The Press Box - James B. Stewart and Tom Junod on Writing About 9/11

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

Twenty years have passed since 9/11. Writers Tom Junod and James B. Stewart stop by to remember and reflect on the events of that day. Bryan talks with Stewart to discuss his 2002 New Yorker piece, "The Real Heroes Are Dead," which follows Rick Rescorla—former soldier, officer, security specialist, and hero who helped save thousands of lives on 9/11—through his love story with his wife, Susan (0:53). Later, Tom Junod stops by to talk through his 2003 Esquire piece that focuses on the infamous picture of "The Falling Man." They discuss how the story came about, why finding the identity of the man in the photo was important, and how the story is received years later (27:40). "The Real Heroes Are Dead" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/02/11/the-real-heroes-are-dead "The Falling Man" https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a48031/the-falling-man-tom-junod/ Host: Bryan Curtis Guests: James B. Stewart and Tom Junod Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Emmy Award-winning producer, actor and comedian Larry Wilmore is back on the air, hosting a podcast where he weighs in on the issues of the week and interviews guests in the world of politics, entertainment, culture, sports, and beyond. Check out Larry Wilmore, Black on the Air on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. This is the Pressbox podcast. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here along with producer Erica Servantes. As you know, we're just a few days away from the 20th anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks.

that brought down the World Trade Center and killed nearly 3,000 people. I wanted to use today's podcast to revisit two magazine stories. They were written about people who died in the attacks and that have lodged themselves in my mind since I first read them. Story number one was written by James B. Stewart. In 2002, Stewart was a staff writer at the New Yorker, and he learned about a man named Rick Raskerla. Rick Raskerla was a Renaissance man.

He was a playwright, he was a Vietnam veteran, And finally, he was the man in charge of security at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in the World Trade Center. On 9-11, Rescora led thousands of his coworkers out of the South Tower to safety and then died after the buildings collapsed. Now, Raskerla's story was truly heroic. But if you read Stewart's story about him and the New Yorker, you'll find that he gave it this very interesting frame. He wrote it as a love story between Raskerla and his wife, Susan, whom he met just three years before the attacks. And Stewart's story has this really interesting, really subtle power to it because it's not just about heroism. It's about what it means to lose a hero and be left behind.

And when the piece was published in February 2002, it got its title from something Rick Raskorla once said about his military exploits. The real heroes are dead. Here's James B. Stewart. All right, Jim, for people who don't know this story, who was Rick Raskorla? So I was in New York City on September 11th. Like everybody else, I was, you know, stunned at the unfolding events. I was, you know, kind of, I really didn't know what to do. And then David Remnick called me and said, you know, we're going to try to put something together for next week's issue.

You're sort of our Wall Street person. Could you, could you rustle up something? And at least it gave me a purpose that day. So I started making calls. And the big story, really, and it was a grim one, was about Hunter Fitzgerald, you know, the big. mostly fixed income firm. It was on the top of the World Trade Center, and they just got, wiped out. I mean, everybody who was there died, was horrible. And so I did some work on that. I made, I think, a modest contribution to that first week's story. But I, you know, I think that

week I heard the anomaly that Morgan Stanley, which had the largest number of employees, had almost no casualties. I think they had seven out of the 3,000. And that caught my attention for two reasons. One, you know, it's like the dog that doesn't bark. So, you know, it's, that was unexpected. And then secondly, it was kind of a glimmer of positive news in this like overwhelmingly tragic, horrible, sad story. And so that's stuck in my mind. But it took a while and it did some poking around and I was kind of asking people like, well, why weren't there more casualty Morgan Stanley? Because I noticed Morgan Stanley was kind of in the middle of Tower One or they were in the upper half, but not all the way at the top. But it wasn't their location because people, firms below them

got wiped out, firms above them got wiped out. So I wondered what had happened there. And that after poking around and getting some false starts, somebody told me, well, they had really been drilled, they were ready, they were evacuated, and there was this guy, Rickris Scorla, who had saved them. It was funny because I think the first person who told me there was this kind of person in charge there had some had it wrong. He said, you know, somebody wrote a book about him, he said, and it was, he said something like, it was young men in fire. So I went and I got the book, Young Man in Fire. Well, he's not, he's not. in that book. There's nobody in that book who would have been in the World Trade Center,

but it did turn out that he was in another book about Vietnam. I believe it was called We Were Young Once or Something. We were Soldiers Once and Young. Yes, right. We were soldiers once in Young. And he was in there. So that's how I found out that there was, the minute I realized, oh, there's a character here, that only heightened the story for me because it wasn't just like accident. It was like somebody really was responsible for this. And then I also, of course, learned right away that he himself had been, was one of the seven who was killed. So it did have a tragic element, but I thought, oh, this is a, this is like, I really want to explore this because here's a potentially heroic figure in this, in this really tragic saga. So a big push inside

the New Yorker to find and report these kind of stories? Well, there was certainly interest, but this story didn't come out for months. I didn't remember it was about October. It was mid-October when I learned about Riscollas identity. And so I called

Morgan Stanley and they handed me off to a public relations person and I kind of described what I was looking at and she got back to me and she said well we're not interested. We're not going to help you. We're not participating in any way. And I was really taken aback by that because I thought, whoa, wait a minute.

