In their words: Daniel Creasy

Can you walk us through your day and just what you remember?

So I was working in Washington, DC at American University, and it was a normal day.

I'd gone into the office a little early because the week after I was starting my recruitment travel. So I had to go in and print out maps for driving because we didn't have smart phones and all that fun stuff. I was at the copier machine and one of my colleagues came up and said to me, “I just heard from my son that a plane hit the World Trade Center.”

So my initial reaction was, “Oh, it's probably just an accident,” because growing up in New York, I always heard that there had been a plane that hit the Empire State Building. There was always the story about that. So I went to my computer and, you know, it's such a different time. Then there wasn't the Internet where you could watch TV or anything. And I didn't see any news stories. And I knew that [a conference room in the building] had a television, so a couple of my colleagues and I went downstairs and The Today Show was on, and they were showing one of the Twin Towers with smoke. And right when I got down there, the second plane hit, and it was this moment of just shock. There were maybe 10 people in the office and in the conference room, and we were just stunned by it. So we just sat glued to the TV. And then there was the first mention of something happening in DC. They had actually said that there were reports of a fire at the National Mall.

My sister had actually just moved to DC and had just started a job the day before — because this was a Tuesday and she started the job on a Monday. She was working in a PR firm, at the Watergate Hotel (they have offices there as well). And so I wanted to call her, and when I called all the phone lines were down. You know, we didn't have texting or anything, so I tried to figure out how I could reach her. At the time, we had an instant messaging system through America Online. So I loaded up AOL instant messaging, and she was on. She hadn't heard anything yet. My officemate had the radio on NPR, and there was an announcement that had come over that there was a fire on the National Mall and that there was a bomb suspected at the Saudi Arabian Embassy, which was across the street from the Watergate. So I told my sister this and I'm like, “Have you heard anything?” And so it was just a lot of misinformation in DC at the time, and there was really no way to connect.

So there was no way to connect to our parents. And then it started to kind of trickle out that it had actually been a plane that hit the Pentagon. So I told my sister, “Go home.” And I said to her, “I'll come see you.” My sister lived in northern Virginia at the time. And so she left, went home, and I got into my car because basically everyone was leaving. . . . They told everybody to go home. And so I drove the only way I knew how to get to my sister’s apartment where she lived in a townhome in northern Virginia. There's this road in DC called the GW Parkway, and it rides right along the Potomac River. In northern Virginia, it goes right by the Pentagon. And the road wasn't closed — it was wide open. There was traffic on it. And when I looked to the right, as I was passing by the Pentagon, I saw basically the tail of the plane sticking out of the building and flames and smoke. And I didn't think you would be able to drive right by it.

So it's a little bizarre. We had known that there had been a plane that hit the Pentagon, but we didn't know what the damage was because they hadn't televised it yet or anything. So, you know, now I'm driving by it. And every time I'm in DC and I drive by that spot, I always remember that vision.

I got to my sister’s. We talked... waited until her — I don't know if it was her husband or her fiance at the time — got home, and then I headed back up to where I lived, which was in southern Maryland. . . . But we didn't get in touch with our parents for a while. It's amazing because when I think back, phones were not working. It was really, you know... you would get instant messaging, and I listened to the radio a lot that night.

For me, DC was where I was living, but New York is where I'm from. And that was hard because I knew so many people who lived in New York, worked in New York. So there was a lot of that kind of anxiety. And then just sitting glued to the television, which in retrospect is not the greatest thing to do in a tragedy.

Now [during COVID-19] is probably a good time to think about that, of walking away from a television. But it was definitely surreal. So that was that day.

So when the idea of 9/11 is brought up to you, most people initially think of the towers that day, but does the Pentagon stick out more in your brain?

You know, it's interesting. I would say that it's the Twin Towers that still stick out in my brain more simply because I'm a New Yorker and I've always... you know, growing up on [Long Island], whenever we'd go into the city, I knew the exact spot on the Long Island Expressway where I would see the Twin Towers and I got so excited to see them.

