In their words: Charles Gassenheimer

What were your initial reactions to the attacks? What did you see and what did you think at the time?

You know, it was interesting. I worked at a firm that was not downtown in the Financial District; we were on 23rd St, which is the Flatiron District. We had our morning meeting, which was ostensibly a normal day of work, and someone came into the meeting and said, "Something’s happened downtown." And so we all came out on the trading floor which had all the TV screens. We had CNBC on and everybody was looking at the screens. At that time, when it first happened, everybody thought that someone had just flown a small plane into one of the towers and that it was an accident. I don’t think anyone understood the scope of it because that was, of course, the first crash; I can’t remember if it was the North or South but one of the towers got hit. At that time, everybody thought that it was an accident and it was just a small plane. It wasn’t until the second tower got hit, and you actually saw the plane because a lot of the cameras were now trained on the World Trade Center (because there was something that was happening), and you watch — you know a 767 is not a small airplane, right? This is a very large plane, and you saw it fly directly into the tower. And I guess the first thing everybody sort of felt was fear. I mean, it was quite shocking.

And as the updates came through, and what felt like an entire day was no more than 50 minutes, you had in succession the Pentagon and then you had the plane crash in Pennsylvania, and you knew that there were other targets. And then that was just — obviously everybody was extremely fearful because you don’t know what the next target was. Anything could be a target then, and clearly, looking through the rear-view mirror, their targets were pretty obvious, but you just didn’t know. I think it’s that fear of the unknown that always sort of really gets you. So that was an interesting hour. We had employees downtown, not in the towers, but I had a brother who was living downtown with both his kids in daycare at the South Tower — the daycare facility. You go through the usual checklist from, “Holy shit,” to, you know, fearing for life and family, to what does this mean for the world as we know it and how will this change the world as we know it. So I think it was those kinds of emotions that were running through the trading floor at that time.

So did you watch the second plane hit on television?

Yeah. My wife at the time worked . . . in the midtown office [of her firm] and she actually saw the plane come down the Hudson, the second plane, from her building. And obviously we also saw it hit, and it was at that point you knew it was absolutely obvious and clear that this was a terrorist attack and they were coming for us.

So in the brief description you wrote down for [our teacher] you used the word “carnage” to describe the aftermath. Would you mind elaborating on that a little bit?

So it was interesting. We went out. Obviously, the markets were closed because a lot of the financial district was hit, and when the towers succumbed and came down that whole downtown area was a disaster area. So we left that day and they literally closed New York City, the bridges and the tunnels. So, if you were there you couldn’t get out and if you were out you couldn’t get in. I ended up bringing a number of my work colleagues to my apartment because they had nowhere else to go; they lived outside the city. Just thinking about all the different ramifications of what happened, including all of the firefighters that ran into the buildings when everyone else was running out... and you know 300-400 people lost their lives trying to save us, and so there were just a lot of emotions going on.

In the days that followed, my focus was trying to get the stock market reopened. I worked on the convertible bonds desk, which was part of the equities trading floor. And because I was one of the employees that lived in the city, I agreed to go in every day versus folks who would have to come in from New Jersey or Westchester. It was kind of eerie getting up in the morning; the streets were empty and going into work it was maybe five or six people on a trading floor that usually has 1000 people at a given moment, and so you’re sort of looking at that trying to get the market open. It happened on a Tuesday, if I remember correctly, and each day following they couldn’t get the market open. And then Friday, they said we’re going to open on Monday, and so that was when things were going to get back to normal. And you knew on Monday that when the markets opened you were going to have just a tremendous loss of economic wealth.

You know I think it’s an interesting time to be doing this interview because in your experience you’ve probably just seen the market go up. I’ve been through four really devastating economic cycles in my career. You know ’08-’09, you guys are probably younger, but I’m sure you remember there was a crisis. I’m not sure how much you were in tune to what was going on but really since ’09 the market has gone in one direction, just straight up, and for it to lose 25% of its value is not insignificant. And you know what’s happening now [with COVID-19] is substantially worse than what happened on 9/11. Obviously the transportation sector got destroyed and some other sectors but I think there was a resilience to the recovery effort that really focused on getting back to work, getting back to business, and not letting the terrorists win.