I'm kind of an investigative reporter. I've told many people with like bad news. And here I thought I was calling with this incredibly upbeat story that would reflect positively on Morgan Stanley. And they were immediately shutting me down. However, I want to quickly say that the woman I spoke to, his name escapes me at the moment. When we, she finished telling me that, she said, Well, she said, completely off the record, here is the name and the unlisted phone number of his widow. And she gave that to me.

And I often look back at that moment. If there's a hero in this story, I don't, you know, the underlying story, but in the journalism of this, this PR woman is a her really went off the reservation and gave me that information. And that unlocked the story for me. So you mentioned Raskerla's wife, and one of the things that's always struck me about this story is the way it begins, or maybe we could say the way it's structured, because you begin with Raskerla meeting Susan, his future wife. I was told from Susan's point of view. I'll read a paragraph here. As Susan Greer was walking her golden retriever one morning near her home in Morristown, New Jersey, she heard footsteps behind her. It was just after six on a warm Saturday and late July of 1998. She liked the quiet and the early morning light. The footsteps came closer and then a jogger. past her. He was tall and somewhat heavy and appeared to be about her age. She was 56. What really caught her attention was his feet. He had no shoes on. It wasn't like her to say anything to a stranger, but curiosity overcame her. And she asked, what are you doing jogging in your bare feet? And why did you

decide to begin the story like that? Well, that's always, that's always a fascinating question. You know, as a writer, I think beginnings, beginnings are the most important part of the story. And endings are the next most important. But there were a number of reasons I ended up doing that, even though there were probably more obvious places to start this. First of all, I wanted the spotlight on Susan and Rick as characters. And as the recording had gone on, I began to think of it less as a September 11th story, though, of course it was. And more, as the headline eventually said, more as a love story between two people who met somewhat late in life. So the time where they meet both kind of help define this as not just another story

of that, you know, somebody who died in the World Trade Center, but as a love story. And also, of course, there's an element of mystery right from the beginning, which I thought was very important to establish, like, who is this character? And there was so much more to him than just the head of security at Morgan Stanley. And I didn't think there was any way to understand how he saved the people, but maybe even more importantly, why he died. Because he didn't have to die. I think this is something that haunted Susan probably still does. He could have walked away and resumed his happy life and he still would have been a hero.

So why did he go back up there? So there are these mysteries about Rick, and the very opening paragraph establishes that, you know, she's asking him a question, you know, why are you running your bare feet? And by the way, the answer is pretty interesting. He's writing a play, and he wants to know about Africa, and he wants to know what it's like to experience running in bare feet so that he can write about it more clearly. Yeah, exactly. And now we've got like, oh, that's interesting. That raises even more questions like why Africa? I mean, we know now he's not your average suburban New Jersey Wall Street guy. So I guess that's why I started there.

There's nothing in the headline treatment, which you mentioned or even the New Yorker's Table of Contents that indicates to the reader that this story is going to be about 9-11. Did you write it in such a way so that we would discover that while we were reading the piece? Yeah. I didn't, you know, it's like the kind, I mean, one thing I love about the story is it's about many things. And I think the best stories are. And I didn't want it to be overwhelmed by the monumentality of what happened on September 11th. September 11th is obviously critical to the story. It's, it's the event that pulls all the strands of Rick's life, brings them all together in this crucial. where he faces the ultimate test.

But it's about him and the other characters. It's not per se about September 11. By the way, I actually had some readers complain to me. Like, they said, like, well, I thought this story was supposed to be about September 11. And I said, well, I said, I don't really know what to say about that. I said, it is. I mean, it is.

but I didn't want I mean so much had been written about September 11th and I thought there were so much more to this story I didn't want people to just sort of typecast it as oh this is another September 11th story it's interesting too to remember this just moment in media time 2002 because now I feel when I encounter a piece including your pieces I've often seen you know 20 tweets about it

that have told me a little bit about what's going to what the piece is going to be about whereas in 2002 there's no social media so I think a lot of people are picking up the New Yorker and starting this piece, starting with this encounter between Rick and his future wife, and they just don't know anything, you know, that's going to happen next if they hadn't read one of the newspaper stories about Risclay that had come out. Well, one of the things I learned writing at The New Yorker and my editor, John Bennett, who edited the story was a wonderful influence on me.

But he always said, and I think the New Yorker practiced this, which was trust the reader. trust the reader to figure it out. You know, they're not stupid. You don't have to hit them over the head with a club. And in fact, if you do trust them and let them figure out what the story is about, it's much more powerful because it's more like they take those events into their own experience and then they draw the conclusions. That will stick in their minds so much longer than something they've been lectured to about.

And I think that's always been a hallmark of New Yorker riding. So by today's standards, let's face it, it gets off to a very slow start. You know, as a rider, you love that. You know, John used to tell me it's like, you know, first it starts out really, really slowly because they don't want, you know, in case if somebody kind of still stepping on, you don't want to kill them. So you go like slow, so then the train starts picking up speed. And then once it hits full, full tilt, you've got to keep it going until, really until the end. You can't slow down then.

But in the beginning, you should take your time. After getting Susan's phone number, how'd you approach her? Well, I called the number, and Susan answered. And we made an appointment to get together. And she was in Morristown, New Jersey, which isn't too far away. I got the New Jersey transit. and I went out there and Susan picked me up at the train station and drove me to their townhouse and, you know,

it was a little bit eerie because it was still fairly soon after Rick had died and their dog was there who I, you know, missed him terribly. And nothing in the house had moved. Susan had touched anything. Rick's shoes were sitting there by the front door. His papers were out. It was, you know, she had not touched anything. And so we went in and we started talking.

