Five years later, memories of a trying task

NEW YORK - The news came into Matt Lauer’s ear as he interviewed a Howard Hughes biographer on what felt like another slow news day in the summer of shark attacks and Chandra Levy.

“Go to commercial,” “Today” executive producer Jonathan Wald told him tersely. “Breaking news: A plane has hit the World Trade Center.”

That’s all anyone knew at 8:50 a.m. ET on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. “Good Morning America” hurried out of an interview with Sarah Ferguson, CBS’ “The Early Show” cut off a cooking segment. Lauer and hundreds of other TV journalists in New York, Washington and southwest Pennsylvania didn’t know it then, but they were about to cover the biggest story of their lives.

The Big Three networks and the all-news cable outlets soon televised live shots of a gaping hole belching thick, dark smoke from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. There was little talk of terrorism in those first few minutes; anchors and reporters on the scene remark about how it was hard to imagine how a pilot could run into a 110-story building on a such a beautiful, clear morning.

“We didn’t know anything, so we were going to figure this thing out along with the viewers,” recalled then-”Good Morning America” co-anchor Charles Gibson. “But it was obvious from the size of the fire that we weren’t going to get off the air anytime soon.”

Fox News Channel’s Jon Scott was about to begin his 9 a.m. shift when he was told to run to the studio.

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“I thought it was an accident, as incredible as that may seem now,” says Scott, a pilot and aviation enthusiast. “It should have hit me right away that, OK, they didn’t bring the towers down in ’93 so they were going to try it again from the air.” On the air, Scott was talking to an expert at 9:03 a.m. when United Airlines Flight 175 smashed into the South Tower.

That same moment on “Today,” Lauer and Couric were talking to an NBC News producer, Elliott Walker, who was walking her daughter to school nearby when the first plane struck. It is Walker who tells “Today” of the second attack.

“Another one just hit,” Walker says urgently. “Something else just hit, a very large plane.” Another witness confirms: ”It looks like a movie, I saw a jet, a large jet ... I watched the plane fly into the World Trade Center.”

On “Good Morning America” -- and “Today,” where the shot wasn’t live but replayed a few seconds later -- there was a gasp in the studio that went out over the air. It’s no longer an accident but the worst case of terrorism on American soil, a seminal event in U.S. history.

“For the rest of my life, I will second-guess what happened then,” Gibson says. “Diane had the human reaction, and she said, ’Oh my God.’ And I had the reporter’s reaction, which was, well, now we know what’s going on -- we’re under attack. And I wish I had her reaction.”

The attack of the second plane -- and the dawning realization that there might be more -- sent shivers through the sets and control rooms of the major networks. Security increased instantly at Rockefeller Center, the landmark where ”Today” is broadcast. Lauer and co-anchor Katie Couric locked eyes and knew what the other was thinking.

“That was the realization, in an instant, that this is a major act of terrorism,” Lauer says. “And where there were two, there could be more, and by the way, we’re sitting in Rockefeller Center, a landmark and iconic attraction in New York City.”

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