U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh reflects on why the 9/11 terrorists attacked the United States, saying they hated the U.S. Constitution, American values and freedom of speech. Kavanaugh’s remarks highlight the broader debate over the motivations behind the September 11 attacks and the freedoms at the heart of American democracy.
Watch the full remarks and Kavanaugh’s comments on 9/11, terrorism, the Constitution, freedom of speech and American values.
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Watch the full remarks and Kavanaugh’s comments on 9/11, terrorism, the Constitution, freedom of speech and American values.
#BrettKavanaugh #911 #September11 #SupremeCourt #911Attacks #USConstitution #FreedomOfSpeech #Terrorism #America #USNews
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00:00It's because they hate our Constitution, which I carry with me all the time.
00:06They hate our values. They hate our freedom of religion.
00:09They hate our freedom of speech.
00:11And we have preserved that in the 25 years since.
00:17We've preserved a lot as a country and thrives as a country, notwithstanding what happened.
00:24In the wake of September 11th, Jimmy was talking about resiliency.
00:27I would say a message for the students, too, is we have much more in common as Americans.
00:3325 years later, as I look back, I'm so grateful to be American, so proud to be American.
00:39Sure, mistakes have been made, of course. Difficult decisions.
00:43Presidents have no-win decisions.
00:46A lot of the decisions that presidents face are, you know, here's a bad option and here's a worse option,
00:52and we don't know which is which.
00:53And that's the life of a president most days.
00:57And if you can second-guess, and when things go bad, they're going to pay the price in popularity.
01:03And Iraq had a lot of negative moments as well.
01:07So I think that's the nature of warfare.
01:11It goes up and down with popularity.
01:13But don't let that detract from your understanding of the potential for unity and the shared values.
01:20I mean, the reason they attacked us is because they hate our Constitution, which I carry with me all the
01:28time.
01:28They hate our values.
01:29They hate our freedom of religion.
01:31They hate our freedom of speech.
01:34And we have preserved that in 25 years since.
01:39We've preserved a lot as a country and thrived as a country, notwithstanding what happened.
01:45So, yeah, the students, Notre Dame students, you've got to get in the arena, okay?
01:53We can leave all the naysayers and all the pundits.
01:57They can all come from the Ivy Leagues and they can, you know, and they can all, from afar, in
02:03their very cushy, you know, boxes,
02:06they can describe what could happen, what should happen.
02:08Now, that's not for us, okay?
02:11We get into the mix.
02:14When you get in the mix, it's good.
02:16There's a thing McNamara used to refer to, the fog of war.
02:21This is not perfect.
02:23Nothing is perfect.
02:25Everything that Monk did wasn't perfect.
02:27I can assure you, everything that I did was not perfect, okay?
02:31But you've got to be willing to get in the arena to make hard decisions.
02:36And then the reality, which the justice brought up, is these are not, like, good and bad.
02:42I mean, like, I had one meaningful guy from South Dakota had come in the early days after 9-11,
02:49and his name was Kurt Higg.
02:51And he said to me, look, this is good versus evil.
02:54Your job is very simple.
02:56Do what's right.
02:58You know what the right thing to do is?
03:00Just do it.
03:01And don't worry about the consequences, whether it was guaranteeing the money and the benefits and the education.
03:10You know, it was worth the risk.
03:12But that, you know, Notre Dame people are not, we're not built to be up on the 15th row commenting
03:17on how interesting that is.
03:20Leave that to Brown and Harvard and all those people.
03:23All right?
03:24That's not for us.
03:33I want to be an advocate for international studies and travel.
03:39If you're just here, your whole perspective is different.
03:43I've been to 90 countries because of Notre Dame.
03:47I've seen the best and the worst.
03:49I've seen the richest and the poorest.
03:51And once you've had that experience, you can't rush to judgment.
03:55You just have to figure out the complex nature.
03:58I've been in the Middle East many times.
04:00I've listened to people from all sides there.
04:02I've been in Lebanon and Israel and Palestine and so on.
04:06And the more you're there and you listen to all the experts, it's really complicated.
04:11All those areas have histories.
04:13They have conflicts that go back 500 years or 1,000 years.
04:17So the more that you get to appreciate the complexity of the world, the more that you can be informed
04:24in these hard decisions that people have to make on our behalf.
04:28We're out of time, unfortunately.
04:30Let me get one last question in and I have three things I want to ask.
04:35Maybe I'll ask them all and you can answer one of the questions.
04:37So here are my three final questions.