I think I took out my, I was to take notes on a legal pad. I took out my legal pad and my pen and settled in there. And I guess within two or three minutes, she was crying and then I was crying. And an hour later, I didn't have any notes. It just wasn't, it was not a time to take notes. It was just a time to kind of be there and feel that. And I remember kind of riding the train back and looking, I had nothing to show for that visit. But I do feel that that was kind of cathartic.

And it also created certainly a bond between me and Susan. And I had more visits out there. And we had many, many phone calls. And it led to a very fruitful reporting relationship in which she shared everything. I mean, she shared her own memories, but she shared Brick's papers and his diary. And he was a writer. He was an aspiring writer. So there was a lot of raw material from Rick himself.

From time to time, Raskerla used a phrase with Susan about his previous military service and this whole idea of heroism. He said, the real heroes are dead. What did that tell you about Raskerler? Well, a couple of things. You know, that phrase, as I remember it, he was, Susan found these medals. I think they were framed or something. And she wanted from his time of Vietnam and she wanted to hang them on the wall.

And he said, no, I don't want them up there. He said, I'm not a hero. The real heroes are dead. And I think, first of all, it does show his modesty. He wasn't in this because he wanted to be famous or because he wanted to be celebrated. And he was doing it for much higher purposes. And secondly, I think,

to survive in Rick's mind meant at the least, being lucky, and at the worst, not being cowardly or anything, but not being as brave as you might have been. In other words, being just risk-averse enough to survive. And the bravest people were not risk-averse. And for that reason, they did not survive. They threw themselves in into the face of death, and it did not. stop them. And real heroes was a phrase that was being used a lot by almost every politician and TV host,

I feel after 9-11 when talking about police, paramedics, things like that. It's almost funny because reading that quote from Raskerlo almost had this chastening quality to it, you know, almost saying, be careful when you use that phrase because you're trying, you know, in a way

to be complimentary, perhaps, but you're not, you know, you're not appreciating the words you're saying maybe as much as you should. Well, Susan introduced me to Rick's best friend, Dan. And so I got to know him in the course of the reporting as well. And they went way back. They went back to Africa where they fought together.

And they were, you know, they were God's gift to writers because they thought so deeply about these issues. They were soldiers, but they were soldiers. but they were philosophers. They were self-taught. I mean, Rick had the Harvard classics, if I recall, right. He had a set of the Harvard classics on his shelf when he was a soldier in Africa. I wonder how many soldiers they have the Harvard classics sitting anywhere.

But he was reading all this. And I think he valued education tremendously in a way that the self-taught often do, because they haven't had the luxury of, you know, an Ivy League education. But they did reflect very deeply on what they were doing and the meaning of life and and what death meant. And that was a running conversation for their entire lives right up until the very end. How much time did you wind up spending with Susan and Dan? Well, I don't know if I could quantify it, really.

It was a lot. It was a lot of time. was a lot of time. And it was valuable for two ways, in different ways. I think Dan was a little wary. Every single conversation he would peel another layer of the onion back. And, you know, Dan, both Dan and Rick were these many-faceted characters who had done some pretty incredible things. And I think some of them, Dan, he was nervous about making those things public. Like, how would people respond? I mean, you know, at some people, at some point he told me how many people he thought he'd personally killed. And I don't remember the exact number now, but I believe it was

over 200. And that's, you know, that's hard. That was hard for him to say. So, you know, this kind of stuff didn't just come out in one interview. Susan was very open. and emotional, but there were elements of the story that were very, very difficult for her, not to share with me, I think, but to acknowledge to herself. And I think in a way, the most important revelation from her came only at the very end. I think we were in the car going back to the train station after our last visit. And I think she started to cry again, and she brought up this idea that she was haunted by the idea that if he really loved her, he would have come home.

And then I thought, oh, how could I have been so blind? Because Susan had to be, she had to carry the torch for Rick. And he was being lionized as a hero. And she had to be gracious. And she had to thank everyone for that. And, you know, join in the praise. The part of her didn't want him to be a hero. I mean, he was already a hero, but he didn't have to be that much of a hero.

You know, why didn't he come home? And that's the very end of the story to try to reconcile this really age-old conflict between love and duty. And it was when I heard that, that the story to me kind of vaulted to a new level because that's one of the great conflicts of all literature. I mean, going back to Homer, when Ania leaves Carthage to found Rome. Dido is like calls on the gods to inflict a storm on his ship to sink it because she's so angry that he has left her. Anyway, these themes permeate life and literature. And this was just an unbelievably vivid example of it in a contemporary setting. And I hope that talking about it helps Susan.

You know, you'd have to ask her, but I felt that it did. It was better to get this out than to just have the, you know, constantly having to bury it. I was going to ask you a little bit about writing about heroes. You had this line in your book, follow the story, which I'd recommend to anybody who wants to learn about writing and magazine writing, about the financial criminal, I mean, you said, when I would ask people what they thought of Ivan Boski, they almost always told me that they thought he was a charlatan, a scoundrel, a criminal. I would have to ask again, urging them to share with me their thoughts when they first met Boski before he had admitted insider trading. So if you switch scoundrel to hero, did you have the same problem getting people to talk about Rick Ruskelingland? To some extent, yes, it's a very similar problem, you know, trying to do the reporting through the lens of events that have happened and so you have benefit of hindsight. And it's very difficult often to get people to put themselves into a different place in time before they knew the things that eventually happened.

