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.

How do you turn down Caroline Kennedy?

The news today that Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg is interested in New York's Senate seat being vacated by Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton strikes people of my generation with nostalgia and surprise. We remember Caroline as the White House pixie, the cute little blonde who rode her pony, Macaroni, on the South Lawn. After her father's assassination, Caroline disappeared behind her protective mother's curtain of privacy. She remained secluded even as she matured, married and had children. Although she is a lawyer, author, philanthropist, fund-raiser and New York socialite, her private life has remained largely hidden from the public.

But now she says she is willing to jeopardize her privacy, become a fully public figure and expose her personal life as a politician campaigning for a seat in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body. Kennedy (who seems to have dropped her husband's name, which has no political resonance) is not running for a Senate seat, but she is actively seeking the appointment from the governor. If appointed, she would have to actually campaign in 2010 for the remaining two years of the term. And if she were so inclined, she would have to campaign again in 2012 for a full, six-year term.

Kennedy seems too much like her mother and too little like her father to enjoy the rough-and-tumble exposure and grueling hours of the campaign trail. I was reminded of this when I happened across a rebroadcast recently of Jackie Kennedy's 1962 tour of the White House. Jackie, who was fabulously popular and influential as first lady, comes across in the black-and-white film as painfully soft-spoken as well as smart, sophisticated and superbly graceful. But it's hard to imagine her going through what Hillary Clinton did over the past two years. It's also difficult to imagine her daughter doing it.

But the Kennedy name still has magic, even as Teddy, the last of the four Kennedy brothers, battles brain cancer as he clings to his own Senate seat. The New York seat Caroline Kennedy covets was once held by her martyred uncle, Bobby. It will be difficult to tell Caroline Kennedy, America's dream girl, that she can't have what she wants. Caroline wants the seat; she may be as qualified by education and experiences as any other candidate (though many candidates exceed her actual legislative or governing experience, which amount to zero).

It's an interesting dilemma for New York, assuming Clinton is confirmed. How can anyone turn down Caroline Kennedy for a job she might be suited to hold but might not be suited to fight for and retain?