Millions Fall Silent to Mark 9/11
CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - All those who cared fell silent.
Gum-chewing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Schoolchildren toting lunch boxes in New York. Yellow-jacketed mercantile traders in Chicago. British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London.
Untold millions everywhere.
Moments of maximum terrible noise one year ago became heavily quiet Wednesday.
New York, of course, led the first moment of silence, at 8:46 a.m., EDT, the time of impact of the first plane that crashed into the World Trade Center.
It ended with Mayor Michael Bloomberg introducing New York Gov. George Pataki, who began reading the Gettysburg Address. Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor, began a reading of the names of those who died in the collapse of the towers.
New Yorkers were not alone.
In Washington and across the Potomac River at the Pentagon, where thousands gathered to remember those killed when the third hijacked jetliner crashed into the building, everyone paused in reflection over New York's pain and loss.
At Washington's National Cathedral, Solicitor General Ted Olson, whose wife Barbara died on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, sat with Attorney General John Ashcroft under the soaring arches.
Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa was speaking in the cathedral when 8:46 a.m. arrived and a bell tolled, interrupting him and bringing on the silence.
The came the Pentagon's own moment of silence, at 9:37 a.m.
President Bush, eyes closed, then blinking, then open, sat there with his wife Laura. He also sat with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who peered out over the crowd during the moment, smiled, and reflexively brushed his hair back with his hand, one of his habits.
That moment ended with the unfurling of the huge flag that was draped from the broken, smouldering Pentagon after last Sept. 11 - one of the first symbols of defiance in that time of sorely tested spirits.
The Pentagon is mostly fixed now. The flag was still dirty and it did not cooperate fully.
It twisted in the stiff breeze, flopped back on the roof, then came back down properly before the end of the national anthem.
Nor were the military families and the government brass alone.
In Shanksville, Penn., on the field where the fourth hijacked plane crashed - the flight where the terrorists failed and 40 passengers and crew died along with four hijackers - another crowd gathered and remembered what happened there and New York and Washington.
After the Pentagon's moment of silence, the people in Shanksville listened to an orchestra play ``Simple Gifts,'' a Shakers' song that became part of Aaron Copeland's ``Appalachian Spring.''
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