By Sophia Braccio/Cronkite News
WASHINGTON – Sept. 11 started as a regular morning for Jeff Flake.
Eight months after he was sworn into the House, the freshman Republican from Snowflake dropped his wife, Cheryl, at the airport for a flight home to Arizona and headed to the Capitol for a hearing.
“Someone came into the hearing room and said, ‘Hey, there’s something strange,’” Flake recounted 25 years later.
He and other lawmakers went to the nearest television. The plane that slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center could have been an accident, they thought.
Then, 17 minutes after the first strike, a second plane hit the South Tower. Flake and his colleagues watched it live. At that point, there was no doubt it was a coordinated attack.
“I just remember leaving the hearing room and just seeing pandemonium in the Capitol,” Flake said.
Flake would go on to win five more House terms and one six-year term in the Senate, giving up his seat after the 2018 elections. He later served as President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Turkey.
That day, everything was uncertain.
Heading from the hearing room to his office, the House clerk told him instead to get away from the Capitol as fast as he could. Lawmakers and staff evacuated.
Terrorists hijacked four planes that morning. Two hit the Twin Towers. One hit the Pentagon, less than 3 miles from the Capitol across the Potomac River. The fourth – likely headed for the Capitol or White House, according to the 9/11 Commission Report – plowed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers revolted.
Once he’d left the danger zone, Flake recalled, his priority became making sure his wife was safe.
“I spent the longest couple of hours in my life trying to find out where she was,” he said.
As the crisis unfolded and federal officials scrambled to determine if other planes had been turned into missiles, the Federal Aviation Administration closed airspace across the country. The unprecedented order required every plane in the air – over 4,000 – to land at the nearest airport. The shutdown lasted two days.
Cheryl Flake’s flight was grounded in Wichita, Kansas. It took her three days to get to Arizona.
Flake eventually connected with her, then headed to a police station with a few colleagues from the House.
By evening, with the immediate threat passed, about 150 lawmakers from both parties gathered on the Capitol steps for a display of national resolve. Flake was among them.
“When America suffers, and when people perpetrate acts against this country, we as a Congress and a government stand united and we stand together to fight this evil threat,” Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said. “Those who brought forth this evil deed will pay the price.”
They sang “God Bless America.”
“Republicans, Democrats, didn’t matter – singing that song,” he said. “I see footage of it today, and it still brings back a lot of those emotions.”
The 9/11 attacks killed 2,977 people and injured thousands more. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in history, according to the FBI.
In the following days, more than 130 nations offered support to the U.S., including Iran and Cuba.
“Just to see representatives, heads of state who might be visiting or ambassadors from other countries, our allies, just standing with us, that was really a special time,” Flake said.
Three days after the attacks, the House voted 420-1 to approve the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, empowering President George W. Bush to use force against those responsible for the attacks and anyone who aided them. The Senate approved the use of force 98-0.
“To go in and get (Osama) bin Laden and to make sure that the Taliban wasn’t hosting al-Qaida, that was the right thing to do,” Flake said.
Six weeks after the attacks, Congress enacted the USA PATRIOT Act, which vastly expanded government surveillance powers. Flake joined a House supermajority that approved the measure, which passed the Senate with only one no vote.
The hunt for bin Laden lasted nearly 10 years. U.S. forces remained in Afghanistan for just under 20 years, with the U.S. returning control to the Taliban in 2021.
“That was not what was envisioned in the beginning,” Flake said, noting that he later became critical of the extended commitment in Afghanistan, “and losing a lot of American lives and resources for what turned out to be not much.”
Flake said he also views the 2002 Iraq War resolution as an error.
He also supported that measure, which led to the toppling of Saddam Hussein and a 9-year war. But Iraq had no clear tie to 9/11, according to the 9/11 Commission and as Bush later acknowledged.
The purported threat was based on “errant information” about Iraq’s arsenal, as Flake put it.
Twenty-five years later, Flake’s thoughts are on how the world stood with the U.S., and the heroics at Ground Zero in New York, at the Pentagon, and on board Flight 93, the one that crashed in a Pennsylvania field instead of in the heart of the capital.
“Remember how unified a country can be, and should be,” he said. “Not just among Republicans and Democrats, here at home domestically, but to honor our allies.”
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