And I don't know that you ever could entirely succeed at that. But I think it helps. The better someone knows someone, the easier it is to do. And both Susan and Dan were intimately familiar with Rick and his thinking over an extended period of time. So with them, I thought it was relatively, it was relative, I won't say easy, but it didn't take all that much encouragement. they thought of him in much more complex terms than just, oh, he's a hero. But you're absolutely right that people, I could give you another example because I've been writing about the Alistair of Les Moon vests at CBS.

And now everyone says, oh, you know, he was horrible. He was a bully. He was a monster. I wasn't surprised. You know, I could have told you he was doing things to women. But, you know, wait a minute. This guy had the most successful. He was like number one on Entertainment Weekly's all powerful people in Hollywood.

That's not what anyone thought, you know, before all this happened. So, yes, it is often a challenge to get people to put themselves back in another context. What do you remember about sitting down and writing this story? Well, I cried a few times while writing it. I remember I was at the kitchen table and I called Dan. I realized I didn't know the last time Dan had seen Rick and I don't know I called Dan and he'd like told me he said I don't want to talk about it and then that he did and I remember I stopped you know ended the conversation and I just put I was in the middle of writing the story and I was trying to put something in and I just put my head down on the table and saw you remember how long it took you to write it I don't think it took all that long I I don't say it's an eat was a easy to ride, but I think, you know, it was, I don't recall the riding being a struggle. I mean, when I'm dealing with other riders and sometimes myself as well, and they say, oh,

I have riders block. 99% of the time, it's because they haven't finished the reporting. And I had a lot of material here by the time, by the time I was writing. And so I guess the challenge was to keep it even in a lengthy New Yorker piece. You know, I didn't go on to write a whole book about this. because there was just so much stuff I couldn't get in there. But I think the piece holds up very nicely just as a magazine story. But no, I don't remember it being all that hard ride.

You know, once I decided where to start. Situating it is a love story between two people and then going from there, then going back into Rick's history and then finally ending up on September 11. Yeah. And I think then you understand, you understand the love affair. You understand his sense of duty and you understand why he made the final choice he did, even though obviously this is a story where the main character was dead, so I could never actually interview him.

Does that change something for you as a writer? Even if you're interviewing the two people that he was probably most intimate with in the world, Dan and Susan, does that change your process at all when you're writing about somebody who cannot push back on anything you're going to write about him? Not really. What it really does for me, or it has informed writing about people who do talk to you

because it's a reminder to me that we can only know ourselves so much. And you need to talk to people who know the character as well in order to really get a three-dimensional picture. So I don't doubt that, you know, if I could have communed with Rick in the afterlife, that he would have had interesting insights. But I felt, as is often the case, sometimes the best insights do come from people who surround the character.

character as rather than the character himself or herself. Finally, Jim, so you finished the story. It's about to be printed in The New Yorker. What did you say to Susan at that moment? How did she receive the piece? I don't really remember giving her heads up. I must have back then, you know, it would come out. I guess we didn't really have internet. It wasn't online. It would typically, there'd be an early copy on Sunday evening. And I believe I arranged for her. her to get a copy of that delivered to her house. And what I remember, I don't remember it was that very night

or maybe it was the next day, but Susan got on the phone and, you know, she said two or three words and then she started to cry. She was crying, you know, immediately. But she liked it. And I think, again, she can speak to this better than me, but she liked that it was framed as a love story. because to her, this was the most important thing that ever happened in her life. And I think she appreciated that she was an important career.

It wasn't just about Rick saving people. It was about their life together as well. James B. Stewart's writing about Rick Rescorla can be found on the New Yorker's website or in his book, Heart of a Soldier. And you could read his columns in the New York Times. Jim, thanks so much for coming on the press box. Sure. Thanks for having me.

Our second story about the 9-11 attacks was written by Tom Juneau. Back in 2003, when it was published, Juno was a writer for Esquire magazine. If you remember the moments after 9-11, there was a big push within the media not to show certain images. For instance, the TV network stopped showing repeated footage of the World Trade Center collapsing, feeling it was exploiting the victims. Another image that was suppressed were the photos of people who fell or jumped to their death. from the windows of the World Trade Center. Those photos were consigned to the corners of the internet, way, way at a mainstream view.

Junot's story, The Falling Man, which appeared in Esquire, is really two things. It's an investigation to find out the identity of a man in one such photo, and it's a reconsideration of just what those photos mean and whether we should look at them, as horrific as they are. Here's Tom Juneau. All right, Tom, Tom, when there's an all-encompassing. news event like 9-11.

A lot of journalists ask themselves, I think, okay, what can I do? What's the way I contribute to this story? Did you think that after 9-11? Yeah, sure. You know, very much so. But I do think that falling man is separate from that. The story that I wrote on the basis of like,

you know, answering that question to myself, what can I do was a story I wrote right after 9-11 about the FBI counterterrorism guy who wound up working for the Twin Towers and then dying in the Twin Towers, John O'Neill. And that was a story that three journalists wound up doing as a, what can I do about 9-11 story, Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker, Bob Colker of New York Magazine, and me. So we all worked on that story in the fall of 2001. And then the falling man was in a different category.

How'd you come across the picture of the man jumping out of the North Tower? Well, so I was in Shelter Island, New York at the time. I was with my wife. It was, you know, the end of summer. And we were, you know, enjoying those days. I had just come back from a trip out to Oregon for a different story that I wrote about oil field workers being held captive in Honduras. I'd come back from Oregon two days before. We were in Shelter Island.

