If this week marks twenty-three years since 9/11, this year has already seen a significant anniversary linked to the attack: in July, the 9/11 Commission Report turned twenty. The report—a 567-page investigation compiled over eighteen months by a staff led by a bipartisan group of legislators—included eleven chapters detailing the cultural and geopolitical winds preceding the attacks, the histories of the groups involved, and the specific, time-stamped progression of what transpired in the day’s various theaters, including insight into how decisions were made in real time. Two additional chapters assigned accountability, discussed what lessons the various agencies involved ought to learn, and provided policy recommendations.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that this doesn’t sound like the most engaging piece of writing. Here’s the thing, though: it’s actually a page-turner—a door-stopper that nonetheless reads like a pacey bestseller, rich with detail, interiority, and momentum. Far from being a dry government document, it walks, talks, and sounds like a journalistic enterprise—in ways that carry enduring relevance today, in our own age of narrative investigations and congressional-probe-as-storytelling. (If it came out today, one might call the report a long-form deep dive.) The language is simple (by design, there are few adjectives or adverbs), and readers are propelled as if by a spy thriller, even if they’re broadly aware of the beats and painfully familiar with the ending. The report was recognized as a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction in 2004. The same year, John Updike wrote that the King James Bible was “our language’s lone masterpiece produced by committee, at least until this year’s 9/11 Commission Report.”
In the report’s ticktock of events on the morning of 9/11, for example, a summary of communications between Amy Sweeney and Betty Ong—two flight attendants onboard American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center—is packed with vivid detail delivered with terse precision: “Sweeney calmly reported on her line that the plane had been hijacked; a man in first class had his throat slashed; two flight attendants had been stabbed—one was seriously hurt and was on oxygen while the other’s wounds seemed minor; a doctor had been requested; the flight attendants were unable to contact the cockpit; and there was a bomb in the cockpit.” If taking the audience inside a hijacked aircraft is normally the gambit of a Hollywood production, zooming in even further to convey Sweeney’s and Ong’s real-time reporting—right down to the mistakes it contained (the hijackers did not have a bomb)—is downright novelistic.
Thomas Kean, the chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the formal name for the 9/11 Commission), was responsible for a team of seventy-eight staffers, three executive leaders, and nine other commissioners; when it came to producing the report, his perspective was informed by his time as a high school history teacher. The vice chairman of the commission, Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, wrote a weekly letter to his constituents. On a day-to-day basis, Philip Zelikow, the executive director responsible for the creation of the report, organized how it was researched and written. For the most part, the teams working on it were separated by topic and would hand in section drafts to Zelikow; Ernest May, a former colleague of Zelikow’s from Harvard’s history department; general counsel Daniel Marcus; and Christopher A. Kojm, the deputy director of the commission, who would then review and edit those sections. After the drafts had been edited, there were marathon internal debates among the staff about presentation, inclusion of material, and general buy-in. Once everyone was in agreement, the manuscripts were shown to the commissioners for approval. “In some ways, the enterprise is more notable because it’s not a single author,” Zelikow recalled earlier this year. “It was a very collaborative enterprise by the staff.”
“They were very keen on the notion of communication to a general audience…They wanted a report that anyone with a high school education could open, read, and understand,” Kojm says. “It is journalistic writing by design, because that’s accessible to the general reader…Journalists are gifted at taking complex, nuanced subjects and presenting them in a way that’s understandable to general readers. Clarity and brevity are the hallmarks of good journalism—and, I think, of the commission report as well.”
This is not to say that the narrative thrust of the report was driven by an outright journalistic desire to write an engaging book, however; Zelikow explains that the driver was, rather, a dedication to a more nuanced approach to the idea of bureaucratic fault-finding. Having read the report produced by the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, which did not study the Japanese side at all, Zelikow knew that he didn’t want to follow the usual format for a report from an inspector general. “The typical way that’s done is that you write up what happened and then you do your ‘gotchas,’” Zelikow says. “But there’s a level at which if you do it that way, you don’t learn, because that’s not the way people actually live and make decisions.
“The whole approach of the report is, instead of saying with hindsight here’s what they did and here’s what they did wrong, let’s reconstruct the information they had and the choices they made given the information they had at the time,” Zelikow says. “And then just lay that out so the reader is vicariously driving through the windstorm along with them.” One advantage of this approach, he says, is that “it does create a feeling of narrative, because you’re empathetically sitting alongside the characters in the story, including the terrorists on the terrorist side.” Kojm adds: “There was a good understanding among the commissioners, and certainly among the staff, of the importance of understanding the enemy. You’ve got to look and see the other side of the hill.”
