MItchell Zuckoff - Fall and Rise - The Story of 9/11

Early in September, Peter needed to fly to California on business, so they decided to turn the trip into a family vacation and a visit with Sue’s grandmother and brothers. The weekend before the September 11 flight, Christine told Eunice of her excitement about the upcoming trip, which included plans for an outing to Disneyland. During one phone call, Christine reported to her grandmother that she was going to California to see Mickey Mouse and Pluto. Then Christine expressed an even stronger desire: “I want to go to your house, Namma!”

On the night of September 10, Christine slept in her new big-girl bed with her favorite stuffed animal, Peter Rabbit holding a carrot. Before she left home the next morning, she’d tuck Peter under the covers, to keep him safe until she returned.

BARBARA OLSON

American Airlines Flight 77

Under the hot lights of the C-SPAN television show Washington Journal , host Peter Slen flipped open a copy of Washingtonian magazine for September 2001. The camera zoomed in to a headline, THE 100 MOST POWERFUL WOMEN IN WASHINGTON. Then it swung across the set to find conservative firebrand Barbara Olson, her telegenic smile dialed to full blast, her gleaming blond hair draped down the back of her red blazer. Slen asked Barbara: “Why are you listed as an influential political insider?”

Barbara knew perfectly well, but she answered modestly: “I don’t know. That’s where they put me.” She changed the subject to a recent lunch where the magazine’s honorees discussed who might be the first female president. Overwhelmingly, the capital’s most powerful women named Hillary Clinton. Virtually alone in dissent was Barbara, who had just completed her second book lacerating the U.S. senator from New York and former First Lady.

“What does it mean to have influence in this town?” Slen asked. “How do you get it? Is it power, is it position, is it money, is it marriage?”

The question carried a sexist dagger, missed by audience members who didn’t know that Barbara’s husband was among the most powerful lawyers in the country: U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, the top legal strategist for the White House. President George W. Bush had given him the job after Olson had argued successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court to end the recount of votes in Florida from the 2000 election, a decision that led to Bush becoming president.

Barbara ignored the jab, replying with a laugh that long work paved the road to influence. She’d grown used to questions about whether a glamorous woman who drove a Jaguar and had a weakness for stiletto heels deserved her place at the center of the political world. But at forty-five, having earned a partnership in a prominent law firm, Barbara drew confidence from the knowledge that before marrying Ted, she’d been a professional ballet dancer, worked her way through law school, and prosecuted drug cases in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. She’d also served as chief investigative counsel for the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

During her five-year marriage to Ted, his third and her second, Barbara had seen her stock rise further as half of a Washington power couple. They hosted enormous parties for the conservative intelligentsia at their home in Virginia. They shared a love for Shakespeare, poetry, the opera, modern art, and their Australian sheepdogs: Reagan, for the president, and Maggie, for British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

When the C-SPAN show took calls from viewers, Barbara’s partisan nature was on full display. After lavish praise from one caller who loved her bestselling book about Hillary Clinton, Hell to Pay , another caller laced into Barbara for criticizing the Clintons. Weeks earlier, Barbara had apologized in the Washington Post for describing the former president’s late mother as a “barfly who gets used by men.”

The caller scolded her: “Miss Olson, you have to learn how to be more human. You’re a very evil person… . You’re not going to survive too long. You got too much hate and the devil in you.”

Barbara smiled through the attack, though not as widely as before. Her blue eyes dimmed momentarily as she blinked away the criticism and the ominous prediction. “Well, we do have a First Amendment,” Olson replied. “Everybody has a right to their own opinion. I don’t have hate in me.”

After the show ended, Barbara rushed on with her life. She needed to pack for a flight to Los Angeles, for her next performance as a face of conservatism: she was booked to appear on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher . Her flight was set for Monday, September 10.

Barbara decided the schedule didn’t work for her. Though it would require a dash from the airport to Maher’s studio, she decided to push back her flight until the next day. Ted Olson would turn sixty-one years old on Tuesday, September 11. Before flying to California, Barbara wanted to wake up beside him, to wish him a happy birthday.

CEECEE LYLES

United Airlines Flight 93

As midnight approached on Monday, September 10, CeeCee Lyles lay on a futon bed in a tiny apartment she shared with four other United Airlines flight attendants near Newark International Airport in New Jersey. She clutched a teddy bear she’d named Lorne and talked on her cellphone to the bear’s namesake, her husband, Lorne Lyles, back home in Florida.

At thirty-three, five foot seven, CeeCee had flashing brown eyes and a love of fine clothes that complemented her athletic figure. Years earlier, Lorne noticed her when each of them was taking a son to baseball practice. He nearly fell out of his car when she walked past. “Man! She is beautiful,” he thought.

CeeCee had traveled a winding road to happiness with Lorne, and the cellphone was a lifeline when her work took her away from him. They’d talk for hours, often five or six times a day, sometimes as many as ten to fifteen. The comfort of the other’s voice mattered as much as the subjects: their sons, two each from previous relationships; her work in airports and airplanes; his, as a police officer on the overnight shift in Fort Myers, Florida. Beyond work and kids, they’d talk about bills and chores and missing each other. As Lorne would say, they’d talk and talk, about “everything and nothing.”

CeeCee had become a United flight attendant less than a year earlier, at Lorne’s urging, after he recognized the emotional toll of her previous jobs, as a corrections officer in Miami and then as a police detective on the streets of Fort Pierce, Florida. When they began dating, Lorne was a police dispatcher in Fort Pierce, so to some extent they’d fallen in love over the airwaves, enchanted by the sound of each other’s voice.

During her six years on the police force, CeeCee had put her good looks to use when she went undercover to portray a prostitute, but she got more satisfaction from helping women and children victimized by crime and drugs. She’d often stop by the Bible Way Soul Saving Station, where her uncle was the pastor, and she became a role model at a Christian women’s shelter founded by two of her aunts. Her kindness had limits, though, replaced by toughness when dealing with criminals. CeeCee excelled in an Advanced Officer Survival course that included hand-to-hand fighting and takedown moves. Before marrying Lorne in May 2000, CeeCee picked up extra shifts and worked second and third jobs to support her sons, Jerome and Jevon, around whom her life revolved. She kept them focused on school, taught them to play baseball, and expected them to fight for loose balls on the basketball court.

Becoming a flight attendant allowed CeeCee to fulfill her dreams of traveling, meeting new people, and trading hardened criminals for the occasional drunken businessman. As a perk of the job, she and her family took sightseeing trips on days off and filled available seats on flights to Indianapolis, where Lorne’s two sons, Justin and Jordan, lived with their mother. They’d done just that the previous weekend, then returned home so CeeCee’s sons could be in school on Monday.