My wife came out to where I was to the deck and said, I don't know if this is like a war of the world kind of hoax. But there's a report on the radio, NPR is saying that the World Trade Center, you know, a plane hit the World Trade Center. And, you know, then that day, you know, began. And but we, we didn't have a TV at the time. And in fact, I didn't see images of what had happened in downtown New York until that late afternoon or evening. We went to a bar in Shelter Island where they had a TV

and we watched the, you know, the tape of the, of the, the plane hitting the building and then the buildings, you know, and the buildings collapsing. And so the next morning, I was, you know, I was hungry to read a newspaper. And so we went to the drugstore and Shelter Island. We picked up the Times and the Post and the Daily News and the Newsday, all the papers and came back home to look at them, opened the Times. You know, the Times had the headline, you know, America attacked, which was one of those things that gives me shivers, you know, even today. And then, you know, opened it up. up and there was the picture of, you know, a man who had fallen from the building, had jumped

from the building. I think it was on A7, if I'm not mistaken. And it was just one of those things like immediate, it was like immediate recognition, immediate, like, for a couple of reasons, immediate, like, put me on notice that the, you know, that the world had changed in some sort of fundamental way. and also put me on notice that one day I would I would want to write about this story. So I wanted to know immediately who he was and what his story was. You write this story in or publish a story in 2005.

So you're thinking about this? 2003. Excuse me. It was two years after. So you published a story in 2003. You're thinking about this image over those months and years? Yeah, yeah. I never stopped thinking about it.

And I always kept on waiting for a story to come out. I thought for sure. That was going to be the thing that kept me from doing the story was that there was going to be somebody else who was going to come up with some sort of definitive account. And, you know, nobody did. And it was his identity that was the question for you. At the time. Yeah.

But I mean, the thing about it wasn't just his identity. It was what happened behind him and what happened above him. I mean, when you, it was, it was interesting because that summer, I went to the top of the World Trade Center for the first time. I ate at Windows. I had a Windows of the World. I went with Granger, David Granger, my editor at Esquire. And, you know, we went to the top and we looked out the window. And, I mean, I remember the view to the South.

than the feeling that, holy cow, I can see Philadelphia. You know, I mean, being like so high. And so having had that experience of being there in that room and knowing that somebody that, you know, came out of the windows that I looked through made me wonder what had happened to propel them. you know, what had happened, if they had made the decision to jump, what had, you know, what had influenced that decision, what had caused that decision?

And the thing about the photo that was, you know, haunting to this moment is that when you look at the photo, it looked as if a decision had been made. There was a certain resolute quality to it. And there was, you know, there was a certain piece to it that made, that, you know, drew me in immediately. It's the, it's the, you know, conflicting information within the one image. You know, I mean, it spoke of a, of a horror that was beyond imagining. And yet it, in its composition, it was not, it was not horrifying. So it was, you know, that's what drew me in.

This is how you wrote about it. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have in his last instance of life embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. It's interesting reading that now because, you know, I think so many of the things written right after 9-11 were very much in this tone almost a funereal tone.

It feels like you're doing something a little different there right at the top of the piece. What was your thinking of starting that way? It was one of those stories, one of the few stories that I've written in a pretty long career where I wasn't really even trying to do anything. I mean, I wrote the first sentence. the hair stood up on my arms.

And then from then on, you know, in the account of the picture itself, it was it was a little bit like writing by Ouija board. You know, it wasn't like I was trying to do anything. I mean, the guesswork that is part and parcel of just about any story I've ever written was not there in that in that description. Guesswork meaning? guess mark like what am I trying to do here you know this sounds good or this sounds shitty or what are you doing you know i mean all of the all of the things that you that you know accompany you as a writer did not accompany me at that moment i mean the story you know was not easy to write because i was i was reporting the story

along with a colleague at ed esquire Andrew chikisky I was reporting the story as I was as I was writing it. So, you know, there was plenty of, plenty of obstacles and roadblocks, but the opening kind of salvo was very much like, I'm just going to follow, I'm going to follow this wherever it goes. Now, you mentioned the image appeared in the newspapers the next day. Right. And then it sort of disappeared from newspapers and from television.

What was it about, of all the disturbing images of 9-11, what disturbed people about that image in particular? Well, it's interesting. Because that was, I mean, that was the other thing that grabbed me about the photo. I mean, there was the fact of the photo, the fact of what it represented and the horror that it represented. There was the composition of the photo, which in many ways, you know, signaled. something that was contrary to the facts. But then over the next three days, it was like there was the complete next three days,

next three months, next three years, there was the complete absence of the photo. I mean, it was like whatever happened to that photo. I mean, that photo was to me, you know, the morning of 9-12, that photo was to me the defining photo of 9-11. and then it completely disappeared. So that became the thing that as a reporter certainly, you know, gave me the itch.