And so a continuation of the story is about a week later. . . . All the colleges had canceled travel for the period of time because most people would do their travel by flying and there wasn't a lot of flying going on. I said to my boss, "I still want to go. I need something to do. I can't sit here and just watch all of this stuff." And he said, "If you don't mind, you can drive." And I didn't like to fly anyway. So that Monday of the week after 9/11, I started driving from where I lived in DC all the way up to my first stop which was going to be in New Hampshire.

And as I'm doing the drive, I drove by New York City, and it was still smoking. That was my first image of the towers no longer being there and there were just these plumes of smoke coming out. That, to me, is the image that will always sit with me about 9/11. Not so much the Pentagon that I saw the day of it but, you know, almost a week later driving by and seeing that.

[The conversation then shifted to Mr. Creasy’s] memories from the time after 9/11.

And then the other thing that I always remember is the next day. My first high school visit was a school in New Hampshire called Bishop Garrett High School. I go in and I meet with the counselor and the counselor says to me, “Oh, you've got a good group of students here.” We always get a bunch of applicants from them. “And they're really excited because this is our first day back at school. But I want to let you know that one of the students in your session lost her father.” And I didn't make the connection right away that she had lost her father on 9/11. I just thought she had just recently lost her father and I thought it was strange that the counselor would say it. And she's like, “Yeah, he was one of the pilots.”

And that just stunned me. I said, “Wait, what?” So in my info session was the daughter of one of the pilots who had crashed into the Trade Center, and she said she had lost her father. Weeks later, I got a letter from her at American that thanked me. She was basically telling me, “I'm no longer interested in American University. I'm going to go to a smaller school. But I want to thank you, because you were the first admissions representative to come back and visit.” And it was the first moment where I felt like some normalcy was returning back to life. I still have that. I put it away and stored it in my files because it was one of those amazing, weird, strange moments that... you know, I didn't feel like I could do anything to help the families of the victims or anything. But then all I did was just go back to doing my job. And I helped, you know, a young woman for maybe 20 minutes think about something different.

When do you think you sort of went back to normal? How did it happen?

I mean, for me, I wanted to force myself to try to get back to some normalcy. And it was really that week on the road — so that second week.

But when I really felt like things got back to normal in terms of living in DC... I could say it's probably not for maybe six or seven months because that December, there was an anthrax scare in DC, and it was at the post office that the mail for American University went to. This was a time when most students were still applying to colleges through paper applications, and so we lost our paper applications to an anthrax scare and we had to wear gloves when we touched applications. . . . So almost maybe the summer afterwards was when we had finished the class and enrolled them.

And I'd always feel like that year was the class of terrorism in many ways — like these were that the college applicants of 9/11. And so I always thought of it that way. So maybe in the summer was when things maybe settled down a little bit. But living in DC always felt a little bit strange afterwards.

When did you feel like there was like a shift between thinking about the victims of 9/11 and then sort of focusing on the government response to terrorism globally? When do you think you made the switch in your head between thinking about those two different things?

That's a great question. I think for me there was a moment, obviously the immediate moment, and I was lucky I did not directly know [anyone] who passed on 9/11... I knew people who knew people, but I didn't lose anyone directly. But it might have been a few days.

And honestly, we went to terrorism right away, so that thought of terrorism and how the government was going to respond to it and that we had been attacked — you know, I lived at a time where we'd never been attacked. Pearl Harbor was my grandfather's generation. So now we have been attacked and we've been attacked hard. And so initial thoughts were all about terrorism.

There was a moment where, for me, the victims really became part of the story. And that was when I had spoken to a friend of mine who I grew up with, and she was still living on [Long Island]. She told me, and this may be like two weeks after it had happened, that there were tow trucks at the train station towing away cars because those were the cars of the victims. You know, people had taken the train into the city that day and they never came back to return to pick up their cars. And it was kind of like a heart wrenching to think about how many cars it was.

