A Decade of Hope (54 page)

ERIN: We can evolve it as the world evolves. We have a library at a domestic abuse center. Children and mothers who are victims of abuse are cared for, and there's a whole system of support for them. While they are there, there's the Brooke Jackman library. And we also started one of our family literacy programs there for the mothers and their children. They come back to utilize it. When they first get there, after they've left their homes in the middle of the night and taken almost no possessions—one mother was with her two traumatized sons in the library, and our backpacks had just arrived, and they were the first two to get them last year. They were just amazed. They saw books, the backpack, the MP3 players, and they were, like, “How did they know? How did they know I need this?” We get to experience many stories like this, and they all inspire us to reach more and more children with Brooke's love of books.

Cameron MacRae is of counsel to a major New York law firm. His wife, Ann, besides being a wife and a mother, is a natural volunteer and, together with her husband and others, created a foundation that improves the lives of young people, the Cat MacRae Memorial Fund. Their daughter Catherine—Cat—was working as a financial analyst with Fred Alger Management, and on 9/11 she was in her office on the ninety-third floor of the North Tower.

 

 

 

A
NN: Both of my daughters grew up right here on the Upper East Side of New York. We lived on Eighty-first Street until Cat was nine, and then moved here, to Seventy-second Street. Her sister Annie was five at the time. They went to the Brearley School on Eighty-fourth Street. And they did have a wonderful New York City life.

Cat was a really great child and always excelled at everything, even in the first grade. All the students who didn't know how to read went downstairs to reading lessons, and all of those who knew how to read stayed upstairs. Of course Cat didn't know how to read, but Brearley made her feel like she was a genius and kept her upstairs the whole time. She thrived there. Both girls loved Brearley, and it was a lovely childhood, with weekends in Southampton. Cameron and I both went to boarding school, and neither one of us liked it, and so we did not send them away to high school. After Brearley Cat went to Princeton, where she really grew. Those were the happiest four years of her life. Because she died at twenty-three we don't have too much to compare to, but she was the happiest at Princeton, where she graduated with honors in economics.

CAMERON: Magna cum laude. She was a very beautiful young lady, and so is Annie. They were both very dynamic and captivating growing up. I speak of Cat as if she's still around, not because I'm delusional, but because she is somewhat very much with us. She loved Princeton, and one of the things that was extraordinarily fun for her was sophomore year. There was a little house next to the dorm called 99 Alexandra, where she'd been assigned to live with nine other girls. That was just a wonderful time for Cat, and she ended up joining the Ivy Club.

ANN: Where there's a portrait of her now.

CAMERON: Yes. If you go into Ivy now, which is probably the most traditional of all the clubs, in the foyer there's a gallery of extraordinary Ivy Club members. The portraits are all men, but they did put a beautiful oil painting of Cat with us. She looks so beautiful.

ANN: Cat met a chap named Andrew Caspersen there. They fell in love and were clearly going to be married. He fell for Cat's interesting combination of being attractive, very nice, and funny—very funny. Great sense of humor. One of the things I remember the most about Cat is, if she'd heard something funny, and if she was eating, she would almost choke. She would just collapse in laughter. She was great on a level plane, and then on the unusual, too. For instance, she was very good in both English and mathematics. She had a perfect little life, and she worked very hard to get everything she achieved. She was naturally smart and naturally athletic and naturally nice, but she was also a hard worker. And that's one of the things that broke our hearts—that she had worked so hard to get to Princeton. She always wanted to go there and had gone to Cameron's reunions because Cameron had gone to Princeton. Since she was six, she had said, “I'm going to go to Princeton,” and in 1996 she got an early admission, which was quite a feat. While there she excelled at mathematics and got a math prize.

CAMERON: I sometimes wonder, though,
What if she had not gone directly from college to Goldman Sachs?
I actually had urged her not to immediately go to Goldman, because even though it is the best investment bank, it's certainly not the nicest place to work.

