Thread by @djrothkopf

A couple of years before 9/11, I participated in a scenario exercise about terror threats that Wall Street might face. It was on the top floor of the World Trade Center. It was sponsored in part by Cantor Fitzgerald.

Tragically, a number of those who attended from that firm died in the attack. Not too long after the attack, I recall running into Howard Lutnick, the chairman of the firm, and I will never forget the look in his eyes, how haunted he was by the losses on that day.

On the day itself, I was on the phone with a friend whose apartment had a view of the World Trade Center. He stopped talking and just started repeating "oh my God, oh my God" and then he told me to turn on my television because a plane had flown into one of the twin towers.

I turned on the TV in my office and walked next door to the office of my then business partner, Anthony Lake, former US National Security Advisor. John Gannon, a former top CIA official and Susan Rice, later National Security Advisor herself, joined us.

We watched on the TV in Tony's office as the towers collapsed. John leaned over to Tony and said "Bin Laden." Later we walked to a nearby restaurant and sat outside for lunch. Washington seemed deserted. The skies were cloudless and blue.

Every so often you would hear a jet fighter overhead. Tony commented that we had entered a new era. We speculated about how much our lives would change, about how much U.S. national security priorities would change.

My daughters were at Georgetown Day School not too far away. I thought in the tumult surrounding the attacks that was the safest place for them. Later they would report that they were among the only kids left at the school, that the other parents had come to pick their kids up.

They were bewildered and troubled and, like everyone else, once home, we spent the day watching reports and finding out the horrific details, the toll the attack had taken.

That morning I had an appointment scheduled with a client, an admiral at the Pentagon.

He had cancelled the night before. I was pretty pissed off at the time. Later I learned that the wing in which his office was located was where American Airlines flight 77 had struck the Pentagon. He had been called away and was safe. But it was unsettling.

A close friend's sister-in-law was a flight attendant on that flight. Other friends of friends were lost. One of the kids I grew up with, a boy we played football and softball with on the street in front of the house I grew up in in Summit, NJ, then a finance executive...

...was at his office in the World Trade Center and lost. Of all the losses, I suppose that is the one that lingers with me the most because all of my memories of him--and I did not have any contact with him once we all grew up and went to college--were of him as a kid.

They were just memories of sunny days and sports and of him and his dog and, as a result, mostly of hope and living in a world that was secure, where nothing bad could ever touch us.

Because of the number of lives lost that day, everyone has memories and stories like this. 9/11 was one of the important moments of history that was deeply personal to each of us. That is as it should be and fuels the memories that keep those we lost alive.

Sadly, political opportunists demagogued our sense of loss and our understandable desire to bring the terrorists to justice into wars and loss and expense and damage to our nation that far outstripped in cost that terrible September day.

I was worried that would happen. Three weeks after the attacks, around the time we deployed troops to Afghanistan, I wrote a column for USA Today in which I worried we would be drawn into a kind of global intifada, a long-lasting conflict in which our disproportionate responses..

...would ultimately weaken us and strengthen our enemies. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened. And for years there...and as we saw the crimes and errors politicians tried to justify by associating them with the names of victims of 9/11...

...we thought our misguided response would never end. And that is why, I am so grateful that on this, the 20th anniversary of the attacks on America, that @JoeBiden has finally brought those errors, those endless wars, to an end. I am glad because it is the right thing to do.

But I am grateful because it will also allow us to honor those we lost as we should have done all along, by remembering their promise and their goodness and seeking to infuse the future of this country with those qualities.

That means both investing our country and seeking to promote and strengthen our values, out of respect for them and because such steps are in the end, the only way to truly keep this country strong and safe.

For too long our response was driven by arrogance and vengeance. It actually has compounded the damage done by Bin Laden. Now perhaps we will respond as we should have all along, by seeking to be our best selves and the best America we can be.

After all, in the end, nothing truly defeats our enemies like putting the lie to the criticisms of us they use as rallying cries...and demonstrating that within this country the good ultimately, is indomitable. With that in mind, we must now also acknowledge...

...the greatest threats we face come from within. Indeed, our flawed response to 9/11 demonstrated that as does the current willingness of some among us to attack the very foundations of our democracy and our society.

In other words, twenty years later, it is high time we undertook exactly the job of work that this administration has made its priority. But it is not just a job for a government. It should be an agenda that is beyond politics, shared by us all.

Pursuing it is, in the end, the one and only right way to commemorate what happened on 9/11 and to ensure history sees that as a turning point that, after two decades of grievous missteps, ultimately led to a new period of American growth, security and leadership.