00:00And the first plane came in, we thought it was a pilot error, maybe a health issue, and tragic.
00:07And then, of course, the South Tower was hit, and then we knew it was terrorism.
00:13And just grief and sadness and watching those images play out.
00:19For me, it got real when I looked down the south lawn of the White House,
00:25and we could see then the Pentagon was on fire.
00:29And so we were quite concerned at that point.
00:33And then a few minutes later, when Flight 93 turned back, headed towards Washington,
00:42the Secret Service burst into our office and said, run for your life.
00:47Oh, my goodness.
00:48And we ran.
00:50And I will never forget seeing the women throw their high heels off on the north lawn so they could
00:57run faster to get out of the complex.
01:00So the staff, we all exited and dispersed.
01:06And what happened then for the next few hours is D.C. is mainly bridges, the Key Bridge, 14th Street
01:15Bridge.
01:15So everyone was trying to get out into the suburbs.
01:19And the traffic, we just were stuck for hours, sitting in the car, listening to the radio of all the
01:27things that were happening to people we knew.
01:31I think people are capable of things that they don't know they're capable of.
01:35In the face of that knowledge that we were under attack, Tom's plane crashed at 9.03 Minnesota time.
01:46So they took off 7.42.
01:51So five minutes, four minutes after 93 took off, the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
01:57So, yes, they had the advantage of knowing that we were under attack and it wasn't just a hijacking.
02:06And how do I make sense of it?
02:09I believe that hearing the flight recorder, the cockpit flight recorder, everybody was very calm.
02:15Nobody's screaming or crying or they are very deliberately trying to get into the cockpit.
02:21Because they believed, I know Tom believed, that somehow they could figure out how to land the plane.
02:28And I think humans are capable of things that they don't think they're capable of.
02:34They're capable of courage and compassion and empathy and bravery and the ability to act.
02:43And when faced with really, really difficult situations.
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