She did leave Goldman, and the final straw was that the previous year she got an assignment the Thursday before Labor Day weekend with a “request” that it be on her boss's desk the following workday. She knew there was no urgency whatsoever for this report, and she'd planned a weekend with Andrew, as they hadn't had much time off during that summer. She eventually allowed herself to be lured away by David Alger, who ran Fred Alger, a fairly prominent money management firm, and she was very happy there, working as an analyst. They manage mutual funds and things like that, strictly in the high-tech area. Unfortunately, David selected the ninety-third floor of the WTC as their office site.

ANN: Well, we all thought it was safe.

CAMERON: It made me a little queasy because when I was a member of the Council of the Banking Commission in 1970–1972, I was in one of the World Trade Center buildings, on the thirty-second floor. I always knew that it was quite a job to get up to the top. You had to go up to the sky lobby, and then change over, and it made me nervous that Cat would be up that high. In retrospect, thinking of the first bombing in 1993, it's now very clear to me that these people kept going after the same target. Which is a worrisome thing in New York City. Cat got a little nervous herself after she began working on the ninety-third floor, so high up.

ANN: She did worry about terrorism. I remember her saying, “I just don't like that building”—and she was aware of the '93 bombing. We are very protective parents. And it's funny, a number of the mothers of victims of the attack whom I've met have all said that safety was a top priority in bringing up their kids. It just did not occur to us. It's absurd that we didn't realize that the World Trade Center would be a target. The '93 bombing should have been enough warning. And Richard Clarke was telling everybody. [Clarke, a counterterrorism adviser, warned the George W. Bush administration about al Qaeda before 9/11.]

CAMERON: What we honestly didn't know, living in New York, was how iconic our city and those buildings were. To the rest of the world the World Trade Center was the center of commerce and power. If we thought our city had a target, we would have thought it would be the Empire State Building.

The thing that really appalled me—and I hold Bush and Cheney extremely responsible for this—was that terrorism was not a priority for Bush. Whatever the pros and cons of the Clinton administration, it was very clear that after the millennium they were very focused on terrorism. Clinton or Gore would attend meetings every day to discuss this kind of threat. When Bush and Cheney came in they rejected everything that Clinton had done. Terrorism was a very low priority. It wasn't in the top ten, probably around number twenty-five. They just dropped the ball.

ANN: The morning of 9/11, I was on the phone to my best friend and Cameron came in and said a plane had hit the World Trade Center. And I said, “Cameron, be quiet, I'm on the phone.” And then . . . We didn't know. Cameron said it hit Tower 1, and we didn't know which tower Cat was in. I remember picking up the phone book and looking up Fred Alger.

CAMERON: We tried to call Cat.

ANN: We never heard from her.

CAMERON: And at that point I was watching CNBC. The thought was that maybe it was a private plane.

We have trouble talking about that day because . . .

ANN: I can talk about it. We had called Cat, but there was no answer—I think the call just didn't go through. We went into total shock. Of course we did. Our best friends came over. And a lot of Cat's friends, Princeton girls, came over. I remember going to the dining room window, and fighter jets went over all those little town houses down on the street, and I said, “Oh my God,” because when it happens to you, you're not fully aware that it's an international incident. Fighter jets—you can't take it all in. But we knew the government was involved. There were a lot of young people here in our home, and every time the phone rang we thought,
It might be Cat
. I won't use the profanity, but I said, If I don't hear from her by four o'clock . . . I'm not sure I said it would mean she was dead, but it would be bad. And then at four I said, “Oh, it's four o'clock.” And then the kids went to work and started calling hospitals.

You know, when you grow up in an apartment building, all the doormen, the superintendent, the tenants, everybody together, it's a village. Everybody knew Cat and was there to help within four hours.