And what did people find so disturbing about it? I mean, that's, I think, really was really what the first part of the written story, you know, was about. You know, there are a lot of, I mean, a lot of people say that, okay, it was the photo of a death, and that's the disturbing thing. And a lot of people say, well, it's a photo that somebody has to know who that is, and that's the disturbing thing. But there were a lot of photos that came out of 9-11, you know, of death. And there was the, you know, the most famous among them,

is the photo of the New York Fire Department chaplain, Michael Judge, being, you know, taken out of the building. I mean, he is not alive in that picture. And nobody objected to that photo being in wide circulation because, to my mind, it presented a heroic tableau. that picture is I mean he is being carried by people I mean he it is it is you know it's like a 19th century

picture of war whereas whereas the falling man is a 21st century picture of war and I think that that's the difference it's not a heroic photo you have to

you have to look beyond that into what it means for it to have sort of any sort of um to even to even be bearable to look at you know it's i mean there are people who find that picture unbearable to look at and and i and i think it's that i think it's that you know we we like our um heroic we like our you know photos of tragedy to be pointing up. This one's pointing down. And there was a backlash, right? These are readers, viewers of television who are calling in, writing and saying, stop showing that. How dare you? Yeah, all over. I mean, that picture, that picture appeared, you know, it was, I mean,

Richard Drew, the photographer was a photographer for the associated press. And so that picture appeared in newspapers all over the country. I mean, and worldwide. And people objected to it strongly from the very beginning as a kind of pornography. I mean, pornographic was the word that was used, I'd say, most often to describe it. People still, people still respond to it in a very, you know, emotional and visceral way. Pornography is an interesting word and used that in the piece. And I feel it was after 9-11 that I first started to hear. at least in wide circulation, the term disaster porn. Yeah, disaster porn or death porn, you know.

Mm-hmm. And that we as news consumers or people writing the news are traversing this line between reporting and honoring somebody and leering at something. Right, right. Giving people this kind of thing that we shouldn't be giving them. Yeah, I mean, when I was first, when I was, so when I first started writing the story, it was nearly, I started in February of 2003. So we're talking about around a year and a half after 9-11.

That picture had been successfully and effectively suppressed by that time. And so had all pictures of people who jumped and who fell. And this is in the story, but I mean, the only place, where you could find pictures were at literal, like, death porn sites on the internet, like, you know, faces of death, kind of like those kind of horror sites. And so you, as a reporter, go on these websites and essentially start, what do you do, print photos off there? Are you able to find, find them on the AP?

No, I found, I found Richard Drew. You know, I went and looked him up. And there was, you know, there was, you know, there had been one story. written about the piece. There are actually two. One was a, I found it in the archives. This is like early on.

This is back in February or March of 2003. I went to the archives of the Columbia Journalism School. And there was like a there was like a thesis, I think, written about it. But then, you know, there was the story that had come out in the Toronto Star about the, about the photo by Peter Cheney. and that had come out, I guess, in November of 2001, somewhere around there. And it was essentially what I had to go on in the beginning. And when you meet Richard Drew, he gives you, or you have this photo that is a famous photo that runs in newspapers, but he also at that point then shows you all these other photos that he took in that same sequence of the following in?

Yeah. So when when Richard shot that photo, I mean, he was, you know, he was standing there and just, he just was just shooting away. I mean, he wasn't like he snapped that photo and put the camera down. I mean, he was just firing away. And it was when he, he didn't know what he had until he went back to the AP offices. And there it was. You know, I mean, there's a lot of, I mean, it's a sequence of 12 photos of, of the falling man falling. And it's the only one that looks like that.

It's the only one that has, you know, composition. The rest are of a person tumbling through the air, spinning through the air, you know, a person in disarray. And the one that they chose was this one. And, you know, and it's at-a-a-a-os. with the rest of the sequence. What conclusion did you come to about why these pictures should not be suppressed? So I think that there was a judgment being made about how to die, about the deaths that people suffered and that some were honorable and some were not.

And the story, if it has any purpose at all besides, telling the story of all the people that photo represents, it was to go against that idea that, you know, that not everybody, you know, was, you know, Michael Judge being carried out by, you know, other firemen in, you know, in stories that could be, that could be told. These were stories that people didn't even, they didn't know. I mean, the thing about the story, I mean, there were, when I told people that I was doing this story, people were like, how could you? I mean, people just thought that, I mean, they thought that there was like something wrong with me. And I've even, I was like, people were like, are you okay?

You know, I mean, and I mean, people did not want this story to be told or even examined. and so many people said, you know, when I said, well, I was going to call, you know, they were like, how are you going to do this story? And I was like, well, me and Andrew are going to, you know, call people and ask them, you're going to do that. Good luck with that. And so I went into that, into that story, totally thinking that people were going to, I was going to call people up and they were going to yell at me for calling them and say, you know, and hang up and say, don't ever call me again. And it was completely the opposite because the fact is, is that people had no information about how their loved ones died. They had no idea. And they wanted to know. And that story was,

was, was, was part of that. And I've found that, you know, so many times since in doing, you know, journalistic work. I mean, I'm doing a story right now where going back into these horrors that happened, you know, years, decades ago that something I got interested in and I'm finding out. And, you know, people are like, how can you call these people? And then you call these people and you find out that years and years later, they're still desperate for information about what happened to them or their loved ones because no one tells them and people think that oh they shouldn't be told or it's going to be you know it's going to be traumatic to them to hear what actually happened to their loved ones who were you know waiters you know at windows or who were traders at canter or whatever and you find that

the trauma is is in the not knowing and that's that story i think is a is a great illustration and demonstration of that this assumption this collective assumption we make right the reason as you pointed out the reason part of the reason the photo was not shown was somebody's loved one is going to be looking at that right and that will disturb them and then we make a second assumption that if we call this person up they're going to say how dare you call me right and ask me questions about this photograph or if the person is. It's a natural thing to believe. I know for a fact that that's not true because I've had the experience of that not being true.

