Les Payne
The New York secretary of state greeted that azure September morning with voting on his mind. Word of a small plane smashing into the South Tower had Randy Daniels speed-walking to his polling station on primary day. “My driver came running up to me, saying that a second plane, a big jet, had crashed into the World Trade Center.”
Under full red alert, Daniels helped the governor mobilize emergency fire trucks and fighters to support Manhattan. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had to abandon his $15-million state-of-the-art emergency command center that was teetering in the smoldering rubble at 7 World Trade Center.
Stunned officials scurried frantically about, attempting to curb runaway panic. Before the bureaucracy logged on, however, city residents from all walks of life booted up and turned their hearts toward each other for the rescue. The attacking beast had envisioned the people of New York crawling over each other cursing their leaders as they fled in panic. Instead, here were New Yorkers gritting their teeth, steeling their nerve and rushing to sift through the rubble.
Osama bin Laden had achieved what no other force had managed since the birth of the nation: He had brought New Yorkers together.
Legions of volunteers bent on service coughed through the ashes of the skyscraper death chambers. Stouthearted men and women, with their sleeves rolled up, rushed forth with food, hot towels, water, ice and beer. Thousands lined up to donate blood. Finger-pointing could come later, for this was a time to salvage and to heal. In the hours and days that followed, a most remarkable transition led to a display of humanness bordering on the Utopian.
“People pulled together in ways I could not imagine,” Daniels said recently.
Crime, in the early hours, fell almost to zero, except, strangely, for bomb threats, which quadrupled. In one curious presentation at the command center, Commissioner Bernard Kerik reported that police had arrested a man for phoning in a phony bomb threat. It turned out the man was already in jail for making a prior bomb threat and phoned the new threat from there.
Gov. George Pataki backed Giuliani from the start and appointed Daniels as state liaison to work “seamlessly” with the mayoral staff. Giuliani, said Daniels, was “a brilliant crisis manager” who repeatedly “anticipated what to do next.” The devastation was unimaginable, yet in some ways the city was lucky. “We were talking early on about 20,000 body bags,” Daniels said. “We knew some 50,000 worked in the World Trade Center.” Had the planes attacked a few hours later, the death toll of 2,749 might indeed have been much higher.
Shortly before 8 that first night Gov. Pataki went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to pray. “It was empty,” Daniels said. “The cardinal came out to greet us. I don’t know what Pataki prayed for, but I would guess strength; he needed it.” Masked task force members walked through blinding smoke at the site and 6 inches of cinder powder underfoot. “The closest I’d come to seeing such destruction was in Beirut in ’79,” the former CBS war correspondent said.
Walking Ground Zero a few days ago, Daniels surveyed the multistory depression with the slurry wall cemented over. The air was clean, as nature had done its job. Workmen milled about the site, but Ground Zero was in no way abuzz.
As for Daniels, he made a run for governor on the GOP ticket, withdrew in April and threw his support behind John Faso. He has withdrawn from politics and is focusing on his new family and developing his real estate investment business in Asia.
“Nine-eleven lit a fire under me,” Daniels said. “I don’t want to waste another day of my life while pursuing what I want to achieve. Tomorrow is promised to no one.”