I was serving as Special Assistant to Acting Governor Donald T. DiFrancesco then — his traveling aide, at his side almost every day. Some days that meant Drumthwacket, the Governor’s residence. Some days it meant the Statehouse. Some days I’d start at his home in Scotch Plains instead. You didn’t know which until you knew.
That morning it was Drumthwacket. I parked and walked into the command center to find the troopers on detail that day, the way I did most mornings. One of them was racing out as I came in — his father was in one of the towers. A plane had hit, that much everyone knew. That early we thought it was small, contained, and an accident.
I walked through the side door into Drumthwacket and saw the televisions on in the troopers’ offices, and that was the moment I knew. This is not what I had in mind for today.
The Governor himself was further inside, in the parlor, with a group of Holocaust survivors the state was hosting for breakfast, deeply engaged in a room you don’t want to interrupt. But reports were coming in that the National Mall was on fire, that this wasn’t contained to one place and we had to get to State Police headquarters.
What I remember most about those first hours isn’t a fact. It’s the fear — deep and gut-level. I was twenty-six years old, and for most of that day I wouldn’t let Rae Hutton, the Governor’s press secretary, out of my sight. I needed an adult in the room, even though by then I was supposed to be one.
The reporters wanted the same thing from us. What do you know? What can you tell us? It sounded like a question about facts, but really it was a search for reassurance, for some sense that someone, somewhere, had an answer. That day was the first time in my life I understood that the adults did not always have the answers.
There was no way to check on the people I loved either. My boyfriend at the time — now my husband — and my sister were both in Washington. None of the calls were going through. The troopers and I had two-way pagers, a little texting, nothing more. No BlackBerrys, no iPhones. You sat and watched broadcast news, and that was the whole of what you knew, professionally and personally, at once.
I had friends at the Port Authority. Several were running late that morning and never made it in. I think about that luck often. Others weren’t as fortunate — New Jersey lost more than seven hundred people that day. I still remind people of this: we were closer to Manhattan than Albany was. We were on the ground before the Governor of New York even arrived. One woman on the Governor’s staff lost her brother in the towers. I went with the Governor and the troopers to his funeral. I have never once heard bagpipes since without feeling that day in my bones.
Later that day, before any of the funerals, the Governor prepared to board a Black Hawk for Liberty State Park. He turned to me first.
“Not today, Lisa. I do not know what we will see. Today, I would like you to stay here and stay safe.”
He was the one flying toward it. I was the one told to wait. Twenty-five years later, I’m still not sure which of us had the harder job.
Debbie Baker went with him — the same trooper who’d first told him a plane had hit. When she came back, she had a blank look on her face. I asked her what she saw.
“There was nobody there,” she said.
That night I drove myself home, alone on roads that should have had other cars on them and didn’t. I have never been more frightened in my life. I got home, turned the television on, and didn’t turn it off. I don’t think I slept.
The next day, we went into the city by boat — the Holland Tunnel was closed, so boat was the only way in. What I saw at the site looked like a war zone, except it wasn’t a war, and everyone there knew it. Hundreds of people moving in near silence, still searching for anyone who might be alive.
I sat in the biggest rooms and the saddest ones after that — meetings with Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki, watching men try to make decisions about a catastrophe no one had a playbook for. I remember Giuliani pushing to get government buildings back open — something close to we need to show them they can’t win — and someone telling him, gently, that the work wasn’t done. Not cleanup. Preservation. It was still a recovery site.
I watched medical students give their time to identification work with no clean edges to it. I walked past telephone poles covered in photographs — faces, names, phone numbers, taped up by people who hadn’t stopped looking yet. There was a smell in the air for weeks I have never been able to describe to anyone who wasn’t there. I will never forget any of it — the rooms, the poles, the smell, the quiet next to the loudest grief I’ve ever been near.
I can’t believe it’s been twenty-five years. Those memories are seared into me in a way almost nothing else from my life is.
That day is the reason I moved to Washington. I wanted to be part of whatever the solution turned out to be — to protect this country, the people I loved, the children I hadn’t had yet and the children they’d go on to have. That’s the call underneath everything I’ve done since.
That day didn’t just define me. It defined a nation.
I asked the Governor this week what he remembers most, twenty-five years on. Not the chaos. Not the decisions. The people who ran toward it. “Even people who weren’t working that day, who went up into those towers to help,” he told me, “and who perished because they were going up while everyone else was coming down.” Tomorrow, like most every year, he’ll be at Ground Zero for the service, standing in the quiet while they read the names.
Twenty-five years ago, he told me to stay behind. Tomorrow, he goes back.
