Golf Carts

Twenty-five years ago this morning, before most of America was awake, I was sitting in a golf cart in Sarasota, Florida, thinking I had probably already witnessed what would be the most memorable part of my day.

I was serving with the White House Medical Unit and covering President George W. Bush with Dr. Richard Tubb. It was still dark outside, well before 6 a.m. Our bags had been placed outside our doors to be collected and taken ahead, the usual routine when another day of presidential travel was beginning and we would not be coming back.

The President had decided to get his three-mile run in before the day started. I remember sitting in the golf cart, medical support positioned nearby as usual, listening to the Secret Service trying to maintain visual contact with a President who was running through a dark property before sunrise. There was some discussion about vehicle lights and figuring out exactly where he was, and I remember quietly finding the whole thing pretty funny. I actually thought that might be the story from the trip I would remember.

For almost twenty-five years, I barely remembered it at all.

At 8:46:40 that morning, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

We were in the motorcade headed toward Emma E. Booker Elementary School when the first reports began coming across the radio. No one really understood what had happened. A plane had hit the World Trade Center, information was incomplete, and there was a lot of radio traffic but very few answers. We were told to remain in our vehicles rather than follow the normal arrival routine while Andy Card went to the President's limousine to brief him on what was known. Eventually, we were cleared to move into the school, and Dr. Tubb and I went to the medical holding area in the front office.

There was a television on, and we watched the second plane hit.

There are moments in life when the distance between ordinary and unimaginable is measured in seconds. Everything that had occupied our attention earlier that morning suddenly became irrelevant, including that run in the dark that I had been so certain I would remember.

That morning has stayed with me for obvious reasons, but twenty-five years later, what I think about most is not simply what happened. I think about what I learned watching people respond to it. I watched a President receive news that no leader could possibly have expected to receive that morning, and I watched uncertainty become crisis and crisis become tragedy. In the hours that followed, I saw something that ultimately shaped my own understanding of leadership: tremendous pressure does not eliminate our obligation to care about the people around us. If anything, that may be when the obligation matters most.

Before September 11, I understood authority, responsibility, rank, training and mission. That day taught me something different about leadership. It taught me about presence.

Almost exactly one year later, I saw it again.

On September 11, 2002, I returned to Ground Zero with President Bush for the first anniversary. Families descended into the enormous excavated World Trade Center site that everyone simply called “the pit.” The President and Mrs. Bush went down the long ramp for the formal remembrance and wreath-laying. There were cameras for that part.

What has stayed with me happened beyond the ceremony.

I watched the President spend time with people who had lost husbands, wives, sons, daughters, parents, brothers, sisters and friends. They told him about people they loved who were never coming home. Some cried. Some wanted him to know what kind of person their loved one had been. Others simply needed someone to listen, and he listened.

There was no speech that could fix what had happened and no decision he could make that would restore what those families had lost. Leadership in those moments was not about having an answer. It was about being willing to stand there and absorb some small part of another person's pain because that person needed someone willing to carry it with them.

I still remember watching his face and his shoulders as one conversation followed another. You could see the emotional weight accumulating, but he continued to engage the people who wanted to speak with him. In all my years around leaders before and since, I have rarely seen such a visible example of someone willingly taking on the pain of other people simply because compassion required it.

We talk a great deal about empathy, compassion and servant leadership. They have become part of the vocabulary of leadership, sometimes used so often that we forget what they actually require. There is a significant difference between talking about compassion and willingly allowing yourself to experience someone else's grief because, in that moment, they need you to enter it with them.

Those two September days, separated by almost exactly one year, helped define leadership for me. It had nothing to do with politics and very little to do with title or position. I saw what leadership can look like when circumstances strip away everything superficial: remaining calm when others are frightened, being present when there is nothing you can fix, listening when there are no adequate words, carrying some of the weight when another person cannot carry it alone, and never allowing the importance of your position to make you forget the importance of the person standing in front of you.

September 11 also reminds me how little control any of us really have over what the next hour, much less the rest of our lives, may bring. Before sunrise that morning, people were exercising, commuting, pouring coffee, getting children ready for school, putting luggage outside hotel rooms and worrying about whatever seemed important at the time.

By 8:46:40, the world had begun to change.

Twenty-five years later, the nearly 3,000 lives lost that day remain far more important than any leadership lesson I could ever draw from it. Today, first and foremost, I remember them and their families. I remember the firefighters, police officers, military personnel, medical professionals, public servants and ordinary citizens who ran toward people who needed them, and the countless families whose ordinary morning became a dividing line between everything that came before and everything that followed.

None of us knows when an ordinary morning will suddenly ask something extraordinary of us. When that moment comes, our titles will matter far less than who we have become and how we choose to treat the people standing beside us.

May we never forget.