While America Sleeps by Russ Feingold

Author:Russ Feingold [Feingold, Russ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-95254-7
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

For eighteen years I had the experience of walking out of my apartment building at 110 Maryland Avenue Northeast in Washington, DC, into reminders of major crises in American history. The land on which this building and the US Supreme Court Building across the street now stand was once used for a prison for some of the Lincoln assassination co-conspirators. It was also the site of the gallows on which Captain Wirz of the infamous Andersonville Prison was hanged. A few hundred feet away to the northeast is the seemingly out-of-place old redbrick Sewell-Belmont House, now a national women’s history museum. During the War of 1812 it was the place where the American troops spent their last night in Washington before the British forces overwhelmed them. The next day, after subduing the Americans, the Redcoats marched to the US Capitol, just a couple of hundred yards away, and burned it down. Whenever I left or returned to my apartment, the elegantly rebuilt Capitol dome loomed, whether in brilliant sunshine or under a sky full of stars on a clear night.

Most of the time I thought of this neighborhood as simply the place where I went to work each day. But on September 12, 2001, I emerged from my apartment building knowing that the United States Senate was preparing to go back into session at that Capitol building, even though Al Qaeda had come extremely close to destroying it just twenty-four hours earlier. Senators had been told that we would each be afforded the opportunity to speak on the floor briefly to express our reactions to the previous day’s events and to discuss a way forward. It seemed unlikely that many Americans would be focusing much attention on these speeches in the midst of all the fear and chaos that had engulfed the nation. Nevertheless, it seemed right to seize this first opportunity to set a tone that could serve us well in the coming weeks and months, as we began to adjust to an abrupt shift in our nation’s priorities and reevaluate our relationship with the rest of the world.

Many senators spoke carefully and thoughtfully. The Senate on that day gave the appearance of a body that could take an entirely unexpected blow and respond with dignity, reason, and a certain measuredness. My own comments amounted to the equivalent of only a few paragraphs in the Congressional Record, but I wanted to make four points that had been uppermost in my thoughts as I joined so many Americans in spending a virtually sleepless night before. After expressing my condolences to all those who had suffered such great loss, and noting my visit to Pearl Harbor just three weeks earlier, I spoke of how irresistible it was to compare the events of September 11, 2001, to those of December 7, 1941. No one seemed to question the appropriateness of this comparison and I was moved by the historical connection to say, “Really, what it is about is an expression of gratitude and love across the generations but in different times in our history.

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