The Long Shadow of 9/11, Told Through the WSJ Archive

For the past 25 years, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have cast a long shadow over America—reshaping its politics, economy and psyche. The Wall Street Journal, whose main newsroom stood across the street from the World Trade Center, chronicled the attacks and the transformations that followed.

In recent weeks, we scoured hundreds of articles from the Journal’s archives to trace that history—and show how the events of one morning in 2001 continue to reverberate a quarter-century later. The stories that follow are drawn from those published accounts.

Much like the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that launched the U.S. into World War II, the terrorist attacks 25 years ago that killed nearly 3,000 people changed the way many Americans felt about their place in the world and their security at home.

A WSJ witness

The morning of the terrorist attacks was cloudless and bright when the first plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. ET.

Wall Street Journal editor John Bussey was standing on the sidewalk near the office that morning when the first plane hit. An arc of debris from the building, aflame against the blue sky, landed blocks away.

His first-person narrative on Page One the next day about covering those hours of terror took readers to Ground Zero, starting with the eerily loud sound of jet engines, flying low over Manhattan, followed by what seemed like a sonic boom.

The nightmare was also playing out in Washington, D.C., where a hijacked plane slammed into the Pentagon, and in the skies above Pennsylvania, where passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers and brought down their plane before it could reach its intended target.

Shattered lives

As profiles of victims emerged in subsequent months, the magnitude of the loss only deepened the country’s sadness and anger.

The dead had been young and old. Men and women. The newly hired and nearly retired. Executives and secretaries. Multimillionaires and hourly wage-earners.

They began the day early, on a day that seemed like most other days: fighting highway traffic, squeezing into crowded subway cars, sitting in airport terminals in Boston, Newark, N.J., and Washington waiting to catch flights, riding elevators to offices atop the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, grabbing a cup of coffee at their desks at the Pentagon, bantering with colleagues, staring at computer screens as the workday began.

Then, devastation.

Iconic photos that defined the day captured the shock, horror, heroism and humanity brought on by Sept. 11.

Joanne Capestro , then 39, worked at a brokerage and investment banking firm on the 87th floor of the North Tower, about six floors beneath where the plane rammed into the building.

She made it outside just as the South Tower collapsed. She screamed and dived under an SUV.

“Everything was white when I opened my eyes,” she recalls. “I really thought I had died.”

“I was really, really, really in bad shape,” she says of the aftermath. Her survivor’s guilt lingered for years.

Michael B Sauer , then a 34-year-old volunteer firefighter, rushed to Ground Zero to help with search-and-rescue efforts, scouring what firefighters dubbed “the pile” for signs of life.

As Sauer traversed the peaks and valleys of the pile, wind blew ash into his eyes and throat. It was hours before he stumbled onto a fire hydrant.

Sauer and his sons continued as volunteer firefighters.

“To me it feels like it was just the other day,” Sauer says. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it.”

The survivors

The scars lasted for decades, especially for the families of those killed, or those who were there and survived. Many would recall and marvel at the split-second decisions to evacuate an office or stay that spelled life or death for them and their colleagues.

Families struggled to make peace over losing loved ones in such a violent way.

Six months after Harley Di Nardo’s sister Marisa vanished when jets struck the Twin Towers, police knocked on the door of the Di Nardo family home carrying Marisa’s charred, black purse, found in the rubble. It was all the tangible evidence they had of her passing.

For close to 15 years, Harley said he buried his grief, then felt moved to learn more about her final moments : “I just really, really miss this person and wanted to know.”

Deborah Borza’s 20-year-old daughter Deora Bodley was the youngest on board Flight 93, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania, killing all 33 passengers and seven crew members. In the days that followed, she decided she could remain angry or make each moment count .

Borza spent 20 years championing nearly every effort to memorialize the passengers and crew members who stormed the cockpit, preventing the hijackers from reaching Washington, D.C., and their presumed target, the Capitol.

Nearly 3,000 children lost parents in the deadly attacks that day.

Family members battled over custody , how children would be raised and who would control the money paid out by insurance policies and victims’ funds.

Now adults, they talk of growing up with night terrors and the burden of constantly being seen as victims of a historic disaster. They also describe pride in their resilience and tight bonds with parents who survived.

Celia Rose Gooding was a toddler when her father, Calvin Gooding , a Cantor Fitzgerald securities trader, was killed. Her mother gave her his wedding band, which Celia takes with her everywhere.

“He has a hand in all my success,” she says.

Edward Seaman and Julia Coombs both lost their fathers and found each other. They fell in love and married years later : “It’s like our dads wanted us to be together,” Coombs says.

