It was 26 August 2003, almost two years since 9/11, and the sickening plume of smoke that hung over Ground Zero in lower Manhattan had long since dissipated. But steam was rising from the steps of city hall, three blocks away, where Hillary Clinton was venting her rage at the Bush administration for having lied to the American people.
“I don’t think any of us expected that our government would knowingly deceive us about something as sacred as the air we breathe,” she said, her voice tightening in anger. “The air that our children breathe in schools, that our valiant first responders were facing on the pile.”
Surrounded by firefighters and the doctors who were treating them for respiratory and other illnesses incurred when they worked on the massive mound of Ground Zero rubble – the “pile”, as it was known – the junior senator from New York was incandescent. Audiotape recorded at the time by WNYC, the city’s public radio affiliate, captures a Clinton quite unlike the controlled public figure who is now a step away from the White House.
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The Clinton who emerges from the WNYC tapes is passionate, raw and unrestrained. Above all, she is livid. She had just learned that the Bush administration instructed officials of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reassure New Yorkers after 9/11 that the air over Ground Zero was safe. In fact, they had a pretty good idea that it was a toxic pall of asbestos, cement, glass dust, heavy metals, fuels and PCBs.
“I am outraged,” Clinton went on. “In the immediate aftermath, the first couple of days, nobody could know. But a week later? Two weeks later? Two months later? Six months later? Give me a break!”
Of all the varied chapters of Clinton’s tumultuous 30 years in public life, the story of her response to the attacks on the twin towers is one of the richest in terms of the clues it provides as to what to expect from a Clinton presidency. It reveals elements of her character, of her domestic policy strengths, as well as her tendency to lean towards the hawkish side in international affairs.
As the 15th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the memories of those days, and her role in them, remain fresh for many who stood by her side. Richard Alles was on the smoldering pile on 12 September, the day after the attacks, when Clinton turned up and proclaimed: “This attack on New York is an attack on America, it’s an attack on every American.”
Then a uniformed firefighter with battalion 58 in Canarsie, Brooklyn, Alles arrived at Ground Zero 20 minutes after the second tower collapsed. He stayed there for two days and nights, seeking survivors amid the ruins. What struck him most about Clinton that day, he said, was what he called her “compassion”.
“She really went out of her way to speak to the first responders on the site to reassure them,” he said. “I never forgot it.”
Alles was also struck by how Clinton quickly grasped the potential health risks of Ground Zero, and how doggedly she pursued treatment for those who suffered. “We all knew from the get-go that the air was contaminated,” he said, “but we had a job to do so we kept on working. Senator Clinton was at the forefront over dealing with it, she showed herself to be a fighter.”
On 9/11, Peter Gorman was president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association of New York City, a union that represents largely white, blue-collar workers of the sort who today might back Donald Trump. The union had pointedly put its weight behind Clinton’s opponent in the 2000 senatorial race, Republican Rick Lazio.
Yet Gorman recalls being pleasantly surprised by Clinton’s commitment, both in terms of her mastery of policy detail and on a personal level. “She would call me on my cellphone to ask how I was doing, how my members were doing,” he said. “One time I was pumping gas at a Texaco station, it was Christmas Eve, and she wanted to know how things were going. When a senator calls someone on my level, that’s impressive.”
That same personal care made a profound impression on Lauren Manning, one of very few people who survived severe injuries from the planes crashing into the towers. She was engulfed by a fireball of jet fuel as she was entering the elevators in the north tower to go up to work at Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 105th floor.
She was burned on 83% of her body; 658 of her colleagues died.
A few months later, Manning was in treatment at the Burke rehabilitation hospital in White Plains, New York, when she had a visitor. Clinton walked into her small hospital room and “embraced me as best she could”, she said. “She was kind and gentle, and she very specifically said to me that she was here for me and that she would remain at my side.”
Manning, who gave a keynote speech on behalf of Clinton at the Democratic national convention in July, said that her most vivid memory was of the senator’s eyes.
“I was covered and swathed in bandages,” she said, “dealing with a great deal of pain, but she captured me with her eyes. They were wide open and expressive, and they remained on mine. She didn’t lose sight of what I was saying to her. To me, that was the mark of somebody who is sincere, who you want on your side.”
Having declared 9/11 to be an attack on all Americans, Clinton soon discovered that the national response was not entirely united or favorable to struggling New Yorkers. The head of the EPA at the time, Christine Todd Whitman, repeatedly insisted the air at Ground Zero was safe even as early as three days after the towers collapsed, as did Mayor Rudy Giuliani despite worries within City Hall that they were facing thousands of liability claims.
Confronted by this wall of denial, Clinton was one of the most powerful voices warning of an impending health crisis. Ben Chevat, chief of staff to congresswoman Carolyn Maloney of New York on 9/11, recalls the impact.
