Editor’s Note: This article was adapted from the afterword to the 2003 paperback edition of William Langewiesche’s 2002 book, American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center. Langewiesche, who died in 2025, reflects here on reporting from Ground Zero as the only American journalist granted full access to the World Trade Center clean-up effort. You can read part one of the American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center series here; part two here; and part three here.
American Ground was originally an Atlantic series, and an attempt to respond usefully to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As it became clear that the magazine was committed to a long and heavily charged project about the deconstruction of the World Trade Center ruins, I wanted to take some emotional distance from the tragedy, and to approach the narrative as if I were looking back on current events from several decades into the future. The result would be, I hoped, like a “history in the present tense.” It was a formulation that came often to mind as I proceeded.
My unwillingness to participate in the public displays of grief was partly just personal. But I also believed that the emotionalism surrounding the site, though at its origins genuine and necessary, had grown into something less healthy—an overindulgence, sustained by political forces and the media, that rather than serving as a catharsis only deepened the social anguish. And I thought that if American Ground was to have lasting value, readers should not be manipulated; they would bring their own feelings and thoughts to the text. My job was to observe for them, not as an “objective” journalist or an earnest encyclopedist, but more openly in the first person, as their agent on the ground. I spent six months immersed at the site, usually seven days a week, and another five months writing. I witnessed many sad moments, particularly when accompanying some of the families of the dead who came to contemplate their loss—but I did not write about that, because their grief was private, or should have been, and it was not my subject. My subject was construction, or more precisely deconstruction—the dismantling of the tangled steel and concrete, and all that this entailed. Now, nearly two years after the World Trade Center collapses, I still believe that the only way to communicate the essence of the cleanup, including the complexity of the emotions involved, was to maintain the narrative’s detachment. In American Ground the idea was to catch a glimpse of America itself, or of a certain slice of it at a certain time—unruly, unscripted, and in action. In the mix lay the bad as well as the good, but the book turned out to be hopeful—even celebratory—and all the more so because it wasn’t trying to be. Judging from the overwhelmingly positive response that followed publication, the narrative detachment did not diminish the book’s meaning to readers, or its emotional impact.
But the responses ran the other way, too. Some readers interpreted my refusal to embrace heroic imagery as disrespectful of the dead, or fundamentally biased against firefighters. They were also angry because the book mentioned looting at the site by firemen as well as by policemen and construction workers, and in particular described a confrontation that broke out when a crushed fire truck was discovered with new blue jeans inside. The street demonstrations in New York that followed the publication of American Ground were local, union-driven affairs, but when some of the press picked up on the story, American Ground became “controversial.”
In New York I was asked by reporters if I found the reaction surprising, and I answered no. I had seen and described these very same emotions in action on the pile, as the ruins were known. Moreover, the emotions were not unusual. Solidarity with a group, the possessive embrace of disaster, a sense of privilege, the searing or bittersweet sensation of sorrow—to various degrees most of us have known these feelings. I knew that the protesters had been through a tough and disorienting experience—the deaths of friends, co-workers, and in a few cases family, followed by the distorting glare of publicity and hype. Now time had moved on, but the feelings remained strong. I had written that the cool-blooded engineers had needed to learn a lesson—that the various emotions at the site had to be accommodated if the larger community was to function and the work was to proceed. America is a dynamic mess, not a dictatorship of rationalists. Now I was learning something, too, about writing nonfiction. “History in the present tense” can be so fresh that it’s alive—and still very raw. The book was becoming a small part of the story it told.
But the book was always just a partial history. Had a calm and open conversation been possible, I would readily have admitted that the account was biased in a particular way—in its emphasis on the deconstruction job. That is not to say that it was biased in favor of one group over another. When I first arrived at the site, I had warned Department of Design and Construction Commissioner Ken Holden and Mike Burton, the construction “czar,” that my presence represented a risk to them, because I would write about the project’s failure—if such it proved to be—as readily as I would write about the project’s success. Though I ended by admiring both men for their performance at the site, for many months this was not a sure thing, any more than success itself was guaranteed. Indeed, some of the principal construction men (and Burton in particular) were taken aback by the candor with which I described their motivations and work.
