Just as this issue of the Bulletin was about to go to press, this country suffered the most horrendous terrorist attack the world has ever seen. With four commercial airliners transformed into deadly missiles, terrorists struck at the heart of New York City and Washington, D.C. The devastation and the loss of human lives on September 11 have left a deep scar on our national psyche.

The reaction from the American public was immediate with 90 percent saying they would favor military action even if that meant going to war, according to a Washington Post poll. Pain and anger are surging through us all. I can only hope that we can build a global coalition that can mount a strategic campaign to mete justice on the perpetrators of this atrocity. To be successful, this coalition must embrace both our traditional allies and those nations with which we have differed historically. Our mutual goal must be to punish and suppress terrorism, a destructive reality in our modern world that knows no national barrier.

This assault on America should serve as a wake-up call. For too long we have functioned as if we lived in a bubble, immune to the barbaric acts of terrorism that have plagued so much of the rest of the world in recent years. Many government leaders and scholars within the Kennedy School have previously issued the alarm regarding the dangers posed by terrorists, but such warnings have generated only limited responses from society. Ironically, even before the tragedy that so transformed our nation, the cover story of this issue of the Bulletin focused on the Kennedy School’s Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness. That Executive Session assembled a working task force of federal, state and local practitioners in public policy and emergency response to work on improved planning for calamities such as domestic terrorism. Undoubtedly, the recommendations that surfaced from this and other exercises will now be seen in a different light as America reassesses its approach to security in this new century.

September 11 will go down as a date of infamy. But it will also be remembered as a day in which Americans — urban and rural, rich and poor, people of all colors, ethnicities and religious persuasions — stopped and embraced each other as fellow Americans. My heart goes out to the thousands who died or who lost loved ones. As a School dedicated to public service, we salute those brave men and women who continued to enter the World Trade Center to rescue victims. These men and women knew it could mean that they would lose their own lives. Our national psyche may have been shaken, but the American spirit has become much more powerful.

Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Dean

photo: Paula Lerner