Garrett M. Graff > Quotes

“Father Mychal Judge, chaplain, FDNY: Good days. And bad days. Up days. Down days. Sad days. Happy days. But never a boring day on this job. You do what God has called you to do. You show up. You put one foot in front of another. You get on the rig and you go out and you do the job. Which is a mystery. And a surprise. You have no idea when you get on that rig. No matter how big the call. No matter how small. You have no idea what God is calling you to. But he needs you. He needs me. He needs all of us.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“We met when we were only 16, at a high school dance. When he died, we were 50. I remember how I didn't want that day to end, terrible as it was. I didn't want to go to sleep because as long as I was awake, it was still a day that I shared with Sean. ~Beverly Eckert”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“We took the time to shake each other’s hands and wish each other good luck and “Hope I’ll see you later,” which is especially poignant for me because we all had that acknowledgment that this might be our last day on earth and we went to work anyway.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“I remember [my first meeting] like it was yesterday. A 24-year-old woman came to see me, sobbing. “Mr. Feinberg, my husband died in the World Trade Center. He was a fireman, and he left me with our two children, six and four. Now, I’ve applied to the Fund, and you have calculated that I’m going to get $2.8 million tax-free. I want it in 30 days.” I said, “Why do you need the money in 30 days?” She said, “Why 30 days? I have terminal cancer. I have 10 weeks to live. My husband was gonna survive me and take care of our two children. Now they’re gonna be orphans. I have got to get this money while I still have my faculties. I’ve gotta set up a trust. I’ve gotta find a guardian. We never anticipated this.” I ran down to the Treasury, we accelerated the processing of her claim, we got her the money, and eight weeks later she died. You think you’re ready for anything and you’re not.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“I think he wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was as if he took the lead—all those angels, right through heaven’s gates. That’s what it seemed like to us. If any of those guys were confused on the way up, he was there to ease the transition from this life to the next.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“I don’t think that the young people who will be [reading] this will know the same freedom I knew growing up.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“Oddly enough, because I was laid off in the afternoon on September 10th, and because the Human Resources Department all died, I was never taken off the payroll. I went back to work again—it’s not like they had to rehire me. I was never gone.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“The significance of the date of September 11th, 9/11, was seared into the nation's collective memory, altering the way those affected looked at the calendar and even clocks.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“Frederick Terna, Holocaust survivor and Brooklyn resident: As ashes were falling, I was back in Auschwitz, with ashes coming down. In Auschwitz, I knew what the ashes were. Here, I assumed I knew what the ashes were—it was a building and human remains.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“I actually named the video September 10th 2001, Uno nunca muere la vispera. It is a saying in Spanish. It's impossible for you to die on the eve of your death. You only die when you have to die.
You're never close to death. You die or you're alive.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“these narratives help make sense of a day that we, as a country and as a people, are still trying to process.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“I wrote, “Rescue 2, John Napolitano, I’m here and I love you. Dad.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“Jean Potter, Bank of America, North Tower, 81st floor: "I would leave the house everyday and say to him the last line of this movie, The Story of Christ, "just remember, Jesus said 'I am always with you'. That's how I would leave him in the morning as I would go to work.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“this might be our last day on earth and we went to work anyway.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“to understand all that came after, we must first understand what it was like to live through the drama and tragedy”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“As I hit Vesey between Church and Broadway, the first thing that struck me was the amount of women’s shoes. I couldn’t understand it. Then I realized women had run out of their shoes—the high heels and what have you. There were women’s shoes all over.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“A specific new fear—that a whole city could just disappear in an instant—permeated the American consciousness in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Writer E. B. White captured that new fear in New York: “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of a plane no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy,” he wrote. “All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation.” •”
― Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die

“This book is an attempt to listen, to hear others’ stories, to know what it was like to experience the day firsthand, to wrestle with the confusion and the terror”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“September 11, 2001, and the subsequent anthrax attack on the U.S. Congress restarted a focus on COG and COOP planning that continues to this day. Today, this secret world still exists, just beneath the surface of our country. In many ways, it’s actually more expansive, powerful, and capable today than it ever was during the twentieth century. Today,”
― Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die

“In that war, the United States had created military forces so enormous as to defy description, yet now, when the nation’s greatest leader in that war lay dead, and a simple ceremony was about to acknowledge the presence of his successor in the nation’s greatest office, only two uniforms were present.” No one else noticed the military’s absence, but Truman thought it a remarkable testament to American democracy that no one asked the country’s powerful military leaders whom they supported as their next leader. “The very fact that no thought was given to it demonstrates convincingly how firmly the concept of supremacy of the civil authority is accepted in our land,” Truman observed.”
― Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die

