A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio

War

For forty years, Harry Belafonte had been trying to get his recording project on the market. It was the history of African American music in the New World and titled The Long Road to Freedom. He’d been at it so long that the technology of music recording had changed, and now the eighty songs would be on five compact discs, packaged with a hardback book and a bonus DVD. I was in my office reviewing all this material in preparation for my first interview with one of America’s musical legends. Outside my door, half a dozen members of the Morning Edition staff were watching television. A plane had struck one of the towers of the World Trade Center. No one was talking about a commercial airliner, so it was assumed to be a single-engine aircraft that probably had mechanical failure, since the weather in New York was beautiful. A local story but worthy of mention in a newscast. I joined the little TV audience for a minute or so, and we saw a second plane enter the picture and crash into the WTC’s other tower. It was clearly not a local story, and Harry Belafonte would have to be interviewed some other day. I anchored live, unscripted radio for the next four hours until another crew took over for the Morning Edition unit. On that horrifying day, many Americans asked what they could do; we were among the lucky ones who knew what we could do—we could do our jobs. I still get compliments from people who heard us. They always say we were W A R 119 W A R so calm and that they appreciated that. I think some of it had to do with our being radio. The video images were so powerful, so vivid, and so dramatic that TV couldn’t resist showing them again and again. We had only the pictures we made with our words, and those pictures were not so devastating. Interviews with ordinary New Yorkers helped us paint some of the pictures, and they were enormously good at it. This was the day I learned that anyone with a cell phone is a potential reporter. Two political careers were revived by the attacks on New York and Washington. Mayor Rudy Giuliani had been ridiculed by the New York press for the messes he’d made of both his political career and his personal life. Praise for his performance on 9/11 gave him notions of running for president. As for the man who was holding that job, he had no real standing until al-Qaeda’s attack. George W. Bush was the loser of the popular vote for president in 2000. He owed his election “victory” to a five-to-four partisan vote of the Supreme Court, which had earlier halted the recount of votes in Florida. The president wasted much of September 11 aboard Air Force One, flying all over the United States while his aides tried to figure out what to do next. Ultimately, he made his way to Ground Zero, stood atop a pile of rubble, hugged a firefighter, and looked presidential. His ratings soared to 80-something percent, and he had the nation ready to follow him to war against terrorists in Afghanistan. Bring it on! Let’s roll. Even Neil Young was on board. The nation was a sea of American flags. We know now that neoconservatives high in the Bush administration had already been pushing for U.S. military action in Iraq. The attacks by al-Qaeda on New York and Washington presented opportunity for the neocons to tuck their pet cause into the War on Terror. Even before the battle of Tora Bora, when Osama bin Laden slipped away and the Taliban were driven into Pakistan to regroup and fight another day, we were hearing of a connection to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. (Never mind that Saddam saw al-Qaeda as a threat and would not allow bin Laden into his country.) All that was needed to extend the war to Iraq was a clever campaign to dupe the media into believing such a connection actually existed. It was a brilliant strategy—so simple, yet so effective. As the United States prepared for the first anniversary of 9/11, prominent Iraqi exiles 120 A V O I C E I N T H E B O X told...