In their words: Jon Frankel

Okay, so I guess just to start off. Where were you on 9/11, and what happened that day for you?

The morning of 9/11 I woke up in my apartment on 68th Street and Broadway, which is considered the Upper West Side, probably about four miles north of the Trade Center, and I was not planning on heading right to the office. I turned on the TV and then decided that obviously I was going to have to be going down there, so I quickly had to shave. I hadn’t prepared to be on camera that day, but I shaved and threw on a suit and started to walk towards the subway. As I was walking to the subway on 72nd and Broadway, having come across paths with a gentleman who worked for the [transit authority], I asked if the subways were still running — because at this point now two planes had hit — and he said yes. And so I ran down the steps and hopped on the train and made my way downtown. I got out down at Chambers Street and was heading down south towards the Trade Center. I was about three blocks north of the Trade Center, walking, when the first tower began to fall. And so I turned around and started to run as fast as I possibly could in a suit. And that was the beginning for me of 9/11.

So you said you went towards the scene when the planes had hit? What was it like going towards it? I mean, I'm sure that was not the normal route.

I had gotten a call from our news desk at CBS News, where I worked at the time, the national morning program, and my instructions were to just get to what we later came to call Ground Zero, but get to the site of the Trade Center and to just connect with a camera crew one way or the other. They didn't tell me who I would be working with, but I would know our people. At this time, of course, nobody really knew the mayhem that was about to unfold. And so when I first exited the subway, I recall that was the first time that you began to... you could get a hint how traumatic this had been. Because all of a sudden, you began to see breakfasts that people had been eating on their way to work. So you know, a yogurt that was just spilled, toast that was just sitting there. A single shoe I remember passing, which — clearly somebody, in their efforts to run, had lost a shoe. So you began to get a sense of the fear that people had felt when the planes had first hit. But I can't say until then that I had really had much sense of my own fear, it hadn't occurred to me at that point. Because things, again, hadn't really unfolded.

And so as I turned the corner — and I remember on the subway, I met a young man who had recognized me from TV and said that he was an aspiring broadcaster and he was interning somewhere and could he tag along, and I said sure — so we were making our way, and again, it wasn't with any great haste, it wasn't with any great fear at that point. I mean, moving with urgency but not sprinting towards it. And then when this tower — when you heard this rumble and you saw it beginning to fall, I mean, it really was a scene, and not to trivialize it, but it's one of those scenes that you would see in a film where, you know, water or dust or flames are chasing you down this alley. And that's what it was. It was the canyons of New York, and you were being chased by this debris that was so loud and just racing you up the street. And fortunately, I had enough of a head start, and you also began to take notice of people who were . . . just covered in dust and debris. And once you got about... I would say I ran for about three or four blocks north. And at that point you sort of felt like you were out of immediate harm's way.

So, after you ran when the towers collapsed, did you go back to cover the story more? I remember you mentioned [in an earlier conversation] that you were with Mayor Giuliani at some point.

You know, there was a time for a few years after where I could retrace my steps and know exactly where I was and where I had sort of settled for a minute to get my wits about me. And I even... I can't even remember whether the young man who sort of attached himself to me when we started to walk out of the subway was still with me at this point. But shortly after I stopped sprinting north on the streets of Manhattan, and sort of collected myself, it wasn't long after that I saw this pack of people walking up the streets — in the street, not on the sidewalk. And it turned out to be Mayor Giuliani. There was a pack of media around him, and so I decided even though I had yet to meet up with a cameraman, I figured I might as well start doing some reporting of some nature just to listen in on questions being asked and get any other information I could. And so I was sort of settled in at the front of this pack and ended up literally right next to the mayor, or one person removed. And at one point I asked a question that actually was used by another network or station that had caught the question.

Then after a few blocks of walking north with the mayor I then just sort of lost him — I moved on and found a phone to use. And I think the first call I made was to my dad just to say that I was okay, because that's where I had been headed before this all happened that morning, just to swing by his apartment. And then after that I called into the office. And that was the beginning of an intensive three-week period where we sort of set up shop at North Moore Street and the West Side Highway. So north of Ground Zero probably, I don't have an exact... I'm going to guess a half a mile or so, because they had set up a perimeter that the media essentially wasn't allowed in unless they were giving specific tours to people. And so every day we would settle there and we would do live shots, and report, and tell the stories that were coming out of Ground Zero from there.