04:42If you can, can you pick out one element of your own life story?
04:47How did 9-11 change things for you?
04:50Obviously, all four of you, it was a pivotal bit of your life.
04:55Second question.
04:59What did the nation do?
05:01What did we do best after 9-11?
05:04It's inevitable we're going to focus on our wars,
05:07which were, at best, we could say not successful.
05:11But what did we do best as a nation after 9-11?
05:17Thirdly, maybe you might say,
05:18what should those who were not born, who are students, undergraduate students,
05:22what should they take?
05:24If you would leave them with one thing about 9-11, what would that be?
05:28Jenny, maybe we'll start with you.
05:30Sure.
05:30So I'll speak to that last question and just kind of reiterate,
05:33you know, students, even if you were to live on 9-11,
05:379-11 is part of your story because it's part of the story of our nation.
05:41In the same way that I teach my children about Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Gettysburg
05:45and many other kind of nation-forming moments that occurred before my lifetime,
05:50I hope that you teach your own children about 9-11.
05:54And to the student who asked astutely this morning, well, how do I do that, right?
05:59Part of what we've tried to do today is arm you with stories
06:01that can become part of your own remembrance of 9-11 that you can share in the future.
06:07I think that's part of our responsibility as citizens, again,
06:10to kind of get our arms around this.
06:11Now, it's hard to get your arms around something as big as 9-11.
06:14We've, I hope, been able to humanize it today through the stories of these four different people
06:19who had four different experiences.
06:21But I did also want to just suggest a small handful of reading.
06:25I'm going to give you some homework, optional homework,
06:27but I hope that you might look up a few of these pieces of what, for me,
06:31are seminal pieces of 9-11 journalism.
06:33And then you can kind of, again, absorb these stories.
06:37And many of these are stories of particular people and particular heroes.
06:40I'm going to look at the titles because I want it to be Google-able for you.
06:44Okay, so look up a piece from the New York Times in May of 2002
06:47called Fighting to Live as the Towers Died.
06:50This is a meticulous and very well-put-together, essentially,
06:53oral history of last phone calls and emails out of the towers before they collapsed.
06:57It's very moving, and a lot of work went into this.
07:00This is the piece that helped identify what a young man named Wells Crowther
07:05was doing in the final hour of his life.
07:07I think he worked for Jimmy's firm, if I recall correctly.
07:09He did.
07:10So this is a person who was, at the time, not much older than you, students.
07:14He was, I think, just a couple of years out of our frenemy, Boston College,
07:18and was working for Jimmy's firm.
07:20His parents didn't know what the end of his life had looked like
07:24until this piece where a number of survivors said the same thing to the New York Times.
07:29There was this man wearing a red bandana who helped me down the stairs.
07:32Well, that man in the red bandana turned out to be this 24-year-old volunteer firefighter and trader.
07:38I think he was a trader.
07:39Sales trader.
07:40Sales trader, yep.
07:41Who, at the end of his life, instead survived the impact, and instead of just leaving the building,
07:46decided he was going to devote whatever time he had left to getting other people out.
07:50And that trademark red bandana made him, again, findable for his family.
07:54So Google Wells Crowther.
07:55There's a lot of material about him, including a movie, I believe.
07:59Read a piece from the New Yorker called The Real Heroes Are Dead.
08:03This is a story of a guy named Rick Riscorla, who was the head of security at Morgan Stanley,
08:08and whose preparation and his actions on that day saved thousands of his Morgan Stanley colleagues.
08:14This is a piece that's 20-something years old, I think, and I've read it a bunch of times.
08:17It's beautiful.
08:19Read a piece that just is in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine.
08:23It's called Kevin Dowdell's Boys, and it's the story of a fire lieutenant who lost his life in the towers
08:29and how it impacted his firehouse, the fire department more broadly, and then his own family.
08:34So, again, through the lens of one particular fireman, you'll get to know a little bit better
08:38the sacrifices made by first responders on that day and their heroism and sacrifice.
08:44One of the really affecting parts of that piece is a recounting of some of the conversations had
08:48by the survivors of this particular firehouse, the guys who were not on duty that day.
08:53And one of the questions they remember tossing around with each other afterwards was,
08:57did the commander who was on site that day make a mistake when he told firefighters reporting for duty
09:04to go into the building and try to save people who were trapped?
09:07Was that a mistake?
09:07Because a firefighter should have been able to look at that building and tell that it was coming down.
09:13And these guys, their conclusion is, no.
09:16How could the fire department, the New York City fire department,
09:19not go into a building where there are people trapped and suffering?
