At 35, I thought I understood America. Then came Sept. 11.

# A personal account of a day that became history

I was 35 and running the Washington bureau for The Detroit News. I lived on 16th Street and worked out of the National Press Building. On a clear Tuesday morning in September I had a suit laid out for work, then traded it for jeans when news began unfolding. My car was blocked in. I walked nearly 14 blocks toward the National Press Club and arrived at the bureau before anyone else.

Phones rang but wouldn't connect. Television images showed things that seemed impossible even as they happened. We called sources, tried to confirm facts, sent reporters where we thought they needed to be — I sent one straight to New York. We did what journalists do: report, move to the next thing, try to keep up with events that kept growing in scale.

# Who walked into history that morning

When you cover history, nobody rings a bell. You're just doing your job on a Tuesday. That's what we did, and only later did the enormity of the day fully register.

# The human moment inside the newsroom

Then my most senior reporter, a man in his 60s, broke down and cried. He had been working — calling, reporting, moving on — until he stopped. So did I.

# What I believed then and what changed

At the time I believed America had moved past the worst of its racism and that, despite differences, we were fundamentally one people with shared values. I believed we were safe. The days after Sept. 11 felt like the most unifying moment of my lifetime: Americans lining up to give blood, strangers treating each other with uncommon gentleness, the world reaching toward us.

Over the next 25 years those certainties became more complicated. I spent 11½ years living outside the United States. Distance changed how I saw home. I came to understand how little many Americans know about the rest of the world and sometimes about one another. I also understood more clearly that the United States is not universally loved and that our actions beyond our borders look different to people who did not grow up pledging allegiance to our flag.

Sept. 11 taught me that America was not invincible.

# Journalism after Sept. 11

Journalism requires skepticism. But patriotism after the attacks sometimes complicated that skepticism. In a moment when government scrutiny mattered enormously, asking hard questions could be read as unpatriotic. Some journalists were reluctant to probe because they feared appearing sympathetic to the attackers. That made the years that followed a testing time for the press's role in holding power to account.

# What stays with me