There was one day, and I can't remember exactly how many days after 9/11, when we realized that the only way to get to the site — and I guess in some ways it was not only reporting but your own morbid curiosity to see it up close — was to dress up as a construction worker. Those were the only people, along with first responders, firefighters, and police officers, who were helping to, still at that point, do what they thought was rescuing some people — before it was deemed recovery. And so we wore jeans and got ourselves hard hats one day, and we managed to get right to the rubble of Ground Zero, and I remember just being in awe of this pile, which is what it became known as. You couldn't believe how massive the steel and the debris was. It was unfathomable, unfathomable on where you would even begin to clean that up.

You know, you were sorry, you were sad because it was your city. You hoped that there were probably still some people with any luck that were hanging on but you also knew the reality that there were at that point — we didn't know exact numbers — but that there were thousands of people, perhaps, buried under the debris. But I likened it to, you know... we all built blocks when we were kids, and you build them as high as you could. And then you'd kick them or knock them over just for the sake of it. It was really fun to watch them all fall. And it, you know, it created a little pile and at that age, you thought that was big. But I liken it to if you came home one day to your house and it splintered into literally 100 million pieces. And much the way that people who have lost their homes from tornadoes or hurricanes, you are sort of left scratching your head, like, "Where do I begin?" And then you just multiply this exponentially. That was the task that was lying in front of everybody.

So in the immediate aftermath covering the story, did you feel like there was a sense of unity, never before seen in the country or since? Like, was it a noticeable patriotic, we'll-get-through-this sentiment?

I think there was to some degree. I think that you could see that there was unity. Obviously, the fact that President Bush had come and stood on the pile and said, "We are one" and "We’ll avenge this," and, you know, everybody who was down in that area in southern Manhattan on the tip was certainly in it and you felt it across the city. There was an incredible warmth and bonding. I remember one night when I finally got uptown going to get dinner one night, and the firefighters from the local firehouse were going to pick themselves up dinner. And because it was still warm out, it was still September and they were dressed in shorts, blue shorts, their uniform and tops, and everybody on the sidewalk gave them a standing ovation. And it was really heartwarming. I mean, it brought you to tears. It was very emotional to see. But at the same time, and maybe because nerves were frayed, and, you know, I was tired from working very early hours and long days, I did sense that I would come back from downtown on North Moore, and I would come uptown to the Upper West Side, and because it was still so nice out, people were sitting at cafes and having dinner. And there was a different mood. It was not that they hadn't felt it. Certainly the consequences were felt citywide because almost everybody that didn't know somebody directly, they knew someone indirectly, a friend of a friend who had been lost or hadn't been heard from yet. But I did notice that there was somehow this disconnect, that you would come back and see people enjoying nice fall dinners on the sidewalk and yet, I was sort of living in this bubble of covering this story. But I realized that tends to happen often when you're in the media — you think it is the epicenter of the world in the moment.

I remember covering the election recount in 2000. Obviously 9/11 was not too much after that, and I remember — you know, I was down in Florida and in Tallahassee — every little brief, and every little question mark that went to courts, and everything that was filed. I remember talking to somebody, and their response was, “You know what, life is going on. Call me in six weeks when they know who's president.” And it made me realize that, as a member of the media, you live in this little bubble, and you're living on every little thing that happens every hour when things change, and other people do go on with their lives.

And to answer your question, there was no doubt that there was absolutely a sense of unity that carried on for a long, long time in the city. And I think because while there were other incidents — obviously, you know, the Pentagon got hit and there was the plane that went down in the Pennsylvania field — and while the whole country was attacked, clearly New Yorkers really took the brunt of it. And so I think it was felt there more than it was if you lived in New Mexico or Alaska or Wisconsin or even Maine — you know, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, that tri-state area — because so many people who died lived in New Jersey or Connecticut, as well. So yeah, there was absolutely a sense of people pulling together. Quite frankly, one I'd like to see more of today as we go through this pandemic.

So moving on from the immediate aftermath, we obviously went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. How did 9/11 play into your opinion back then, being a reporter?

