“On Sept. 10 [2001], I was in Washington D.C. for a conference that started the next morning. And instead of going to the opening reception, I went over to congress, and I saw Hilary Clinton speaking, and I ran into [former U.S. Senator] Kit Bond, … who I had covered as a journalism student at the University of Missouri decades before. The next morning, I walked into this conference room — three walls of windows looking one block ahead at … the capitol. And … the [World] Trade Towers had been hit. All the sudden, the smoke from the Pentagon started wafting into our view. … Everything in Washington D.C. was shut completely down. There was no one in Washington [D.C.] that next night. I was on the Mall with a couple thousand other people singing all the songs and waving the flag and crying at a memorial they were holding. And I was stranded there for a couple of days until I could finally get out on a train. The morning of Sept. 12, I woke up and went outside, and it was like “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Here I was in a major metropolis, and there was not a person, car, train, airplane, no one around.”