Diane Swonk, Chief Economist
Sep. 11, 2009 – 9:00 a.m.
9/11
At this moment (8:00 am EST) eight years ago, I was walking back into the World Trade Center to attend a breakfast for the 43rd annual meeting of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) – I had previously chosen the location for its prestige for our meeting on my ascent to the Presidency of NABE on a trip to New York back in 1998.
I was late as I had tried to squeeze a T.V. interview in ahead of time. I remember thinking how sad it was that there was so much security, which was a residual effect of the 1993 bombing. The complex seemed a foreboding fortress to someone who worked in one of the tallest buildings in Chicago her whole career without ever having to flash an ID.
I was ushered up to the front of the ballroom to help mentor the students we had visiting NABE. We introduced ourselves. We had quite an international group. One woman was from Norway, another lived in Dubai but came from the Philippines, and of course, there was the Italian, who later became a dear friend and colleague, Adolfo Laurenti. He was working on his PhD and said he wanted to apply his knowledge rather than waste away in an Ivory Tower. (His Italian accent made it seem all the more passionate.) There was also a young man from Denmark, but he joined us as we were walking out.
Bob Scott, who was the President of Morgan Stanley at the time, was our keynote speaker. (In those days, investment banks were still plentiful on Wall Street.) He began to speak, and the first plane hit. We couldn't see outside. Many of us assumed it was another bomb, patterned after the 1993 attack. Others thought it was an earthquake because of how everything shook for what seemed like ages. I still remember the sound of the crystals chiming on the ceiling and fearing that the whole thing would soon collapse on us.
Bob Scott tried several times to collect himself and continue to speak. I guess he didn't want to acknowledge the magnitude of the reality we were now experiencing.
Soon, the hotel started to evacuate us. We tried to exit out the front, but its glass atrium had imploded. We were connected to the two buildings, and heard the announcement in the second building that the building was secure. The speaker told them NOT to evacuate.
If my phone records are correct, it took us 16 minutes to get out of the hotel via the kitchen and side door. I had called my husband to let him know I was out. He told me it wasn't a bomb, but a plane. By now, this was obvious.
The chaos had already begun. Papers were falling like snow from the broken windows above. It seemed like a lot for an information age where everything was supposed to be electronic. Then came the plane parts and the jumpers.
This is when instinct kicks in. I told everyone to run toward the lady – the Statue of Liberty in Battery Park – to avoid the large buildings. If we were under attack, it seemed the best place to go. By now there was about ten of us, and we collected as many as we could along the way. Carl Tannenbaum, who was the chief economist at LaSalle Bank at the time, joined us. The Chicagoans always had a way of finding each other.
Three blocks later, the second plane hit, and the panic intensified. One plane could have been an accident: Two were an attack.
The hardest part was seeing people hold hands and jump from the highest stories, all manicured and in their most expensive suits. These were parents, sons, daughters and best friends. Many of them called for help from their offices, others wrote notes for help and threw them out the window. Minutes later, those notes became letters of farewell to their loved ones. My friend Bill McDonough, who was president of the New York Fed at the time, had all the papers that reached the Fed collected and delivered to those they could locate in the days and weeks that followed.
I got a call out to my boss at the time, Jamie Dimon. His secretary, Karen, took the names and phone numbers of all those with me to let their families know they were alive. He told me our offices in mid-town were still open with a skeleton team. We had a destination.
At eight blocks away, near the remains of a fort in the park, the buildings began to sway, and then, as if they gave up, they collapsed. It was as if all the life left in the souls trapped inside passed through me. I could hear their screams and feel the unbearable silence of their death.
Our day, however, had only begun. Adolfo leaned into me and said that the wind had shifted. The dust and debris from the building was coming our way. It was an immense cloud, and I didn't want to panic anyone further. I told him not to tell anyone – we would deal with that later. He was calm and collected. He had training in the Italian military and knew how to handle a crisis, something that would serve him well as the financial markets melted down electronically last fall.
