(1)
Mo
At 5:26AM on September 11th, 2001, the 43rd President of the United States of America rolled over in his sleep and with his left arm, knocked a full glass of water sitting on the edge of his nightstand onto the floor. The sound of glass caroming off the lamp and water splashing on nightstand, book, reading glasses, and finally the floor was enough to wake the President from the last moments of his sleep. He had always had an uncanny ability to awaken himself just before his alarm would go off, but this was a novel way to have woken up, the President groused to himself. He reached over to turn off the alarm, and tried to survey the water damage in the darkness before the dawn. It's always darkest before the dawn...who said that? thought the President in one of those nonsensical early morning ruminations that seem to bridge the gap between dreaming and waking. Dream...what was I dreaming? He couldn't get it back, but he did remember that Mo was there. Mo again. Geez, what's with all these Mo dreams? God, you're trying to tell me to call Mo, aren't ya? Well, then, I gotta call Mo. Stop acting like two babies. "Shoot, there's water in my slippers!" The President shook the water out of his slippers and sauntered into the bathroom to begin his day.
Mo Levison slept through it. Being on the West Coast has its advantages, but in his opinion the three-hour time difference from the East was not one of them. He had been up late writing letters and reading, and decided that for once-in-a-blue-moon he was going to put the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the hotel door, press the "Do Not Disturb" button on the phone, turn his cell phone off (a very important step), and sleep until he woke up.
Morris Levison was a lawyer/activist, or an activist/lawyer, or maybe an activist/lawyer/writer/advocate. Some people derisively called people like Mo Levison "cause junkies," and, in fact, he had laughingly referred to himself on more than one occasion as exactly that. Tall and well proportioned, with a generous shock of curly dark brown hair that was showing the inevitable signs of thinning and graying, he still cut a handsome figure well into his fifties.
The previous evening, Levison had been a featured speaker at the Conference on Women's Human Rights & Overall Human Rights Education, sponsored by Amnesty International, and held in Fullerton, California. This type of event was standard fare for a man like Mo Levison; "a fat pitch right in his wheelhouse," he would say. He enjoyed almost nothing better than talking about human rights, and women's rights were a close second. You had to be a certain breed of animal to enjoy talking about such things, and Mo Levison was the right breed.
The President was in Florida to promote his "Putting Reading First" initiative and to drum up support for his stalled Education Bill. He had made a brief stop in Jacksonville on the 10th before arriving at the Colony for a dinner with his younger brother Jeb, the Governor of Florida, and several local Republican leaders including former Governor Bob Martinez. After dining on chili con queso, tortilla soup and a New York strip steak cooked medium and served with pinto beans, and washing it all down with a couple of non-alcoholic beers, the President retired early, as was his custom, and was asleep before 11PM.
Morris Levison was born in Brooklyn, New York, in December of 1946, six months and two days after George W. Bush. He was the only child of the well-known left-wing Jewish couple, lawyer and social activist Harry Levison, and his wife, the author Claire Cohn Levison. On the surface, it would be hard to find two less likely candidates for a life-long friendship–Levison, the Brooklyn-born child of alleged communist parents, raised in the mid 20th-century Jewish intelligentsia that included such luminaries as Hannah Arendt, Max Schactman, Allard Lowenstein, and Rabbi Abraham Heschel, and George W., the scion of the politically conservative Bush family, grandson of Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush, and son of Congressman and future President George H. W. Bush.
Levison grew up in an intensely intellectual, politically active, humorless household, where argument and debate were the main sports, and fun and jokes were seen as bourgeois behavior. He had been a voracious reader from a very young age, and there was no lack of reading material in the Levison household. Young Morris tended to shy away from the more polemical writers, which knocked about two-thirds of the family library off his reading list. He was obsessed with Abraham Lincoln, and by the time he reached high school, had read about all there was to read concerning the sixteenth president. He idolized John F. Kennedy, unlike his parents, who hated Kennedy's father and considered the son an elitist Bostonian Klainer gornisht, a k'vatsh. Like so many others, Morris was devastated when Kennedy was assassinated.
Levison absorbed many of the core beliefs of his parents, but seemed to be a softer, more compassionate version. He had determined that he didn't want to live his life in the state of bitter anger that his parents seemed to thrive in. Instead, he slowly began to seek out spiritual pathways to find answers to the vexing social problems that dominated the era in general and his home in particular. He became fascinated with Martin Luther King, Jr., someone whose cause he and his parents could agree on, and through him, went on to study Mahatma Gandhi and his concept of Satyagraha.
