In the days immediately following 9/11, Gail Sheehy went to Middletown, New Jersey, a community that lost more people in the World Trade Center than any other outside New York City. For the better part of two years, Sheehy followed the women, men and children who remained after the devastation and who continue to put their lives back together. Sheehy's Middletown, America:  One Town's Passage from Trauma to Hope , was published by Random House in September 2003 and received wide critical acclaim. Yet for Sheehy, the Middletown community and the nation, the story continues and threat remains.

In her book, and later in a series of articles for the New York Observer, Sheehy continues to tell the story of four widowed moms from New Jersey who turned their sorrow into action and became formidable witnesses to the failures of the country’s leaders to connect the dots before September 11. Sheehy follows the four moms as they fight White House attempts to thwart the 9/11 Commission.
 
In addition to her articles for the New York Observer, Sheehy is regularly featured on radio and television coverage about the failures before and the aftermath of September 11.  

Here is a sampling of her work:

by Gail Sheehy

FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, THE WHITE HOUSE STONEWALLED THE MILD-MANNERED CHAIRMAN OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION. BIG MISTAKE.

Would you pretend for a minute that I'm the president?"

Tom Kean didn't laugh. He recognized the voice of Andrew Card, George W. Bush's chief of staff. Card said the president needed to replace Henry Kissinger, the chairman of the 9/11 commission who was resigning, just days after being appointed, amid conflict-of-interest allegations. "Would you do it?" Card asked.

"Yup."

With that one word, the web of denial and deception that surrounded the colossal failure of the nation's leadership to defend America against a terrorist attack began to come apart.

For if Bush had expected Kean-the former Republican governor of New Jersey and, like Bush, the scion of an East Coast patrician family-to provide cover for the White House, he was in for a surprise. "Some people mistake his good manners for weakness," says Al Felzenberg, the commission's spokesman, who has known Kean for more than 30 years. Kean proved to be everything that Kissinger wasn't: committed to openness, determined to pry out the administration's secrets, and, most of all, willing to learn, from the weight of the evidence, that the White House version of 9/11-that "everyone was at fault, so no one was at fault"-was patently false. Under Kean's leadership, the commission excavated enough truths to flood bookstores and computer browsers with a scorching 500-page report that lays bare the shocking lack of preparedness on the part of America's leaders to protect the nation against foreign attack. "They stood up to the administration when the Bush folks were about to submarine them," says Senator Bob Graham, who chaired an earlier congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

Kean has a simple explanation for why he took his mission to heart: He's from New Jersey. The state lost 691 residents on 9/11, one-quarter of all the victims in the World Trade Center. Several of Kean's friends were killed; his tennis partner of 20 years was on United Flight 93, the plane that would have crashed into the White House or the Capitol had the passengers not wrestled the hijackers to the ground. As Kean would learn in the course of the hearings, it was an act of courage and common sense not displayed by anyone in the nation's leadership that day.

Three weeks after 9/11, Tom Kean had risen to the pulpit at a memorial mass at the cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. "I remember looking out and seeing women holding infants who'd been born after their husbands were killed in the towers, and others who were pregnant," he recalls. "It was so emotionally overwhelming, I almost couldn't speak."

Within a week of agreeing to chair the commission, he met with representatives of the families, including the four widowed "Jersey Girls" who had pushed relentlessly for an independent investigation, and who had personally grilled Kissinger about his refusal to disclose his list of foreign clients. They had one urgent plea, Kean says: "It's got to be transparent. Don't just go and hide in a dark room. You've got to share everything with the American people. I said, 'We will.'"

He was true to his word. In 12 public hearings over a period of 15 months, the country's political leaders and intelligence chiefs were called to account and bureaucrats fumbled for excuses. And the whole spectacle was televised-even as the administration tried everything in its power to kill off, tie up, delay, and ignore the commission's search for the facts.