We walked through the park to the other side. The chaos of the dust, and being trapped in it, left everyone scrambling. A mob tried to break into a glass restaurant to escape the debris that now engulfed us. My colleague from the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics handed me his tie to filter the soot.
Someone was handing out masks, but there weren't enough and we had an asthmatic with us. Another economist and I later gave a face mask to a woman on crutches as the crowd yelled at her to move faster.
We made it onto the east highway, and it looked like a sea of refugees. We were covered in soot and death, and still had miles to go. A bus stopped for us, and let us on. Everyone inside looked so clean. We made it halfway up to 42nd street, but still had to cross the island to get to our offices and help.
We stopped at an open-air bar and used their phones, which were now not working so well, and called my colleagues at the bank. They were waiting for us.
We got to the United Nations building and heard more planes in the air. Another ripple of panic broke out, but these were our guys now. They had secured the island.
Once back in our New York offices, we called other mid-town headquarters to match husbands and wives, find friends and get people someplace to stay. I worked the consulates, who took care of most of our foreign visitors. Adolfo got out on a train somehow with my colleagues. (He still has a little travel size bottle of powder I bought when I ran to get asthma meds and toiletries from a local drug store. Why powder? Who knows, I was a mom trying to get back to my children, everything sample sized went with me.)
At about 5:00 p.m., after everyone had left, I went outside again to make the walk north to a reporter's place on the upper-west side. She offered to take me in. There were no cabs. The street was empty. I made it up to Central Park, and I could hear the voices of children playing. It was surreal.
A voice called out, "Diane, are you okay?" Who knew my name? The doorman at the plaza read my name badge, which I still brandished. He saw the soot which still covered me from head to toe. I could taste it in my lungs for eight weeks. He took my hand and placed it into the hand of a New Yorker. I was walked block by block, and given the hand of another New Yorker until I got to where I had to go.
My friend Kathleen ran to me and gave me a hug. She said she had steak, wine and Bourbon. I said I would take it in reverse order.
I haven't written about that fateful day since December 2001. So why revisit it now? Because when people ask me if I have ever seen anything worse than what we are experiencing today, I say yes. In fact many of us have, and we are still here to bear witness and move forward.
We dug ourselves one heck of a deep hole and getting out of it will be no easy feat, but we will get ourselves out of this, changed, and hopefully a bit wiser. We have overcome worse – many much worse than I – and it is who we are and what we do as a nation.
So on this anniversary of 9/11, I find myself filled with hope instead of dread. I have traveled a long way over the last eight years, and have overcome obstacles I once thought insurmountable. I have found strength in my own vulnerability. Remember those we lost on 9/11 and all those since then, including the casualties of the Great Recession. Take a meal to a family who is hungry, donate a coat to the homeless who will soon have to weather the winter and, for at least one moment, stop blaming and be thankful that you are one of the lucky ones.
© 2009 Mesirow Financial Holdings, Inc. ("Mesirow Financial"). All rights reserved.
The information in Diane Swonk's Fed Flash is the proprietary and copyrighted material (the "Copyrighted Material") of Mesirow Financial. The Copyrighted Material, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced, retransmitted or submitted to any media outlet, or posted on any Web site aside from mesirowfinancial.com without the express written consent of Mesirow Financial. This information provided here in is believed to be obtained from sources deemed to be accurate, timely and reliable. However, no assurance is given in that respect. The reader should not rely on this information in making economic or other decisions. The views expressed herein are those of the author and may not necessarily represent the views of Mesirow Financial, its operating businesses or other of its employees. This communication does not constitute an offer or solicitation, or solicitation of any offer to buy or sell any security, investment or other product. Likewise, this communication serves to provide certain opinions on current market conditions, economic policy or trends and is not a recommendation to engage in, or refrain from engaging, in a particular course of action.
