| The
Statue of Liberty overlooks the Manhattan skyline, where two powerful
beams of light shoot upward, memorializing victims of the Sept 11
attacks. (AP photo/Daniel Hulshizer |
What
do you say when tragedy strikes? Probably the most common words spoken
on such occasions are these: “Is there anything I can do?”
In the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon disasters
in September, many Americans and citizens of other countries did what
they could. Some offered prayers; some wrote checks to relief charities;
some donned helmets and spent hours, days, weeks, months, rummaging
in the rubble for survivors and, later, victims. Some wrote or taught
about world peace; some responded by planning for war.
Beyond a doubt, there were Phillips Academy alumni taking action in
all of the above categories. Recently, the Andover Bulletin learned
about four whose lives were changed by their participation in ways
small and large.
|
Burke
Dempsey '80
|
A
Wall Street barn-raising
If you didn’t
know of Cantor Fitzgerald before last summer, you do now. It will
always be Sept. 11’s biggest casualty, the firm that lost 658
people. Few will ever
forget the TV footage of its sobbing chief executive, Howard Lutnick,
reporting that not one single member of his company made it out of
the World Trade Center alive and telling how his own life had been
spared because he had taken his son to his first day of kindergarten.
Most likely you wept along with him for those faceless hundreds. But
for Burke Dempsey ’80, the WTC was not an urban monolith populated
by faceless people in gray suits. It was the business address of associates
and friends. As managing director of the banking investment firm UBS
Warburg LLC, he worked particularly closely with clients at Cantor
Fitzgerald, which occupied the north tower’s top five floors.
“The men I knew at Cantor were mostly 40 or younger. They were
smart and vibrant, in great shape. If anyone could have made it down
those stairs or figured out a way to get out, those guys would have.
But they were trapped,” says Dempsey, who learned of the disaster
as he sat helplessly in a taxicab.
After a sleepless night at home in Greenwich, Conn., where he and
his wife concentrated on keeping their two young sons away from the
TV, the Stanford University graduate hit Manhattan on Wednesday, Sept.
12, determined to “do something.”
First he checked in with Cantor Fitzgerald’s attorney, who had
set up a recovery center in his midtown offices.
“They had this bank of phones, all ringing. It was surreal. You’d
pick up the phone and talk to widow after widow who wanted to know
if her husband was on the ‘safe’ list. But there was no
‘safe’ list—just the list of people who hadn’t
gone to work that day. It was kind of a reverse Darwinism, where everyone
who’d been early to work perished, while those who had been late
or decided to go play golf were saved,” he says.
Dempsey’s next priority was to help Cantor Fitzgerald reopen
for business the next day—because, he says, “Cantor is the
heart and soul of the bond market, and the bond market is the bedrock
of the economy. You can’t just not open the bond market.”
The company had lost approximately one-third of its employees. Besides
the CEO, survivors included a systems group who had planned a fishing
trip the previous day, those who’d been late, sick or on vacation,
a handful who were traveling or attending off-site meetings, colleagues
from Cantor’s offices in London, Chicago and Los Angeles, a woman
who’d had the good luck to be laid off on Monday. The next challenge
was to find a workplace for them.
Dempsey arranged for Warburg to open an abandoned trading floor at
its Park Avenue address, then asked his co-workers to help get necessary
partitions, office furnishings, an entire electrical infrastructure,
and computer and telecommunications systems into place at warp speed.
With the zeal of neighbors at an old-fashioned country barn-raising,
nearly 100 of them rolled up their sleeves and got to work.
“Everyone wanted to participate. It was a way to allow people
not to feel helpless any more. It was the most powerful display of
professionalism and humanism I have ever witnessed, and I wanted it
never to end,” he recalls.
Six months later, Dempsey reports, the Cantor folks were still camped
out at Warburg, but were getting ready to move on in late spring.
“As the company grew again,” he says, “the space became
too small. They’ve been packed in there, and the place has been
booming with trades and noise and activity. They’ve been flooded
with resumes, and, miraculously, both Cantor Fitzgerald and its major
subsidiary, eSpeed, turned a profit in the fourth quarter amidst absolute
Armageddon. It’s phenomenal to see!
“I liken it to a major forest fire that sort of burned all the
trees around; there are charred remains everywhere, and yet, on this
one tree, there are signs of green. The buds are sprouting, and it’s
starting to grow again.”
Dempsey will never forget the pain of fall 2001—“between
my colleagues and I, we went to dozens of funerals,” he says—but
he will also not forget the unusual show of Wall Street camaraderie.
“For a moment,” he says, “I felt connected to other
people in a really intimate way.”
|
Chris
Wray '85
|
Chris
Wray ’85
moved to Washington in May 2001 to join the Bush administration’s
justice department, having been recruited by former colleague and
mentor Larry Thompson, the No. 2 person in the department, to be his
principal deputy.
Four months later, the pace of his work abruptly quickened. Since
Sept. 11, Wray’s universe swirls with round-the-clock meetings,
conference calls, high-level briefings, strategy sessions and budget
oversight. His hours are long, “and it’s not just the quantity
of the hours, but the pace of the hours—it’s pretty relentless.
It’s unforgiving,” he says.
Wray’s work blends traditional law enforcement with some aspects
of what is now called homeland security. He says, “Under the
leadership of the president and the attorney general, there is now
a much more sharpened focus on prevention as opposed to prosecution.”
With terrorist perpetrators intent on harming U.S. citizens even when
it means killing themselves, the more traditional prosecutorial process
“is a lot less effective,” he says. The justice department
is now concentrating on disrupting terrorist plots, taking up the
model of Robert F. Kennedy and his campaign against organized crime.