And yet every time I set out to do a story like this, I sort of assume that people are going to be traumatized and are going to be really, really mad at me when I call them. And it's, you know, in many times it's not the case. Andrew was a researcher at Esquire who's helping you out? Andrew was the head of the research department. He was the lead fact checker. And at the time, Esquire had to make cuts,

and they were looking to eliminate staff positions. And Andrew volunteered to take, you know, to take the hit so that other people on his staff would not have to. That's the kind of person that Andrew is. So Andrew at the time was a freelancer. And when it became clear that the story was heading in a direction that was, you know, sort of towards a reported story, well beyond essay, you know, I asked David for help and David Granger for help.

And he said, let's contact Andrew. And so that's how that happened. And, you know, Andrew, Andrew, this would not be the story that it is if Andrew had not helped me out and participated. We spoke every day, you know, for a month. We would call each other in the morning, check in, and then we'd each work all day. I was reporting and writing. Andrew was reporting. And then, you know, at night, around 10 o'clock, we would check in with each other and talk until, like, for the next two hours.

And how practically speaking do you sort of narrow down the identity of this person? Well, I mean, you start off with some basic information and you, you know, you learn more. I mean, the thing so that, you know, the information that you start off with is that he's wearing black pants. He's wearing black high tops. He's wearing a white shirt and he is a person of color. he looks tall though it's hard to look tall next to the world trade center but he looks lanky so you have you have an idea of his physique and maybe a guess at how old he is he looks like anywhere from what like 25 to 40 and so you start with you start with that and then you start thinking of where he

might have come from where did what were the businesses that were above where the plane hit because those are the people, those are the people who jumped and who fell. And so you start with that. And then, you know, you get information that way. And then Richard Drew, you know, shows you the sequence of the photo. And in that sequence, there's something that's like blazingly clear. It's that he's wearing an orange shirt underneath his, underneath his white one.

And that's how we did it. You know, the orange shirt turned out to be like the conclusive thing. You mentioned Peter Cheney, a journalist who had tried to figure out who the falling man was. And one person he thought it might be was this man named Norberto Hernandez. Yeah. Whose family you visited. What was that visit like? Well, that was really the first.

face-to-face reporting, you know, I had done. Those are the first people that entered the story other than Richard, Drew. And I had read online that they were not happy to put it mildly with Peter Cheney's story. And I found this was like in the early days of the Internet, so this was not an easy way to, there was no face. at the time or anything like it. There were just message boards. And so on a message board, I found Catherine's, you know, Nuberto's daughter's AOL address to give you an idea of where we were at the time.

Found her AOL address. And she said, you know, I asked her if I can come to see her. And she said, please clear my father's name. So anyway, I was back in Shelter Island at the time, and I drove into Nassau County and into West Hempstead and visited the Hernandez family. And it was Catherine and her sisters and her mom. And I came with the sequence of photos. And so I talked to them. And what had happened was that, so Peter had identified Norberto Hernandez as the person in Richard Drew's photo.

He, I mean, he kind of based it on a hunch. You know, he was sort of desperate to find somebody. And he saw a picture of Norberto in a subway platform. like, I think that's him. And then he went and did some reporting, and it seemed to support his contention. And it broke the family apart, you know? I mean, there were, like, Nerberto's siblings believed that it was Norberto, but his immediate family, his wife and his daughters, you know, did not.

And were scandalized by the association. and they were really suffering. You know, that was the thing that when I went there and saw them, I mean, they were really suffering because what they believed was that Nuerberto would have done anything to get home that he never would have given up. And they looked at the photo as an emblem of surrender, you know, to fate and to death. And so they were really, really, really, upset about it because that identification went against everything that they believed about their

father and their husband. And the thing that I, you know, remember from that day was that I talked to them for a long time, had coffee with them. And, you know, I took, you know, I went outside and went to the car and I got the photos. And I told, you know, Catherine that I had them. And she was like, I'm going to go take a look at them but I don't I don't want my mother to see them in case it is Norberto and she looked at the photos and she was like

you know thank God and then you know her mom who had been they were trying to keep her in the house she came out and she was like let me see them and she saw them

and then, you know, you know, knew that it was not, it was not her husband. Because, because of the orange shirt, by the way. Hmm. Because he wouldn't, he didn't have an orange shirt. Didn't have an orange shirt, yeah. How many families did you wind up talking to him? I don't know. I would say, I would say, I would say, close to 50.

Wow. 50. Yeah. Yeah. And so we talk to a lot of people. I mean, you can better ask Andrew that. I mean, there were a lot of people that we called. Some we couldn't get in touch with. Some, you know, a lot of the people who worked in windows were immigrants.

And, you know, we had, you know, unless they, unless they had, you know, a promising lead, you know, or unless they offered the promise of something, you know, we, like, weren't using interpreters or anything like that. So we had problems with some of that. So, you know, a lot, a lot of people. And why was finding the identity of the following man important to you? Well, I mean, when I first looked at the photo on, you know, 9-12, I mean, the two, there's, you know, it raised two questions. number one, who was that and what was the story? And number two, you know, what happened to, what happened, you know, in the building, you know, in what kind of hell, you know, drove him, you know, into the sky, essentially.

