Post-9/11 Washington has become an armed city, but UGA alumni in the U.S. Senate and House are reconstructing a more vigilant and secure nation

B Y - R I C H A R D - H Y A T T

tepping off the escalator at the Capitol South Metro station, he is the first person you see. He wears a soldier's work clothes, which would camouflage him in a jungle setting. But against this stark marble background in this citified setting, he stands out from the rest of the commuters in his Army fatigues. On his head is a smart black beret. On his hip is a square-handled pistol. His post is First and C, two blocks from the Capitol dome. He stands guard in front of the posh Capital Club, where power lunches shape the fate of nations, and across the street from the Cannon House Office Building, where members of Congress—including a number of University of Georgia alumni—are working to reconstruct a more vigilant and secure nation in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

This isn't the capital of a banana republic. This is America, home of the free. And this is Washington, seat of the U.S. government, home of the president, a city of monuments that is, itself, a monument to world democracy. And yet, even here, terrorism threatens our daily welfare and existence.

On this unseasonably warm day in January—some 100 days after Sept. 11th—Washington has a military presence. Uniforms dot the corners. Barricades block side streets near the Capitol. Driving by the White House is verboten. Metal detectors screen briefcases in federal doorways. Security personnel demand that pockets be emptied before people enter government office buildings. Inside those buildings, mail slots are sealed. UPS and FedEx aren't allowed to go door to door; neither can a florist delivering roses. Mail is screened, scorched, and slow; October's mail is only now being delivered. Constituents from home can't just drop by anymore. Outsiders are intimidated by newly mandated security at local airports and by the threat of chemical warfare in Washington's official buildings. Under the Capitol rotunda, all is quiet—the kind of eerie quiet you hear in a funeral parlor when folks aren't sure if they should be talking. On this day in Washington, D.C., there are more statues in the Capitol Rotunda than tourists—even though this is one place in Washington, D.C., where tourists are once again allowed to roam.

Zell Miller speaks out against terrorists

Carrying his own bags, Zell Miller walks through Reagan National Airport. An aide driving a borrowed SUV waits at the curb. Papers are on the seat so he can catch up on business. Instead of his office, Miller's aide drives him to his apartment near the Dirksen Building.

Miller (AB '57, MA '58) is a United States Senator, pressed into duty after the death of Paul Coverdell, obliged to return to politics from his teaching position on North Campus at UGA 's Institute of Higher Education.

Miller and his wife Shirley have just returned from Georgia. (Woodrow and Gus, their loving and demanding dogs, expect them home on weekends.) But before he gets down to the business of being a senator, there are chores to be done. First, there is the matter of getting into his building. Miller can't find the security key and an attendant has to let them inside. Upstairs, he sets down his luggage, grabs a stack of dirty dress shirts, and asks Shirley what they need from the grocery store. There is no sign of increased security as he walks to a nearby laundry and leaves his shirts. All alone, he moves up and down the narrow aisles of a neighborhood market, picking up a quart of milk, a dozen eggs, and other things they will need that week. Safety isn't an issue to Zell Miller.

"This is the time we live in," he says. "This is the price we pay for being secure. I think we'll have to get used to it. We are in this for the long haul."

Miller feels comfortable and safe. Not as comfortable and safe as he did prior to Sept. 11, but comfortable and safe nonetheless. He could have gone to a secured location that day with other members of Congress. Instead, he set up shop in front of the television in his simple apartment, watching events unfold minutes away at the Pentagon and a couple hundred miles away at the World Trade Center.

Shirley Miller was back in Atlanta, checking out the cause of a recurring inner ear problem. She heard the news while she was inside an MRI machine.

"The 1960s ended on Sept. 11," the former Georgia governor says. "Think about it. It is no longer cool to blame America and criticize the military. That's not the in-thing to do anymore. Once again, we have flags flying and once more people are singing 'God Bless America' with gusto."

Within the week after the terrorists struck, Miller was attending a memorial at the Pentagon and watching smoke blanket the massive ruins of the twin towers. What he saw at Ground Zero was what he imagines hell to be like.

"Smoke so heavy you couldn't see the end of it," he says. "The smell was like that acrid smell you get when you boil water and the water goes away leaving the pot to burn."

In his 16 years as Georgia's lieutenant governor and eight years as chief executive, Miller witnessed some terrible things. But nothing could have prepared him for what he saw in New York and at the Pentagon.

"The worst sight I had seen was all those caskets floating on top of the water after the flood in Albany," Miller recalls. "This was worse. This was the graveyard of several thousand Americans."

Angered by the carnage—and by the sheer affront of the terrorists' acts—Miller's Marine Corps instincts rose to the surface. Bomb the hell out of 'em, he said on the hallowed floor of the U.S. Senate. Ignore the collateral damage, he added.

"That wasn't said by some barbarian who doesn't care about innocent people being killed. Of course I do," he says. "But it was the reality of a situation that we can't do without such things happening. That's what makes war so terrible."

Some colleagues cringed when Miller was so blunt.

