Twenty-five years on

The attacks were supposed to make American politics more serious and less bigoted. Neither happened. Anti-Muslim rhetoric is louder now than it was in 2001.

They're attacking

On a gorgeous September morning, Senate staffers poured out of the Hart building onto the street. A woman rushing past named the targets: the Pentagon, the Mall, the White House, everywhere.

“"The Pentagon, the Mall, the White House, everywhere!"”

A black-and-white TV

He ran to his one-room Nation bureau half a block from the Capitol and switched on an old set. The towers burned. People were falling from heights that made no sense.

The email that aged in minutes

His editor had written just before 9 a.m.: a plane hit the World Trade Center, but it probably wouldn't affect the issue going to press. The second plane struck at 9:03.

Nobody was in charge

The Capitol and the office buildings emptied. Legislators and staffers milled in the street with no instructions. Officers circulated without direction while rumors flew that Bush was dead.

Third in line, lost

At Constitution and First, Sen. Robert Byrd stood with one aide. As president pro tempore he was third in the line of presidential succession, and he was asking a beat officer what to do.

Get in a car and drive

The officer's answer was the whole failure in one sentence. There was no plan, only a warning that another plane was inbound and advice to get as far away as possible.

“"I don't know. But we've been told there's another plane in the air and it's heading here."”

Banging on every door

He ran all five floors of his building, knocking and passing on what the officer said. One door opened on Sen. Russ Feingold's apartment, packed with his evacuated staff, who cleared out fast.

“"I don't want to spread rumors, but..."”

Twenty minutes out

Flight 93 went down in a Pennsylvania field just after 10 a.m., after passengers learned of the other attacks by phone and rushed the cockpit. The 9/11 Commission put the target at the Capitol or the White House.

“"Everyone's running up to first class. I've got to go."”

A failure of imagination

The warning signs were there to be connected. We got reinforced cockpit doors and TSA lines, but the harder lesson was about seeing threats we have decided not to picture.

“"The most important failure was one of imagination."”

The threats we still won't picture

The same blindness applies well past terrorism. Pandemics, climate change and domestic extremism all sit in the space where leaders decide something is too unlikely to plan for.

Forty people, the other direction

A handful of killers changed the world. So did a small group of passengers who chose to fight, and gave up their lives to make a terrible day less terrible.

Punished by their own success

Because they stopped the attack, Flight 93 sits at the edge of the 9/11 story. The images we remember come from lower Manhattan and the Pentagon, not a green field in rural Pennsylvania.

Forty tones in the wind

A Capitol plaque names the 40. In Shanksville a 93-foot tower holds chimes tuned to sound both consonant and dissonant, and a webcam shows one man walk up at sunset, kiss his hand, touch the base, and go.