On the morning of September 11, 2001, New Yorkers woke up expecting an ordinary day. It was late summer, and there was no apparent reason to believe that anything extraordinary was about to happen. Then, in Manhattan, a passenger plane crashed into the North Tower of the enormous and deeply symbolic World Trade Center. Minutes later, a second plane struck the South Tower, and the chaos became impossible to contain. Television networks across the United States, and soon much of the world, began broadcasting the unfolding disaster almost in real time. For many Americans, this was the first time in their lives that they had witnessed a large-scale attack of this magnitude on American soil. Yet September 11 did not happen in a peaceful world. War, political violence, inequality, greed, and destruction were already part of the international landscape. What changed that morning was the scale of the shock and, above all, the way the event would reshape American foreign policy, journalism, security, and the collective imagination of an entire generation.
Before the attacks on the World Trade Center, the United States had already been deeply involved in conflicts and military interventions around the world. The Gulf War against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the interventions in the Balkans alongside NATO forces, and the invasion of Panama were part of the geopolitical background that preceded September 11. None of this makes the attacks less horrific, nor does it justify the murder of civilians, but it matters if we want to understand the world in which they occurred. The attacks killed 2,977 people, making September 11 the deadliest terrorist attack in history and the deadliest attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. I think that distinction matters because, over the years, the event has sometimes been turned into a simplified story in which history seems to begin at the moment the first plane hit the tower. It did not. There was a world before September 11, and there were political decisions, wars, alliances, and conflicts that existed long before that morning.
Perhaps one of the most uncomfortable parts of that story is the existence of the people who came to be known as the jumpers. These were men and women trapped inside the towers who, faced with unbearable heat, smoke, flames, collapsing floors, and the impossibility of reaching a safe exit, fell or chose to jump from the upper floors. Their exact number has never been established with absolute certainty, but estimates generally place it in the hundreds. Their stories are difficult to look at because they force us to confront something that is much harder to process than the image of a burning building: the individual human being inside it. These people were not simply symbols of terror or anonymous figures in a historical photograph. They were workers, parents, sons, daughters, friends, and strangers whose final moments became part of an event that millions of people watched from a distance. Even today, the subject remains deeply controversial, partly because many people believe that showing those images is disrespectful to the victims. I understand that reaction, but I also think there is a danger in allowing discomfort to erase what actually happened.
Richard Drew's photograph, known as The Falling Man, became one of the most recognizable and controversial images associated with September 11. Drew was an Associated Press photographer who was working in Manhattan that morning, and he photographed several people falling from the towers. The image that became known as The Falling Man shows one individual suspended almost perfectly vertically against the enormous structure of the North Tower. Its composition is strangely calm, almost geometric, and that may be precisely what made it so disturbing. The photograph was not fabricated, staged, or an invention of the press. It documented a reality that many newspapers and television networks struggled to show. Major American media outlets, including The New York Times, Time, and The Washington Post, were cautious about publishing such photographs, largely because of concerns about taste, the dignity of the victims, and the emotional impact on the public. I do not think the problem was simply that the photograph was inaccurate. The uncomfortable truth is that it was too accurate in one particular sense: it showed the human consequences of the disaster without giving viewers the comfortable distance that comes from seeing only buildings, smoke, airplanes, and emergency crews.
More than two decades later, I still think The Falling Man represents one of the most difficult questions that journalism has had to face since September 11: what do we owe the dead when their final moments are also part of history? I am not arguing that every disturbing image should be published without consideration, or that the suffering of victims should become spectacle. I am arguing that there is a difference between respecting the dead and pretending that certain parts of their deaths did not exist. The people who fell from the World Trade Center did not become less human because their final moments were horrifying, and their stories should not disappear simply because they make us uncomfortable. There were emergency calls, voicemails, messages, photographs, eyewitness accounts, and forensic evidence that helped establish what happened inside and around the towers. Those pieces of evidence remind us that September 11 was not only the story of two buildings being destroyed. It was also the story of thousands of individual decisions made in an impossible situation. For me, that is why The Falling Man remains so powerful. It does not merely show a person falling. It forces us to remember that, behind the historical event we have spent twenty-five years discussing, there were human beings whose last moments were real, terrible, and profoundly personal.