"Wait a minute," he says. "They were saying those same things at that coffee shop in LaGrange, in Claxton, in Hepzipah. They just weren't saying it on the floor of the United States Senate. Others may think it's undignified for a senator to say those things, and it may be."

Miller has just turned 70. As a young man, he yearned for a career in Washington. As an older man, he was content teaching at the University of Georgia. He didn't seek this job. It sought him.

"I wonder if I would feel this way if I were 43 years old with 30 years of service ahead of me," he says. "I try to put myself in that position. It's not that I'm smarter than other folks. I've just lived longer. I've seen what will work, and how you get results and how you don't."

Miller remembers Pearl Harbor. As a young boy in 1941, he had gone to check out Rural Electric lines with his Uncle Hoyle and Aunt Phoebe. They were going somewhere else and he went into his house to tell his mother, who told him what the Japanese had just done to the U.S. fleet in Hawaii. They huddled around a radio that Sunday afternoon, just as the world huddled in front of televisions nearly 60 years later on Sept. 11, 2001. By the next spring, Birdie Miller had taken a job at the Bell Bomber Plant in Marietta. Her son and daughter were uprooted to Atlanta. For them and for others of their generation, it was a time of sacrifice.

"It remains to be seen how Sept. 11 will change our lives today," says Miller. "This is going to be a long drawn-out affair. I pray that we have the will that great generation in the 1940s had to see it through."

Phil Gramm works to restore order

It was one week to the day since Phil Gramm (BBA '64, PhD '67) had announced that after 24 years in public office—the last 18 as a U.S. Senator—this would be his final term. When the Sept. 11 attacks occurred, he was in his press secretary's office preparing for a 10 a.m. press conference on the tax bill. Scheduled to join him at the Capitol was Zell Miller, a Democrat whose alliance with President Bush on certain domestic issues has made them the Senate's political odd couple. The TV was tuned to CNN and Gramm saw footage of the first plane hitting the north tower in New York. Pushing for a permanent tax cut no longer seemed a pressing matter that morning. Gramm called Miller and they agreed to cancel their meeting with the media, even before knowing that terrorists were to blame.

"Gramm told me what had happened," Miller recalls. "He said we ought to cancel the press conference, that a plane had hit one of the towers."

"These terrorists struck at the temple of our economy and center of our democracy, as if by destroying our buildings they could kill our values," says Gramm, the senior senator from Texas. "If terrorists can convince us to give up our own freedom, they will have succeeded. They must never succeed."

Since the day after the tragedy, Gramm has worked to get the country back on track and assure Americans that the terrorists did not succeed.

On Sept. 14, Gramm, the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, announced that Congress had responded to national threats with a bipartisan, unanimous vote to give the president "the money and power to make war on those who make war on us." The $40 billion approved was to be used for retaliation, recovery, and assistance, and it allowed the president to spend nearly $20 billion without any restrictions.

"I do not believe this is going to be an easy war . . . and I believe it is going to be a costly war to fight," Gramm told a national audience.

Gramm has also championed terrorism reinsurance legislation, which would serve as an economic backup in the wake of ballooning insurance prices following Sept. 11. Failing to pass such a bill, says Gramm, would be more dangerous than failing to approve an economic stimulus package.

In the months following the tragedy, Gramm also made his acting debut in the upcoming film, "Gods and Generals," the sequel to the 1993 Civil War epic, "Gettysburg." Gramm was typecast as a politician, but he didn't have a speaking part.

Gramm said that he wasn't giving up his day job just yet, but that the movie was a welcome break from worrying about anthrax.

Congressmen were forced into the streets

On Tuesday morning, Sept. 11, people on Capitol Hill were doing their customary thing—downing cups of coffee, shuffling papers, and getting ready for another day of running the country. For members of Congress and their staff—a number of whom are UGA alumni—it was a day that will forever live in infamy.

Rep. Johnny Isakson (BBA '66) was talking to a group of people from North Carolina who, ironically, were in town to plan the 100th anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright's first flight. A century later, the Wright brothers' invention was being used as a guided missile on U.S. soil. When news of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks reached Capitol Hill, a security guard asked Isakson, a Republican from Marietta, to leave the room and for others to file out behind him.

Rep. Jack Kingston (AB '78) was downstairs in his office looking for a cup of coffee. When he got back upstairs, a phone caller told him to turn on the TV. Not long after that, the Republican from Savannah led his staff out of the building. The streets were alive with people and rumors. Kingston looked for a phone that worked so he could call the parents of his young staff members and let them know their children were safe.

Rep. Saxby Chambliss (BBA '66), chair of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Defense, was working on a farm bill that morning. A major manufacturer of farm equipment was in his office for a meeting. Chambliss had seen footage of the first plane and a staff member on the phone said officials didn't think it was an accident. A second call ordered Chambliss to get to the Capitol immediately. Outside, smoke from the plane crash at the Pentagon was already in the air.