“While no known record exists of the first entreaty to the Greenbrier, resort historian Robert Conte believes it came during the property’s 1956 North American summit, which brought Eisenhower together with the leaders of Canada and Mexico. While historic details are sketchy, Eisenhower appears to have met privately with railway president Walter Tuohy during the three-day summit to discuss the bunker. Then, the day after Eisenhower departed, the congressional leadership wrote him an opaque letter on March 28, 1956: “This is to introduce Mr. J. George Stewart, Architect of the Capitol, who is calling upon you on matters of vital importance to the Congress of the United States.”
― Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die

“was a pretty shy and quiet child, but I had made my first friend on my own. After that day, my friend came over and said, “We can’t be friends anymore, Hiba. My mom said until this is over, we can’t be friends anymore.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“President Nixon and Kissinger were joined for the promotion ceremony by CIA director Richard Helms and Defense Secretary Laird; all the men were in a good mood, even Nixon was smiling and laughing. They’d just pulled off one of the great nuclear scares of the Cold War—and only the Soviets had noticed, just as intended. Over the months ahead, though, it became clear the feint had done little either to move forward peace talks in Vietnam or alter the U.S. balance with the Soviet Union. The government never received a single inquiry from an allied nation, nor did any reporter ever ask about it; the feints would remain secret until the 1980s. •”
― Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die

“The system left the Navy captain, Air Force major, or whoever happened to be on duty answering the phone in the Pentagon’s Joint War Room to choose the presidential successor. “A judgment [would] be made by the senior officer on duty in the JWR as to when he has in fact received a communication from the senior non-incapacitated member of the list,” the report explained. “The possibility exists that the man to wield Presidential authority in dire emergency might in fact be selected by a single field grade military officer.” Moreover,”
― Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die

“I have the greatest admiration for the private security officers, guys who are only making about $ 25,000 a year. We had often asked security guards, prior to 9/ 11, what they would do if a bomb went off and they saw a couple dead bodies. The consensus was always that they would run. But on September 11th, I had 60 guards working with me and not one ran. With the two towers burning, standing with bullhorns, keeping people moving out of the Towers, they never blinked.”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“After initial annoyance about the surprise drills, the Pentagon quickly saw value in the president’s interest. “It is the first time in years that they have a president who takes his role as Commander-in-Chief seriously,” a White House aide bragged. “They’re ecstatic.” Amid Vietnam, Watergate, and a relatively calm period of the Cold War in general, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford had shown little interest in the emergency procedures, which for the most part had continued to chug along far off the White House’s radar. Carter’s administration, on the other hand, ran the only full-scale activation of the Greenbrier congressional relocation facility—on cue, the Forsythe Associates team hauled hundreds of desks out of their warehouse on the resort grounds and—while the conference facilities were closed to the public—set up the exhibit hall as if Congress had successfully relocated there. Outside the small Forsythe Associates crew, none of the resort guests or staffers noticed. •”
― Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die

“book intends to capture how Americans lived that day,”
― Garrett M. Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

“During his first week on the job, McNamara sat down with the Pentagon’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG), which had just completed an intensive study, known as WSEG Report #50, that found that a Soviet surprise attack on only five locations—the White House, the Pentagon, Camp David, Raven Rock, and Mount Weather—would likely destroy all of the nation’s command structure. Even simply hitting the first two would likely wipe out the military command structure, since Raven Rock and Mount Weather weren’t normally manned with senior personnel. “Both the Presidential and the SecDef-JCS levels of command are presently subject to operational incapacitation by the same events,” the report explained. Hitting all the nation’s major military commands and leadership sites would involve attacking just fourteen installations—a”
― Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die

“Ever since the Truman administration, official U.S. war plans assumed that the Soviets would begin a nuclear exchange by exploding smuggled nuclear weapons inside their Washington, D.C., embassy and their U.N. mission in New York—thus ensuring that the opening salvo came without any warning whatsoever. In the early 1950s, the FBI had searched frantically for a nuclear weapon that a Brazilian informant told them had already been smuggled into one of the Soviet-bloc U.N. consulates in New York. They never found it—but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. Several”
― Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die

“crews, added to the unfolding chaos around Washington. It’s possible—perhaps even likely, given a study of the morning’s timeline—that reports of the Doomsday plane over the capital are what triggered concerns to evacuate the White House and activate COG procedures. NEACP’s takeoff just six minutes after American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon injected confusion”
― Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die