The Man for the Moment: Tom Ridge and the 9/11 Inflection Point

Gov. Tom Ridge aboard the National Guard Chinook helicopter as it circled the crash site before landing in the meadow in Stonycreek Township, Somerset County, near Shanksville, September 11, 2001.
Courtesy of the Thomas J. and Michele Ridge Archives at Mercyhurst University

On the cloudless, blue-sky morning of September 11, 2001, Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, unaware the State Police in Harrisburg were looking for him, was at his Erie home enjoying the crisp air while he cleared his raised flower beds of dead stems and dried leaves. Gardening was a favorite pastime for the Vietnam War veteran and former congressman.

For Ridge, that peaceful moment in his yard was something to embrace after two decades of public service. He had accomplished much since the days that followed law school at Dickinson. His stewardship of the state drew political praise in national Republican circles. He had been considered as a presidential running mate, first for the GOP’s Bob Dole, who lost his bid for president in 1996, and then in 2000 for Texas governor George W. Bush. The future president even spent a night in Harrisburg, allowing the two friends to take a jog along the Susquehanna River the following morning; however, Ridge, in a surprise move that some found astonishing for a modern politician, decided to withdraw from consideration as Bush’s running mate to instead focus on his children who were entering their teenage years.

Before gardening that morning, Ridge visited his mother in the hospital, where she was recovering from surgery. He brought her Dunkin’ Donuts and “real coffee” while unbeknownst to him at the time, an act of terrorism already started to play out in the Pennsylvania skies 200 miles to the south. The finale of that incident left a meadow in Stonycreek Township, Somerset County, scorched, the remains of United Airlines Flight 93 — a Boeing 757-222 aircraft with 44 people aboard, including four hijackers — fragmented and spread across a burned, blackened ground. Investigators surmised that some of the passengers tried to stop the terrorists. The plane had crashed into the earth with such force, about 575 miles per hour, that the ensuing fiery explosion created a mushroom cloud that rose high above the rural landscape. Light pieces of debris were found as far as 8 miles away; human remains were collected within a 70-acre area around the site, according to National Transportation Safety Board investigators.

What target the hijackers planned remains speculation today, but according to the report released in 2004 by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, created by Congress and known as the 9/11 Commission, the terrorists diverted the plane from its original course of Newark to San Francisco. Their intention was to fly the aircraft, now used as a missile, to Washington, D.C., and possibly strike either the White House or the U.S. Capitol.

As Ridge tended his garden, with Flight 93 still airborne, the crew dead and the terrorists at the controls, the State Police reached the trooper assigned to the governor. The plainclothes officer relayed what seemed incomprehensible news to Ridge: Two terrorist-hijacked planes hit their targets, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.

American Airlines Flight 11 smashed into the north tower, killing all 92 aboard including the five hijackers. Approximately 22 minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 flew into the south tower, killing all 65 aboard including the five hijackers. The twin towers became blast furnace chimneys; white and black smoke poured from them into the clear azure skies. Ridge responded to the news immediately. He called his chief of staff, Mark Holman, and began to arrange for the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency to deploy. He stood, while speaking to Holman, before a television and watched NBC News Chief Pentagon Correspondent Jim Miklaszewski report on the New York City attacks from the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Left, An aerial view of the Flight 93 crash site, showing the point of impact in the field and a scorched patch of trees in the adjacent forest. Right, Flight 93 impacted at about 575 mph, leaving a crater reported to be 15 feet deep and 30 feet wide. In the investigation that followed to gather evidence, the crater was excavated to an area of 85-by-85 feet and 27 to 40 feet deep.
Pennsylvania State Archives, RG-30.83: Colonel Paul Evanko Collection

“I’m talking on the phone and at the same time watching NBC, and Jim Miklaszewski is wrapping up his interview and he said, after a pause, ‘There’s been a loud explosion on the other side of the building and I’ll go see what it is.’ They concluded the interview that abruptly,” Ridge recalled to me in a recent interview.