This time around . . . we cannot see the enemy. We don’t know what it is, and it’s just much more fearful because a lot of the people are asymptomatic and you know, generally capital markets like certainty and they put a very high multiple — meaning they give a very high value in the future — to certainty, and they hate uncertainty. So what’s going on right now, as you can probably see when you turn on the news during the workweek, is just a tremendous amount of doubt and uncertainty being played out in the capital market so it’s just a very scary time.

You mentioned resilience after 9/11 with people trying to get back to their daily lives. When did you start to feel like everything was returning to normal after the attacks?

Really Monday when they reopened the markets, again it’s just — I’m going to use analogies to where we are today because it’s appropriate. The New York Yankees were headed to the playoffs that year. [The playoffs were postponed for 6 days after 9/11, returning on Monday, September 17.] Watching the Yankees game, everything sort of felt right. To see baseball, to see sports, was a real healer at that time, and I suspect that when we watch our first baseball game after this, and it may not be in May, and it may not be in June — I don’t know when it will be, but the idea that we will see baseball this summer — I believe we will, I’m sure that this too shall pass — that will be a healing moment.

You know, the markets obviously recovered pretty quickly after 9/11, and I don’t know that that will be the same analogy. It may take one or two years for this to play out. As they say there’s a 25% drop in a week, which is a very devastating impact and what started as a crisis of fear is now turning into an economic crisis. 9/11 was just a crisis of fear. It never became an economic crisis. That helped I think as well, to answer your question, with the recovery effort after the fact. You know normalcy was that the market started to function and everybody was sort of able to comprehend and evaluate it in a real way, and so I think at least that gives you some sense of an answer to your question of how it feels to be normal in a society. People obviously started getting on airplanes and traveling. I think I had to do my first business trip a couple weeks after 9/11. I was not fearful about getting on an airplane. I was fine, you know, and I think everyone was normal and everybody had stories to tell and everybody had people who they’d lost. We had a lot of clients, some that we spoke to every day, that worked in the towers and died. You know, part of the grieving process and moving on is to remember them and remember that we need to get on and move forward. That’s an important part of being alive as well.

So how long did it take for the markets to rebound after 9/11?

It depended on the sectors. Obviously the defense sector pretty much went up right away. I think most people were anticipating it. George W. Bush, the president at that time, was sort of giving a prelude to the fact that we were going to war and we saw a lot of aerospace and defense stocks start rallying. The transportation sector probably took about three to six months to fully recover but the stocks really did OK as a whole, you know? After that first week, things started to normalize. I think with a news or economic event — equities, of course, are a forward-looking mechanism, not a backward-looking mechanism like the credit or bond markets, so when you’re looking forward they are predicting the outcomes, so I think there was some rotation out of the transportation and growth stocks into some of the aerospace and defense stocks. I remember that very clearly but overall I would say within three or four months things were very much back to normal.

So you mentioned the aerospace and defense stocks going up because of President Bush immediately alluding to the fact that we were going to war. What did you think of the foreign policy response to 9/11 and our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan?

You know it’s interesting. I was a Republican during the Reagan and Bush era, and then I voted for Clinton — I was a Clinton Democrat. My views are pretty centrist, like most Wall Street people. I think we are mainly... I call ourselves Mike Bloomberg Democrats; we are socially pretty liberal and economically pretty conservative. And I think that Bush made everybody feel good, and he did a good job really making everybody feel safe, and I think that was probably his biggest strength. There has been a lot written about Dick Cheney’s, the vice president’s, role and what they decided to do based on what turned out to be false evidence with Iraq. And at the time we didn’t know, and I think the trust in government was much higher than it is today.

That’s the one thing that when all is said and done about Trump — whether he gets reelected or not, clearly we’ll see (I hope not but that’s a different story) — I think that people’s confidence in government today has been drastically eroded, and that’s the one thing you can’t really account for. You don’t know how important that is; it’s one of those intangibles. I think people’s confidence in government back in the early 2000s time frame was very high and I think Bush did a good job of making everybody feel safe. [There were questions at the time of Bush’s motives for going into Iraq, but mostly we looked at it as striking back at and conquering fear.] I’m not suggesting that it was a good thing, I’m just giving you the answer to your specific question which is people needed and wanted to feel safe. I think his approval ratings at that time were really high. . . . Clearly his second-term his approval ratings plummeted because he really didn’t handle the ongoing war in Iraq very well, but at the time answering your specific question I think people needed to feel safer.

