Bryce Zabel's INSTANT HISTORY

America Under Attack: September 11, 2001

We're coming up on the five-year anniversary of 9/11 and, no doubt, countless thousands of new words will be spilled trying to make sense of that day and where we've come since. Newsweek went strong on pictures in this "EXTRA EDITION" and the picture on the cover was titled, simply, "9:03 A.M. TUESDAY, SEPT. 11, 2001: Hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 explodes into the World Trade Center." Take a moment and look at this cover, CLICK IT if you want to see the full size, you saw it on the newstands, you may even have bought several copies.

Cover Photograph by Kristen Brochmann, New York Times

Try for a few moments not to think about all that has come since and how divided our country has become, again. Remember instead how it actually seemed in the aftermath of 9/11 that we would pull together, as we have done many times before, into a united country.

Nothing like this has ever happened to America before. With chilling skill, terrorists struck at our heart last Tuesday, hijacking commercial jets, then crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- cold-blooded murder on a mass scale. The human toll is beyond imagining, the psychic costs difficult to calculate. We always thought we were safe. We were wrong.

The magazine devoted its special coverage into only four sections: IN PICTURES; AN ACT OF WAR; THE AFTERMATH and A DAY OF AGONY. After an extended spread of photographs, the opening article, "A New Day of Infamy," began with the story of Jeremy Glick on the doomed United Airlines Flight 93, a telling that has seen two versions come to film this year, one on TV, the other in theaters. But after the Flight 93 story, the article kicked in:

A victory for courage over cowardice, but forces of terror carried the day on Sept. 11, 2001. The date, like Dec. 7, 1941, will live in infamy. The audacious air assault on the political and financial capitals made a mockery of Fortress America and ended the illusion that its citizens can somehow float above the hatreds of the world. The thick clouds of smoke and dust billowing from the spot where the World Trade Center once stood were eerily reminiscent of the photographs from the Japanese attack on Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor -- only the clouds were engulfing lower Manhattan, where hundreds of thousands of civilians live and work.

The coverage then goes into the differences that sixty years have brought: no enemy army to be declared war on, and a fight that will, at times, resemble one against shadows.

There's so much in this issue to contemplate. Of course it would be easy to go back and point a finger at President George Bush who famously said, "Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for those cowardly acts." Even Newsweek pointed out then that it was 90% likely to be Osama bin Laden, but that finding him would be no easy task. Five years later, he is still at large, but Sadaam Hussein is in jail. It's funny what lead to what.

Jonathan Alter got to write the article that ended Newsweek's coverage. Always eloquent, he began:

Summer is over in America. Fat and happy is history, a closed chapter in our national experience. By midday Tuesday, with the surreal horror sinking in, the sense spread widely that life in the United States will change as permanently as the skyline of New York City. But change how? Despite the unspeakable carnage, maybe we shouldn't change so much after all... For the past decade, we've lived in a golden age. Peace and prosperity -- as good as it gets. Now that feels like past tense -- as good as it got. But life on a downward slope is a profoundly un-American notion. As we grieve and heal, let's not let a horrible day open a horrible era in the life of this country.

Well, the truth is, even though we said that "everything changed" on 9/11, many things have gotten back to normal. We're still obsessed with vacuous celebrities and reality shows. But the road to retribution took a left turn into Iraq and we have the same old blue/red division we had when Gore and Bush tied on election day 2000.

Maybe everything hasn't changed. I wonder if Alter got it wrong and that maybe everything should have. For what it's worth...

New Orleans: Time's Crystal Ball

New Orleans has always had a complicated relationship with the water surrounding it. Everyone told the first settlers it was the wrong place to build a city. And Time -- in a July 2000 cover article about "Life on the Mississippi" -- pretty much nailed what was going to happen in New Orleans. The inside article was called "The Big Easy on the Brink" and sub-titled, presciently, "If it doesn't act fast, the city could become the next Atlantis." 

The article gets right to the point and gets that point right-on. It opens like this:

"If a flood of biblical proportions were to lay waste to New Orleans, Joe Suhayda has a good idea how it could happen. A Category 5 hurricane would come barreling out of the Gulf of Mexico. It would cause Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans, to overflow, pouring down millions of gallons of water into the city. Then things would really get ugly. Evacuation routes would be blocked. Buildings would collapse. Chemicals and hazardous waste would dissolve, turning the floodwaters into a lethal soup. In the end, what was left of the city might not be worth saving. 'There's concern it would essentially destroy New Orleans,' says Suhayda."

The man quoted -- Suhayda -- a water-resources expert at Louisiana State University, had concluded that New Orleans might not even exist as a city by the end of the century. His prediction, in light of recent events, even raises questions about whether or not the city should be re-built (although for political reasons it almost certainly will). Remember, this is a city that, in the old days, after a heavy rain, bodies actually washed out of the cemeteries. The article makes the point that what is threatening New Orleans is a combination of two man-made problems: more levees and fewer wetlands.