The time was 9:37 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77 had smashed into the western side of the Pentagon; a fearsome fire erupted, the billowing black smoke seen for miles. Everyone aboard was killed, 64 people, and 125 in the building, a portion of which collapsed. The fire took days for firefighters to extinguish.

At that moment Ridge, with a prevailing sense of helplessness because he had little information to make sense of what was happening, ordered Holman to get him a helicopter so he could get back to Harrisburg; however, the federal government had by that time, 9:45 a.m., grounded all aircraft nationwide. It would take hours before the State Police received clearance for the governor’s flight via a National Guard Chinook helicopter.

At 9:49 a.m., while Ridge waited, the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, 56 minutes after Flight 175 smashed into the building between floors 77 and 85 at 590 miles per hour. The plane carried 10,000 gallons of aviation fuel that created a conflagration. At 10:03 a.m. Flight 93 crashed, a result, investigators have determined, of the passengers fighting to resist the hijackers, having learned from calls to their cell phones about the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

As another billowing column of black smoke rose in American skies and drifted across Somerset County, the north tower in Manhattan collapsed, 1 hour and 42 minutes after the impact of Flight 11. The death toll from the crashes, fires and collapses of the twin towers was 2,606 — 2,192 civilians, 343 firefighters and 71 law enforcement officers.

Chinook helicopters are large, elongated military aircraft with twin rotors, porthole side windows, and a flat backside that opens into a wide ramp to slide out skids strapped with supplies that parachute downward to waiting troops. Late on the afternoon of 9/11, Ridge was aboard a Chinook, circling the crash site in Stonycreek Township. He recalled two indelible moments from that day as he peered out one of the porthole windows at the meadow below.

“I’m expecting to see what one would normally see after an aviation accident, parts of the engine, fuselage — there’s nothing but a smoldering hole,” he said.

Governor Ridge with Pennsylvania National Guard Commander William Lynch and State Police Commissioner Paul Evanko.
Courtesy of the Thomas J. and Michele Ridge Archives at Mercyhurst University

The other moment was after the Chinook landed and he walked toward the site: “I can close my eyes and see the press corps, there are a ton of people there, obviously, but over in the distance there had to be 18 to 20 ambulances and emergency vehicles. Pennsylvanians had rushed to the site as soon as they heard the plane was down. And here we were 5, 6 hours later, and they’re still there, probably in wonder, shock, anger, uncertainty — those are the feelings I had standing there at that scene. There are certain things you can close your eyes and see; I can close my eyes and I can tell you exactly where I was the first day I got shot at in Vietnam. I can close my eyes and see a lot of things that are significant to me, but I’ll never forget that.”

Eight days later, according to Ridge’s book, The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege . . . And How We Can Be Safe Again, the White House called the Pennsylvania Governor’s Residence in Harrisburg, and Vice President Dick Cheney, with Chief of Staff Andrew Card listening on the line, informed Ridge that the “president wants to do something differently in the White House to deal with the terrorist threat. It’s a high priority.” The vice president said, “We’re very serious about this, and he wants to talk to you about being part of it. . . . Please keep an open mind.”

***

Not unlike the “day of infamy” that President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared 60 years earlier, on December 7, 1941, when Japanese naval fighter planes struck the U.S. military forces at Pearl Harbor, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks changed America, shattered the serenity of a beautiful fall morning, and sent the nation into war. Like Pearl Harbor, the hallowed ground in Somerset County where passengers died while stopping terrorist hijackers is considered the first skirmish of what President George W. Bush would declare as the “war on terror.”

“On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941. Americans have known the casualties of war, but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning,” Bush told a joint session of Congress nine days after the attacks. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.”

Seated in the audience that evening was Tom Ridge. Memories of the attacks and his visit to the meadow rekindled as Bush talked about the state of the union and said, “We have seen it in the courage of passengers who rushed terrorists to save others on the ground.”

