The Free Press

The billionaire strolled into the three-star restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side wearing a wrinkled tan suit and loafers in desperate need of a shine. That was the first clue that Michael Moritz, 72, wasn’t your typical Silicon Valley rich guy. It wouldn’t be the last.

Of late, Moritz—the former chairman of Sequoia Capital, who is worth an estimated $7.6 billion—has been using some of that wealth to help revive San Francisco, the city he calls home. Last month, he announced a competition offering up to $50 million to as many as three organizations that have ideas to make the city better. But before we get to his noblesse oblige, an explanation of what came first—well, besides the fact that, after ordering tea (for him) and cabernet (for me), we both recalled the time I interviewed him early in his venture capital career for a story about Steve Jobs.

Moritz had also once been a journalist, a correspondent for Time magazine before joining the venture ranks in 1986, investing in companies such as Google, PayPal, and YouTube. You make bets like that, you get rich. And if you use some of that money on philanthropy and “promoting Britain’s economic interests,” you can get a knighthood, which Moritz achieved in 2013.

Anyway, Moritz was in town to promote his new book, Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile, which—clue No. 2—contains not a single word about technology, artificial intelligence, or how to become a successful venture capitalist. It is instead about the murder of his grandparents, and many of his other relatives, in the Nazi death camps, and the effect that had on his father especially, who, along with his brother, made it safely to England in his teens. It’s also a beautiful piece of writing. Clue No. 3.

There are tall buildings that can be seen fully only from a distance. That was certainly true for the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, before they were destroyed by Islamist terrorists who murdered almost 3,000 innocent Americans 25 years ago today. The same might be said for historical events. But at a distance of a quarter century, how clearly do we see the cataclysmic assault of September 11, 2001? In some ways, the view is darker, murkier, and more uncertain than ever.

It is clear that the unity that Americans experienced immediately after the attacks has dissipated almost completely. We are now furiously divided over basic questions of national identity and purpose. And astonishingly, we’re even divided over who is to blame for the attacks.

Leading figures shaping the views of millions, and especially young people, have distorted the history and meaning of 9/11, making it more difficult to fully and collectively honor the dead, the sacrifice of first responders, and the courage of those willing to fight and die for our country. To take two examples who have been in the spotlight lately, that includes Hasan Piker, who once declared that “America deserved 9/11,” and has become the darling of the Democratic left, livestreaming to his fans with a framed image of the burning towers in the background. And it includes Tucker Carlson, who recycles the libelous conspiracy theories he once denounced, promulgated in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 by Hezbollah, suggesting that Israeli and American Jews were in on the plot.

When I think about the attacks on September 11, 2001, the memory I return to most often isn’t what happened that Tuesday. It’s what happened the Sunday before: I was a college student and had requisitioned the television in my apartment because HBO was premiering a new series, Band of Brothers. The 10-part show, which aired between September and November 2001, follows a regiment of the 101st Airborne Division during World War II and is based on the journals, letters, and interviews of those soldiers.

As a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps midshipman, headed into the Marines, I believed my entire future would be spent as part of a band of brothers. That night, as I settled onto the sofa, that iconic title sequence started: sepia-toned paratroopers falling across the sky en route to liberating Europe, the swelling strings of the nostalgic soundtrack. There wasn’t a hint of cynicism in the series. Or of equivocation about America’s role in the world.

As the United States’ sensibilities about war—and warriors—have changed over the past two decades, I have often thought of Band of Brothers. It’s a good barometer of where the country was before 9/11 and of the emotional distance we have traveled since. Today, the United States is different: It is skeptical of its role in the world, and more clear-eyed about the costs of war—despite having an all-volunteer military that insulates most citizens from those costs. Our appetite to export our ideals abroad is also diminished. Scandals from Abu Ghraib to Edward Snowden’s leaks and the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan, have left this country’s democratic evangelists in disarray. A United States in which Band of Brothers has near-universal appeal is a very distant memory.

It’s Friday, September 11. Today, we’re bringing you a different Front Page. It’s dedicated to one thing: the attack on America 25 years ago, what it meant then, and what it means now.

September 11 was an epochal break, the violent punctuation mark with which one era ended and another began. We have stories on how it changed the world, the war on terror that followed, its contested legacy today, and more. We have the insights of our columnists, like Niall Ferguson and Douglas Murray, as well as the perspectives of those who served on the front lines in the War on Terror, like David Petraeus and H.R. McMaster. But 9/11 was, first and foremost, an atrocity in which wicked men murdered thousands of Americans. And so we begin with the day itself.

On September 11, 2001, Kristina Jones was three months into her job as an attending psychiatrist at St. Vincent’s, the closest hospital to the World Trade Center. She worked 13 hours that harrowing day. The next day she wrote for seven hours, trying to record what she had seen before it evaporated from her mind. Then she put away her recollections, confiding in only a few close friends about them, because her experiences felt small compared with people who had lost lives, family members, or friends.