09:21If we didn't do that, it would have been the worst day in the history of the fire department
09:24for a different reason than it turned out to be, right?
09:28So again, that sacrifice, which is incredible.
09:30You can look up the Flight 93 transcript.
09:34Those people actually made a number of phone calls to their loved ones and to operators, essentially,
09:39and then left, I think it was Todd Beamer who left the line open, right, for quite some time.
09:43So then you can read a transcript of these folks talking about,
09:46we're going to rush the cockpit, there's a few guys who are leading the way,
09:49you know, we've taken this vote, et cetera.
09:51And that's very powerful as well.
09:54These are really difficult and sad pieces to read, but it was a difficult and sad day.
09:58And a big part of how we honor these folks is to remember them and remember their names,
10:03their specific names and their particular stories.
10:05And again, ask ourselves, you know, if I was Wells Crowther,
10:08would I have been ready to kind of jump into action instead of thinking only about myself?
10:13So I hope that helps you, younger people, as you kind of go about this project of never forgetting,
10:19even though you don't have personal memories of it.
10:22Father?
10:24Oh, me?
10:25Yeah.
10:26I guess I'm the only father.
10:27No.
10:31The Eucharist has always been the center of my prayer life.
10:35But I have found in times of challenge and tragedy,
10:40being able to celebrate the Eucharist as a priest with a broader community is worth its weight in gold.
10:47And this is one example when we gathered on the South Lawn.
10:50I think everybody who was there was able to bring together their perplexity, their fear,
10:57and their turning to God in a time of difficulty.
11:00That time and the women's swim team accident was another example of two occasions
11:06where my ability as a priest president to be able to gather the community in prayer,
11:12I think, was beyond anything I ever imagined.
11:16Jimmy?
11:22Well, something I always say about people, this guy's writing this thing,
11:26and he's trying to get me to say how your life changed after 9-11, you know.
11:29And I kind of, not resent your question, but I kind of resent the theme, okay?
11:35Because, as I said, I had access to a world-class education.
11:40I had wonderful parents.
11:42I had a good family.
11:43I have faith.
11:45My values were intact before 9-11, okay?
11:50Now, nothing that I learned from a group of terrorist murderers
11:54helped me establish what my values were, okay?
11:58My values were intact then, they're intact now, all right?
12:03But I believed in friendship, faith, family, the same.
12:07The one thing I will concede that is different, and I felt this firsthand,
12:13is when I would hug my children
12:18and know that Chris, Herman, Tommy, Jimmy,
12:24none of these guys can hug their kids anymore.
12:26The intensity that I hugged them was greater,
12:30and a little bit longer, and still is.
12:33So the way, you know,
12:36I read this thing today, my son said it to me,
12:38Peggy Noonan, I think, wrote it,
12:40and, you know, a crisis is the world's greatest editor.
12:45You know, it's a little bit like what Monk talks about,
12:47how when things are really bad,
12:49you know, an MP comes in love.
12:50So that bleeds into the second part of your question.
12:52That's when America is great.
12:54You don't have to be here for 9-11
12:56to know that the company came,
12:57the country and our company came together.
13:01Because you have to come together,
13:02because you have no choice.
13:03And you don't get yourself involved in silliness
13:06and stupidity and noise.
13:09You focus on what's ahead of you.
13:12And I think that I was always pretty good at that anyway,
13:16but the intensity with which I bring it,
13:19I have, you know, I'm impatient,
13:21so it's a terrible characteristic I have,
13:24but so I will cut, you know,
13:26I don't, if it's superfluous, I cut it off, you know,
13:29which is, and I'm worse now than ever, you know.
13:33So, but I think our values,
13:37and there's so much of this chirping around issues
13:41rather than the fundamental thing that is really important.
13:45We came together as a country,
13:46whether it was Pearl Harbor,
13:48whether it was however it manifests itself through 9-11,
13:53people came together to help each other.
13:54There was nobody was asking, like, what do I get?
13:57It's what can I do?
13:58And, you know, people say, well, geez, you did an unbelievable job.
14:01Yeah, I mean, I had the whole,
14:02I had 250 million Americans pulling for me.
14:06If I couldn't do it, that would have been embarrassing.
14:09You know, I had the whole world trying to help me.
14:13So, why the hell wouldn't I be able to do it?
14:16And that's kind of an attitude, you know,
14:19we adopt a get-your-uniform-dirty attitude here,
14:22and I think that's very important.
14:24I think it's very American.
14:25Yeah.