To Ridge, the meadow takes its place among historic Pennsylvania locales such as Valley Forge, the winter encampment of Gen. George Washington’s Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, and Gettysburg, where Gen. George Meade and the Army of the Potomac fought a decisive Civil War battle to preserve the nation. “It was the first battle against terrorism,” he said of Flight 93’s passenger revolt. “We’ve been at the epicenter of an extraordinary number of historical events throughout the history of this country. In a profound way, we’re there again.”

In his speech to Congress, the president addressed the question of how America would fight the war on terror and prefaced his announcement with, “Our nation has been put on notice, we’re not immune from attack. We will take defensive measures against terrorism to protect Americans. Today, dozens of federal departments and agencies, as well as state and local governments, have responsibilities affecting homeland security. These efforts must be coordinated at the highest level. So tonight, I announce the creation of a Cabinet-level position reporting directly to me, the Office of Homeland Security.” He turned and introduced the man to head that effort, “a trusted friend, Pennsylvania’s Tom Ridge.”

As the applause faded, President Bush said, “He will lead, oversee and coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to safeguard our country against terrorism and respond to any attacks that may come. These measures are essential. The only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it and destroy it where it grows.”

Ridge takes questions from reporters in Somerset County on 9/11.
Courtesy of the Thomas J. and Michele Ridge Archives at Mercyhurst University

Although the rest of the nation may have felt reassured, Ridge faced what many believed, and some pundits suggested, would become a monumentally thankless task — to ensure against further attacks on American soil, which much of the public believed was coming, while organizing a nation, once thought impregnable, to stand in readiness. The pressure was tremendous. It was a job fraught with bureaucratic and political minefields, but Ridge, an infantry staff sergeant with the 23rd Division during the Vietnam War, told friends he had no choice but to accept. When the president of the United States calls on you to serve your country in a time of crisis, he said, you don’t say no. His family understood this as well and realized the difficulties to their own lives it would entail. Ridge recounts in his book the response from his wife, Michele, the daughter of a career Army soldier: “You can’t say no, Tom.”

Asked about his decision, Ridge mentioned the 1942 book They Were Expendable, journalist William L. White’s fictional account of actual sailors and soldiers left behind during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines to face capture in World War II. Ridge said, “They knew the chances were 100 percent that none of them were going to make it.”

He recalled similar warnings received from friends and staff: “They said, ‘You know, this could happen to you and you’d be blamed for it.’” He acknowledged the situation but said, “that’s just the way it’s got to be.” Besides, he said, my situation “wasn’t nearly as dramatic as a holding action against an invasion force.”

When the president called him that evening, according to The Test of Our Times, he told Ridge, “We’re in a war, obviously a different kind of war. And if we are attacked again I want to be able to pick up the phone and ask one person what’s happening and what are we doing about it.”

***

Ridge accepted the appointment the following afternoon. He was given two weeks to conclude his affairs as governor and report to duty. Initially, Ridge was named assistant to the president for Homeland Security and given a small office in the White House with about a half dozen staff members. They faced the seemingly daunting job of coordinating about 20 federal agencies, each of which played some role in protecting the homeland.

“Once I told the president I would take the job as the assistant to the president for Homeland Security, we wrote the job description,” Ridge said. “We spent the next week writing the job description so I would have it when I took the oath about two weeks later. Initially, I had a pretty good idea what I had to do without looking at the job description. I felt from the get-go [that] you build the relationship with the intelligence community and the military, just a personal one. I always felt you couldn’t secure the country from inside the Beltway.”

One of Ridge’s first efforts, working with his staff, was to establish a line of communication with governors and mayors “and then build that kind of information-relationship with the FBI and the CIA, so that where appropriate we could channel the information on down.”