At the conclusion of the hearings, in late June, Kean agreed to a lengthy interview on the triumphs and regrets of his chairmanship. He had grown accustomed to seeing me at the hearings, which I had covered for Pacifica Radio. To talk, Kean had to step out of a Sensitive Compartmental Information Facility, a secret vault in the Capitol building, where he was poring over classified documents in preparation for the final report. He had spent much of the last year taking six-hour round-trips by train from his home near New Jersey's horse country to sit in these inner sanctums, where neither tape recorders nor cell phones may be used, and where even the notes he took had to be left behind in a safe. His long, lean frame seemed to bear a weight that hadn't been there when the commission's work began. His gap-toothed smile had grown a little more wan. He was appalled at the poisonous partisanship of Washington: "It's worse than it's ever been, he says," putting the best face on a process even he admits was frustrating, "There's a lot wrong with the country. But while I was sitting in the Oval Office"-during the single interview Bush finally agreed to do, but only off the record and only with DickCheney at his side-"I thought to myself: Where else in the world could private citizens, half of them not in the same party, grill the president?"

What Kean-who seems congenitally unable to be confrontational-didn't say is that he had to shame the president into sitting for even that brief session. For months, Bush had shown disrespect, if not outright contempt, for the investigation, refusing to turn over documents that included crucial briefings given to him on the Al Qaeda threat in the summer of 2001. When Kean and two other commissioners were finally allowed a glimpse of selected briefings, they were not permitted to copy or transcribe them, only to take notes that were reviewed by the White House.

Being treated like a pesky underling clearly did not sit well with Kean, but he kept his frustration to himself. When Condoleezza Rice, Cheney, and the president refused to testify, he didn't subpoena them; instead, he repeated week after week that "I'm hopeful they'll make the right decision." And when Rice finally did appear, commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste maneuvered her into giving up the title of the seminal CIA briefing written for the president on August 6, 2001, five weeks before the attacks: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S." That settled the question of whether the president had been warned; as public pressure increased, the administration was forced to release the entire document.

Yet Kean's diplomatic nature cut both ways. He agreed to water down some staff reports critical of the White House and backed away from following up on the question of foreign financing of the hijackers. Senator Graham was worried that the final report would gloss over the crucial issue of a radical Islamic network-inside the United States and funded by Saudi Arabia. "I believe that support network is still in place and preparing to facilitate the next attack," he told me, noting that the redacted pages in his committee's report contained evidence of foreign financing for 2 of the 19 hijackers. "My contention is that significant support was being given to all 19," he said, "but the FBI was not interested in answering that question for our inquiry."

And the Kean commission's staff statement blandly concluded, "We found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded Al Qaeda." (Kean is a member of the board of Amerada Hess, an oil company that does business in Saudi Arabia.)

"I think [Kean] understood that he had a limited amount of political currency to spend and spent it wisely," says Jamie Gorelick, one of the commission's five Democratic members and a formidable question- er. But, she notes, "when we really needed to say, 'We have to have this information and have it now,' he would come through for us."

On the surface, Kean and Bush have much in common. Both come from privileged backgrounds; Kean's father and Bush's grandfather served together in Congress. Kean is a genuine East Coast aristocrat whose ancestry tracks back to one of New Jersey's first families-"or second, or third," he says with a chuckle. Both he and Bush battled dyslexia and were dismal students, but privilege got them into Ivy League colleges, where they did well enough. Kean graduated from Princeton and studied to be a teacher at Columbia Teacher's College. By the time the White House called, he had been out of politics for almost 15 years. He had turned down offers of Cabinet positions from presidents of both parties-George H.W. Bush and Clinton-and had resisted calls by the GOP to run for the Senate after his two terms as governor in the 1980s. For more than a decade, he had been tucked away in the hills of north Jersey as president of a small liberal arts college, Drew University, content to teach history, serve on tame presidential commissions on youth and women, and play lots of tennis.

