The Day Politics Stood Still

It started as just another Tuesday.

I rolled into the Mark Warner for Governor campaign headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia a few minutes after 9am. I walked into the campaign press office that I shared with three colleagues. Only one of them, Troy, was already there.

“Hey, did you hear about this plane that just hit the World Trade Center?” he asked. I hadn’t. I looked at one of the televisions in our office — the only ones in the entire headquarters. The scene of the smoke billowing out of the tower — my office building just 7 years earlier in my first job out of Georgetown — were disturbing. But no one knew what was going on. One of the commentators thought it was a small engine plane that had just lost control. “God, that’s awful,” I said out loud.

I started to get ready for the day, TV still on in the background. People started coming to my office for our daily message call with the campaign consultants. Folks were buzzing about the plane, but we still had no sense of what was happening. We got the consultants on the line and started our call. I was reading the daily news clips when it hit me that things were suddenly silent. Someone gasped. I looked up.

The second plane just hit.

For a few moments, no one moved. Someone said, “I think we should cancel this call.” But I think the consultants had already hung up.

As word started to spread, the rest of the campaign staff came into our office to watch the coverage and we began to realize we were under attack. Our candidate, who had come into the office that morning, rushed back home to be with his young daughters. People started trying to call friends in New York to see if they were OK. It wasn’t easy to get through.

The campaign leadership pretty quickly hit pause. We pulled down our television ads and canceled all of our campaign events until further notice. Our Republican opponent did the same at almost the same exact time.

Then the Pentagon was hit. Several of us climbed to the roof of the old warehouse that was converted into our headquarters. We hung out there often to escape for a bit. But there was no escaping on this day as we stared at the plume of black smoke rising up into the sky just a few miles north of us.

We went back into my office. People were still glued to the television. I watched my old office building collapse as a colleague sobbed on my shoulder. I remember trying to reach friends of mine on Capitol Hill when we heard the fourth plane that went down in Pennsylvania may have been headed there. Roads and metro were shut. I told friends to come out to where we were. There was no way for them to do it.

No one knew what was going on. We heard a bomb went off at the State Department. (It hadn’t.) As I was sitting at my desk trying to call friends in NY, there was a large boom that knocked pictures off the wall. We were convinced it was another explosion. Turns out it was the sound of jets being scrambled from Andrews Air Force Base to escort commercial airliners that were still in the air.

At one point, when the candidate returned to the headquarters to be with the staff, I walked into his office. As press secretary, part of my job was to travel with him. No one knew who was behind this yet. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda weren’t household names then. But I knew that initial speculation was going to turn towards “Arab terrorists” (that was the term back then). It was one of the few times that day I remember thinking politically — I’m Arab American, and if that was true, I didn’t want to become an issue. I suggested to him that I should come off the road. Mark Warner looked at me and said, “Shut the hell up.”

I appreciated that more than I ever told him. But I still worried. That night, an Islamic bookstore in Old Town Alexandria was vandalized.

The next few days were a blur. I don’t remember all the specific events with nearly the same clarity as I remember those initial few hours. For the next few days, the campaign remained suspended. Neither candidate in our race began campaigning again until that Saturday — and even then, there were no celebrations or rallies. Mark Warner gave what I will always believe to be the best speech of his career that weekend, speaking at a barbecue in Central Virginia, talking about the tragic events, what they meant to him and his daughters, and why it was so important for us to come together.

He wasn’t being political. He was being human. We all were.

We rallied behind our President. We rallied together as Americans. We rallied together as people — grief-stricken, angry, confused. We didn’t think about government or politics — we thought about one large community we were all a part of.

That sense didn’t last forever, and eventually politics crept back into our lives.

But for a few days in September 2001, politics stood still. We were bound together by something bigger.

I just wish that it didn’t take a national tragedy to make us feel that way.