In those immediate days and months after 9/11, the information shared was most often actionable but, as Ridge recalled, it was sometimes preemptive. “Many of my phone calls with governors and mayors, and there were a lot of them, weren’t asking them to do anything. ‘Here’s what we know, we think it’s credible, so if I have to call you a second or third time about doing something specific, you’ll know that we’ve been following it for a week or two.’”

Homeland Security’s role was defense, while the military and intelligence communities played offense. “Our job was to play defense,” Ridge said. “So, it morphed from an effort to build relationships and share information with the state and locals under the very sound, fundamental precept that you can’t secure the country from inside the Beltway. In a federal system, it’s important to have allies and take advantage of resources available at the state and local level.”

Ridge takes the oath of office as secretary of homeland security from Vice President Dick Cheney, as President George W. Bush looks on. To the right are Ridge’s wife Michele, son Tommy and daughter Lesley.
Courtesy of the Thomas J. and Michele Ridge Archives at Mercyhurst University

The tasks of reorganizing and establishing unheard of levels of cooperation with other federal agencies became frustrating because of the natural bureaucratic resistance to change. Before long, following an assessment of the situation made by Ridge and Congress, it was determined that the Office of Homeland Security in its existing form could not sufficiently meet the country’s needs in a new era of asymmetrical warfare — with surprise attacks against the civilian population by small, rudimentarily armed but innovative groups.

“It was clear, absent the president’s engagement and our building out the architecture for an agency, that individual Cabinet members were not inclined to do anything different other than to encourage greater collaboration and greater communication,” Ridge said. “I think the president realized [the need] because there had been multiple studies from think tanks in D.C., and there were a couple initiated by Congress, that talked about the need in an interconnected, interdependent world to build a border agency to monitor people and services going across the border. Well, this put the exclamation point on the need.”

Thus, a department, similar to home or interior ministries in other countries like England, was required. It became the largest reorganization of the federal government since the National Security Act of 1947, which consolidated the military under the secretary of defense and created the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 consolidated 22 agencies with 240,000 employees under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the third largest Cabinet department following Defense and Veterans Affairs, its policies coordinated by the White House’s Homeland Security Council.

DHS began operations in autumn 2003 with Ridge as secretary. The effort to establish or “stand up,” in military parlance, this new department within the federal framework, to assure the public, and to assuage concern among some who were suspicious of the agency’s size and enforcement scope, was massive, said Duncan McGill, dean of the Ridge College of Intelligence Studies and Applied Science at Mercyhurst University in Erie.

“He was dealing with a small staff in the Homeland Security Council,” McGill said. “They were formulating the plans to build the department, but imagine the difficulty of taking 20-something different organizations in December–January of 2002–2003 and standing up this now behemoth of an organization all with different cultural- and
mission-related ties, bringing them together, and trying to formulate a unified policy for how you’re going to combat terrorism and bring safety back to the country. And by the way, at that point in time, we’re well on the way to preparing for war in Iraq.”

In March 2003 the United States launched an invasion of Iraq as part of the War on Terror, which meant that Ridge and his team, in addition to building a department to protect the homeland, also prepared for whatever threats wartime would bring. This made reorganization doubly difficult compared to the less complicated 1947 reorganization, which was done in peacetime.

“It’s full speed ahead,” explained McGill. “Everything was happening fast, and of course, when you bring all those organizations together, each of those organizations has a structural hierarchy that usually ends with some director or boss because they’re managing money, they’re managing assets, their managing mission, but there’s nothing on top that brings all these folks together. So, how do you incorporate that to get to the assets you need to build a headquarters?”

Put under DHS control was the Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Coast Guard, Secret Service, Federal Computer Incident Response Center, Nuclear Incident Response Team, and 14 other agencies, from animal disease to plant health inspection. Ridge shared a vision that inspired, challenged and encouraged the people under his leadership, McGill said.

“That’s the kind of leader the governor has been,” McGill said. “He always does, in my opinion, what’s best for the country. He’s not what I call a far right, far left kind of person. His focus is country, not ideology. I think, in that regard, he was the right leader for the time.”