The U.S. responds

Sept. 11 marked a shockingly successful attack by a stateless group of Islamic militants. Within weeks, the U.S. attacked Afghanistan to root out al Qaeda terrorist bases. That response morphed into a massive military response: a War on Terror.

The war began in earnest on March 20, 2003, with comprehensive air and ground offensives as coalition troops crossed into Iraq. The initial campaign achieved its immediate objective with remarkable speed: Within three weeks, Baghdad had fallen and Saddam Hussein’s government had effectively collapsed.

But it didn’t take long for the war—and Americans’ response to it—to turn sour.

News reports were filled with lists of soldiers killed in Afghanistan or Iraq, the men and women writing the next chapter in the history of the September 2001 attacks.

Ultimately, more than 7,000 U.S. military personnel would die and more than 53,500 would be injured in those wars.

In May 2011, word came that Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader behind the 9/11 attacks, had been killed and buried at sea after a U.S. Special Forces operation in Pakistan.

Many in the nation felt catharsis, and deep respect for those who had pulled it off after nearly a decade of often-frustrated efforts.

But the U.S. wouldn’t leave Afghanistan until August 2021, about a week before the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The chaotic withdrawal turned America’s longest war into its most tragic exit.

The last U.S. troops in Iraq, serving in an advisory role, are scheduled to depart this month.

Rebuilding lower Manhattan

In the months after the attacks, many New Yorkers feared that the downtown Financial District would become a ghost town. The opposite happened.

The neighborhood’s population boomed as once-in-a-generation tax breaks gave incentive to developers to turn aging office buildings into apartments. Even as Wall Street firms moved their offices to Midtown Manhattan or New Jersey, tech companies and other firms moved in .

Companies devastated by the Sept. 11 attacks, including Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost 658 employees that day, also managed to rise from the ashes .

Many victims’ families and advocacy groups, some of whom vowed to lay down in front of bulldozers, objected to rebuilding on the site because they considered it a graveyard and hallowed ground.

One World Trade Center, the 1,776-foot office building that rose in place of the Twin Towers, cost $3.8 billion, making it the most expensive skyscraper built in the U.S. up to that point.

Few urban projects can compare with the new World Trade Center in scale or ambition. More than $20 billion in public and private money was spent creating the office, retail and transportation hub that includes the 9/11 Memorial & Museum .

When American Express broke ground in July on a new 55-story headquarters, it filled the last major development site at the new World Trade Center, a milestone after 25 years of disputes and delays over the rebuilding effort.

Health hazards linger

An estimated 400,000 New Yorkers were exposed to caustic debris and toxic pollutants, including asbestos, in the 9/11 dust cloud that hovered over lower Manhattan for months, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More than 95,000 responders are enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program. Deaths and illnesses hit New York City’s fire and police departments especially hard, with acute respiratory illnesses associated with Sept. 11 evolving into chronic conditions and cancer .

This month, New York City officials released a trove of documents detailing air-quality issues and what the city knew about the toxic conditions around Ground Zero following the attacks.

Resilience and red ink

In many ways, the U.S. economy proved surprisingly resilient when it came to the attacks.

But the long-term consequences of spending massive amounts on the subsequent “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, in addition to the creation of new federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, helped inflate the national debt.

U.S. government debt topped $40 trillion last month and the portion borrowed from the public approaches 100% of the country’s annual GDP, a level not seen since World War II.

The spending isn’t over.

The costs of caring for post-9/11 war vets will reach as much as $2.5 trillion by 2050, most of which has not yet been paid, according to an analysis by Brown University’s Cost of War project.

Polarized politics

When terrorists attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001, they provoked a response that, seen from today’s perspective, seems remarkable: The country immediately united across every political and ideological divide.

It didn’t last.

Leaders from both parties, academics and major media organizations largely supported the post-9/11 wars in their early years, but as those wars became longer and more controversial, many Americans became disillusioned with the institutions that had supported them, according to Rice University history professor Nathan Citino.

“Without those ‘forever wars,’ I don’t think Donald Trump would have had the political success that he’s had,” Citino says. “In some ways, and I think about the current war against Iran, we haven’t learned the lessons of 9/11 in terms of the limits of military power.”

Meanwhile, the USA Patriot Act, passed after the 9/11 attacks, dramatically expanded the government’s surveillance powers, and intensified the debate over civil liberties.

The next generation

More than 95 million Americans were born after the attacks. Even more were too young at the time to remember them.

New generations are coming of age with no firsthand memory of Sept. 11 or the world that existed before it. As the attacks pass from lived experience into history, the question is how that generation will understand the events of that day—and all the choices that followed.