Rep. Ander Crenshaw (AB '66) had been on Air Force One with the president the night before. George W. Bush had gone on to Sarasota and the freshman Republican congressman from Jacksonville had returned to Washington. Crenshaw was at a breakfast meeting across from the Capitol when word came of the attacks. Someone said a plane had gone down on the mall between the Capitol and the White House. Crenshaw knew his wife usually walked there in the mornings. When he couldn't reach her by phone, he started walking to their condominium. She was safe and had no idea about the attacks.

A policeman told Isakson to get away from government buildings, so he and an aide slowly made their way out of Washington proper. Isakson ended up at a hotel in Virginia, where he was scheduled to speak to an educational group. The meeting room was set up for 800. but only 25-30 people showed up. Isakson invited everyone to gather round him. "Let's talk," he said.

The rest of the morning, he sat in a restaurant across from the hotel. "Everybody was eating, waiters were waiting," he recalls. "A TV was on—and nobody was talking. It was 2 o'clock before I was able to stand in line at a phone and call home."

Meanwhile, Kingston—who, in January, was part of the first House delegation to visit Central Asia since Sept. 11—was on the streets around the House office building.

"Communication just fell apart . . . we were dumbstruck," he says. "There was no formal evacuation. We left the building believing the Capitol had been hit, the mall had been hit, the Sears Tower in Chicago had been hit, and the State Department had been hit. We assumed we were under full-scale attack. We also assumed it was in God's hands—and it was."

Later, at a secured spot for members of Congress, misinformation was still being spread. It also became apparent that there was no real security plan for Capitol Hill.

Chambliss, a candidate for Democrat Max Cleland's Senate seat, has been studying terrorism and our intelligence network for several years. Joined by others on his committee, he set up shop in his nearby apartment on Sept. 11. They were safe, but they had no way to confer with other members.

"Information must be shared," the Moultrie Republican says. "The computer network between agencies [the CIA and the FBI] isn't as good as it should be and we don't have the human assets we need. Some of that is the fault of the agencies. Some is the fault of Congress for not providing resources. And some is related to the sophistication of the enemy. Sept. 11 pointed to our deficiences and Congress is taking steps to correct them."

Recently, Chambliss returned from a Middle Eastern tour where he and members of his subcommittee were trying to gauge the level of support for America. Chambliss met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres, Syrian President Bashar Assad, and Jordanian King Abdullah II.

"Our allies have been dealing with these issues for years . . . we hadn't," says Chambliss, who became a regular on CNN talking about homeland security. "Now we have a system of portable phones that don't rely on cell towers—and every member of Congress has a Blackberry, a hand-held computer that is capable of two-way communication. We are also retooling our intelligence network."

Staff members from the House and Senate—many of them recent UGA graduates—were also in the streets on the day of the attacks.

Zack Deming (BBA '00), a native of Albany who works for Chambliss, went to a nearby bar and watched events unfold on a TV screen. "There was utter silence," he recalls. "The only sound you could hear was from people lined up at a pay phone trying to get a call through."

No one provided a secure location for the thousands of Congressional staffers who were left to fend for themselves. That hit home very quickly to Steven Meeks (BSA '98) of Ty Ty, another member of the Chambliss office staff.

"I wondered, Are we next?" says Meeks. "The Pentagon was only a mile and a half away as the crow flies. I had the attitude that we had to carry on with our lives. We had to reflect and not forget—but we had to carry on."

Selby McCash (ABJ '58) is considerably older than Deming or Meeks. He has worked in Washington for 20 years, not counting his years as a Capitol correspondent for the Atlanta Journal. He is now press secretary for Georgia congressman Sanford Bishop, a Democrat from Albany. McCash remembers the helpless feeling that people in Bishop's office had that morning when they realized that the husband of former colleague Britley Weiss worked in the World Trade Center complex. Later, they would learn that Rich Weiss lost his life in the Sept. 11 atacks.

McCash, a former editor of The Red & Black, will never forget how the Pentagon looked after being struck by the hijacked plane. But more than the building, he remembers meeting the families of people who died that day in Washington. "That gaping wound is still there," says McCash, "and all of those people should be remembered."

Weeks later, McCash came down with what would later be confirmed as the flu—but because of the anthrax scare and similar symptoms, he had to be treated as if he had been exposed to the potentially lethal bacteria.

From one moment to the next, no one knew what to think or do on Sept. 11. As the hours passed, old fashioned patriotism came to the fore. It peaked in late afternoon when word came that the congressional leadership was returning to the hill. A press conference was hastily put together on the Capitol steps. City buses blocked the streets to traffic and most workers were at home, so, basically, the only people on the sidewalks were congressmen headed back to the Capitol. Isakson and Kingston were among them.

"There was no background noise at all. It was eerie," says Isakson, describing his walk to the Capitol steps. "The press conference was brief. Reporters were as quiet as we were."

Then it started . . . softly at first:

God bless America, land that I love, stand beside her, and guide her . . .

"It was impromptu—we all just started singing," says Kingston. "We wanted to show the world that terrorists can't run Americans out of the Capitol. And we wanted America to know that the lights are still on and we're going to be there."

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