Twenty-five years later, Dr. Jones decided that she wanted to share what she wrote about St. Vincent’s. Her words are a time capsule of September 11, and a remembrance of those whose lives were lost.

Dr. Jones was one of millions of Americans caught up in the attacks. We gathered 10 first-person testimonies from the day the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon was hit, including a photojournalist who ran toward the World Trade Center when almost everyone else was running away, and got the shot that changed her life; a woman who was a toddler in the Pentagon day care when the plane hit and is now a U.S. Air Force captain; a firefighter who came from Maryland to help with the search and rescue; and memories from The Free Press’s Joe Nocera and Will Rahn, who were in New York City that day.

The morning after the towers fell, Nicholas Clairmont recalls, his mother bought an issue of all four major New York City newspapers—and saved them. Two decades later, Nick read them for the first time, and now he reads them again every September 11. What do they tell us about the day the world changed? Read Nick on the first rough draft of 9/11 history.

Frank Siller was waiting for his firefighter brother, Stephen, to show up for golf on September 11, 2001. He never did. Frank sits down with Coleman Hughes to discuss how he channeled his unimaginable grief into a cause that has changed thousands of lives.

Twenty-five years ago, Americans watching monuments to the country’s security and prosperity wondered: Where will the next attacks occur? Answering that question has been the job of the U.S.’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies ever since. And the country has succeeded in preventing another major jihadist attack after September 11, write William Barr and Michael Mukasey, two former U.S. attorneys general. But, they warn, 25 years later, we’re starting to forget the vital importance of a post-9/11 surveillance law to “detecting and disrupting a new generation of terror plots.”

In response to the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush launched the War on Terror and the era-defining invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In our pages today, General David Petraeus recalls a pivotal moment in that war: the surge. Read his inside story of how Bush navigated one of the most consequential moments of the post-9/11 era—and why he views Bush choosing to double down in Iraq as “one of the most courageous presidential decisions of the 21st century.”

Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster was on the phone with the Pentagon when the building was struck on September 11. He joins Aaron MacLean to discuss the wars that followed, including the rise of ISIS, and why McMaster thinks the latest Iran ceasefire was “a big mistake.”

For some, 9/11 was a sign of the fall of the American empire. Twenty-five years ago, Niall Ferguson was one of the people predicting the decline of American power. He looks back on those forecasts and admits: I was wrong.

Today, not just the legacy of 9/11 but the basic facts of what happened on that day are contested in a way that would have been unimaginable to an America that unified immediately after the attack. Revisit Douglas Murray’s recent essay on why the lies about that day must be resisted.

And, reprinted from the archives, Matt Labash’s report from Ground Zero in the aftermath of the attacks.

There are only a handful of moments in American life that split time into before and after—where you were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, when the Challenger exploded, when the Twin Towers fell. September 11, 2001, was one of those moments. To mark the 25th anniversary, we asked a range of people who were at Ground Zero, at the Pentagon, or hundreds of miles away that day to tell us about what they experienced and how they think Americans should remember it today. —The Editors

Jennifer Altman, a New York photojournalist, was driving to an assignment in Brooklyn.

On September 11, 2001, I was driving down FDR Drive to an assignment in Brooklyn when I looked up and saw the North Tower of the World Trade Center in flames. I pulled over and started shooting pictures until a police officer told me to get off the road. I parked near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge and ran toward the towers, calling my photo editor from Newsday to tell him I was going there instead of my original assignment. Thousands of people were coming toward me; I was the only one running in the opposite direction. As I was running, the second plane flew over my head. I remember how loud it was and how close it felt. I ended up at Church and Fulton Streets, where the survivors were being helped.

I felt like all of my skills and photojournalism assignments had led me to be there at that exact moment. I followed my intuition. I always trust that part of myself. I know it will always lead me the right way.

Hello, and welcome back. What day could be more appropriate for TGIF than September 11? TGIF on September 11 reminds me of me, every year, trying to celebrate my birthday on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. April 20, baby! A terrible and ruthless commander was born that day, and also Adolf Hitler. Someone’s always doing something terrible in honor of him, and I’m just trying to have a tiramisu. (Look out for a package of amazing Free Press stories on the 9/11 anniversary in a special edition of The Front Page later this morning.)

Quickly, before we get to the news: If you haven’t heard, we are hosting another supper club. Sign up here. And my Bar is doing an event with author and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore on October 1. Get your tickets here.