Nor did the report use the names of particular CIA or FBI agents or members of local agencies in New York or DC who may have made mistakes amid the chaos of that morning. “It’s really important to keep in mind that the people you’re writing about are other human beings like you—some of whom carry terrible psychological burdens,” Zelikow says. “If you dropped the ball and three thousand people died, [you] might read that as a bestselling book basically saying that you were negligently complicit in the mass murder of thousands of Americans.”
The apportioning of political blame (or the appearance thereof) was also a delicate matter for the commission to navigate. But Zelikow says that the “highly contested environment” into which the report entered ended up making it better, forcing the commission to “concentrate on the facts” and pare the language to its barest essentials. “We actually thought that it would strengthen the narrative power [and] the credibility of the report overall,” Zelikow says. “Simply lay out the facts dispassionately—and not boringly.”
The sheer scope of the task made that a tricky task. “Journalists are commonly taught to basically find the person who becomes the protagonist, and then you give the story its narrative drive through the story of that person,” Zelikow says, but the commissioners found themselves with many, many protagonists, and many branching investigations—settings that took their team across quite literally the entire globe. Another guiding principle, he found, was to trust his audience. “Keep it terse and keep moving,” he said. “Keep the language accessible but keep it real. The report is not dumbed down. The report is readable. We were very careful never to use jargon or buzzwords any ordinary person could not understand.”
As for that most basic of journalistic tasks—fact-finding—Zelikow more than stands by the effort today. “It turns out, much to my surprise, that the report has held up extremely well after twenty years,” he says. “Factually, really nothing has come out that would cause us to rewrite a single sentence of the report.” Kojm agrees. “Here we are twenty years later and, essentially, the story put forward by the commission is intact,” he says.
When it came time to print the report, the commission made the somewhat unorthodox decision to use a private publisher, WW Norton, which aided with copyediting but also with printing and distribution. According to Zelikow, Hamilton was initially puzzled by the notion of writing the report as a book for a general audience; he may have appreciated clear writing intended for everyone to read, Zelikow says, but he thought they were “going to write a government report and throw it over the transom.” “No,” Zelikow remembers telling him. “On the day this comes out, it will be in every bookstore in America. And that’s what we did.”
Mike Laws contributed reporting.
Other notable stories:
- Tonight, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will debate on ABC News. Peter Baker, of the New York Times, writes that Trump is facing questions about his “cognitive health”—an article that critics of the Times said had been a long time coming. (Baker wrote that Trump’s remarks are often “summarized in news accounts in ways that do not give the full picture of how baffling they can be”—echoing a critique of “sanewashing” that we wrote about in yesterday’s newsletter.) The Times also checked in with the organizers at ABC, who won’t commit to fact-checking the candidates but won’t commit to not doing it, either. A company that provides closed captioning for debates told Politico that muting candidates’ mics makes its job easier. And a British paper reported that Harris has been prepping for the debate with the famed acting teacher Lee Strasberg—who died in 1982.
- Leonard Leo—the influential conservative activist who has played a leading role in masterminding the Supreme Court’s recent shift to the right—gave a rare interview to Alex Rogers, of the Financial Times, in which he previewed a billion-dollar effort to do something similar in corporate America, with the media industry among those in his sights. “We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious,” he said, “so we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident.” Per Rogers, Leo “intends to invest in a US local media company in the next 12 months, although he has not decided which.” A group he founded has also been active in funding campaigns against TikTok.
- Jorge Ramos announced that he will leave Univision at the end of the year—putting an end to a four-decade tenure at the network, during which he became one of “the most recognized journalists in Spanish-language television,” as the Times put it. In other media-jobs news, Jamie Heller, the business editor at the Wall Street Journal, will take over as editor in chief of Business Insider, succeeding Nicholas Carlson. And on the media beat, Brian Stelter helmed his first edition of CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter since announcing his return to the network. In a departure from his previous stewardship of the newsletter, it will now go out in the mornings and be “shorter and sharper.”
- The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus profiled Jewish Currents, a small left-wing magazine that is aiming to “criticize Israel while holding on to Jewishness.” The publication “offers sanctuary and a place of instruction for a generation of Jews who love their parents but have split with them,” Lewis-Kraus writes. Its “ambition, at what feels like an inflection point in American Jews’ relationship to Israel, is to remind readers that Jewish identity has always been in flux.” Readers “come for the anti-occupation politics, but they stay for the roundtable discussions of ‘texts’ like Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
- And for CJR, Jens Söring—who was convicted of murdering his girlfriend’s parents in Virginia in 1990, released on parole years later, and recently made the subject of a show on Netflix—reflects on how coverage of his case has changed over the years: while he was in prison, various journalists wrote stories questioning his conviction, but he now feels “betrayed” by Netflix and by Amanda Knox, a former ally who recently asked “What if he actually did it?” in an essay for The Atlantic. “The story of my innocence has been told; it’s become boring,” Söring writes. “The media giveth, and the media taketh away.”
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Kevin Lind was a CJR fellow.