Following 9/11 there were the incidents of anthrax that were being sent to different people, and in envelopes in various government agencies and such, so we spent some time covering that. But then it was clear that we were going to go to war. And as the national correspondent for the CBS Morning Show, one of the first things we had to do was, with the possibility of going to cover the wars, we had to go to a three-day camp, and I believe it was somewhere in Pennsylvania, in order to learn how to take care of ourselves and defend ourselves in a way — not so much defend as if we were going to war, but you know, how to apply gas masks, how to give CPR, how to defend yourself in hand-to-hand combat if for some reason you were to get kidnapped and had to defend yourself — sort of a survivor's survival skills camp, a step up from Outward Bound, if you will, because of the medical training and such. And then sure enough, I went to cover the war in March of 2003, and I went to Kuwait. And shortly after I spent a few days or a week in Kuwait, and then embedded with the 101st Engineers in the desert and I think it was — I'd have to check my notes — it was either Camp New York or Camp New Jersey. And I was embedded with this group of engineers. And so it was... it was interesting to watch this, you know, how this all evolved. How we went from being a very innocent, protecting country, and then the world arrived at our doorstep, in a sense, you know, we were attacked on our own land for once.

Outside of Pearl Harbor... which was obviously before my time, but for many Americans, most Americans, it was so distant since it wasn't on the mainland. And so this was — you know, to go from 9/11 and having covered those events to find myself covering the war, and, my situation was a little bit different, because in that time, in January [2003], I had met a woman who had lost her husband on 9/11. And we very quickly began to have a romantic relationship. Now she is my wife, but, you know, at the time, we were two months, three months into dating, and it wasn't lost on me that as I was walking around the desert, embedded with these troops, that I was covering the war and the guys who had taken this woman's husband — it all seemed rather odd to me.

And, you know, one of the things I was struck by covering — these were not fighting troops, as they were the 101st Engineers, but they still had to carry guns and such because one of the jobs that they had was to ferry troops — fighting troops — up to the front lines. I remember meeting kids, and they were kids. They hadn't planned on fighting a war or being in the Army; they had enlisted in order to go to college, to pay for college. And so there were kids there who were, you know, from Bronx Community College and other places. And before they knew it, they found themselves sitting in the desert of Kuwait, learning how to load a gun and do all sorts of other things that are a part of war. It was just a very strange experience to be around that, but I think most people felt pretty good about what they were doing at the time. I think a lot of people... you know, it turns out so much of that information was misleading and false, and we probably shouldn't have been there to begin with. But at the time, people felt very good about what they were doing.

Were you included in that? Just like your personal feelings about the war at the time, because I know looking back on it now, it's easy to say we probably shouldn't have been there to begin with but at the time, what were you thinking?

You know, I'll be honest with you, I never thought we should have been there. And not because I'm so wise or anything, but I'd read enough thanks to my brother, who wrote a thesis about Vietnam and the media when he was in college. There were a lot of Vietnam books sitting around the house when I was growing up when he was finishing college, and I'd read a bunch and always took a great deal of interest. So I knew about the whole domino theory that existed and the idea that in Vietnam, that if we didn't tackle communism there, that it would spread and, you know, be a domino effect, and there would be communist countries all across Southeast Asia. That didn't happen, of course, and for that reason, I guess that little bit of education, I never believed it was the right thing to go in there and turn things upside down. I didn't think there was enough evidence at the time.

And I also can recall, part of the reason... I was certainly not sympathetic to the hijackers, terrorists who did this. But I gained a new understanding because I remember sleeping in the tents when we were embedded with the troops. I had brought a New York Times Magazine, probably the last one, you know, before I'd left home, and there was an article in there that had been written by an Egyptian man who had, at one point, immigrated to the United States in the hopes of getting a job at Microsoft, and he didn't get the job. And he was really soured on not getting the job. And instead, he went back to Cairo and he enrolled at the university and he became a little bit of an extremist. And it occurred to me that for so many of these people, it's not about that they have such strong convictions, it's just that life is not so good for them. It's not everybody — there's obviously some more real idealists. But in this case, it was an interesting eye into their world that for so many people who don't have the means, and all they want to do is make a good living and make a working wage if not more, and support their families and this and that, and when things go south, and there aren't other opportunities, that they turn to... they make bad decisions. And so for that reason, I felt like our turning the world upside down wasn't a good thing.

So I do think that the younger Bush administration, and those around him — Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld, and Karl Rove — I think they were fighting, you know, a war from George Bush's father's time and looking to finish it off or something. And so I... and I'm not a hawkish guy, I don't believe necessarily in war. So I didn't feel like we should be there. But that wasn't my role.

