September 14, 2001: Open Lines - Callers Respond & React to 911, Day 4
Callers range from a young man in Georgia describing the strange quiet on normally busy streets to a black caller in Chicago who questions whether America truly includes all its citizens in times of crisis. A truck driver on the road to Arizona raises concerns about the vulnerability of the nation's supply chain. CNN transitions its coverage branding from "America Under Attack" to "America's New War," and Art muses about who decides these slogans and whether he will ever be important enough in the media to sit in on such meetings.
Art reads Tom Clancy's essay from the London Sunday Mail comparing the attacks to Pearl Harbor and describing the quiet, steely resolve of American military professionals. He closes the hour warning that the war dice are about to be rolled and that once they are, nobody can predict where they will land.
Key Moments
The End of the Innocence: Bell opens with Don Henley's 'The End of the Innocence' and tells the audience this has been one of the roughest weeks of his life - finally falling into bed for ten hours after running on six hours of sleep all week.
Falwell and Robertson blame America: Bell reads from the Washington Post the Falwell/Robertson 700 Club exchange blaming feminists, gays, the ACLU and abortion-rights supporters for the attacks - saying he didn't believe it until he read it himself.
Religious extremism there and here: After reading more of the televangelists' remarks, Bell directly compares them to bin Laden's writings - asking how different the two really are if you set them side by side without attribution.
What a decision for a President to have to make: Bell explains that fighters were scrambled toward both the second-tower plane and the Pentagon plane but arrived minutes late - and that only the President can authorize shooting down a civilian airliner.
Just nuke them: A caller repeatedly tells Bell to 'nuke them' as the response to the attacks. Bell presses again and again on what exactly that means - turning the country to glass? - until the caller can only repeat the phrase. Bell ends with an exasperated 'Sheesh.'