Books : After : Excerpts

From After: How America Confronted The September 12 Era

In short, the way the system throws people into the arena and encourages them to fight for their "special interests" seems to have served America well.

But there was more than this adversarial system at work. When President Bush said after the attacks that the terrorists must have thought that America was "soft," it was easy to agree not only that the country's enemies had assumed that, but that Americans, too, considered themselves soft, or at least not as tough as the "greatest generation" that had fought off Hitler.

Americans turned out to be anything but soft. Remember Eileen Simon standing up to Ken Feinberg at that crowded meeting, clutching her research about workers' compensation, or her success through the year in helping her children recover. Remember Gale Rossides and the go teams, toughing it out at TSA. Remember Brian Lyons and his co-workers, cleaning up Ground Zero, early and under budget; or Michael Cartier and the relentless teams at the medical examiner's office and at Fresh Kills, who found his brother. Remember Larry Cox reviving his airport, or Sal Iacono summoning the will to start over. Remember James Brosnahan standing up for the American Taliban, the tens of thousands of Red Cross volunteers swarming New York, or that IBM crew pulling all-nighters to hook up the September 11th Fund's website.

Many of those people were heroes -- men and women who were inspiringly motivated by more than their own interest. In some cases -- Bob Lindemann risking all to speak out about the naked Northern Border, or Hollie Bart working for free to keep Sal's shop afloat -- that seems obvious. They and others -- such as Lawlor, Byrne, and dozens of other members of Ridge's staff, or Rossides and the thousands of people who joined the TSA, or Romero, who manned what he sees as the barricades of freedom -- are patriots in the true sense of the word. But it is hard to argue that nearly everyone involved wasn't moved to some degree by the tragedy of September 11 and by loyalty to his or her country in a way that made them think about both the public and their private interest. More important, it is pointless to try to gauge the mix of "selfish" or "selfless" motivations at work. We live in a society that depends on both. Asking whether Ken Feinberg worked all those hours for free, traveled all those miles, and put up with all those attacks to bolster his professional reputation, or because he wanted to do good for the world, is to ask the unanswerable and ultimately the irrelevant. What counts is that he did it, and that he lives in a country where a mix of public and private motives encourages him to do it.

Similarly, when Sergio Magistri says he cares about people not blowing up in airplane explosions, and when the blue-smocked men and women in his factory say they derive special meaning from their work because it has a special, higher purpose, there is no reason not to believe them. But what counts is that Magistri and his people, motivated undoubtedly by a mix of enterprise and mission, did ramp up and did get those machines out there into the airports. There is every reason to believe that what got Gale Rossides up before dawn most mornings, as she fought to get TSA into all those airports on time, was her commitment to her mission, but what matters most is that she was tough enough to pass her test.

Whatever combination of public and private motivation made people like these, or McCabe, or those TSA go team leaders, or Romero work so hard, or that made Tom Ridge leave his family and his governorship to come to Washington and work his way through all the obstacles thrown in his path, or that kept his staff working day and night, the important thing is that they did.

The results have hardly been perfect. We could all write a happier ending, in which America is completely safe and the enemy, like a disease, has been eradicated. But this threat isn't like that. Although the country might have moved faster with a leader in the White House less afraid of the anti-government wing of his own party, the results are far better than most would have imagined on that morning after the attacks.

We need to remember where America was that morning.

No one knew when the stock markets would be able to reopen, or even whether New York's economy, or the country's, would ever get back on its feet.

Sal Iacono had no idea whether he would ever re-sole a shoe again, and those who lived in the apartments near him at Ground Zero thought they had lost their homes.

Chuck Schumer didn't know whether the President would stiff him when it came to helping New York.

Eileen Simon didn't know how she was going to pay the bills, or when her kids would stop crying as they rummaged through her husband's laundry to sniff his memory.

Michael Cartier didn't think he had a prayer of finding his brother or getting the time of day from the people in charge of finding him.

Larry Cox couldn't imagine how the planes were going to get back in the air.

Sergio Magistri, who had just finished a round of layoffs and was producing fewer than three machines a month, thought he should ramp up production at InVision, but he was scared of once again getting out ahead of demand.

Bernadine Healy and the Red Cross had no idea of how they were going to attract and channel charitable contributions to thousands of victims. Although the Red Cross failed the test of establishing a coherent, accountable policy, other groups, such as the September 11th Fund, stepped into the breach with sensible strategies, sound management, and the creation of a system for pooling information and efforts that provides a template for handling future disasters. And, of course, all the thousands of volunteers and millions of contributors proved that at least in this context Americans were not "bowling alone."

On the morning after the attacks, Ken Feinberg and any other lawyer who'd ever worked the country's tort system couldn't begin to predict how many thousands of lawsuits spanning how many decades were going to tear the country apart, as victims of the tragedy tried to cast blame on everyone except the terrorists who had caused it. The victims fund has proved to be a far better alternative.

And, as Kevin McCabe looked out across his port and was able to do nothing but put aside hundreds of containers based only on the country he thought they had come from, while his colleagues in North Dakota and Detroit strangled trade by holding up trucks at the checkpoints, and while Bob Lindemann was called back from the front by Border Patrol bosses who actually said it was too dangerous to be out there, it was hard not to believe that there really was no way America was ever going to be safe again.

America is still not safe, not in the sense that an attack is not possible or even probable. But the country is much less vulnerable than it was. America has come a long way, making progress fitfully, as democracies must, toward achieving the longer-term changes that will enable the country to protect itself in the September 12 era.

Although American freedoms and the legal system that protects its people have been tested and even changed, Americans are still fundamentally free. Although terrorism, by definition, involves those living quietly in their communities, the country did not constrict freedom at home nearly to the degree it did during World War II, when thousands of its citizens were interned in camps.

A cost -- in inconvenience as well as expense -- has been added, and will continue to be added, to the nation's commerce. But the country's economic system has not been crippled, far from it.

How Americans live has been indelibly affected. But the country's core values and way of life remain the same.

The American people and the American system have been as resilient as ever. Even as the nation changed, it prevailed, because its people remained fundamentally the same -- motivated enough and tough enough to pursue the same mix of self-interest and public interest in the same spirited, open arena that since its beginning has been the source of America's enduring strength.