Television Remembers 9/11 a Decade Later

Aaron Barnhart - Kansas City Star

The 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on America will be one of the notable television events this season. And if what Linda Ellerbee discovered among America's youth is any sign, perhaps we should all pay a little closer attention to the coverage this time.

Ellerbee, in her 20th year of producing news programs for Nickelodeon, opens her latest special, "What Happened? The Story of Sept. 11, 2001," with clips of kids expounding on what they have learned about 9/11 from listening to grown-ups.

"I'm pretty sure Saddam Hussein was the one who ordered this," one girl says. Another says the hijackers were all from Japan, while a third asserts that 500 planes were hijacked.

"None of what you heard those kids saying is true," Ellerbee tells her young audience afterward. "But it's not their fault. Most of you don't remember Sept. 11, 2001."

To remedy that, she has put together a 20-minute primer on the attacks, and you could do worse than sit through it, with or without a child by your side. Ellerbee zips through the horror without scary video or music, talks to former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer about what it all meant, then closes with a montage of images from the vigils held around the country that night.

"Try to let the images you recall from Sept. 11, 2001, be these," she urges her viewers.

Rarely did television fulfill its role as "window to the world" as completely as it did on that day. Lower Manhattan was almost like an enormous soundstage, with its cloud-free backdrop and thousands of video cameras capturing the mayhem from every conceivable angle.

Reviewing the events of 9/11 through several of these new documentaries, I'm struck by how little most of us really knew about what was going on at the time. But Ellerbee is right about the power of images. In fact, all the crucial information you needed to know for the next decade was right there on the TV, in the images of those smoking buildings.

Those two huge pieces of real estate were iconic symbols of American might. They came down because a determined bunch of criminals figured out how to turn passenger planes into flying Molotov cocktails. And if they were that clever, it stood to reason, they probably were going to be hard to find.

In the years that followed, our leaders -- from both parties -- did a very poor job of grappling with those basic facts. We did not, it turns out, take a hard look at American might, but instead wielded it in popular yet ultimately costly and futile ways. We did not take the terrorists or their complaints seriously (except for some journalists, lone wolves such as Richard Clarke and the 9/11 Commission). And we let the hunt for Osama bin Laden drift quietly from the headlines.

"9/11: Day That Changed the World," airing on the Smithsonian Channel, gives us a better understanding of why things went so wrong. You have to wait for that part, though, because it comes at the end of what I think is the best you-are-there account of 9/11 that I've seen.

The film is briskly paced but thorough, covering those 102 minutes of terror in about half that time, as the directors pick judiciously from the endless trove of news footage, dashboard cam video, home movies, radio chatter and eyewitness interviews.

Of the film's talking heads, notable are Dick Cheney and Bush chief of staff Andrew Card, who explain the chaos within the executive branch; Rudy Giuliani, whose magnificence on that day has stood the test of time; and Curt Bedke, the avuncular commander of Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, who's full of funny stories about the president's brief visit there, including the white-knuckle ride aboard Soccer Mom, the base minivan, which picked him up on the tarmac. (Bush later said it was the only time all day he actually feared for his life.)

And just when you think the directors aren't going to address the elephant in the room, in comes Donald Rumsfeld, the man running the Pentagon, also hit on 9/11, mumbling about the "fog of war" and oh my goodness, how could anyone have been prepared for something like this? But security adviser Richard Clarke and CIA counter-terror chief Cofer Jones will have none of that.

"The briefings were regular ... forceful ... strident," Jones says about his pre-9/11 presentations to Rumsfeld and top brass regarding al-Qaida.

Contradicting the defense secretary's claim that counter-terrorist plans were "years" out of date, Jones replies, "We'd been working on this for years. Our plans were pretty much developed."

As the president's men were unwinding from their long day, Clarke recalls Rumsfeld saying something about going into Iraq, too. Clarke couldn't believe his ears. Seems that Rummy believed Afghanistan alone didn't present "enough targets."

President Bush is not interviewed here, but he wouldn't have added much, if "George W. Bush: The 9/11 Interview," airing tonight on Nat Geo, is any indicator. The interview feels like it was held over from 2010, when Bush was promoting his book "Decision Points." (I lost count of how many times he said, "I made the decision to ...") Stuck in the moment, the Decider seems uninterested in sharing any lessons he might have learned from that day. That's too bad, because he owes posterity a favor; it has been kinder to him than the media were.

By contrast, MSNBC's "Day of Destruction -- Decade of War" dwells little on 9/11, focusing instead on the decisions made afterward and their consequences. Specifically, the buildup of the "intelligence-industrial complex," a vast secret bureaucracy that the film argues has changed America in disturbing and often unnoticed ways.

The film combines the reporting of NBC News' chief war correspondent Richard Engel with MSNBC's most popular pundit, Rachel Maddow. A preview wasn't available at press time, but based on an interview with Maddow's producer Bill Wolff, the film will spell out the "tectonic changes" inside government "while no one was looking."

One example is the way the president wages war in the post-9/11 era.

"We don't declare war anymore," Wolff said. "(President Barack) Obama just went ahead and bombed Libya. No one debated it."

For many of those who were in the towers and Pentagon on that day, or had loved ones on the doomed flights, the past decade has been a struggle to move on, as a remarkable documentary project called "Rebirth," airing on Showtime,makes clear.

Filmmaker Jim Whitaker chose a handful of people who suffered loss in the attacks and interviewed them regularly over 10 years to see how they were dealing with their pain (or not).

The first person in the film is Ling Young, who was working in the World Trade Center near the blast, was knocked unconscious and received second- and third-degree burns but revived in time to escape. Her healing story is physical, yet as excruciating as her recovery is, in some ways it's easier than for Nick Chirls, who was a teen when his mom died in the attacks; within a year his dad had remarried.

You also see New York coming back, year after year, in Whitaker's film. For me, one lump-in-the-throat moment was seeing the opening of the temporary train station in 2003 to replace the one destroyed by the World Trade Center collapse. I remember taking the commuter train in from New Jersey and emerging from the tunnel to see ground zero below me. As the train slowly ringed the entire circumference of the crater, it left an indelible mark on me, and no doubt millions of others every year.

If documentaries aren't your thing, the series finale of FX's "Rescue Me," which will air Sept. 7, is also a worthy way to mark this sad anniversary. Created by comedian Denis Leary and his writing partner Peter Tolan in 2004, "Rescue Me" revolved around the career, family life and psychological disorders of Tommy Gavin, played by Leary, a New York City firefighter who has steadfastly refused to experience rebirth, regeneration or remorse.

The 9/11 decade was dominated by two debilitating conditions: post-traumatic stress disorder and the traumatic brain injury. Both could be traced directly to the attacks and their aftermath. Leary's character was the only one on American TV, year in and year out, who had either malady -- and he might have had both. You wondered if his tendency to make bad choices was a result not only of PTSD but also of getting hit on the noggin by too many flaming crossbeams.

Not every one of the 93 hours of "Rescue Me" has been a keeper, but fans of the show, and even onetime fans, will find the finale a satisfying conclusion to the series. They may even feel the urge to shed a tear at one or two points, though that would be most un-Gavinesque.

----

More televsion news

More Entertainment

Copyright 2012 by Kansas City Star