On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 al-Qaeda hijackers took control of four commercial airplanes. Two hit the World Trade Center’s twin towers in Lower Manhattan, one struck the Pentagon and a fourth crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Nearly 3,000 people died that morning, most of them in New York.
Twenty-five years later, the stories that still stand out are the ones built around small interruptions: a school run, a doctor’s appointment, a late-running interview, a meeting that moved across the street. Those changes of plan kept Howard Lutnick, Larry Silverstein, Jim Pierce and Mitt Romney out of the towers on 9/11.
Lutnick, then CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, worked from the North Tower’s 105th floor and was normally at his desk by 6 a.m. That morning, his wife had him take their son to school instead. He later said it was his son Kyle’s first day of kindergarten. His phone kept ringing without connecting that morning; he later learned it was his brother Gary trying to reach him to say goodbye. Gary went to work as usual and was among the 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees who died.
Silverstein had signed a 99-year lease on the Twin Towers weeks earlier and held daily breakfast meetings at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the North Tower’s 106th floor. His wife booked him a dermatologist appointment for that morning instead. He later recalled that his children Roger and Lisa were both running late to the same meeting, and his aide Geoffrey Wharton left breakfast early and rode the elevator down at 8:44 a.m., two minutes before the plane hit. No one else at the restaurant survived.
Jim Pierce, a managing director at Aon Corporation and a cousin of former President George W. Bush, had a meeting planned on one of the South Tower’s top floors. The group grew too large, so it moved to a nearby building at the last minute. Twelve people never got word of the change, and 11 died. Pierce watched the second plane hit from next door and said, 'I knew we were under attack.'
Mitt Romney, then president of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics, had planned to unveil the Games’ torchbearers at a press conference blocks from the towers. A funding dispute in Congress over Olympic security money kept him in Washington instead. He later wrote, 'We had planned to be in New York City on the 11th.'
Other accounts in the same circle follow the same pattern. Michael Lomonaco stopped to get his glasses adjusted and survived. Sarah Ferguson missed a meeting after an interview ran long. Jimmy Dunne was 50 miles north trying to qualify for a golf championship. Mark Wahlberg canceled his seat on American Airlines Flight 11 a week earlier, and Seth MacFarlane missed the same flight by minutes.
The numbers come first: nearly 3,000 dead, 658 lost from Cantor Fitzgerald, 66 dead at Sandler O’Neill, 11 dead after a meeting moved. Behind every number is a schedule, a building and a decision that did or did not happen in time. Power leaves a paper trail, and on 9/11 that trail is written in minutes.