And so what were some of the noticeable changes that you saw after 9/11, if there were any for you?

I do think that, you know, it relates back to your earlier question. I do think that people... there was a kindness and a generosity and a sweetness about people. More of an understanding. But with time that wears off, somehow we tend to forget our... the way our brains work is that we tend to forget the bad things that happen to us. And we get back to normal, you know, and you look at 2008-2009 and the recession, and people were losing homes, etc. And everybody said, “Oh, you know, we're going to do things differently.” Sure enough, when people got back on their feet, full steam ahead, we all became consumers again, and we all started buying, and the world got rich again — not everybody, obviously, lots of people didn’t. And the same questions exist today.

You know, we're all going through this [pandemic]. We're all experiencing the same thing, but we're not experiencing it in the same way. In this pandemic, people are talking about the end of the world and how much things are going to change. You know, real estate and jobs, and people go to work and school, and you wonder, “Okay, yeah, the next year and a half might be different. Will it stay different?” I don't know. Again, we tend not to remember. So after 9/11, things certainly changed, people's attitudes changed. I don't think it lasted. I think all you have to do is look at our political situation and see how divided we are. And I think that tells you that the unity that was born out of 9/11 has since faded.

And how would you compare the [COVID-19 pandemic] to 9/11 in terms of specifically the media, because that's your realm?

I think that this, again, speaks to the divisiveness. I think that back then people trusted the media, people believed in the media. I don't want to sound so Puritan and naive; there were certainly some who believed the information that was being disseminated by the government about weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein allegedly had, and there were others who didn't. But I think that today, you would find that a lot of people absolutely wouldn't believe what the media was reporting. . . . The media is finding itself in a very difficult position. And I think unfortunately, it is hurting people and costing lives because not everybody's believing what's going on. And I guess in some ways the same could be said after 9/11 and going to war because, you know, not everybody... not everybody was getting the right information then, either.

Well, I hate to backtrack, but I wanted to ask, and I never got the opportunity earlier. But when you were with Mayor Giuliani, what kind of questions were you asking? Because I remember you mentioned that one got onto another network's coverage. So what kinds of questions were you asking Mayor Giuliani at the time?

Wow, I wish I could remember what I asked him. I’m sure that — I'm guessing they were just questions about how many people, did they know how many people were in the buildings, what kind of response, how many firefighters might have been lost. At that point, I think we were probably more concerned… we tend to grab on to numbers. And that's what everybody was so focused on. Because the thought was, well, you have these two buildings that house thousands and thousands of workers, and so that fear was that the death toll was going to be very high. So I'm guessing that a lot of the questions were about that. I don't recall specifically what I asked but I'm sure also so much of it was about the logistics and, you know, would bridges and tunnels be closed, and how would people be able to get around the city, and would the city shut down, and all those sorts of things. . . . I mean we're talking about the incident being, you know, less than an hour old. So I think everything was fair game. It was fair game to ask anything at that point. But I wish I could tell you I could remember exactly what I asked but I don't.

I guess one more lingering thought is you mentioned how as a reporter you sort of are sucked into a story and other people get over things a lot quicker. And you saw how people were going back to normal when you were still covering the story day in and day out. So when did things start going back to normal for you? Was it just after the three-week period when coverage was over? Or was it further down?

It was probably not until I got back from Kuwait. I felt like the smoke had cleared for me, because I think finally... I'd have to check the exact timing, but I think it was April or May. I must have gotten back in late April. And I think that then I ended up covering a big fire that took place up in Providence, Rhode Island at a nightclub with some pyrotechnics. So I think that was sort of the first story that I covered since 9/11 that didn't relate to 9/11. Everything was 9/11, from September up until I returned from Kuwait. I even went off to Gander, up in Newfoundland, where a bunch of planes landed on 9/11 because the airlines were shut down. You know, you couldn't land in this country. So there were a bunch of planes that were in flight from Europe, and they ended up going up and landing in Gander. So even then I remember going up there to do a story, and I don't remember the exact timing of that, but everything I did was tied into 9/11 for many months after. And even though I got a break and covered other stories, when the first anniversary rolled around, we were right back in the thick of it. You know, telling the story all over again.