Ridge said Homeland Security benefitted significantly from retired military, Coast Guard and intelligence professionals who went to work in the new department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., along Nebraska Avenue, just across the street from American University (in 2019 the headquarters moved across the city to the campus of St. Elizabeths Hospital). This was normal progression for public servants in these fields, said McGill, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served as a nuclear and counterproliferation officer.

Secretary of Homeland Security Ridge in a discussion with President Bush in the Oval Office.
Courtesy of the Thomas J. and Michele Ridge Archives at Mercyhurst University

An engineer, McGill was working for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Pentagon on the eve of 9/11. He was on night shift in the defense secretary’s cables office, monitoring traffic of overseas messages. “There was certainly a knowledge that events were going to happen,” he said. “We knew something was happening, we just didn’t know when or where or what.” He went home that morning and went to sleep, only to be awakened a short time later by a phone call from his superior who told him to turn on his television. That evening, McGill returned to the Pentagon, well away from where Flight 77 smashed into the building earlier that day, and went into the National Military Command Center.

“I can still remember on the night of 9/11 — you could smell the smoke in the building — going into the MCC, and there’s one Predator [drone] that’s flying over Afghanistan that we’re getting a feed from. Just one. That’s the knowledge we had on that night,” he said. “The Predator was very new then; it didn’t carry weapons, it was an observation tool.”

Shared intelligence became the watchword of not just American military and intelligence agencies, but also Homeland Security. If the department was to work as Ridge and Congress envisioned, every agency needed to work with DHS at levels not before considered; however, sharing publicly was another matter. The color-coded threat-level alerts became fodder for late night comedians because the public didn’t know exactly what do with them. The threat level ranged mostly between yellow (elevated) and orange (high) but never reached red (severe) or the blue and green (guarded and low). Ridge and McGill point out the threat levels were signals for federal agencies on response preparedness to protect civilians, assets and infrastructure.

“We never went to red because we never had a post event,” McGill said. “There’s all kinds of areas that the public generally doesn’t see how the government has to act, and in cases it does, it’s sometimes without the state’s authority; in some cases, it does it with the state’s authority.”

Before Homeland Security was organized, the federal government’s response to threats to the homeland was ad hoc, conducted by handfuls of agencies, McGill said. “Today, we have a structure that allows us to do that under the authority of Homeland Security.”

***

Tom Ridge left the Department of Homeland Security before Bush’s second term. In part, according to The Test of Our Times, because of politics. He felt he had accomplished his mission and that it was time to move on, to let a new secretary tend the garden he planted and tilled those first couple of seasons. He believes 9/11 made people more aware of terrorism’s potential dangers.

As the head of Ridge Global, his own cyber security firm, Ridge said the world has become even more interconnected and interdependent since that fateful day 20 years ago. Although he doubts there’s much chance for another 9/11 attack, he believes there’s always a potential for one. Global terrorism is a permanent threat, he said, and the sophisticated technology available today gives dissidents greater tools in which to cause harm.

“We don’t have to keep looking over our shoulder, but I think the country should be reassured that we have a lot of unsung heroes and heroines, great patriots, that go to work every day around the globe to help us identify and defeat global terrorism as we know it, including cyber,” Ridge said. “Their guard has always been up, and it always will be, that’s part of their mission.”

Further Reading

The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Authorized ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004 / Longman, Jere. Among the Heroes: United Flight 93 and the Passengers and Crew Who Fought Back. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. / McMillan, Tom. Flight 93: The Story, the Aftermath, and the Legacy of American Courage on 9/11. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2014. / Ridge, Tom, with Lary Bloom. The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege . . . And How We Can Be Safe Again. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2009. / Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and The Road to 9/11. New York: Knopf, 2006.

Peter Durantine, a writer and journalist for nearly 30 years, covered Gov. Tom Ridge and his administration. He lives in Hummelstown, Dauphin County.