‘History is not a dull subject,’ warned Caryl Phillips, the novelist, at the end of his 9/11 Letter. ‘It’s a vital, contested narrative, peopled with witnesses to events which touch both head and heart. It’s the most important school subject because not remembering is the beginning of madness.’ Perhaps he should have said ‘not remembering correctly’ in this week of commemoration of the events of ten years ago.
Phillips’s letter was the most powerful of the five that were specially written for Radio 4’s Book of the Week (and produced by Julian May and Beaty Rubens). Most of them were fuelled by personal memories of being in the city on that day, but only Phillips gave us a witness account that was objective enough to carry a deeper meaning. He was in New York, teaching at Columbia University, a ‘resident alien’ with a British passport. He stepped out on to Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan on his way to class and noticed that people on the sidewalk were rooted to the spot and looking south. At what? The next moment he saw a huge explosion, and then a ball of flame erupted from the North Tower. ‘Nobody moved. There was total silence and then we strangers began to look at each other.’
What was surprising about his account was how, even after seeing that first explosion, he just carried on walking to the subway believing that the authorities would soon sort out the aftermath of the accident. It was only when he arrived at his office to find the computers down, the telephones dead and a colleague desperately anxious about her husband who was in the World Trade Center that the horror of what was happening began to sink in. Phillips was very matter-of-fact about it. He just turned round and walked home — which meant walking closer and closer to the source of the dense black cloud that was all that remained of the Twin Towers. He was personal, and yet objective; not drawing big conclusions. Just setting out, without emotion and yet with feeling, how the experience had affected him.
Fiction, it turns out, is not an appropriate medium in which to look back at 9/11. Even now, ten years later, it’s too soon to interpret or translate the events of that day. Michael Eaton’s drama for Radio 4, Washington 9/11 (which is broadcast today), is a fast-moving and sometimes provocative reconstruction of the conversations between President Bush and his team from the moment of the first impact. I listened to a preview copy while in the car and found myself shouting at the radio as Dick Cheney (acted by Stuart Milligan) urged the need for the President’s office to have the power to act outwith and beyond the constitution. Is that really what he said? Was Eaton using transcripts, or his imagination? It was discomfiting not to know.
What we need is not an imagined response but the frank revelations of those who were involved at the top, and who were trying to make sense of what was happening even as the events unfolded. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller was deputy head of MI5 on 11 September 2001, with responsibility for domestic security in the UK. In the first of her three Reith Lectures (Radio 4, Tuesday mornings, repeated Saturdays) on ‘Terror’, ‘Security’, ‘Freedom’ (which follow on from the inspiring talks given by Aung San Suu Kyi earlier in the year), she recalled watching TV with her staff as the Twin Towers collapsed. The rest of the day was spent checking intelligence on al-Qa’eda and directing the collection of more intelligence. Next morning she and her counterparts in MI6 flew out to Washington on a special flight. The RAF were unwilling to let them go. American airspace was closed. Would they be allowed to land in the USA? They met with the CIA, FBI and NSA, who ‘were angry, shocked, and tired’. Their talks were ‘sobering’. That night she and her colleagues talked late into the night in the garden of the British Embassy.
Her duty after 9/11, she believed, was to try to work out why the terrorists had acted as they did, and how they had come to believe their actions were the right ones. She was quite clear: the attack was a ‘monstrous crime’, not ‘an act of war’; Iraq was ‘a distraction’, not the real task in hand; afterwards there was ‘great anxiety and tension in the service’. But perhaps her most important assertion was when she claimed in response to a question about the effects of ‘the media narrative’ that ‘the 24-hour media has made it very hard for slow, careful decision-making’. How can people in her position make the right decisions when constantly bombarded with demands for action before enough is known?
Eliza, as she likes to be known, talked such great good sense, with such clarity of purpose. Her unusual ability to blend strategic intent with human insight is formidable.
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