A perpetually high-achieving student, Morris graduated as the valedictorian from Brownsville Academy High School in 1964. He planned to study law, and then like Gandhi, use his law degree for the public good.
It was against this background that Morris Levison was thrown together on the first day of college with the carefree, practical joke-loving George W. Bush. Against all odds, the two became fast companions despite their radically different upbringings, and were dubbed the "Odd Couple" by mutual friends.
It was easier to see what George liked in "Mo" (for that is what George, and virtually everyone else called Morris) than vice versa. Mo was simply a good friend–loyal, smart, compassionate, and honest. Levison acted on many occasions as a tutor and an unofficial guardian for the energetic, easily distracted future President, and the Bush family was not unaware of the essential role that Morris Levison played in getting George W. through Yale. Most people are aware that George W. Bush was a C student at Yale, but almost no one knows that the only reason he passed was because of Mo Levison. George would later say about Mo, that "He always brought out the better angels in my nature...even if he was Jewish," Bush would add, if in proper company, for the two of them had a running gag about their faiths, or lack thereof, that had lasted almost as long as they had known each other. For here was the balancing weight in the relationship: George made Mo laugh, pretty much all of the time, and there is no discounting of humor in any relationship. Plus, George Junior had great people skills; he was a wonderful organizer, had boatloads of charisma (which was helpful in securing dates with pretty young co-eds), and seemed to be in the middle of all things social and sociable from the very minute he set foot on the campus in New Haven.
As the dawn made its regularly scheduled appearance on the morning of September the 11th, 2001, the 43rd President of the United States of America pulled on a ratty old t-shirt and running shorts and laced up his shoes. He was feeling okay, considering.
The President's running companion du jour was veteran Bloomberg News White House correspondent and former All-American long-distance runner Richard Keil.
"How's it hangin', Stretch?" said the President with a distracted wink as he extended his left calf against a tree.
"It's hanging well, Mr. President," replied the lanky, 6-feet-6 reporter.
"Good, good. You ready?" Without waiting for an answer, he said, "Let's do it." The President took off at a pace somewhat beyond a jog, and eventually finished the four and-a-half mile course in 32 minutes. The only dialogue that passed between the two men in those 32 minutes was this exchange:
"Hey Stretch–who said 'It's always darkest before the dawn?'"
"I dunno, sir, who?"
"No–that's what I'm askin' you. Who said it? First? I mean, who said it first?"
"You mean, who came up with it? Originally?"
"Yeah... who's the first guy that first said 'It's always darkest before the dawn?'"
"I... really don't know...why?"
"No reason, just wonderin'..."
Richard Keil left the golf course wondering exactly why he had gotten up at 5AM that morning.
In befriending young George, Levison felt a burst of rebellion from the stuffy seriousness of his radical Jewish upbringing. Just going to Yale was rebellion enough, as his parents had preferred NYU, or even Columbia. Instead, Morris had chosen Yale, and had stumbled into a most unlikely relationship with the rudderless young Bush. In George W. Bush, Mo Levison had found his joker, his fool, in the best sense of that phrase. To borrow a line from a popular movie, Bush and Levison completed each other.
Though they had remained close after college, there was an unspoken agreement within the Bush family that because of the Levison family's political affiliations, Mo and George's friendship would take place primarily out of the public eye. This was exactly how the Levison family, who didn't share Morris's affection for George or the Bushes, felt as well. So, for the better part of the next thirty years, the relationship was filled with hundreds of phone calls, semi-annual vacations spent with the Bushes, and a one-sided correspondence from Mo to George that became another long-running gag between the two. "I'm a reader, not a writer," George would say, to which Mo would fire back, "This must be a new development, because I don't remember a single book that you even opened at Yale." "That's because you were stupid enough to read them all for me," Bush retorted, and on and on the cutting humor would go.
After his run, the President showered, then at 8AM sat for his daily intelligence briefing while eating a sesame bagel with light cream cheese. Nothing in his intelligence briefing, except upon reflection, would indicate in any way the calamity that was about to follow.
While the President was washing sesame seeds from his teeth with a second glass of orange juice, the hijacked planes began taking off. American Airlines Flight 11 was the first to go, leaving Boston’s Logan Airport at 7:59 a.m. The others followed soon after, except for United Flight 93, scheduled to leave at 8:01 out of Newark, New Jersey, but which was delayed on the runway for about 40 minutes. At approximately the same time the Flight 11 hijackers were stabbing passenger Daniel Lewin-8:20 a.m.-President Bush’s briefing ended. While walking to the waiting car, the President turned to Blake Gottesman, his personal assistant, and said, "Blakey–remind me later to call Mo."
