9/11

 

I was not drunk when I took this picture

Twelve years ago I was working for Tom Daschle in the Senate Democratic Leader's Office, room S-221 of the U.S. Capitol. It's a beautiful office suite directly across from the Senate floor with gorgeous hand-painted ceilings and antique Minton tile floors. The best part of the office, though, is easily the view - even though only eight of us worked there (including the senator), we had the entire balcony on the right Mall-side of the building.

do you see me? I'm on the left waving. I'm sorry to tell you this, but those jeans look awful on you.

For years I looked out on some variation of this

and weather permitting, ate lunch or got some work done out here

 

I don't know how to quit you, Taco Salad Tuesday

 

As much as a pain in the ass that job could be, there was never a day that I wasn't truly awestruck by my surroundings; as trite as it is to say, it was simply a privilege to be there. The view on the morning of September 11, 2001 was exceptionally lovely although we were almost too busy to enjoy it. We were getting ready for the weekly Democratic Leadership meeting with our whip and committee chairs and also visiting with one of my all-time favorite people in the Senate, John Glenn. He'd been retired for a few years but stopped by fairly often and was always indulgent when we asked him to tell us stories of his time with NASA. As we were talking, our floor leader, Marty, came in the office to tell us that a pilot had flown into a skyscraper in New York. Marty didn't seem too freaked out, but Senator Glenn (who's rather unimpeachable when it comes to planes) told him, flatly,  "pilots don't fly into skyscrapers". We all huddled around one of our office TV's and tried to figure out what happened. As we were watching footage of the World Trade Center, another plane banked around towards the second tower, and Sen. Glenn said "oh, that's on purpose." The plane hit. We were stunned. Contrary to popular belief, we didn't have any sort of batphone or top-secret source of information so we didn't really know what to do; as stupid as it seems in hindsight, we decided to press on with the meeting. Not too far into it, CNN started reporting news of a fire at the Pentagon, just as Patty Murray pointed out the conference room window and yelled "SMOKE!". There was a huge black finger of smoke and soot rising up to the left of the Capitol; I remember not being alarmed as much as absently thinking "so THAT'S where the Pentagon is. I thought it was a little more west..." Somehow it hadn't really sunk in that perhaps this particular building isn't where you'd want to be if your country is under attack, so we all just kind of milled around, lemming-like, waiting for who knows what. I called my then-fiancée JHP (who was in Memphis for work) to let him know what was going on and he told me to get the hell out of the building. I assured him that wasn't necessary, everything was fine and that I'd call him later; almost immediately after I hung up we started getting phone calls that the White House and Gephardt's office were both evacuating. Just as Tom was telling us it might be a good idea for us to split, too, the Capitol police came busting in, yelling "GET OUT GET OUT A PLANE IS HEADED FOR THE BUILDING". Well, that threw cold water on us pretty quickly and we all ran like hell. I'm sure there probably is some protocol to get the senators out before the expendables, but I didn't care, I was gone. I bolted down the hard marble staircase and was waved down the hall by dozens of screaming cops, some in combat gear. One of my police buddies, Blonde Dave, said "Elise, get the FUCK out of here NOW!" and all I could think about was ooooh all those senators heard Blonde Dave use the F word! And why did I pick today of all days to wear these really uncomfortable high heels?

 

Once we got outside we reconvened on the south lawn, again not really sure what to do, yelling at each other over the din of sirens. We saw our security team hustle Tom away in his bitchin' Navigator, but the rest of us just stood around. My colleague Mark Childress remarked (presciently) that if someone really wanted to get us they'd flush us out of the building and hit us with a bomb, or maybe anthrax; the police must have been thinking something along those same lines because they told us to move to safe quarters. Done. I went to the 7-11, bought a case of beer, 3 pints of ice cream, a pack of Marlboro Lights and went home to make some progress on them. Cslos was out of town for work so I was home alone, completely wigged out and glued to the television. I was stunned when our chief of staff called (from a still undisclosed location) and said we were to head back to work the next day; it was to be business as usual. Driving in the following morning under a sky full of F-15s and helicopters, I thought the low-grade panic that held me would probably never leave, not for the rest of my life. A lot of people have talked about how collegial things were after 9/11 - how people were more kind and less petty, buying coffee for strangers and putting small differences aside - but I just remember being scared, especially once we found out that flight 93 had more than likely been headed our way. I could no longer enjoy our amazing view without imagining a passenger plane hurtling towards us; the Mall had become a potential runway, pointing right towards our office. I was especially heartbroken to discover that a brother of one of Cslos's close friends - the father of a newborn daughter, no less -  had been on the plane and engineered the revolt. It's beyond jarring to imagine what would have happened had service out of Newark not been so shitty, and those passengers less brave. Everyone I know who was in the Capitol that day thinks about that a lot. I think of that now twelve-year-old girl a lot.

 

Things slowly got back to normalish. We started fighting with the Republicans and the White House again, I got less twitchy and (a little) less bitchy. And then we got this

 

so we threw some Cipro in the mix, which we were told can lead to schizophrenia or ruptured hamstrings or a host of other things that suck but not as bad as dying except on top of it all you have to give up caffeine and alcohol and that probably violates the Geneva Conventions. Thanks, you 4th grade Greendale School assholes.

Then we lost the Wellstones, and I no longer had a sense of humor about any of it. It was time to think about moving on.

Damn if I don't still miss those taco salads, though. I miss my colleagues, too. Boatloads. Even, and in some cases, especially, those on the other side of the aisle. To this day I count some of the opposition as my favorite people. In spite of what you may think of politicians and their henchmen, the ones I was fortunate enough to work with were, and are, (for the most part) fine people who are truly doing the Lord's work, or at least trying to. They work crap hours for crap pay and horrid poll ratings and love almost every minute of it. I did, anyway. Thank you to the immeasurably brave folks on that airplane who very well may have saved all our lives that day, and to the first responders and members of the military who put their lives ahead of ours every day. We really won't ever forget.

thanks for letting these two happen



We will now return to our previously scheduled judgementalness, cynicism and general asshattery.