NEW YORK (AP) – Three presidents and their wives stood gloomily side by side at the 9/11 National Memorial, sharing a moment of silence to commemorate the anniversary of the nation’s worst terrorist attack with a display of ‘unit.
Presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton met at the site where the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed two decades ago. Each wore blue ribbons and held their hands over their hearts as a procession passed a flag through the monument, watched by hundreds of Americans gathered for remembrance, some carrying photos of loved ones lost in the attacks.
Before the event began, a plane flew over in a mysterious echo of the attacks, directing Biden’s gaze to the sky. For much of the ceremony, he stood with his arms folded and his head bowed, listening as the names of the victims were read. At one point, the president wiped away a tear.
Biden was a senator when the hijackers ordered four planes and carried out the attack. It now marks the eleventh anniversary of 9/11 as Commander-in-Chief.
The president will spend Saturday respecting the trio of places where the planes crashed, but he left the speech to the others.
Vice President Kamala Harris was scheduled to speak at the National Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, in commemoration of the heroes who shot down a hijacked plane bound for the United States Capitol. According to prepared statements, Harris planned to praise the courage and resilience of the American people and speak of the unity that Americans experienced in the days following the attacks, calling the unit “essential to our shared prosperity, our national security and our standing in the world “.
The White House released a recorded speech Friday afternoon in which Biden also spoke of the “true sense of national unity” that emerged after the attacks, seen in “heroism everywhere, in expected and unexpected places.”
“For me, this is the central lesson of 9/11,” he said. “Unity is our greatest strength.”
Biden arrived in New York on Friday night, while the horizon was illuminated by the “Tribute to Light,” disturbingly marking the location of the towers.
After the morning ceremony in New York City, Biden will visit the field near Shanksville where the plane fell from the sky and head to the Pentagon, where the world’s most powerful military suffered an unthinkable blow to his home.
Biden’s task, like that of his predecessors before him, was to mark the moment with a mixture of pain and resolution. A man who has suffered immense personal tragedy, Biden speaks of loss with power.
In his video message, he voiced the pain of the 9/11 memories, saying, “No matter how much time passes, these commemorations all come back painfully as if they had just received the news a few seconds ago.”
Robert Gibbs, who served as Obama’s press secretary, told Biden, “It’s a time for people to see him not as a Democratic president, but as president of the United States of America.”
“The American people are a bit in conflict over what they’ve seen outside of Afghanistan in recent weeks,” Gibbs said. “For Biden, it is time to try to restore some of it. Remind people what it is like to be a commander-in-chief and what it means to be the leader of the country at a time of such importance. “
On the twentieth anniversary of the attacks, Biden now assumes the responsibility assumed by his predecessors to prevent future tragedies and must do so against fears of rising terror following the hasty departure of the United States from Afghanistan, the country of the United States. which go 11 attacks were plotted.
Biden is the fourth president to console the nation on the anniversary of that dark day, which has shaped many of the most consistent national and foreign policy decisions made by executives in the past two decades.
The terrorist attack defined the presidency of George W. Bush, who was reading a book to Florida schoolchildren when planes crashed into the World Trade Center. He spent that day away from Washington for security reasons, a decision Sen then made. Biden urged him to reconsider, the current president wrote, and that night he delivered a brief, stopped speech from the White House to a terrified nation.
The following year, Bush chose Ellis Island as the venue to deliver his first birthday speech, the Statue of Liberty on his shoulder as he promised, “What our enemies have begun, we will finish.”
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were deadly when Obama visited the Pentagon to commemorate his first September 11, 2009.
“No word can relieve the pain of your hearts,” he said.
“We remember the beauty and meaning of their lives,” he said. “No passage of time, no dark sky can extinguish the meaning of this moment.”
When Obama spoke on his tenth birthday, Osama bin Laden’s attacking brain was dead, dead in a May 2011 Navy SEAL raid. Although the nation remained entangled abroad and vigilant against terrorist threats, the anniversary was devoted more to healing.
President Donald Trump pledged to take the United States out of Afghanistan, but his words during the first anniversary ceremony of September 11, 2017 were a living warning to terrorists, who told “these savage murderers that there is no dark corner out of our reach, nor any sanctuary beyond our reach and no place to hide anywhere in this great land ”.
On Saturday, as Biden headed to the three locations, Bush was to pay his respects to Shanksville. Trump planned at least one stop in Manhattan and had to comment on a boxing match at a casino in Hollywood, Florida.
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Jaffe reported from Washington.