But for better or worse I certainly did pay more attention to the construction leaders than to anyone else. They were my subject, and this was no secret. From the very start I saw their role as interesting and forward-looking, in part because their challenges all lay ahead. That was the premise of my initial approach, and of the book that resulted, which, as the subtitle indicates, is about the “unbuilding” process. I wanted to tell the story fully, and this sometimes required me to grapple with implications and cross-connections, most significantly the extraction of the dead and the increasingly volatile social dynamics on the pile. But whenever possible I avoided straying into unrelated areas, of which there were many.
It has been suggested that I must have been glad to be the only writer with free access to the inner world of the Trade Center site, but the opposite is true. There was obviously more happening there than I alone could know or describe. More important, exclusivity is a cheap trick; transparency is good for everyone, and I would have preferred it. The presence of the daily press would have served the useful role not only of informing the public but also of clarifying the participants’ views of themselves. It is worth remembering that the Trade Center site was an intensely chaotic place. A huge number of worthy efforts were being pursued in all directions and almost spontaneously, in many cases with admirably little direction from above. For the first few weeks there must have been two dozen chiefs, each doing good work and believing to varying degrees that he or she was the one in charge. Certainly there was room for a variety of experiences and impressions. Volunteers working in the food lines would have had a very different view from that of the telephone-repair people, the National Guard, the police officers at the perimeter gates, or the sanitation crews working ferociously to clean up the surrounding neighborhoods. All of them would correctly have seen their roles as necessary for the functioning of the whole. But I was not writing about them.
I would hardly have mentioned the firemen either, had they not played such a pivotal role in the process of the unbuilding. Despite what the public believed, after the search for survivors ended, and the dust and smoke suppression was taken over by civilian water crews, the firemen’s role was not primarily physical. Beyond the increasingly careful raking of fine debris, and the immediate handling of human remains, which others could have done, the firemen’s position was largely symbolic. Their presence was crucial nonetheless, a forceful reminder of the human consequences of the attack, and of the importance of keeping people’s emotions in mind; it was also, as I have described, a source of friction and resentment on the pile, and ultimately a political challenge to the progress of the deconstruction. But in the climate of the times in New York, even short and neutral descriptions of any role or action that was not “heroic” constituted dangerous territory.
The demonstrators’ anger was real, and though it often seemed based on misunderstandings of the book, it also grew from a fundamentally different view of the Trade Center experience. This was to be expected, and there will surely be other, different versions, in print, of the story that I told. In the meantime, the demonstrating firefighters legitimately wanted to register their opinion that American Ground was wrong and unfair. I was doing my job, and they were doing theirs. They chanted and held up signs for the cameras, inflated a giant plastic rat (a well-worn union prop), and went home.
Heavily involved in these demonstrations was a group, small but vocal, that organized a campaign to have the book withdrawn and destroyed. Among others, its members included civilians who in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks had volunteered at the site, or in other ways had come into close contact with the firefighters, and had embraced their humanity and grief. They called themselves the WTC Living History Project, and announced their ambition to record and publish the oral history of this important event in the national experience. First, though, they fought against what they perceived as the injustice of American Ground. They organized e-mail campaigns against the book, disrupted public events, impugned my motivations, accused me of plagiarism, and pored over the text for factual errors. They found of course people from the site who were willing to dispute some of my observations and perspectives, and they called into question some of my information. They circulated to the press a long electronic document in itemized form, in which they attempted to lay out their case. Predictably, they had a more heroic “united we stand” view of the Trade Center site than did I. Again, all of this generated publicity, especially of the local television and tabloid kind.
It was reassuring to know that before publication, American Ground had been heavily vetted by The Atlantic’s rigorous fact-checking department. For five months, two veteran checkers had gone over the text full-time, verifying statements and descriptions, reading and rereading primary documents, and cross-checking details, often with multiple independent sources. Typically, with the campaign against American Ground under way, The Atlantic did not retreat into a hostile posture but called its readers’ attention to the Living History Project’s compendium (which was posted on the internet) and published angry and critical letters, along with some admiring ones. With an eye on the specific points raised in the various accusatory documents, it also undertook an extensive review of the earlier fact-checking.
