News, nostalgia and inspiration at the Newseum

On our first visit to Washington, D.C., in 25 years, my wife and I went to the Newseum, located at 6th Street and Constitution Avenue. Neither of us was sure what the Newseum would be like, but we paid our entry fee and began exploring the six levels of exhibits about newspapers, news reporting, and history.

It was a worthwhile visit, although the galleries and corridors and stairs could be a maze. Of particular interest to us were a video presentation of reporters talking about their response to 9/11. They were at work in Manhattan when the terrorists crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center. Watching the scenes and hearing the reporters' disbelief (like all of us) that this could be happening, took us back to that horrific day 16 years ago. Despite the life-risking dangers as the towers fell and thousands died, the reporters swallowed their personal feelings, fears and concerns for themselves, their friends and their families, and continued to report what was happening.

I couldn't help thinking that the current president of the United States called these self-sacrificing reporters "enemies of the people" and purveyors of "fake news." The close-up video of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center was so terrifying and so clearly an airliner aimed directly at the building that I once again could not understand how anyone could deny that this tragedy was carried out by Islamic terrorists who hijacked four aircraft in a well-planned and malevolent plot against the United States. Yet some conspiracy theorists even today say the whole thing was carried out by the federal government.

Another exhibit in the Newseum examined the relationship of President John F. Kennedy with the press. Kennedy seemed to enjoy sparring with reporters at news conferences, and an interview video shows Kennedy saying that the  adversarial relationship between the press and the government is a natural and healthy thing. Another exhibit celebrated JFK on the 100th anniversary of his birth. These exhibits gave me a flood of nostalgia. The grief I had felt in 1963 was renewed hearing this brilliant, articulate, inspiring and short-lived president. I could not avoid a comparison between this man, who wrote books and regularly read 15 newspapers a day, to the current president, who boasts that he never reads books and requires the White House staff to limit any briefing papers, no matter how complex the issue, to one page. How far we have fallen!

Another Newseum exhibit was a 50th anniversary look back at the civil rights era of the 1960s. The cruelty of segregation and the officials who responded to protesters with violence were exceeded only by the murders of many civil rights advocates and bystanders. It's an era worth remembering not only because of the illogical cruelty and oppression but also to be reminded of how far we have come.

The Newseum is a stop to include on your Washington trip. I only wish the museum had offered a discount if I showed my old press pass (I still have it).

First-time visitor to World Trade Center site

On my first visit to New York City, the site of the World Trade Center was not on the top of my list for things to see. The horribly disturbing television and newspaper images from 12 years ago are still too haunting. But I was with a group that wanted to see the memorial taking shape there, so I went along, and I'm glad I did.

It's difficult to grasp the enormity of the site where two monster buildings once stood, dominating the Manhattan skyline. Just getting to the site takes some doing. You weave through a maze of security checks and converge on a place of quiet and awe, but it's a place not terribly different from the rest of lower Manhattan, with small trees, walkways and tall buildings looming overhead.

Two fountains mark the footprints of the buildings that stood there before the greatest terrorist attack in history. Standing at the edge of the fountains, watching the water flow downward into a catch basin, flowing like unending tears, it's hard to envision the towers that stood there or the lives that ended there. Perhaps if I had been there while the towers still soared into the sky or later, when the ruins  still smoldered and people raked through debris for human remains, I could more readily picture what was lost. Names of the victims of the attack are carved into the bronze border of the fountains. All around the site are additional memorials to the innocent victims and to the firefighters and others who perished trying to save others. Sellers hawk picture books about the attack on street corners nearby. It's a gloomy, mournful place.

Ground Zero (a moniker I never quite cared for) brings to mind another memorial — the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. I've visited that site just a handful of times, but each time it left me choking back tears for all of the nearly 60,000 names carved there in black marble. I touched the names of my contemporaries, names that could have been mine. As awe-inspiring as the World Trade Center Memorial is, or will be, it cannot top, for me, the emotion I felt standing beside that slash of black marble with so many names of so many lives lost too early.

The (Sunday school) lessons of 9/11

Today's 10th anniversary commemorations of the 9/11 attacks are more interesting than the NFL games on this first weekend of the season. The anniversary and the 10-year-old event were the topics of an adult Sunday school discussion this morning. Blame me for that. Asked to teach the class and given the freedom to choose whatever material I wanted, I settled on the anniversary as a discussion starter. I downloaded some material from several religious websites, including some National Council of Churches material.

Ten years later, some of the shock and anger have abated, but the grief and the determination remain. A statement signed by thousands of religious leaders issued days after the attacks condemned the terrorists' strategy of using any grievance as an excuse for violence and mass murder. But it also called for a response of love and understanding instead of more violence. Ten years later, our primary response is still violence against violence.

And where has it gotten us? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars in U.S. wealth. Our troops are still trying to pacify cities in Afghanistan, and our scheduled departure from Iraq could result in civil war in that former dictatorship. Osama bin Laden, who planned and gloated over the 9/11 attacks, is dead, shot by a Navy Seal in a daring nighttime raid. But American troops remain bogged down in his former sanctuary.

In a CNN interview today, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to concede that the Iraq war was a foolish and costly mistake, but the question clearly made him uncomfortable as he hedged his answers. The invasion that led to the aptly named book "Fiasco" was sold as a means of stopping the spread of "weapons of mass destruction," but it turned out Iraq didn't have any. Instead, it had hundreds of thousands of mines and artillery shells that were easily converted into "improvised explosive devices" that proved perfect for killing and maiming American troops.

The attacks of 10 years ago will be judged in history as an act of infamy at least as brazen as Japan's Dec. 7, 1941, attacks. But America's response to the latter attacks were clearly not as effective as the response of December 1941 and following. World War II lasted less than four years from the date of America's entry. The response to 9/11, dubbed a "war on terror," has lasted 10 years — and counting, in time, lives and treasure.