Washington in 'panicky disbelief'

By Bart Jansen,

Copyright © 2001 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Word of a plane crashing into the side of the World Trade Center interrupted me as I unpacked my satchel Tuesday morning.

I work in the U.S. Capitol in the third-floor Senate press gallery, where television pictures showed smoke billowing from one of the flaming twin towers. I recalled for another reporter how a plane had flown into the side of the Empire State Building decades earlier.

Then a second plane flew into the second tower on live television and exploded in a fireball. The sight took my breath away. I was born in New York City, I attended graduate school there, and I return often, dragging friends to the top of the trade center for a dizzying view from the swaying building.

The excitement of a good news story quickly gave way to nausea. I comforted another reporter who was sobbing in front of a television.

Capitol police soon evacuated the building, fearing we were another target. I left fast enough that I forgot my personal bag and laptop computer.

Outside, many Hill staffers savored an early end to the work day, heading to cars and trains. Who could blame them? Standing in the shade of enormous oaks, a cool breeze blowing, the day seemed perfect. But the scene was also chaotic as a white Jeep broadsided a blue sedan on First Street between two Senate office buildings.

My wife works at the Food and Drug Administration and our two young daughters attend federal day care, like some of the youngest victims in the Oklahoma city bombing. We try to keep our minds off terrorist threats. She had been sent home shortly before my evacuation.

I tried to keep working, jotting notes with trembling hands. Halting questions were sometimes met with long pauses.

"It's a horror," said Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe. "It's a tragedy of enormous proportion, the dimension of which is almost indescribable." Snowe was pacing by the side of the Russell Senate Office building, dialing numbers on her cell phone to ensure that all of her staffers were out of the building.

She had heard about the first plane as she dashed out of her apartment for the office. By 10 a.m. she sat in an interview with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward discussing the child care tax credit. They ended the interview when they realized what had happened. "It was like 'now our minds are not going to be on the tax bill today,' " Snowe said.

Snowe recalled 20 years earlier, just before the bombing of a Marine barracks in Lebanon, how she stood on the House floor with her husband, who was also a representative at the time, after a vote. A man leaned over the balcony railing brandishing a bag. She turned to a staffer and wondered aloud what would have happened if it was a bomb.

"You know what? It was a bomb," Snowe said. "He detonated it when they tackled him but it didn't go off."

By now there had already been an explosion at the Old Executive Office Building, an ornate building next to the White House, and at the Pentagon. As Snowe spoke, another explosion shook the ground where we stood. We both looked at the sky for the sound of another jet passing overhead. "This is clearly going to change us forever," she said.

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican, walked somberly past Snowe. I introduced myself as a graduate of the University of Iowa before asking his reaction. He recalled how officials thwarted an alleged plot to blow up the Seattle Space Needle a few years ago. He had been in the capital for a weekly 9:15 a.m. conference call with 15 radio reporters from Iowa. He was evacuated from his Capitol office at 9:35 a.m., shortly after a radio interview ended.

"I guess you get pretty smug," he said. "Who would have ever imagined this would threaten us on Capitol Hill?"

Down the street, Union Station closed and traffic clogged Massachusetts Avenue leading out of the city. Sirens wailed for hours. Police shooed tourists from federal buildings. A Capitol police officer on a motorcycle prowled the grounds, stopping a man with a backpack to examine the bag.

Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, arrived minutes earlier on his commute from Wilmington aboard Amtrak train 832 that arrived at 10:10 a.m.

He marched from Union Station up to the Capitol intending to give a speech, but police prevented him from entering the building. "I said, 'God damn it, I'm going to make a speech on the floor of the Senate.' I thought we should keep it on, we should keep the government functioning," Biden said. "We aren't going to allow the government to be intimidated."

His heart was stronger than mine. Several senators made a point of warning reporters not to stand too close to the Capitol. I caught glimpses of the destruction on television at a pizza shop as I wrote this story in longhand. Both of the twin towers had now collapsed and part of the Pentagon, too.

Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia, ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, compared the day's events to Dec. 7, 1941, when he was in Washington. He served as a sailor during World War II.

"I said to my young staff today, 'This is another Pearl Harbor. Now it is your generation that is challenged as was mine. You are up to it.'

"We were all in panicky disbelief," he said.

Staff Writer Bart Jansen can be contacted at (202) 488-1119 or at: bjansen@pressherald.com

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