Testimonies From the Day the Towers Came Down

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/books/review/the-only-plane-in-the-sky-garrett-m-graff.html

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THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKYAn Oral History of 9/11By Garrett M. Graff

In the days after 9/11, a conventional wisdom took hold among the elite factions of the reflective class, the central tenet of which was that things had now “changed forever.” Irony, disaffection, superficiality, mindless consumerism, time wasting — hallmarks of blithe living enjoyed by the “Seinfeld” generation — had now fallen into a cultural mortar and pestle, ground into dust and replaced by our collective privileging of depth, compassion, earnestness, complexity, meaning. Old boyfriends called and said they were sorry — for cheating and dawdling, for failures of commitment and appreciation. Art, journalism, popular culture would all sober up. Someone like Jeff Koons would have to find a new line of work — maybe he could get a job at UNICEF. As a country, we were now on an accelerated path to maturity. Sept. 12 did not look into the future and see the social latency, the fractured attention, the Rich Kids of Instagram.

New York itself was expected to diminish both in size and mythology. People would leave their brownstones and apartments, protect their families from the inevitable march of terror and go to Maine or Canada or New Zealand. But as it happened, few abandoned their lives for the presumable haven of the pastoral. Most remained in the city and in the subsequent years close to 500,000 others joined them. In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center, New York would experience one of the greatest real estate booms in its history.

Things did change for those intimately connected to the events of 9/11, either by virtue of what happened on that Tuesday morning or because of the two misguided wars the attacks precipitated. It is with the first group that the journalist Garrett M. Graff now finds himself involved, after years spent writing about the consequences of 9/11 in terms of geopolitics and national security. “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11” is a book exquisitely suited to audio format, a detailed cataloging of hundreds of personal stories, read by actors and culled from 5,000 oral histories conducted and archived around the country.

Oral history is the telling of the past in its most democratic construction. It fell out of fashion in the late 19th century, underwent a revival in the 1960s and then eventually faded from view again as data and analysis assumed greater value over plain narrative. Graff’s project beautifully achieves its chief goal — educating people too young or born too late to remember what the day of Sept. 11, 2001, felt like. But it also restores a form to its rightful place as necessity.

We hear from first responders, office workers in the twin towers, people traumatized by witnessing falling bodies (among those people: Rudy Giuliani). Early on, we listen to the words of Andy Card, then chief of staff for George W. Bush, who recalls that on the morning of 9/11 the president was in a great mood: “I remember literally telling him, ‘It should be an easy day.’” It is that sense of obliviousness to what is coming that gives “The Only Plane in the Sky” some of its most intense emotional energy. There is nothing quite like the absence of foreboding in the voices of those to whom disaster is about to extend its tentacles to jolt a listener from the complacency that tomorrow will unfold much like today — with a rote and tedious commute, a low-cholesterol breakfast, a stop at the dry cleaner.

Graff’s oral history is at its most dramatic when what would otherwise appear to look like misfortune or at least grating inconvenience turns out to be its own miracle. One woman we encounter was fired on Sept. 10 from her job at Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment house located on some of the highest floors of the North Tower. The thought at the front of her mind was that if she left quickly, she would make it home in time for “General Hospital.” The next day the firm lost nearly two-thirds of its Manhattan work force.

For the chef Michael Lomonaco, quotidian good luck came to look like divine intervention. Lomonaco ran Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the North Tower. On the morning of 9/11, he went to vote in the city’s mayoral primary. The line turned out to be so short that he had time to go to LensCrafters and get a pair of glasses repaired, which then meant that he was eventually running late enough to miss the planes crashing into his place of business.

“The Only Plane in the Sky” gives us a litany of What Ifs. What if a particular ticket agent had not told Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers boarding American Airlines Flight 11, to hurry up or he would miss his plane? What if the husbands and wives and sons and daughters making final calls from doomed aircraft had not connected with the loved ones they sought? What if parents flying on the hijacked planes had booked flights a few hours earlier or later? How would the lives of their children have been different if these mothers and fathers had not perished? Unlike many works of history, “The Only Plane in the Sky,” a mountain of indelible anecdotes, does not feel like a novel. It feels, instead, like dozens that ought to be written.