around for why it wasn’t. More on that in a bit.

Meantime, old friend Jim, a veteran of US national intelligence with all of its superficial glamour and internecine bureaucratic wrangling, recalled not only where he was on 9/11/01, but where his son was on the evening before.

“I’ll tell you in a bit where I was on 9/11,” Jim recalled. But my son Billy… he had a story to tell.

“Billy took his then-girlfriend up for a late dinner and drinks on the evening of September 10 at Windows on the World, the famous restaurant/bar high in the north tower of the World Trade Center. They were celebrating the girlfriend’s promotion at work. Billy said they both had too much to drink and actually stayed until the place closed for the night at 2:30 am.”

Windows on the World occupied 50,000 square feet in the north tower. The restaurant had opened on April 19, 1976. None of the staff members who was present in the restaurant on 9/11 was able to make it out alive and died when the North Tower collapsed at 10:28 am because the impact of the American Airlines flight that had been highjacked by terrorists cut off all means of escape.

The main dining room in the restaurant faced north and east, allowing guests to look out onto the skyline of downtown New York City. The dress code required men to wear jackets and was strictly enforced. According to the dress code, a man who arrived with a reservation but without a jacket would be seated at the bar. The restaurant offered jackets that were loaned to the patrons so they could eat in the main dining room.

In 2000, its final full year of operation, Windows on the World reported revenues of $37 million, making it the highest-grossing restaurant in the United States.

Jim carried on with his tale. “Wouldn’t you know it?” he mused. “My son Billy never saw the girlfriend again. To this day, he has no idea whatever happened to her. He says he was troubled for months afterward by what he calls ‘survivor’s guilt,’ and never could bring himself to reach out to her. He thinks maybe she felt the same.

“Anyhow,” Jim continued, “I was working in my downtown Washington office on the bright, clear morning of 9/11. I remember thinking that the air that day felt scrubbed clean in the same way it does after a tropical depression or even a hurricane passes through.

“There was a television monitor mounted in the corner of a conference room in the suite where my office was located. I had gone to the conference room to set up for a meeting with some of my staff, when I heard loud voices on the TV, which was set to CNN. I looked up, and there were images of the twin towers in New York City on fire.

“I just stood there in the conference room, staring incredulously at the TV on the wall.  A couple of colleagues drifted in and did the same. Then there was shouting from down the hall. We looked up, and out of our windows we could see a giant plume of black smoke billowing from the area around the Pentagon, several miles down the river from where we were.

“Soon enough, we learned from TV reporters what had happened. We began to get notices from higher-ups in the organization to evacuate the building and seek to get across the Potomac River to Virginia.  There was this surreal feeling we all shared – was this the apocalypse?

“Most of us had grown up in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, all too aware of the threat of what was then called ‘mutual assured destruction’ from prospective simultaneous deployment of the large nuclear weapons arsenals maintained by the US and the Soviet Union. But by 1990, 11 years earlier, the Soviet Union had collapsed of its own internal contradictions and the biggest threat to American security had seemed to be isolated attacks against US embassies by Islamic terrorists in East Africa.”

Jim paused to reflect on the quarter-century that has passed since 9/11 and the brilliant execution of Osama bin Laden’s masterpiece of terrorism. “I do wonder sometimes what we’ve learned from that horrific day,” he said.

There was no question then, and none now, that the US wasn’t prepared for what happened 25 years ago. A defining image from that day was of then-president George W Bush, leaning into a photo op at a primary school near Orlando, having just been advised by an aide of the apparently interrelated terrorist attacks against New York City and Washington DC. Bush is shown looking up in confusion. He clearly was stunned, as was the entire nation.

There was an urge for revenge, leading eventually to a series of misbegotten wars in the Middle East. There was Kuwait, then Iraq, then Afghanistan, plus various adventures in Syria, Libya and elsewhere, leading the US eventually to what may become the worst of all misbegotten wars in the Middle East – the stuttering, intermittent but potentially really devastating conflict with Iran.

The US plunged in where others had failed, even as it had done in Vietnam in the 1960s, learning little from others’ experiences while continuing to rely upon the fabulous run of “American exceptionalism,” a hyperbolic term for American innovation and hard work (and the extraordinary and unprecedented run of good luck and serendipity that had blessed the USA and masked its shortcomings from its very inception 250 years ago.)

At home, meanwhile, the country demanded that Bush do something to forestall future attacks on what was quickly renamed the ‘American homeland.’ The major domestic result of 9/11 was the creation, in November 2002, of the US Department of Homeland Security. DHS rapidly assumed a tough, law enforcement posture in Washington.

DHS is, first and foremost, the answer to the question ‘what did President Bush do after 9/11 to make sure it never happened again?’ In studying the government after 9/11, many experts found an opportunity to fix bureaucratic anomalies that had accumulated after World War II in an era of dramatic US government growth.

For example, the US Coast Guard was transferred from the Department of Transportation to DHS. This made sense in some respects. So too did the transfer of the US Secret Service from the Department of the Treasury to DHS. The Transportation Security Administration was established just two months after 9/11 when president Bush signed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act. And within a year, commercial airports across the US were progressively "federalized," placing federal security screening personnel at all major airports by November 2002.

But the grouping of agencies such as the Coast Guard, Secret Service, and TSA within DHS underscored their law enforcement missions, as did the simultaneous merger of previously dissonant agencies US Customs and Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), also under the DHS umbrella.

The US Customs Service, whose proud history dated back to 1789, had a long history of robust collective representation through the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) within the US government. (US Customs, incidentally, was the progenitor, in 1973, of the Drug Enforcement Administration.)

Many INS employees were previously represented by a broader-based, generally less aggressive umbrella group. Since the merger, some of these discrepancies have persisted.

Another entity that resulted from the formation of DHS was the bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  We now know what ICE can be.