For much of the commission's first year, Kean kept a low profile. But in December 2003 his attitude began to shift. The commission had discovered that even though the administration insisted that no one could have imagined terrorists using planes as missiles, the government had picked up warnings of precisely such plots since at least 1991. Investigators had also confirmed that as early as 1999, the nation's intelligence apparatus had identified three of the future hijackers as "notorious" terrorists connected to an Al Qaeda "operational cadre," and yet had allowed them to enter the country, rent an apartment in San Diego from an FBI informant, and ultimately board the plane they would crash into the Pentagon even after they had set off airport metal detectors.

Kean was getting angry-and worried that the government was not doing enough to prevent another attack. On December 3, he told CBS that "I do not believe [9/11] had to happen." He added: "There are people that, if I was doing the job, certainly would not be in the position that they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed."

It was a statement the White House never expected to hear from Tom Kean. A Bush spokesman promptly shot back: "There is nothing that we have seen that leads us to believe September 11th could have been prevented." But Kean never backed off.

Kean is haunted by what he has learned, down to the minutiae. He can recite like the birthdays of his children the precise times when the nation's air-security apparatus picked up signs of disaster on each of the four planes. He struggles with the knowledge that had the airlines and the government responded in time, at least one of the planes-Flight 93, the one carrying his friend-could have, and should have, been saved. He runs through the evidence once more: By 8:24 that morning, before any of the planes had crashed, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Secret Service knew that Middle Eastern men had hijacked more than one plane. "But," notes Kean, "neither the American Airlines nor the United Airlines crisis centers, nor the FAA crisis center, think to issue a general warning to all airplanes: 'Watch out, cockpit security-multiple hijackings.'"

It's precisely the kind of detail some of the 9/11 families were hoping the commission would focus on. They were particularly anxious to see the commission produce a timeline of the actions and inactions of leaders including Bush, Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the morning of September 11-an analysis that might answer the question that consumed them: "Who knew what, when did they know it, and what did they do about it?"

But that detailed timeline never came.

Instead, the commission's final report, released in July, was focused on "just the facts," Joe Friday style; it didn't include the more interpretive staff reports, or transcripts of witness interviews in which excuses were laid bare and secrets revealed. It was a way to avoid charges of partisanship, to preserve the commission's unanimity, and, Senator Graham suggests, to limit censorship from the White House. "I'm sure they didn't want the report combed over for months with lots of pages cut out," he says, "the way ours was." (For a more detailed analysis of the report, see www.motherjones. com/911).

The family members felt let down by the commission's measured assessment, particularly its refusal to name names and lay blame. "Every time we asked a question about the total absolute failure in communication between the leaders of the country and the lead agencies that are supposed to protect us from attack," two of the widows, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie Van Aucken, told me after the final hearing, "the staffers would say the same thing: 'The outcome wouldn't have been any different if the leadership had gone from top down.'"

Yet the commission forced Americans to confront for the first time the ugly truths about 9/11. The report amplified the note Kean first sounded last December-that the tragedy could have been prevented, and that the blame went all the way to the top. The White House was left on the defensive, unable to refute damaging conclusions including the finding-which Cheney continued to refuse to accept-that there had been no collaboration between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

Asked for his own assessment of the commission's work, Kean is characteristically diplomatic. "We're very grateful the president has said he'll listen," he says. "For a while, we were afraid we were going to be up against closed minds." In public statements, he tends to accentuate the positive: "We are safer than we were-no question about it."

Never mind that the commission unearthed a long list of evidence to the contrary: The administration has failed to over- haul security agencies that have been exposed as fatally flawed; spies, law enforcement investigators, and government analysts still aren't prepared to fight a mobile, high-tech, global army of jihadists; and, except for CIA director George Tenet, not one of the leaders who failed to prevent the catastrophe has been pushed out.

It's a troubling litany that Kean knows all too well. "I didn't say we're safe," he qualifies. "I said safer."

This article ran in the August 2004 edition of Mother Jones.