“The Bush administration was saying, ‘There’s no problem, move along’,” he said, “and so it was hard work getting any traction in the media. Yet we knew there was a problem because people were getting sick with respiratory diseases and cancers.”
Chevat, now executive director of 9/11 Health Watch, said: “It took Clinton to put a spotlight on the issue and change the frame.”
‘She was a sponge for knowledge’
Clinton and her allies started small but over time succeeded in dramatically expanding the health program for those who became ill after
9/11. Within weeks of the attacks she had helped secure $12m for a pilot project at Mount Sinai hospital, screening some 9,000 workers with suspected Ground Zero illnesses.
By April 2004 the program had grown to a $90m fund offering three free medical exams a year to 50,000 first responders and residents of lower Manhattan. In 2010, Clinton having passed on the baton to her successor in the US senate, Kirsten Gillibrand, reluctant Republicans in Congress were cajoled into passing the $4bn Zadroga Act, covering the health costs of those impaired by the toxic fumes. Last year the program was extended for 75 years, and now serves 65,000 emergency responders and almost 10,000 9/11 resident survivors.
Philip Landrigan, who hosted the first World Trade Center medical program at Mount Sinai, puts this success story in no small part down to Clinton’s relentless pursuit of the subject coupled with her attention to detail.
“She was angry at the Washington political leaders who would come to Ground Zero, have photos taken and then go back to DC and do nothing,” he said.
“She became deeply knowledgable on the subject, not just fiscal and administrative details, but also about medical and mental health problems. She was a sponge for knowledge.”
Clinton’s powerful engagement in the 9/11 health cause makes for a strong contrast with how her presidential rival, Donald Trump, spent his time in the wake of the terrorist attacks. He used a loophole in federal funding to help small businesses hurt by the disaster to claim $150,000 in subsidies for a Wall Street real estate project.
Yet when it comes to this year’s presidential race, several of the people who worked closely with Clinton after 9/11 said they were puzzled by her struggle to win over voters. As a senator operating on the ground, and one to one, she came across as an effective and empathetic leader, they said. Writ large across the nation, her persona struggled to come across.
“She may not be the most natural politician,” said former firefighters union president Peter Gorman. “I regret that sometimes she doesn’t come across well in front of a crowd as people don’t know her as so many of us do.”
Alles, the firefighter, put her troubles with popularity in 2016 – she has an unfavorable rating of 55%, according to the RealClearPolitics.com average of polls – down to the criticism she has endured from political opponents and enemies over decades, from Whitewater in the 1990s to Benghazi and the email controversy today. He doubted many of his fellow firefighters would back her in November, as the good work she did after 9/11 has faded from view.
“Younger fire officers aren’t aware of what she did as senator,” he said. “While they were growing up all they heard was this bad stuff about Clinton – the damage has been done.”
What hasn’t faded from view is something else that has frequently bugged Clinton: her vote in October 2002 to authorize the use of military force in Iraq, a resolution that paved the way for the invasion the following year. The controversial decision – the hardest of her political life, she has said – was predicated on her response to the collapse of the twin towers.
As she told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, the 9/11 attacks “marked me, and made me feel [fighting terrorism] was my No1 obligation as a senator”.
Micah Zenko, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has studied Clinton’s changing approach to Iraq, suggested her views were more nuanced and thoughtful than she has been credited for. He pointed to her speech to the Senate floor before casting her war vote.
“She emphasizes the UN and sanctions route, and doesn’t emphasise neo-conservative nation building,” he said. “She was very conscious that this was not a blank check.”
On the other hand, Clinton continued to support the military escapade in Iraq until 2005 and only fully disavowed her vote a couple of years ago, when she wrote in her memoir Hard Choices that she “got it wrong”. That she continues to wrestle with this vexed subject, and her record on it, was shown on Wednesday night when she used a foreign policy town hall in New York City to state bluntly that she would not put US ground troops into Iraq “ever again”.
That has not assuaged anti-war campaigners who were active in 2002 and 2003. They are still angry about Clinton’s pro-war vote, given the warnings they raised at the time.
“There were many concerns raised, and one of the biggest was that little wars lead to big wars and big wars lead to bigger wars and this is going to be a quagmire,” said Leslie Cagan, co-chair of the anti-war coalition United for Peace and Justice. “There is no endgame here … and of course that’s what happened.”
As early as 2004, Clinton was back on the Brian Lehrer show slamming the Bush administration again, this time for having misled the American people over weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s purported links to al-Qaida. “There wouldn’t have been a vote … if everything we knew now had been known then,” she said.
But that further peeves the anti-war campaigners because it ignores the fact that before the invasion happened they were sounding the alarm about precisely those issues.
As Cagan put it: “There were many warnings: don’t do this, don’t go into Iraq, don’t start a war that doesn’t need to be started. It wasn’t like you couldn’t hear that, if you were listening.”
- Andrea Bernstein is the senior editor, politics and policy, for WNYC
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