"Mo who, sir?" Gottesman replied.
"Mo Levison" was George W. Bush's answer as he walked on ahead.
'P re: Moe Levison' was the scribble on Blake Gottesman's notepad.
While George W. Bush was drifting through his late twenties and thirties as a part-time oilman and living through his self-described "nomadic period of irresponsible youth," Morris Levison had gotten his law degree at Columbia Law School in New York City and was becoming a fairly well known social activist and human rights advocate. He had never married, and in this day and age, sadly, it must be explained that it wasn't because of some hidden sexual preference. Levison was simply married already to his causes, which were legion: human rights, first and foremost, but also nuclear disarmament, environmentalism, women's rights, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the abolition of the death penalty, and most recently, the evils of globalization. There was barely a week that he wasn't flying to some Conference on the Rights of Someone or Something. Morris had always claimed that he desired to marry, to have someone to share his life with, but he "wanted to wait until he could devote enough time to it to do it right," as if it was another cause to tackle. Although he had had one serious relationship in recent years, he had never seemed to find the time, and now, as daylight was turning to evening, it appeared that he never would.
The Bush family liked Mo Levison, liked having him around, despite their political differences, and appreciated the grounding effect he had on their oldest boy. Except for the friendly ribbing that cemented their relationship, politics was rarely seriously discussed when Mo was around, and Mo liked that just fine. Occasionally, the elder George or one of his ubiquitous politicos would float a trial balloon Levison's way to gauge how the other side might see things, but that was more the exception than the rule. While Levison's friends from the "other side" wondered why on earth Levison would choose to spend his precious vacation time with them, of all people, it was precisely because he knew he wouldn't have to think about defending or saving anything, or anybody, if only for a few days. He could just fish, or sail, or play tennis, or talk about unimportant things, or listen to the Bushes talk about things that were important to them, without feeling like he had to fix them or save them. He would joke about "feeding his inner WASP," and, like all jokes, there was a grain of truth to it.
Bush and Levison also shared a love of baseball, and when George W. became a part owner and general managing partner of the Texas Rangers, Levison was often seen sitting next to Bush in his seat behind the Ranger dugout, carefully identified when necessary as "an unidentified man". When Levison was with George W., he could just enjoy a baseball game without worrying about whether the chemicals that the Rangers' groundskeeping crew had used to make the grass so green were seeping into the Arlington, Texas groundwater.
Morris Levison first came to semi-prominence with a series of articles in The Nation on the rights of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. These essays reliably drew praise from the political left and much condemnation from the leaders of the American Jewish lobby, who labeled Levison a "self-hating Jew." He was also active in futile attempts to abolish the death penalty, and took on the cases of several condemned death-row prisoners seeking to commute their sentences to life imprisonment. In 1987, Levison succeeded in having the Texas Supreme Court overturn the conviction of Rashaan Porter for the rape-murder of Kelly Ann White, contending that with a measured I.Q. of 65, Porter was not capable of understanding the criminal nature of what he had done. Porter was committed to Rusk State Hospital in East Texas, where he died in 2004.
It was the death penalty that led to the serious breach of the friendship between George W. Bush and Mo Levison. When Bush was elected Governor of Texas in 1994, Levison was present at the swearing-in and the celebration afterward. Levison was proud of his friend, proud of how he had turned his life around, had found direction, and had even found faith. Levison was not a practicing Jew in the traditional sense, but he had a deep spiritual faith, and an abiding belief in God. Although Marvin Olasky is generally credited with popularizing the term "Compassionate Conservative," there are those in the Bush inner circle who are convinced the term came from Levison. Although Morris Levison was definitely not a conservative, he thought his friend would make an able governor because he was a good listener. Karl Rove, chief political architect of the Bush gubernatorial victory, considered Levison a bad influence on George W. and sought to keep him away from his boss, but couldn't control the Governor's private phone use, or his family's vacations.