So with this sense of fear and confidence in government did you see a great unification in the country initially after the attacks?

Yes I did. I think the sales of American flags went up like 100%. I think there was a lot of patriotism. I’ll give you a story; perhaps you don’t recall, but there was an interesting story for you. There was an NFL player named Pat Tillman — you can Google him if you don’t know the whole story — but he was a really successful NFL player. He left the NFL to join the military and you saw a lot more military enlistments, you know really hundreds of percent at that time.

After 9/11, a lot of kids your age decided to go take that path because America was attacked and that was the first time that ever really happened. Usually we’re helping others and we’re a defensive force and here we are attacked on our own homeland. So, it was a big event and you saw a lot of nationalism, a lot of patriotism, a lot of military recruitment and enlistment. It was a very interesting time from that perspective, you know very different from today, very different from other times. I think some of the negativity around what we did in Iraq came over time but not at that time. I think the difficulties of the war, the casualties, the damage, and all of that which comes with any war came over time and a lot of the questions got asked over time and obviously that became a major problem and a major expense. Our national debt went up by trillions and trillions of dollars.

How did 9/11 impact your job or did it? Have you noticed any lasting impacts on the financial markets from 9/11 specifically?

There really wasn’t. I think, in New York City — to answer your question in my job, no, there was no long-term impact. This was a crisis of fear, it was not an economic crisis. I think there’s an 180-degree difference from today. This is a crisis of fear that has now drastically become an economic crisis. I think this will impact a lot of jobs with a lot of problems. This is more, in a lot of ways, like ’08-’09 in that this is a full-on economic crisis. 9/11 was not; it was just a crisis of fear, and if anything the markets were fairly robust. I remember that the next big event after 9/11 that hit the U.S. was a major blackout in 2003 or 2004 where the entire Northeast got blacked out for 24 hours. That was a pretty big deal, but again we didn’t see anything really drastic to affect the economy. The seeds of recovery were sown by the Clinton administration and you saw the late ’90s was a real economic recovery, from the early ’90s, which was our last major recession, up until the time Bush came in. And again, similar to Trump, I think Clinton had laid the seeds for a tremendous economic recovery and I think Bush got the tailwinds of that and I think Trump is getting the tailwinds of that as well with Obama. So I think the economy was largely still pretty robust.

I think in the New York City economy, obviously real estate got hit pretty hard for a period of time, but then we recovered and the insurance money that came in after 9/11 similar to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 in Miami. (That was perhaps before your guys’ time or memory but I had just graduated high school in ’91 from Ransom and so all of the boxes for college were packed in my house in ’92, and they ended up being sucked out of our house and ended up at the bottom of the swimming pool. So that was pretty memorable; 60 or 70,000 homes were destroyed.). So I think anytime you have that kind of destruction you see a lot of dollars come in. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Memorial or the Oculus, which is the new transit hub, or the Brookfield. There’s been $10-15 billion put into downtown and it’s really pretty remarkable.

Yeah we took a trip at the beginning of the semester. This is a semester class on the roots and legacies of 9/11 and in the first weekend we took our whole class to New York and we spent a lot of time around One World Trade Center, the Memorial, and the Oculus. So we saw firsthand how massive the recovery effort was.

Yeah the Oculus is $4 billion. Only one building was built as opposed to the two towers. You saw One World Trade Center, and perhaps you went up into the observatory... there was a huge lawsuit over it. Was it a one casualty event or two? Silverstein was the leaseholder who had literally just signed a lease for the two World Trade Centers from the New York Port Authority — the Port Authority owns the land, and he had signed a lease literally to lease those buildings for 99 years like six months before 9/11 so pretty ironic timing. So he was responsible for the rebuild efforts.