I was very sure about the essence of what I had written. But despite the enormous effort that had gone into getting the details right, it was not unlikely that factual errors had slipped in. American Ground is a tight book, but a long and complicated piece of reporting. The publication of the paperback edition has offered the opportunity to make a few corrections. For example, the office into which Peter Rinaldi and Frank Lombardi escaped after the 1993 bombing was not associated with Brown & Root, as I had written, but rather with what was then the independent law firm of Brown & Wood. But the really striking result of the fact-checking review was that on item after item, the accusations proved to be incorrect.
As might be expected, there were gray areas. The emotional state of the American Airlines flight attendant Betty Ong was described one way in initial press accounts and another way in some later ones; tapes of Ong’s phone call have not been made public. In the paperback edition, I have omitted any reference to her emotional state. Often the discrepancies involved not just sources and perceptions, but time frames. I was accused, for example, of underestimating the size of the Fire Department. Well, the Fire Department when? We stuck with the obviously approximate number (14,000) that the department itself had given to us as the most relevant count for the period in question.
Time and again there were fundamental misunderstandings by the book’s critics, either of the site or of the text. In a passage about Mike Burton’s difficulty in ceding power as the work matured, I had written that “by the spring” the construction company Bovis had taken over day-to-day management of the job. The critics countered with a January 1 date, confusing the moment when Bovis became the sole “prime” contractor (initially a paperwork and billing rearrangement) with the much slower process of gaining significant operational control.
One of the peripheral points of contention by the Living History Project was that there had never been, as I had written, an attempt (presumably by workers with a cutting torch and heavy tools) to break into a huge Bank of Nova Scotia vault containing gold and silver, underground in the old H&M Railroad station at the site. I knew that the bank had denied an attempted theft at the time, even as the bullion was being urgently transferred to another location; police thought otherwise, and said so to the press. Now in the Living History Project document, a Port Authority police lieutenant was cited as saying that there had been no sign of an attempted break-in. Later, to the press, he wondered why no one had spoken to him. I was in the vault several times, and heard about a break-in attempt firsthand from the police and others standing guard there, some of them with shotguns. I was also told about it by an independent engineer who had a supervisory role in helping with the removal of the bullion, and by city and Port Authority officials who were directly involved. Contemporary newspaper reports in The New York Times and elsewhere refer to an attempted break-in. In the end there seemed to be no good reason to change the text.
As noted, these criticisms and more were posted by the Living History Project on the internet, and some were offered up at the public demonstrations and to the press. I responded repeatedly to the more important points, but tried to avoid sinking into the swamp of confused allegations and misinterpretations, many of them based on erroneous and perhaps naive assumptions. Some of American Ground’s critics seemed to be unacquainted with the concept of “spin,” or with the notion that people in nominal positions of authority might not know what was actually transpiring on the ground. In the free-for-all of the pile, the titular authorities often didn’t even know that they didn’t know. In such circumstances, there were frequent discrepancies between official reports and reality.
One genuine error that did emerge pertained to the early dispute between Port Authority police officers and firemen over whether to free a dead Port Authority policeman’s body by expeditiously amputating his leg. Though the book’s description supports the firemen’s view that amputation was the right thing to do, I wrote, “The police pointed out—correctly—that no dead fireman would have had his leg cut off.” Information received later suggested that there were cases I was unaware of in which firemen’s bodies had indeed been freed through amputation. As a result, in the paperback edition the sentence now reads, “The police maintained that no dead fireman …” The rest of the passage is unchanged, however. The Port Authority police officers were indeed angry because they believed that the firemen were interested only in searching for their own. The officers’ view was too crude to be fair, and I described it as such. But there is no doubt that for an astonishingly long time (months), the various categories of the dead were treated with different levels of ceremony and respect. The denial of this pattern was among the more audacious criticisms of American Ground. The differential treatment of the dead constituted one of the most glaring realities of the Trade Center site, and it exacerbated the tribal resentments that occasionally erupted into fights.