Then there was another moment where I was speaking to a friend and we were watching — maybe CNN had done it — that weekend they did like a retrospective of all the news. And somebody had said on the news, “All the hospitals were waiting for the victims.” And they had, you know, they’d ordered all of these body bags and everything. And they never came. The bodies never came. And my friend who is sitting watching the news said, she’s like, “Where were the bodies?” And then there was a picture on the screen of a person walking with all the ash and soot on them. The other person who was sitting there said, “The bodies are on those people,” like the bodies are ash. And that was — that made me cry. That was the first time you saw the real... because you didn't think about it. You know, the ash to you was the buildings. It wasn't the buildings and the people. And I remember there's one other moment I remember. A few weeks afterwards, I finally looked at the newspaper from the day after, and The New York Times had published some heart-wrenching photos. There's one where you actually see a man who jumped from the building. And it was just that was another moment where you like, wow, these are people. It wasn't just something on the news.

I don't know. I can't think of an actual moment, but I think it was a mix of everything. And I think... you know, nowadays we see it as a terrorist attack. I think that that's the way history writes about it. But I can remember everything at the moments that it happened, in that week of news, was just about the missing people. Bush would get on the news or Giuliani would be in the city and they would be talking about, you know, we're going to recover. But those first few days were so much focused on missing people.

I remember that the pictures throughout New York, people just holding up flyers of their family members. You know, they knew they were dead. They just knew. But they just didn't want to believe it.

So you're very involved in people our age and are around a lot of younger people as part of your work. How did you see young people react? Did you think it changed their ideas of colleges, professions, lifestyle, and just in general?

You know, it's interesting. I'm trying to remember back. I've always had a lot of students who worked for me when I worked at colleges, so I always tried to keep [up with what was important to] them. And I don't think these, you know, the students who were in college at the time, that it really changed their perspective that much about the world they lived in right away.

I can honestly tell you there were other moments that had occurred that made them more fearful of the world they lived in. I remember when Columbine happened — the first real mass shooting that impacted them. About a year after 9/11, there were DC sniper shootings. There were over 20 people who were killed by a sniper. [He and his accomplice were eventually caught.] That made everyone really scared. And so I think it was more of a gradual change where I began to realize that students saw the world differently than they had originally seen it.

I also was young at the time — I had graduated college just a few years or so earlier. You know, when you're younger, you feel invincible. But I feel like that dread, I didn't grow up with that much. We didn't have massive tragedies when I was growing up. I could see that in the later generations. And then your generation was born after 9/11. You've lived in a world where you've always been at war. There's always been terrorism. You know, there's always been school shootings. There's always... I mean, there's never been a global pandemic. So you can cross that one off your list now.

But you guys have lived in a world where there is optimism. And I think that's what's changed a bit, society became more pessimistic a little bit. And I can see that in the younger generation, but not right away. It took a little while. But the reverse of that and I think your generation is going to be proof of that as much as you've inherited a dangerous and scary world. You also walk into this world very optimistic that you can change it. You can change the environment. You can change. You know, you guys all saw it all last year with Marjory Stoneman Douglas that you could change gun violence. You guys are optimistic that you can make changes, which I don't think the generations who came before you — which is really the post-9/11 generation, the first ones who kind of grew up in it... The millennials weren't as optimistic that they can make change.

Do you think of millennials as a mindset or an age group?

That's a good question. Well, you know, what's interesting is if you look at the study of generations, there always used to be definitive breaks at generations, like monumental times. And they used to take a long period of time — like 20 years since, you know, Generation X, which then, you got the millennials, and then you've got Generation Z, you guys, your generation. See, generation changes are so much quicker [today] because of technology and because of social media. I think the millennial generation... when we say millennials I lean more towards it's a kind of a mindset, in the sense that it's just the way they think about the world. Millennials are the "me" generation. They put themselves first and foremost because they don't anticipate anyone else doing that.

You know, all the previous generations before them inherited a world that was better than their parents' was. [They] always felt like their parents had helped them through things and respected their elders. The millennials inherited a world worse off, and therefore they were like, "You know what? I'm only going live for myself." So I think . . . your generation comes in right on the heels on that. You definitely have some of the similarities, but you also have a real approach to caring about the world and society because you realize you have to fix it. Because we've screwed it up so much for you... You guys are optimistic.