Rumors, fears mark nation’s capital

Benjamin Grove

Friday, Sept. 14, 2001 | 9:55 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- I got to my downtown office about 9:20 a.m. Tuesday. I didn't know two commercial jets had slammed into the World Trade Center a half-hour earlier -- a newspaper reporter behind on the news.

I checked my messages, flipped on CNN -- volume down -- my normal routine. I logged onto my computer, scanned the Associated Press wire. Lots of stories with "attacks" in the headline slugs. I turned up CNN.

Anchors began reporting an explosion at the Pentagon, across the Potomac River about 2.5 miles away. I hadn't heard or felt it. But it was quickly clear there had been synchronized attacks, two in New York, at least one in Washington. This was big.

The first tower in New York collapsed. I called my editor back in Las Vegas, not sure where to go. Head out if its safe, he said. I scrambled to reach the press secretaries of Nevada's four lawmakers. They didn't answer office phones. Officials had ordered an unprecedented evacuation of House and Senate office buildings and the Capitol -- its dome gleaming white against a blue late-summer sky.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., and staff had just prayed moments earlier in their office, in part for the husband of Ensign's legislative director Pam Thiessen. Mark Thiessen works in the Pentagon. He was OK, they learned later. Pam Thiessen is pregnant. "This has been pretty traumatic," she told me later.

I reached Ensign's spokewoman, Traci Scott, on her cell phone. She was panicked, on the move. A huge explosion, rumored to have been on Capitol Hill, had just frightened people. They were fleeing buildings. They were moving Ensign somewhere safe. (His home near the Capitol, I learned later.) Scott hung up.

I flew out of my office. Maybe I could find the Nevada lawmakers. Metro subway trains were still running. I headed for the station a block from my office. A few people on the sidewalks scanned the sky. I took the train to historic Union Station a few blocks from the Capitol. No one on the train spoke.

Union Station was crowded. People flooded to the train that I was leaving. I ran into a reporter I knew. People were fleeing Capitol Hill, she said. I hustled to the Senate office buildings trying to reach the Nevada press secretaries on their cell phones. No luck. Pager and cell networks were overloaded.

I sped around the sidewalks outside the Senate office buildings. On Constitution Avenue, Capitol Police ordered me back. No one allowed near the Capitol. I hurried to a park north of the Capitol. Four senators were milling around with a few reporters and staffers.

"America is going to be changed forever," Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said. My first thought: Good quote, I'll use that in my story. Then I wondered, is this for real?

Rumors flew. Car bomb at the State Department. Fire on the Mall. (Those were false. And the explosion Capitol Hill workers heard may have been an aftershock of some kind at the Pentagon, nearly three miles away.)

People were milling in the parks around the Capitol and office buildings. Few seemed panicked; most looked confused. Some picked at useless cell phones.

Another friend who writes for a Maine newspaper said the fourth plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. Fourth? I asked. I didn't know a fourth plane had been rumored to be headed for the White House or maybe the Capitol.

Ninety minutes to deadline. I called my fiancee, working a half-mile due north of the White House. She was fine. A purse snatcher tried (unsuccessfully) to grab her handbag last spring. For a while, we felt unsafe in this city.

I went back to Union Station to crowd my way back on the Metro. The station was closed. I walked back to my office, about a mile. Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., called me from her townhouse on Capitol Hill. She had just spoken with her husband and father. I finally reached aides of the other three Nevada lawmakers. I wrote a story that reported them safe.

This was a bizarre city to live in this week. "Under attack." "At war." My town -- where I live?

Some signs of normalcy are returning. Phone lines cleared. Congress came back, vowed rebuilding and revenge. Hot dog vendors returned to their corners Thursday.

But anxiety still hangs heavy like humidity here. People are edgy. The U.S. Capitol was evacuated again late Thursday afternoon after a bomb threat -- the second time in history.

In a town with lots of U.S. flags, it's conspicuous when they fly at half-staff. With no commercial airline traffic overhead, the skies rumble with low-flying helicopters.

Sirens are still unusually frequent, jangling nerves. Military humvees rolled in trendy, upscale Georgetown this week.

More black-sedan and Chevy-Suburban motorcades than usual are still streaking through the streets. In one motorcade, guards with rifles peered out open windows at people walking to work. Normally quiet embassies tucked in the District's nicer neighborhoods are busier, men in suits in and out.

People in the nation's capital wonder when life will return to normal. They wonder, what's normal now?