I wrote about looting at the site in a few passages. I was told about it first by policemen on the pile soon after I arrived. The looting started before the South Tower fell, as I wrote, “with the innocuous filching of cigarettes and soda pop,” and it rapidly spread and became more ambitious in the hours and weeks afterward. It involved firemen as well as other groups at the site. This was an open secret on the pile, well known to people there, as well as to more distant police and city officials, and to some reporters. After the campaign against American Ground began, a number of eyewitnesses came forward (including police officers, city officials, construction workers, and reporters) and privately offered me their moral support. A few went further and offered, if need be, though tentatively and with trepidation, to go public in the book’s defense with personal accounts of the acts that they had seen. I thanked them, but because I still hoped that the book would not become the carrying horse for this particular topic, I turned them down.
I included what little I wrote about looting because the looting was pervasive, and it affected working relations on the pile. To have glossed over it would have been dishonest, and would have required me to omit descriptions of some of the most significant social challenges that faced the project. It’s obvious that only a small number of people engaged in the looting. But their actions greatly exacerbated the frictions on the pile, and for that reason became a necessary part of the story. As for the specific misdeeds, I never felt they were pertinent to my subject. In the story of the deconstruction it was the tribal perceptions of the misdeeds that counted, whether right or wrong. But that point was lost in the din of controversy. In tabloid reduction, American Ground became simply “the book that accuses the firemen of looting.”
The most controversial passage turned out to be the description of an argument that broke out on the pile when jeans from a retail store were found in a fire truck that had been crushed and buried under the pile. One of the book’s critics, a professional writer independent of the Living History Project but with ties to firefighters, put considerable effort into reconstructing that fire truck’s final moments on September 11, to make the case that jeans from a retail store (apparently the brand was Structure, not Gap, as I had been told) had essentially become enmeshed with the truck as it was hammered down through shopping arcades rather than having been placed in the truck before it was buried. A reconstruction of the truck’s fate had no bearing, however, on the story I was telling in American Ground. That story was strictly related to the emotional and divisive social dynamics of a day in late fall, three months after the towers came down. It was not an account of whatever happened or did not happen on September 11, and it was certainly not intended as an exposé of the last moments of the fire truck’s crew. Nor was it the report of a rumor: Detailed descriptions of the argument, and the immediate context in which it took place, were provided to me shortly afterward by multiple independent eyewitnesses. These were people well known to me, who for months had proved to be reliable and steady sources, and who held important jobs on the pile. The reactions of the construction workers seemed to me to be unnecessarily provocative—as my description sought to make clear. But the argument over the jeans did not come out of nowhere. It occurred against the background of differential treatment of the dead, as well as of extensive looting in which firemen were known to have been involved. By placing the episode after these subjects had been explored, casting it in the past tense, and deliberately suppressing the identities of those involved, I tried to keep narrative attention focused on what mattered: a growing threat to the social order on the pile, which seemed to me to be a more important subject than looting, and certainly more pertinent to the unbuilding. I made that point explicitly a few sentences later: “The site would never stand united, as sloganeers said it should.”
That said, it is clear that the passage has been misinterpreted by some of the public, including people beyond the book’s critics, as an accusation. One reason is that in the course of the campaign against the book, pieces of the episode were frequently torn from context and acquired a life of their own as printed snippets and disembodied sound bites. But misinterpretation may also be due to my unintentionally ambiguous choice of wording. The construction “It was hard to avoid the conclusion that … while hundreds of doomed firemen had climbed through the wounded buildings, this particular crew had been engaged in something else entirely” can be read as my own assessment, rather than, as was intended, the explanation of an assessment by others who were preconditioned to construe it that way. Therefore in the paperback edition I have added at the start of the sentence the phrase “In their eyes” to clarify my meaning.
The World Trade Center site was an extremely complex place, loaded with emotion and political symbolism, full of action and confusion, with many interpretations possible. Having restricted my view to the engineering and deconstruction process, I wrote about it with complete candor, expressing my opinions openly, as I always do. I realized that the approach I took might offend a certain number of people who subscribed to different views—including the essentially two-dimensional one that has received so much publicity, and depicts the Trade Center project in maudlin and “heroic” terms. I do not perceive the project that way—and did not when I was there. More impressive, I felt, was another sort of American greatness that emerged at the site—a complex weave that included diverse acts and motivations, and also a culture of improvisational genius that seemed enormously encouraging about the future. There was no need to engage in propaganda. I wrote about the Trade Center with the assumption that candid descriptions would serve the subject best.
The post Postscript to American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center appeared first on The Atlantic.
