Twenty-five years after 9/11, lessons from those who led through the chaos

For Mullen, who was a three-star general at the Pentagon, news of the plane crashing into the New York City tower first sounded like a horrific aviation accident, as it did to most Americans at the time. 

“I was in my office, and I had a career aviator watching TV, and one of my aides said a plane just flew into a tower up in New York,” Mullen remembered. “He said that he thought it was obviously some small commercial aircraft that had gotten lost.”

Mullen was pulled into a meeting to discuss that tragedy when they all saw the second plane crash. “In that office and with an awful lot of people in Washington, that’s when we knew we’d been attacked.” 

When the third plane hit the Pentagon, it felt like an earthquake. “It was a big explosion, a rumble kind of thing,” said Mullen who was in a different section of the Pentagon from where the plane hit.

“We were trying to figure out literally where we were, who hit us, and then what to do,” recalled Mullen. “We knew we were at war immediately but didn’t know necessarily with whom. The Navy lost 42 people in the command center. That’s where the plane hit.”

For Gibbs, who was born and raised in Manhattan, this was an “extraordinary and unimaginable event.” Gibbs, who is now the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice of Press, Politics and Public Policy, was a writer for TIME magazine back then. She has penned more cover stories than any writer in TIME’s 100-year history, including the iconic, black-bordered September 11 special issue, which won the National Magazine Award in 2002.

When her editor called, he said he wanted only one story to be told, and he wanted Gibbs to tell it.

Despite the uncertainty of the moment, Gibbs knew there was a story in people’s real-time reactions. “Disney World, the Mall of America and every landmark around the country shut down. And then the airspace around the United States closed,” said Gibbs. “No one knew how far this reached and what it was going to mean. What we were feeling and hearing in New York and Washington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, was actually being felt and experienced even in small towns all over the country.” It was as if, said Gibbs, we all knew everything would be different from then on.

“Everyone understood that we had been living in a kind of illusion that had just been shattered, but no one knew what that was going to mean in a day or a week or a month or 25 years,” said Gibbs.

The memories led to important lessons for each of the Forum speakers.

Pfeifer, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at HKS, recalled the extraordinary bravery of everyone pushed into action—which he wrote about in his memoir about that day, Ordinary Heroes—and the life-or-death decisions that were made.

“I think we are now in a better situation, but it didn’t happen overnight. Learning from what we did at the Center for Terrorism and Disaster Preparedness in New York City was key, but, for me, it was also coming here to HKS for the mid-career program,” said Pfeifer. “That gave me that year to think and put things in perspective. What I came up with were three concepts: connect, collaborate, and coordinate,” said Pfeifer.

“On 9/11, I would have given anything to have five seconds of video of the South Tower collapsing because I had no idea that it collapsed. Today, with technology, it’s more important than ever and that we share critical information in real time.”

Gibbs said she misses the sense of unity that came out of that tragic event. “One of the lasting things about that day that we could not have anticipated, but we could have wished for, was the way average people in all kinds of roles who don’t think of themselves as heroes or being particularly brave or having great sacrifice demanded of them, stepped up,” said Gibbs.

“What I was getting was story after story after story of unbelievable heroism,” she recalled. “Everywhere you saw individual decisions being made about how to respond to a moment no one was prepared for, the response was generous and brave and sacrificial.”

Mullen reflected on the lack of internal communication about the factors leading to 9/11 and the lack of public support for the ensuing wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. He worries about parallels today with the war in Iran.

“I was a very senior officer in the Navy when the Twin Towers were hit. I was a fleet commander, and I didn’t know a thing about Al-Qaeda. Turns out we knew as a country, but I didn’t,” said Mullen. It’s always a reminder, he said. “You think you know everything. You never know everything.”

“As military leaders, we work for whoever the president is, and you’ve heard time and time again: There’s no more critical decision that a president makes than going to war,” said Mullen. “My own view is we need to make sure that the American people are in support and stay in as we execute these kinds of wars, including the one we are in right now. By all the polls, we’re in a pretty unpopular place.”

Pfeifer also said that he would like a return to the sense of unity Americans felt after the attack.

“From being at the Kennedy School and traveling the world to talk to victims of terrorism, my thought is that we don’t ignore the pain of being victims or survivors,” said Pfeifer. Instead, he said, we should give it a purpose.

“Without purpose, there is no hope. And without hope, there’s no call for action. What I’ve seen at the Kennedy School and across the world is, in these difficult times, we can change the pain to a sense of purpose. And I honestly believe that’s what Kennedy School is about,” said Pfeifer.  And, he said, we have a lot to do.

Past and future IOP Forums are always available to livestream from the IOP YouTube channel.

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Photographs by Martha Stewart and Dave Sanders