It’s important to understand that things happen in life and that you have to focus on how you stay calm and focus on fixing, improving, and moving forward with the economic redevelopment of downtown. And now if you guys were graduating college instead of high school and you’d be moving to New York City you’d want to live downtown, that’s where all the young people are now. So it’s really come full circle in terms of now being very hip and very cool. Obviously TriBeCa is a hot area, and the financial district — they now have a term for it called FiDi, which didn’t exist when I was younger — and it’s all just part of the cycle.

Is there a detail from that day that you remember the most that sticks out to you still?

You know it’s interesting. There are memories from the day and the week and trying to get the stock market reopened, but I guess on that day I remember leaving Credit Suisse, walking out of the building with one of the traders, and the only thing I thought to myself was... Look I understand there’s people in the buildings [who had lost their lives, including a close friend of mine from college who happened to be at the Windows of the World at the top of the North Tower]. But I think on that day the one thing I felt remorseful for was all the firefighters who ran in and tried to save all the folks, and you know 300-400 people lost their lives trying to save people like me, mainly financial people, and I think that there was a lot of remorse for that.

I think we have only one or two more questions if you have time. What change in daily life in America sticks out to you the most since 9/11?

Look obviously I’m going to answer that question from a business perspective because that’s my vantage point, but I think the most significant change that happened since 9/11 was the TSA. I mean I don’t know exactly when you all were born, but I imagine that you’ve probably never been to an airport where you didn’t have to go through the TSA process.

‘01 and ‘02.

Yeah 9/11 babies. You know, it’s interesting, I think the TSA is the most significant change to America. I think that by now everybody has become accustomed to the level of screening that we have to go through to get on an airplane, but literally you would just walk off the curb, walk into the airport, and five minutes later you’d be boarding your plane. And you know, I am Jewish and I had been to Israel and watched the security [with] Israel and El Al, which was extensive anytime you had to go on an El Al plane because they have always been under attack since they were formed as a state. So you know, I think the idea that America had to wake up to a new day where our lives were going to be inconvenienced from a travel perspective and [accept] that the regulation and security was only going to move in one direction, right? That was never going to be repealed, they were never going to roll that back. So I think that’s a real change. . . .

How has 9/11 shaped your views on the world? It’s a broad question.

Well how much time do you guys have? Look, I think we live in a world that’s global and connected, and I have two kids that are around your age so I see the importance of how you all think differently, and I think it’s critical. I think that we have always as a society have always believed in abundance, and especially in America, and you know, forget efficiency and forget conservatism, and the whole idea of recycling. Environmentalism has always been important to me. In the last three years I’ve become vegan and plant-based and I think it’s very important for the world. I think one of the things we’re experiencing with coronavirus and all these other viruses is that they all started with is animals and they all started with us eating animals. To answer this question specifically, I think I see hope in your generation that you understand that we only have one planet and there’s no other planet. I like to say that there’s no Planet B, and I’d like to think that you all can carry that torch. I think we’ve done a bad job, however, baby boomers, in sort of acknowledging that and doing what we need to do for the climate and for the world.

So I think the world is global and connected and I think Trump's foreign-policy is just wrong, and the idea that you can be an isolated nation in today’s world is impossible. I think coronavirus has proven that — as he says, the “China virus”... well viruses don’t have a passport. It doesn’t have a nationality. We are all humans who live on this planet and if we don’t get the sense that we’re all in it together real quick this is going to kill us. . . . We’re doing our part by isolating, but you just don’t know and so I think to answer your question, I think that it’s important to understand that we’re in a world that’s global and connected, and I see that changing over time.

I see the importance of what it means to the religious. Religion was a really important part of the world during the 20th century. I see religion becoming less and less important and less and less people of your generation may practice religion, or it has become less important to you all as a part of society, and I think that you are seeing some different trends. I think you’re seeing some different days. Greta Thunberg is an example. 20 years ago she would’ve been a weirdo and a person that no one would’ve paid attention to. . . . So I’m trying to give you some perspective of looking at life through a different lens and I think that’s important. I think change is important because it’s the only constant in life and I think you’re going to say change comes out of this as well so anyway that hopefully that gives you a personal perspective.