Covering 9/11 showed journalist how to handle Covid pandemic,

Like many Americans, I remember every detail of Sept. 11, 2001, like it was yesterday.

I was a congressional reporter in Washington, D.C., for Dow Jones Newswires and was getting ready that Tuesday morning to cover a hearing when I noticed a shot of the twin towers on CNBC instead of the usual market news. I’d been in New York City the week before and just missed meeting one of my college roommates, Elsa Gomez, for lunch in the south tower, where she worked on the 72nd floor as a portfolio manager for Morgan Stanley.

I had just turned off my hair dryer and turned up the volume to hear what the TV reporters were saying when the second plane crashed into the south tower, at 9:03 a.m. My frantic calls to Elsa’s cell phone rolled to voice mail, and then my own phone rang.

My bureau chief, John Connor, yelled, “Do you see the news?”

“Yes, I’m watching it now. I was getting ready for that hearing,” I said.

“Forget the hearing. We’re under attack!” Connor yelled. “Get to the Capitol right now and start reporting.”

Internet and cell service weren’t remotely close to what they are today. I had a flip phone and a pager. The difficulty in communicating on 9/11 would later prompt Dow Jones to buy BlackBerrys for everyone, but few of us had them at the time, and I wasn’t one of them. If I happened to get an offhand quote from a senator or regulator that broke news, I called the main news desk in Jersey City, New Jersey, and dictated my story to the copy desk, which sent headlines and the finished stories to the markets.

My heart was racing. I drove to the Capitol and ran into the Senate side with my laptop, cellphone, reporter’s pad and pens. I got lucky and ran into John Glenn, the former astronaut and retired Democratic senator from Ohio. Glenn said he was told the crashes were intentional, an attack of some kind, and that he was waiting to hear about a security briefing on it.

As we were talking, at 9:37 a.m., a third plane crashed, this time into the Pentagon. A Capitol Police officer grabbed one of Glenn’s arms and one of mine, yelling, “Everybody out NOW.”

We ran out to the lawn along with other Hill staff, reporters and lawmakers. I was panicked. At 30, I had zero experience covering war zones. As a business journalist, I had never even covered so much as a bad tropical storm, let alone a terrorist attack. My most dangerous assignment was facing pushback from the Capitol Police while staking out late-night negotiations on Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the legislation that gave rise to the financial crisis by allowing sleepy banks to open massive trading arms.

We all stood around on the Capitol lawn looking at each other, not knowing what to do. I tried to call in and report what Glenn had told me but couldn’t get a signal. That’s when we saw the smoke billowing out from the Pentagon and heard what we thought were bombs going off across D.C.

We were all terrified, except maybe David Rogers, a veteran congressional reporter for The Wall Street Journal, who liked to call…