Free 43* by Jeff Greenfield Page A

and the low-key South Dakotan
     Daschle found himself Senate majority leader.
    Now Daschle was heading across the hall from his office to Room 219, where the Democratic
     leadership team was waiting: Harry Reid, Jay Rockefeller, Barbara Boxer, Bill Nelson,
     Byron Dorgan, Barbara Mikulski. The Republican majority in the House was still arguing
     for massive tax cuts; the Gore White House was pushing back on shoring up Social Security;
     the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, as well as the unions, was growing increasingly
     impatient with the president’s small-bore proposals. For God’s sake, we’re looking at five trillion dollars in surpluses over the next
     decade—when are we going to start acting like Democrats? So it wasn’t going to be the most pleasant hour or so, but it came with the territory.
    “Senator!” Marty Paone, secretary to the majority, bolted into Daschle’s office. “Turn
     on the TV! They say a plane hit the World Trade Center.”
    “Small plane? Commercial?” It was John Glenn, with a lifetime of flying behind him.
    “They don’t know … they’re thinking maybe pilot error?”
    “Pilots don’t fly into skyscrapers,” Glenn said. “There was a B-52 that hit the Empire
     State Building back in the 1940s, but it was a very foggy day—not like this … ”
    “If that’s all we know,” Daschle said, “I should—”
    But John Glenn was looking out of Daschle’s window, across the expanse of the National
     Mall, and he was saying, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God … ”
    * * *
    The dome of the United States Capitol is 288 feet high, 96 feet in diameter. It was
     made out of 8.9 million pounds of cast iron. United Flight 93 was a 757-222: 155 feet
     long, twelve feet four inches wide, weighing 255,000 pounds, carrying more than 11,000
     gallons of jet fuel. Had the plane struck the dome head on, it would have reduced
     the Capitol to a smoldering shell.
    But what happened was bad enough.
    As the hijacked plane flew down the National Mall, a half-dozen crew members and passengers,
     armed with boiling water and knives, overpowered the hijackers guarding the cockpit
     and burst inside. First Officer LeRoy Homer and passenger Todd Beamer grabbed Ziad
     Jarrah and began pulling him out of the pilot’s seat. With Jarrah still grasping the
     controls, the plane angled upward seconds before it reached the Capitol, its fuselage
     striking the Statue of Freedom and dome a glancing blow. But that was enough to send
     tons of cast iron crashing down on the Capitol grounds and onto the House and Senate
     chambers as well. The plane itself careened sharply to the left and crashed into Lower
     Senate Park; the explosion sent flaming debris into the Russell Senate Office Building,
     which promptly caught fire. Some pieces of the dome, now in effect airborne missiles,
     flew due east some thousand feet and struck the Supreme Court.
    The spectacular summer day had brought several dozen House and Senate members to the
     East Front of the Capitol—posing for pictures with their constituents, chatting with
     members of the press, informally lobbying one another. There was no time for a warning,
     no chance to run.
    Within minutes, television sets across the country, then across the world, were displaying
     a once unimaginable split screen: in New York, the Twin Towers of the World Trade
     Center enveloped in fire, thousands fleeing downtown as plumes of smoke billowed through
     the narrow canyons; in Washington, the Capitol, its dome partially sheared off, the
     House and Senate wings enveloped in smoke and rubble, fire trucks and ambulances crowding
     the East Front, rescue workers scrambling over the ruins, looking for the dead and
     injured.
    From his stateroom aboard Air Force One, President Al Gore watched as well. The Secret Service had pulled him out of Miami
     International Airport as soon as the second plane hit the World Trade Center, moments
     before Flight 93 struck the Capitol dome. As the