This is the Sept. 11, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
A quarter century has passed since Sept. 11, 2001 — the day nearly 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The victims’ families first had to endure the shock of what happened. Then in the weeks that followed, so many desperately held on to hope — clinging to homemade signs with their loved ones’ photos, repeatedly calling hospitals hoping for good news, and ceaselessly praying for a miracle that would never come.
When that bright September morning began, I was a cub reporter at CBS News in my first week working as a correspondent for the network. I was excited that day to be arriving early and had dressed in a wine-colored suit I splurged on at Lord & Taylor.
The New York City mayoral election was supposed to be the big news that day. Instead, the tragic events of Sept. 11 would turn my workday into five weeks of round-the-clock coverage from ground zero.
After the first plane hit the towers, I watched the horror unfolding on TV screens across CBS News. I burst out of my office and sprinted toward the newsroom to see what the editors needed. The usually bustling operation had erupted in chaos. Bill Felling, the assignment editor, was waving his arms and mouthing the words: “Go — just get there.”
Running out of CBS and onto 57th Street, I went looking for a cab. Instead of catching a taxi, I found gridlock. Something massive was unfolding in Manhattan. What I couldn’t have known was how the day ahead would soon become a defining moment in all of our lives.
There would be the era before 9/11, and the lives we lived after the towers fell.
After taking a left on 57th, I caught up with CBS producer Mike Nobile and realized the only way I was getting down to the World Trade Center was by running.
Within 10 minutes of the first plane hitting the tower, with heels in hands, I was out sprinting full speed and barefoot down the West Side Highway — running alongside lines of parked cars stuck on the roadway.
Doors were open, people were standing staring at the sky, listening to their car radios, trying to understand what was happening at the Twin Towers. Soon after the second plane hit, I heard the news spreading from car to car — shouted from those stuck on the West Side Highway.
“Another plane hit the towers! Another plane hit the towers! What the hell?”
I kept running.
My mind now whirling and on high alert.
Wherever you were in New York that morning, you realized at that moment that the first plane crash had been no accident. The realization that America was under attack crashed down upon us all. It was when we started asking whether there was more chaos ahead on this clear, bright September morning.
Any sense of security felt in the hours before the attack was gone.
Later, I would learn my parents had begun calling me frantically from their home in McLean, Virginia. Dozens of voicemails would flood in that morning, but I would only hear them weeks later when I returned home.
My mother’s voice sounded unusually shaken as she desperately repeated the same message.
“Bibi, give us a call, please.”
I kept running until I made to the outer perimeter of the towers. Somehow, I found myself standing next to Byron Pitts — CBS News’ top correspondent at the time. Byron had advised me just a few days earlier to always get to work early because that was how you got assigned the best stories.
Yet here we were, standing together the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, staring at what would become the worst story we would ever imagine covering.
I kept asking Byron about the flickering dots raining down from the towers. Was it debris? Shattered windows? Metal scraps?
I quickly began writing down details of what I thought I was seeing. But Byron stopped me and said that wasn’t debris I saw flying from those windows — but rather poor souls falling to their deaths.
People who were being forced to jump 70-plus stories by the flames now engulfing their offices. It soon became evident to all of us watching from below that there would be no escape for people trapped above the crash zones.
What we could not predict was how there would soon be no escape for those below the crash site, either.
That’s because the next horror we saw unfolding was the tower’s peak beginning to collapse on itself. The mass of steel and glass crumbled to pieces in an avalanche that kept growing larger and falling faster while it rumbled down at sickening speeds in our direction.
Everything now seemed to be unfolding in slow motion, as my brain struggled to catch up with the reality in front of us.
I stared at the scene in disbelief.
Byron grabbed my hand and dived behind a nearby car, until we realized we needed more protection from the coming storm.
We then sprinted north as the huge ball of smoke, debris, and mangled remnants continued rolling toward us.
We burst through the doors of a school just as the dark mass blew violently overhead. Inside, the space turned from a bright and cheerful classroom to a black, smoky fallout shelter, as soot covered the windows. We could hear pieces of the Trade Center debris clunking against the school’s walls and windows, rattling ominously against the structure’s support beams.
No cellphones were working, so I started scrambling for a landline. I rifled through a closet and found clothing, including a pair of boots I would wear for the next five weeks.
I also stumbled across an old-fashioned telephone. So Byron and I began fumbling around, looking for a phone jack in the wall. Miraculously, we found one. I plugged in the phone and heard that dial tone, as satisfying as drinking water in the desert.
Within minutes, Byron and I were on the air. The school soon became the place where we did our reporting, and where firefighters would come in to clean up, get a drink of water, and then march back into the towers. Some of the veterans had been around long enough to have ominous expressions on their faces. Several used our live line to CBS to tell their wives they loved them, and to say goodbye on live television. One walked away after looking me in the face with deep, devastated eyes, as if to let me know he was in his last hour here on Earth.
Too many I saw that day faced the same fate.
The firefighters we watched walking back into the remaining tower became some of the thousands of victims who died. Despite the grim prospects that lay ahead, they never flinched or faltered.
My husband at the time, Jim Hoffer, was an investigative reporter for WABC Channel 7. Jim was having a similar experience on the other side of the Twin Towers, covering the story live from his angle. Days later, we would stumble into each other in the middle of the West Side Highway. And for two people who had spent years talking about every angle of news stories we were covering, on this occasion there was little to say. We grimly hugged one another and then went our separate ways back to the story.
That would be the first time I stopped and allowed myself to feel the totality of all that was happening around me. I remember thinking how much the world had changed for us all. That moment of realization will stay with me forever.
Those are some of my reflections from that day. There are so many more, but this is my meager attempt to describe the indescribable events of Sept. 11. And I know too well that my scattered thoughts here do not come close to adequately conveying the pain, suffering, and loss borne by so many families.
Their moms, dads, brothers, sisters, daughters, and sons all went to work that day, on that beautiful September morning, and never came home.
Weeks later, when our rolling coverage finally dialed back, I was able to return to my own home to see my little girls for the first time since the towers fell. I remember feeling guilt for just being able to do what 3,000 souls had not been able to do at the end of that day — go home.
Looking up at the sky today, as I do every year on this anniversary, I find myself back in that Lord & Taylor suit, racing toward a news story in the Financial District that would change our lives forever.
I also remember on this anniversary the person I was before the attacks that came from those blue skies.
Those September skies.
The first day of school.
The crisp autumn breeze.
My new job.
Memories sweet and hopeful.
Then I reflect on the depth of darkness that day would bring, along with that uncertain future that surrounds us still.
Twenty-five years later on this mournful occasion, I remember all the moments of that day like they happened yesterday.
The post “Go — just get there”: Mika Brzezinski reflects on reporting at ground zero, 25 years after 9/11 appeared first on MS NOW.
