It started out a day like any other for Gustav Niebuhr. He got on the express train near his home in New Jersey as usual. But as the train approached the famous and beautiful New York City skyline, Niebuhr saw smoke rising from the north tower of the World Trade Center.
It was clear that today would not be like any other. By the time The New York Times reporter reached the newsroom, the city was buzzing with news of a terrorist attack.
Seeing the events unfold on the TV in the newsroom was different from other catastrophic events Niebuhr had watched on TV as a reporter. This was too close to home. To be exact, two miles to the south of the Times’ building. During the chaos Niebuhr said, “Everything seemed to be slowing down.”
He called his loved ones to check on their safety, e-mailing his wife because the phone lines to New Jersey were jammed.
Niebuhr’s shared his personal story as a journalist at a lecture full of students, faculty and USM community members last Wednesday as part of Media Fest 2002.
Media Fest was sponsored by the Media Studies program and the Maine Humanities Council.
Niebuhr gave a personal view of what it was like in The New York Times newsroom on Sept. 11 and how the event was covered.
Currently, he is a visiting fellow at Princeton University, but was a journalist for 20 years prior, spending more than seven years as a national correspondent for The Times, and he got his start at a small paper in rural western Massachusetts.
Even with years of experience covering tragic events Niebuhr said, “Nothing could have prepared me and my fellow Times reporters for this event. A reporter must rise to the challenge of describing the unimaginable, and do it with a series of deadlines.”
Sept. 11 was very “intimate” for those in the city, especially those who saw it happen, he said. Being a religion correspondent, Niebuhr’s assignments after Sept. 11 frequently dealt with the Islamic faith. He was responsible for covering the backlash that U.S. Muslims felt after the attack, and reported the thoughts of U.S. Muslims who condemned the attack.
Niebuhr distinctly remembers three assignments from that time period: A story on sermons preached the weekend after Sept. 11, visiting a Fayetteville military base and its mosque, and spending a day with a hermit in Philadelphia.
On the other hand, Niebuhr thinks that there were stories that should have been covered by The Times but never were, like the “anti-backlash,” or outreach to U.S. Muslims by their non-Muslim neighbors, or the increase in interfaith activity.
“This is good stuff that actually happened,” he said, “and it was important.”
Niebuhr reflected on seeing the thousands of missing persons posters plastering walls everywhere after the attack. He said that the flyers “renewed the sense of the tragedy’s enormity.” When it came down to it, Niebuhr said, “You couldn’t leave it behind you at the end of the day.”
One of the last projects Niebuhr worked on as a Times employee was to help create profiles of victims lost on Sept. 11. He said that talking to family members was rough but at the same time “very rewarding work.”
Niebuhr said that for weeks after the attack, anyone who called would ask him “Is everyone you know alright?”
For a week or so he resented the question.
He soon realized however, that there were still thousands searching for loved ones and that his feelings were selfish. These people were only trying to cope. They were “feeling their way in a new landscape.”
Staff writer Natalie Frye can be contacted at [email protected]