"The levees installed along the Mississippi to protect the city from water surges have had a perverse effect: they have actually made it more vulnerable to flooding. That's because New Orleans has been kept in place by the precarious balance of two opposing forces. Because the city is constructed on 100 feet of soft silt, sand and clay, it naturally "subsides" or sinks, several feet a century. Historically, that subsidence has been counteracted by sedimentation: new silts, sand and clay that are deposited when the river floods. But since the levees went up -- mostly after the great flood of 1927 -- the river has not been flooding, and sedimentation has stopped."

You've read the upshot. The city has been and continues sink about three feet a century, bad news for a city already eight feet below sea level. Factor in global warming that may be raising the sea as much as three feet a century. Then there was the wetlands issues. The Louisiana coast, according to Time, was losing 16,000 acres a year, mostly as a result of population expansion into once pristine areas, destructive oil and gas drilling, pollution and land loss through lack of sedimentation.

"As it turns out, barrier islands aren't just nice to look at; they are also a key natural barrier to hurricanes. (Every 2.7 miles of wetland absorbs a foot of storm surge.) As the wetlands go, the chance of a hurricane blowing the city away grows."

The article makes clear that engineers were frantically trying to come up with solutions, but that the big sticking point was money. The price tage for a complete solution would have been as much as $14-billion in federal and state money. (Of course, if we re-build, that may look like a bargain.) Here is the article's conclusion:

"So far, little has been done. Part of the problem, of course, is that excessive worrying and planning are radically at odds with the spirit of the Big Easy... New Orleans is still a place where the primary meaning of hurricane is a fruity rum drink the law lets you carry openly as you carouse in the French Quarter."

Not anymore. You can read Adam Cohen's entire article by clicking here.

Watts Riots: Burn, Baby, Burn

During August of 1965, the Watts riots transfixed the nation in an explosion of racial violence that, when it was over, left 36 dead, 900 reported injured, over 4,000 arrested and at least $200 million dollars of property damage.  It was an orgy of burning and looting that left the area looking like a ravaged war zone.  It all started with an arrest of a black man by the hated LAPD on charges of drunken driving.

Imagine 15,000 National Guard troops fanned out over a 50-square mile piece of Los Angeles real estate and you can get a picture of what the nation witnessd for the five days the riots raged.  Newsweek titled its inside article: "After the Blood Bath" --

In the war zone called Watts, whole blocks lay in rubble and ashes.  Black men and women -- the human debris of war-- queued up in bread lines at makeshift relief stations.  Jeeploads of of heavily armed soldiers prowled the streets, an American army occupying part of America's third biggest city.  And outside a pillaged store, a Negro teen-ager -- himself a ruin before he ever reached manhood -- surveyed the wreckage without a wisp of remorse.  "You jus' take an' run," he said, "an' you burn when they ain't nothin' to take.  You burn whitey, man.  You burn his tail up so he know what it's all about."

Well, what was it all about?  Clearly, if you were black and poor in 1965, there was plenty to be angry about -- from unemployment to an unsympathetic police department.  But did the looting and burning actually send the right message?  Just this week, Joe R. Hicks, the former executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had this to say in the L.A. Times:

The riots, however, only made things worse.  And since then the problems have metastasized -- in large part because the city's black elite demanded massive government intervention, rather than shouldering responsibility for their community's future.

Turning to Newsweek's coverage in 1965, it's easy to see where the beginning of Hicks' complaint is being born.  There are several references to aid packages to come from Washington.  Even President Lyndon Johnson argued, "It is not enough to simply decry disorder.  We must also strike at the unjust conditions from which disorder largely flows."  Yet, at the same time, there are many themes in the magazine's coverage still being sounded today, specifically re-building black families as a way of strengthening communities.

The Watts riots also exposed divisions within the black community.  Martin Luther King came to town and realized within minutes that the chasm that separated white America from the black ghetto also divided him from angry blacks.  ("Black", by the way, is a new word.  In Newsweek, the preferred word is "Negro" and is used extensively.)

Inside a faded, second-story meeting hall, King was quickly ringed by 300 angry Negroes.  "The people don't feel bad about what happened," one soliloquized.  "They had nothing to lose.  They don't have jobs, decent homes.  What else could they do?"  "Burn, baby, burn," someone whooped, to a chorus of laughing applause... King finally got the crowd under control, but he wound up canceling other stops in the riot zone for "security reasons."  Watts, clearly, was a battleground lost.

Of course, it was all repeated in May of 1992 after the verdict in the Rodney King trial.  That year 58 people died, the National Guard went back on patrol, and many of the same complaints and arguments heard at Watts were heard again.

This 1965 Newsweek marks one of the first national appearances of the 60s phrase "Burn, Baby, Burn."  Made infamous by the riots, it was first used by a disc jockey known as Magnificent Montague when he was working in New York and Chicago in '63 and '64.  He's shout it any time a piece of soul music got him excited, and he brought it with him to Los Angeles where his listeners appropriated it for the arson that marked the riots.  During those terrible days, his station manager and even Mayor Yorty asked Magnficent Montague to give up his slogan.  He did, at least while the fires were hot, changing to: "Have Mercy, Los Angeles!"