14:26Justice.
14:27I think after September 11th,
14:29my religious faith was strengthened.
14:33I was already religious and faithful.
14:37The president talked about a woman who went to St. Patrick's Cathedral
14:40in the day of September 11th to see if God is still there.
14:47He talked about that.
14:48And God's purposes are not always our own purposes.
14:55And the only way to make sense of the tragedy and the death
15:00was to go back to my religious faith.
15:04And then the lessons of faith, translating that into action.
15:08You know, I think Matthew 25 is something we all in the Catholic world
15:13grow up with, of helping others in need.
15:16And to connect it to September 11th, the people, the firefighters rushing up the stairs,
15:22the people helping the disabled person down 68 flights,
15:27carrying her down 68 flights, the red bandana, Father Judge,
15:32all the stories, Todd Beamer.
15:34I mean, there are stories after stories of courage of people, as Jimmy said,
15:39who got in the arena, who risked their lives, who lost their lives.
15:43And so for me, translating that is to, you know, say yes when I can,
15:49to help out when I'm thinking, as we all do, we're human.
15:52Woe is me to be thinking about the sacrifices made by others
15:57and to get in the arena to help others, to take advantage of our opportunities
16:02to make the country stronger and better, to get involved,
16:07and to remember the great humanity, the shared humanity,
16:13the great shared values that we have as Americans, even in the divisions.
16:18We have to continue to overcome that, recognize the good in the other person.
16:23They might have a different view of free speech or the Fourth Amendment than you do.
16:27They're still a good person.
16:31And, you know, President Bush was a role model, as you can probably tell,
16:39for how he behaved and conducted himself in the years thereafter.
16:44And so get involved, recognize the good in other people.
16:49And I didn't mean to interrupt you, Jeff, but Wells Crowder,
16:53who you were good enough to mention, who, you know, is the red bandana.
16:57He did go to Boston College, which is unthinkable.
17:00But 22 people from Boston College died, you know,
17:06when they're recognizing him today.
17:08And I had three sisters that went to Boston College.
17:11But Wells sat, like, 12 feet from me.
17:16And now I was in an office, you know, dictating, and then he was out on the floor.
17:21But the thing I, and I don't, and this is very important,
17:25just purely for the younger audience, okay?
17:29I know his dad very well, who has passed.
17:31I know his mother very well.
17:32She invited me.
17:33He got the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
17:35I was, of course, I'm always playing golf,
17:37but I was playing golf in Ireland, so I couldn't go.
17:39But she was nice enough to invite me to it.
17:42But the thing that, for some reason,
17:44always makes me think about Wells and the attitude of what he was,
17:49was that kid had what I call active eyes.
17:52He was darting all around.
17:55And he was, like, moving even before, which I appreciate.
17:57I don't like guys that sit back and let the world go.
18:00I want action, you know, and especially on that trading floor.
18:04And I can tell if a guy's going to be, or a woman's going to be successful or not.
18:08Anyway, the thing I find most incredible about him,
18:12obviously what he did was incredible.
18:14He went in there, had the red bandana, saved people, did all that.
18:18But his dad told me later on, and they wrote a book about him,
18:23that he really didn't take to the trading end,
18:28which has always been stunning to me.
18:30Because usually you can feel that.
18:33And just for a young person, you know,
18:36what we're lacking in the White House now is humility.
18:40The whole world lacks humility.
18:42And sometimes you've got to put, you know,
18:45don't be in such a rush to tell everybody how unhappy you are with everything.
18:50All right?
18:50Sometimes just get through it.
18:52And this guy came in.
18:54And, I mean, I was in early, and I left late.
18:56And I don't ever remember Tom being there when he wasn't there.
18:59And he worked his ass off.
19:02And, but it always, it's been so incredible to me
19:07that his dad told me that he was really thinking about doing something different.
19:10And he wanted to go more into service, which of course,
19:13but it just, that's a good example for a younger person.
19:17You know, that stuff didn't happen by accident.
19:20He didn't, he wasn't raised where all of a sudden he figured,
19:23hey, I'm going to go down there and help these people.
19:25I mean, he had, he had high ethics.
19:29He had a high work ethic.
19:31And he was going to do the right thing.
19:33And a lot of people are alive today because he did.
19:37It's a lesson that we don't always know what the Lord has waiting for us.
19:43And he was ready, he was where he could, he should be so he could serve.
19:49Jenny Reddy, Lichter, Jimmy Dunn, Justice Kavanaugh, Monk Molloy, thank you.
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