“Kennedy used to say that if he found a mobster jaywalking, he’d
lock him up for jaywalking. Likewise, here, we are attempting to identify
those who would harm innocent Americans and derail those efforts before
they are successful,” he says.
A native of New York City and a graduate of Yale and its law school,
Wray, who lives in Bethesda, Md., with his wife and two young children,
was previously a litigator with the firm of King & Spalding in
Atlanta. He left to become a federal prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s
office in Atlanta, where he prosecuted everything from fraud to racketeering,
murder for hire to guntrafficking—“everything you can imagine,”
he says. Everything, it seems, except terrorism.
|
Seth
Moulton '97
|
Despite
what was written in U.S. News & World Report, Sept. 11
events did not change the plans of Seth Moulton
’97; they merely substantiated them.
“Leaving church on a Sunday several weeks ago,” columnist
David Gergen wrote in the Dec. 24 issue of the magazine, “Seth
Moulton posed a haunting question. Moulton is a clean-cut, good-looking
young guy who graduated from Harvard last spring and represented his
class as commencement speaker. ‘I had been planning to go to
Wall Street for a while,’ he said. ‘Now, with what’s
happened, I think I should give some time to the country.’”
But Gergen had it wrong, Moulton says; with or without 9/11, he already
knew he wanted to join the Marine Corps.
“I have a degree in physics, but I knew I didn’t want to
spend my life in a lab,” he says. “I wanted to do some sort
of service. I chose the Marine Corps for the same reason I chose Andover
and Harvard—I wanted the best.”
After Sept. 11, when war seemed imminent, some of his friends and
family thought he would change his mind, but the attack on the United
States just strengthened his resolve.
“Sept. 11 cemented the decision in my mind. Suddenly, joining
the military wasn’t just good for me, it was important for the
rest of the country,” he says. “After Sept. 11, a lot of
people weren’t sure how to help, but I was confident I was doing
the right thing.”
Last fall, Moulton was sent to Officer Candidates School
in Quantico, Va., for 10 weeks of leadership evaluation. He graduated
on March 29 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He’s
currently at The Basic School, where all newly commissioned officers
report for training as infantrymen, in the event they become involved
in battle.
Moulton will serve in the Marine Corps for a minimum of four years,
all the while learning what he hopes will be “tremendous leadership
skills.”
“A lot of my friends and classmates have seemed a bit lost and
unsure of themselves lately,” he says. “Many aren’t
sure what they’re getting out of their jobs. What I’m doing
is tough, but I’m glad to be here.”
How unusual is it for a young Ivy League graduate to make a choice
like Moulton’s? Unusual enough that, before he left for Quantico,
CNN invited him
to appear on “The Point,” where he explained his decision
to join the military.
“We can talk a lot about what we wish we did in the past and
the kind of world we’d like to have for the future,” he
said, “but this is not just a question of what we want for tomorrow.
It’s a question of what we’re willing to do today.”
|
“I
feel very fortunate, because my work with children and with the memorial
committee has helped me to work through and deal with this terrible
disaster, so I feel like I’m actually making a contribution—I’m
actually doing something.”
|
Jennifer
Cecere '69
|
|
Jennifer
Cecere ’69,
an installation artist who has been showing work in New York and
around the country for 25 years, is going to help make sure no one
forgets last summer’s horror. She was invited in October to
be a member of the Memorial Process Committee of the New York New
Visions Coalition. Her group of some 20 designers, architects, city
planners, landscape architects and artists is responsible for development
of design and planning recommendations for memorials throughout
the city for those killed on Sept. 11.
The Memorial Process Committee is one of several committees under
the umbrella of New York New Visions, now working on different aspects
of revitalizing and rebuilding lower Manhattan, Cecere’s own
neighborhood. Her group meets at Van Alen Institute, a not-for-profit
organization that runs many important architectural and art competitions
around the world. Here they work with the National Endowment for
the Arts and others, including representatives from the Port Authority,
New York City Planning Department, the Park Department and the Museum
of the City of New York. Eventually, there will be a competition
for a permanent memorial. But because the permanent memorial process
could take years—in Oklahoma City it took five years before
a permanent memorial was in place—the committee will open up
different types of competitions for temporary memorials. “Un-solicited
designs and ideas have just been pouring in,” she says. First
and foremost in her mind is “keeping the competitions as open
and democratic as possible; anyone wanting to submit ideas can.
Don’t forget,” she says, “the Vietnam memorial in
Washington, D.C., was designed by a student.” The most prominent
among the temporary memorials Cecere’s committee endorsed was
the one that featured twin columns of light beaming
blue light a mile high into the night sky.
Another project that ties Cecere closely to the tragedy is an art
residency at a school in Ozone Park, Queens, funded by the New York
Times Foundation Art Rescue Fund, where she works with seventh-
and eighth-graders on hand-made books about Sept. 11.
Cecere earned a B.F.A. degree from Cornell in 1973. Her installations
are objects that resemble furniture and are assembled to evoke rooms.
One piece, commissioned by the Metropolitian Transit Authority,
is a group of welded iron and steel chairs installed in the Union
Square subway station.
Of her current activities, Cecere says, “I feel very fortunate,
because my work with children and with the memorial committee has
helped me to work through and deal with this terrible disaster,
so I feel like I’m actually making a contribution—I’m
actually doing something.”
Kennan
Daniel, Theresa Pease and Paula Trespas contributed to these accounts.
|
|
|
