In his “On Our Scope” column, this magazine’s Editor-in-chief Fred Schultz describes the experience he and I had on the morning of 11 September. As we drove to a briefing that was to provide a detailed breakdown on the explosion of the battleship Arizona at Pearl Harbor, we passed by the Pentagon and thought nothing of it. Within two hours, we thought a great deal about it, for the briefing was interrupted by the news that the United States had been hit that morning with “another kind of Pearl Harbor.”
As Fred has written, once we learned of the morning’s terrorist attacks, our attention to the Arizona was short-lived. We soon moved to an adjacent room for live television coverage of the still-unfolding events. Dozens of people were present as we listened to Peter Jennings try to comment on the images we saw of the burning World Trade Center. As we watched, the first tower collapsed in a heap. A gasp of anguish rose in the room, and I saw a woman bury her face in her hands and begin shaking. The eyes were providing pictures that the mind didn’t want to accept.
In the days that followed, the television networks provided nonstop coverage of a degree of terrorism never before inflicted on this country. The comparisons with Pearl Harbor and the explosion of the Arizona were both eerie and inevitable. And the accident of timing even provided a bizarre footnote. One of the networks came up with the information that the groundbreaking for the sturdily built Pentagon had been precisely 60 years earlier. Construction on that symbol of American military power had started on 11 September 1941, less than three months before the Japanese attack plunged the United States into a world war.
There are many parallels, including the detailed planning and execution involved in both attacks; the demonstrations of patriotism and national unity in the aftermath of both; the desire to punish the aggressors; the need to do something to make a contribution; the bemoaning of intelligence failures; the evidence of heroism amid disaster; and the feelings of shock and dismay the came from the realization that previously unthinkable actions had been inflicted on Americans in time of peace.
A number of differences stand out as well. For one thing, the enemy in 2001 is not nearly so obvious nor the course ahead so clearly defined. For another, in 1941 the news media were limited largely to newspapers, radio, and newsreels. The armed forces controlled the release of information and issued only driblets about the degree of destruction in Hawaii. Sixty years later, television provides a vast amount of information and a high degree of immediacy as it brings the horror into our homes. And television had made the images of grief far more palpable and public. Molly Kent has written a moving book titled USS Arizona’s Last Band (Kansas City, KS: Silent Song Publishing, 1996) as a tribute to her brother, Musician Clyde Williams, and his lost shipmates. She described the impact on individual families as they learned of the loss of crew members. Television now greatly speeds up the information cycle and extends the grieving process far beyond immediate families.
And the weaponry was much different in this new kind of Pearl Harbor. In 1941, the U.S. and Japanese navies were similar in format. Both had their battleships, carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines—essentially mirror images. Now, however, we are faced with an “asymmetrical threat,” a type that does not mirror our own arsenal. In 1941, the Japanese had to steam far across the North Pacific to deliver their bombs and torpedoes. The great irony is that the terrorist invaders were able to inflict body blows on the U.S. mainland by making weapons of American strengths: the technological superiority of our commercial aircraft and the freedom and openness of our society.
We have lost something as a people because of the new requirements imposed by security. Thirty-some years ago, my bride Karen and I were able to walk into the Pentagon in civilian clothes without going through security checkpoints. In that same period, we were able to board commercial aircraft simply by walking from the ticket counter to the gate—no metal detectors or guards in between. On 11 September, the precautions that had been installed over the past three decades were either insufficient or irrelevant.
Of the words and images that poured forth in the days following the terrorist attacks, two particularly stuck in my mind. One was an interview with Israeli’s former Premier Benjamin Netanyahu, who described the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as “a wakeup call from hell.” And then there was the memorial service from the National Cathedral. A choir provided a stirring rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” including its powerful words from the era of our national Civil War. We now have a new century and a new challenge. May the Lord help us surmount this one as He has aided us so often in times past.