CAMERON: One of the doormen, with whom we were close, and who ultimately enlisted in the marines, had an old jalopy, so he, Dennis the superintendent, and I tried to get down to the World Trade Center site. We couldn't get past Fourteenth Street. We stopped, and I walked around in that area trying to get my cell phone working. I was hopeful, as I thought they all would have gathered in David Alger's office, and he would have led them out.

For the next few days I went to the hospitals—St. Vincent's, Bellevue, even Lenox Hill—but didn't find out anything. We had a little hope when we saw a list of survivors that had had something close to Cat's name on it. And I had some hope that everyone would have gotten down into the subbasements.

ANN: And you called people about that too, to find out how they were constructed.

CAMERON: I don't even like to go back there mentally. It's just so awful, and it was beyond belief. I watched the collapse on TV.

ANN: We both did. With our daughter inside.

CAMERON: It's a horrible thing.

ANN: A friend of ours went to pick up Annie the next day from Amherst and brought her home. Chuck Scarborough [a local TV news anchor], who's a friend of ours from Southampton, put up a picture of Cat on the TV news with our telephone number. We were all in our bedroom watching it, and the phone rang, and someone said, “I know where your daughter is.” It was some crank, but for a minute you believed him. You were desperate to believe him.

We had a candlelight vigil in Central Park. Everyone came down to Seventy-second Street and lit candles. There was a picture of Cat on the door of our apartment building. People came up to me and said, I'm so sorry, and I remember saying, We don't know.

CAMERON: Needless to say, neither the city administration under [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani nor the national administration did anything to reach out, or try to coordinate, or to say, Here's a master list. I think they were reasonably confused. It's hard to tell how aggressive their efforts were.

It's understandable that people made errors, but then to use the tragedy as a platform for a political career, which Giuliani tried to do, and then to watch people who, particularly in the case of Bush and Cheney, who were in part responsible—and believe me, I'm an independent—use it successfully in a platform for a political career is absolutely nauseating. It still is.

There was a terrible waste of our resources, and our prestige, and so many lives lost when Bush and Cheney elected to go into Iraq, with no connection to September 11. Anyone with half a brain knew that at the time, and it is clear now. And it's hurt our security. I think that over the last nine years the Iraq war and the failure to clean up Afghanistan have hurt our country.

ANN: This is a big part of our grieving too. Because you have got to get mad.

CAMERON: You can quote me: Cheney can roast in hell. And since Bush followed his ideas and advice, they both can. Our security is internationally weaker because of all this. Domestically it's not very pleasant, to say the least, because of how many of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been incorporated—for instance, cargo security. Having a “national security czar” has turned out to be counterproductive. On the positive side, it is quite remarkable that a number of these plots in recent years have been foiled. The New York City Police and Fire departments are as alert as any city's defenses can be. I am impressed that we were able to intercept the Times Square bomber, but, unfortunately, terrorism just keeps going on. Now Germany is on alert for a possible Mumbai-like attack. The problem is that we didn't corral the thing.

The Obama administration has been reasonably successful in providing security, and some of the things the Bush administration did at the end were working. I also think that mistakes are being made by the Obama administration, such as the idea of having civilian trials for terrorists, which is just way-out liberal thinking gone crazy by people who have never been in a courtroom. Why they should be tried in New York City is beyond me, and Attorney General [Eric] Holder has been extremely ill advised in pushing for those kinds of things. Certainly it's beyond me, when you have a quasi-military attack on our facilities abroad, whether it's the USS
Cole
or one of our embassies, [that they] will not admit that we are essentially fighting an ongoing war.

ANN: I know exactly where I was when I realized Cat was truly gone. It was the Friday after September 11. We often go to church, and there were a lot of services that week. But that Friday we went to the Church of the Heavenly Rest, where Cat had actually been confirmed. The church was packed [with people] praying for those lost on September 11. I remember sitting in that pew thinking, and it just came to me:
She's dead
. It was as if she had whispered in my ear. I just knew it; it was a revelation.