And so, you know, every story has like a mechanism, you know, or an apparatus that sort of gets you into it. And finding the identity of the man seemed to be essential to finding out the story of what happened, you know, in the room that he vacated, you know. and they all seem to be, they all seem to be, you know, the essential information. But it, you know, the story as it went on, it didn't, it didn't turn out to be that way. The story really was about all the people that that photo, you know, represented. They all had stories. You know, even when I knew that, you know, like, a person at Canter Fitzgerald wasn't that person. I was hearing the stories of people at

Canter Fitzgerald and they all those stories seemed to fit in to that to that one photo. I mean that that photo was was was speaking for people whose stories had not yet been told, you know, people who whose death, they didn't go unmarked, but you know they were they were sort of unknown and one after another you know of the people that I spoke to sort of entered that photo and I didn't want to exclude them I didn't want to write about one person when I could write about 50 you know or or 200 or 3,000 you know and so you know that's what just kind of happened as we were reporting it. I mean, it was just one amazing story, you know, after another. And so we wanted to figure out a way to get all those stories in there.

And then the other thing was that, you know, we had met the Hernandez's. I had met the Hernandez's. And I knew I knew the damage that the identification and the misidentification had caused. So I didn't want to repeat that. I didn't want to repeat that. I didn't want to. do that. So when we came to the ending of the story, I, you know, I believe we came up with a pretty good argument for identifying Jonathan Breiley as the person who Richard drew photograph that day. I think that, I think that Jonathan, you know, is the best candidate, but was I, were we a hundred percent sure, no. And by that time, that's not even what the story was about. It was about something different. Jonathan Breyley, who worked at Windows on the World, we should know that people haven't read the piece and owned an orange shirt, which leads you to that conclusion.

Right. And black high tops. And, you know, if you look at Jonathan, you can, you can definitely, you know, make even just a visual argument that Jonathan was the person that Richard, photograph. You said you wrote the beginning of the piece as if by Ouija board. How about the rest of the piece? What do you remember about writing? It was like World War I trench warfare, man. Because it was, you know, we would, it was a story that was like, so when I wrote the beginning of the story, I handed in the beginning and then, you know, handed in a very rough draft at the end, a rough draft that was based on almost, you know, just it was, we were just groping through the darkness, you know, and that story. And at that point. So. But, you know, the way that the reporting happened was that I was able to structure the story based on, like, what we had. So handed in like a third of the story, and Grange was like, great. The rest of the two-thirds of the story need a lot of work. I was like, yeah, I know that. And then it was like two-thirds of the story.

And then it was like three-quarters of the story. And then it was, I mean, so we finished that story. at the last possible moment. I mean, that story closed on the day the magazine closed and went to the printer. I mean, it was, it was, I mean, we were, we were trying to figure out who it was and how we were going to present this

until, like, the last instant. And the, when we, well, when I, when I finished writing it, I handed it in, got fat checked, you know, Granger, Granger signed off and then he gave it to an editor named Peter Griffin. And, you know, Peter was, Peter was like the ninja editor at Esquire. And he just cut the last two paragraphs and he said the story ends here.

And I don't even know what those last two paragraphs say anymore. I have no idea. but because the story ended there. I mean, Peter, Peter, it was one of the great editing moments that I've experienced in my career. It was definitely the greatest edit because he just, he just ended it. And there was no, there was not even any argument about it at all. I mean, usually that's the kind of thing that you argue over. And it was like, no.

And then like, boom. And then pretty much they hit sand and it went to the printer and that was it. So people, some people told you, when you told them you were working on that story, they said essentially too soon. You can't do this. How did they receive it when the story came out? I mean, I think that the story was, I mean, really, it was, I mean, I still have like a lot of the emails that I received about it. And they were overwhelmingly and surprisingly positive.

I think the people understood what we were doing and accepted it. I mean, I'm really, I mean, if there's anything that that story did, is that I think it made the deaths of the people who jumped less taboo. And I think that's, you know, because part of it had to do with the acceptance of the story itself. But the thing that I remember more than anything about that was, you know, I got called in by all things considered to speak about it, and I was interviewed about it. And at the very end of the interview, Melissa Block asked me, she said, you know, there are some people who look at this story as, like, the worst thing a journalist can do. like this is this is the this is the lowest form of journalism what would be your answer to them

and I said can I read the end of the story and that I did and she said thank you and that was it that was the interview that was the end of the interview yeah we're do you had this one line in the story and I'll close here you say you call the following man an unknown soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen yeah I've thought of that a lot in the last couple of weeks. I was going to say, as the Afghan war sort of ends or we think ends, does this story sit in your, yeah, I don't know, I think is the right answer. But does a story sit in your head differently 18 years later than it did when you published it? No, I mean, I think that it, I think that the ear resolution of it, I think was, was the, was the, was the,

right choice and fitting the ambiguity of it to leave the ambiguity open was the right choice and was, you know, the appropriate choice. Yeah, you know, I think that the story still, still, I don't think our moment has changed very much. I think that, you know, what happened on 9-11, we've had, we've had such a, such a difficult time digesting that as a country. and as a culture. And to me, the falling man photo is emblematic of that. We have trouble accepting it. We have trouble accepting the magnitude of, you know,

what happened that day. And, you know, we tend to look for, you know, heroic avenues out of that. And the whole point, of the story is that acceptance of that magnitude is not found by heroic avenues, but by falling into it, you know. You can read The Falling Man on Esquire.com. You can read Tom's new stuff on ESPN.com.

Tom's you know, thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks, Brian. That's the press box. Thanks so much to James B. Stewart and Tom's you know. I am Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. David Shoemaker and I are back soon with more lukewarm takes about this. media. See you then.