→ Writing resignation letters from AI companies is the chic new thing: One young man, Jacob Coxon, left OpenAI and joined Anthropic and then resigned four months later—“I resigned from Anthropic today,” he writes—before describing the danger in developing artificial intelligence and asking people to please stop. “If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because ‘it’s happening anyway’—or take this moment to call for different conditions?”

Coxon’s post went super viral. Even Elon Musk was shocked by the virality: “I don’t think this has ever happened for a post from a new account with almost no prior activity.” Jacob’s argument is that everyone building AI knows that it could kill us, so Americans have to stop building AI and, I guess, hope that China and other countries just voluntarily stop too? Or that everyone in the world pinky promises to not do anything weird? Evan Hubinger, the Anthropic lead in charge of “alignment,” which means making sure AI doesn’t decide to kill us, actually agreed with our Jacob on the stakes: “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.” I agree too! Can someone tell us what to do about it? Jacob? Evan? Read this report on “misuse” to understand what Anthropic is combating, and what Iran and the others will use AI for as soon as they can (okay, fine, partly they used it just to plan the Supreme Leader’s funeral, which is a great time to bring in Claude).

Like all arms races, everyone has to agree to stop doing the race for it to work. That is not what’s happening. But smart young Americans have been told for a generation that we are the worst people on Earth (aside from Israelis) and should cede power to any other more ethical nation (CHY-NA, Pakistan, anywhere is better than Mom’s house). So we do have a wide swath of intelligent people ready and willing to be subjugated. They want us to put all our tools down and sing “Kumbaya” until all the peoples of Earth sing together, hand in hand, or until a better leader (Kim Jong Un?) comes to guide us. Building the thing that we need to win feels a little icky. For context, this is Jacob’s profile pic:

What sweet, gentle Jacob (the best camp counselor in all of Maine) can’t imagine is that genuinely malevolent nations sit outside our gates, some hoping to kill our society and subjugate us to their interests. I don’t mean to offend you, Jacob, I just think we’ll also need to have AI tools given this human reality. Please don’t cry, Jacob. Oh god, guys, we’ve made him cry. He’s wearing his backpack on the front now.

Frank Siller was 8 years old when he received envelopes for his first communion. They contained $26—all in dollar bills—more money than he’d ever held in his life. His parents made him give half of it away to a family in need. He still remembers exactly how it felt to hand it over, and he has no memory of what he did with the rest.

That’s the kind of fam…

Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster was on the phone with the Pentagon when the plane struck the building on September 11, 2001. “I thought, Okay, we are going to war,” he recalls. Twenty-five years after 9/11, McMaster joins Aaron MacLean to discuss the wars that followed. Drawing on his experience as a wartime commander and national security adviser, McM…

Are you still on the family phone plan?

In his new comedy special The Family Plan, Jared Freid breaks down the messy truth of life as a millennial son—from his mom monitoring his martinis to his dad shouting about his weight at the beach. This week on Second Thought, he joins Suzy and Dan for a deep dive on boomer parents—and explains why, beyond all the…

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were not the first acts of jihadist terror on American soil, nor were they the last. They were, however, the most lethal and transformative. In a matter of moments, thousands of people were incinerated against a bright blue sky. Passengers on a commercial flight became heroes, phoning hasty goodbyes to their loved ones before making an awesome sacrifice. And while monuments to the nation’s security and prosperity were reduced to rubble on television screens, Americans wondered, “Where will the next attack occur?”

Answering that question has been a singular preoccupation of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies since the attacks. It has required legal and institutional reforms, moral clarity, political courage and, above all, a clear-eyed vision of the nature of the threat. The September 11 attacks were not merely criminal acts; they were acts of war, whose terms, targets, and rules of engagement were dictated not by the Geneva Conventions but by jihadists dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization.

In the wake of 9/11, the federal government implemented sweeping reforms in an effort to prevent an attack of that scale from ever happening again on U.S. soil. Now, a quarter-century later, we can look back with some satisfaction that September 11 was not a prelude to a blitz, and that many other attacks have been thwarted. But acknowledging our nation’s success in preventing another major terror attack does not mean that the job is finished. Our enemies are still out there, still preparing for the next strike. And yet Congress is now taking away some of the essential tools we have used to foil attacks by al-Qaeda, ISIS, and similar groups over the last 25 years.

Until September 11, the United States had dealt with terrorist attacks mainly as criminal law enforcement matters. From the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the FBI has worked with local law enforcement partners to build successful counterterrorism cases out of little more than charred fragments. Starting with shreds of a clothing label and a thumbnail-sized piece of plastic explosive recovered from the Scottish countryside, the FBI was able to trace the Pan Am bombing to two Libyan intelligence officers. And from the burned-out remnant of a vehicle parked beneath the World Trade Center when it was attacked in 1993, the FBI was able to identify the individuals who were responsible for the blast and uncover a further plot to bomb other major New York City landmarks.