The Morning Nobody Came to the Hospitals

September 11 was the most traumatic event of my career. Easily. I think it was that for our entire broadcast.

The broadcast was 60 Minutes II, which began in 1999 and ran through 2005. That morning showed how differently we sometimes worked from the original program. At the time, 60 Minutes did not really like covering breaking news stories. I did. So as the boss of 60 Minutes II, I sent everyone we had into the story and tried to cover every angle we could find.

Scott Pelley led the coverage and was covered in ash that day. We eventually found ourselves responsible for prime time every night for roughly ten days. We handled five full hours, followed by half of prime time for another three or four nights.

One of the assignments I handed out that morning seemed fairly routine at first, but it became the part of the day I have never really been able to put down. The city was setting up emergency hospital facilities across Manhattan, putting cots in place, staffing medical stations, and preparing for the wounded. I sent someone to check on those locations.

He continued checking in throughout the morning. Nobody was being brought to them. There were no injured people being treated in any of those units.

That was when we began to understand the shape of what had happened. Everybody had died. The people who escaped had escaped healthy, and they got out of the city as quickly as they could, along with almost everyone else who left that day. There was no middle category. The absence itself, those rows of empty cots with people standing beside them waiting, told the story before any official numbers could.

I was not in charge of the second night of prime time. I took over the rest beginning Thursday, because the attacks had happened on a Tuesday. But on that second night, I went down to Ground Zero. I was allowed through and went in with the police.

It was one of the most difficult scenes I have ever witnessed. It was almost as if you could feel the souls in the air.

I lost some friends there. I lost the son of a dear friend.

For all of us, covering that story was the biggest and most important thing we ever did, and it never really leaves you. If you were in New York, if you lived there, it does not end. These most recent twenty fifth anniversary commemorations were most powerful in New York for exactly that reason. It does not leave us. It is as if we had been at Pearl Harbor and Pearl Harbor was our hometown.