Governor Bush's refusal to grant clemency in what to Levison were several questionable death row cases brought the relationship between the two longtime friends to a level of acrimony that had been avoided until then. The human rights advocate peppered the governor with letters, articles, and psychiatric evidence all either dryly or emotionally pointing to reasons why the death penalty should be reconsidered or mitigated. He tried appealing to Bush's Christian faith, posing a 'What would Jesus do?' series of examples. Through all of this, George W. Bush remained silent. Maybe he was just too busy; maybe he didn't want to have to think about it that hard; maybe, he didn't get the letters. As Bush continued on his way to becoming the governor with the most executions (152) in the nation's history, the friendship between the two men ruptured publicly. Levison wrote a series of articles, first in Tikkun magazine, a left-leaning Jewish periodical, and then once again for The Nation condemning the Texas governor for his "irresponsible, bordering on reckless use of the awesome power he wielded as judge, jury, and God" in refusing to even consider most clemency requests. Levison secured the breach with an uncharacteristically furious letter to the Governor, in which he quoted, among others, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton, and Rabbi Abraham Heschel in a futilely patronizing attempt to help Bush "see the light." The letter may have had the opposite effect, as executions actually increased after this date.
It was to be five years before they spoke again. Governor Bush became President Bush the Younger, and Levison was not invited to, nor did he attend, the inaugural. He was never seen at Camp David, nor did he set foot on the ranch in Crawford, Texas. By the middle of 2001, President Bush was too pre-occupied with running the nation to worry about bothersome friendships from the past. In fact, just about the only time George Bush ever thought of Mo Levison during this time was in his dreams.
At 8:46AM, as the President's motorcade was riding down Highway 301 near Sarasota, Florida, American Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. At 8:48, Ari Fleischer, the President's Press Secretary, felt his pager go off. Fleischer, upon hearing news of the crash, immediately dialed Andrew Card, the President's Chief of Staff, who was riding with the President one car ahead. At that point, it was considered an accident. "Mr. President, some sort of plane has just crashed into one of the Twin Towers," said Card.
"New York?" asked Bush.
"Yeah yeah," replied Card, still on the phone with Fleischer.
"Geez... how in the heck could...bad weather?"
"I don't know...I don't think so," said Card.
"How could a pilot not...must've been engine trouble or something," speculated the President, himself a former pilot. "What was it, a single engine?" he asked as he stared out the car window. Just then, Card's second phone rang. It was Condeleeza Rice, the President's National Security Advisor. "Andy, I need to speak with the President ASAP when you arrive at the event," said Rice.
"Will do," replied Card, and looking at Bush said, "you need to call Condi when we get to the school."
On the morning of September 11th, 2001, at 9AM Pacific Standard Time, Mo Levison woke slowly and deliciously from a rare good night's sleep. He called down and ordered a continental breakfast with a pot of coffee, and jumped in the shower without turning on the television. He had a late-afternoon flight out of LAX back to Newark, and although it would get him home fairly late, it gave him the glorious luxury of actually taking his time to check out of the hotel and drive down to LAX at a reasonably traffic-free time of day (although experience had taught him that in LA there was no such guarantee).
At 9:03AM, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Beepers, pagers, and cell phones started going off in the classroom almost immediately. Some of the President's Secret Service agents actually watched the second crash on a television in the next room. A Marine responsible for carrying Bush’s phone immediately said to Sarasota County Sheriff Bill Balkwill, "We're out of here. Can you get everyone ready?" Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, in the back of the room with the President, immediately received word on his pager. Chief of Staff Andrew Card was down the hall when he heard about the second crash. The ashen-faced Card waited until there was a pause in the reading drill, and as the children were reaching under their seats to get their books, came in and whispered in the Presidents ear, "A second plane just hit the second tower. America is under attack." It was 9:07AM.
A knock on the door left Mo Levison no choice but to answer it with a face half-full of shaving cream. As the waiter put the tray of croissants and jellies on the table next to the television cabinet, he said, "Man, it's unbelievable isn't it?"
"Yeah, it's a beautiful morning. I can't wait to get out in it," was Levison's uncertain reply as he handed the man two dollars.
"Naw, man, I'm talkin' 'bout the towers, bro'," said the waiter.
Now Morris Levison was confused. "What towers?"
"Man, turn on your TV, bro'," said the man. "It'll blow your mind...we gots a war goin' on..." And with a "Later, bro'," the waiter left the room.
Levison quickly found the remote and turned the TV on, flipping the channel to CNN. What he saw made him literally fall over on to the nearest bed. The picture was of downtown Manhattan, but there was a huge cloud where the Twin Towers were supposed to be. "What in God's name..." was all that Mo, feeling more and more like Rip Van Winkle, could conjure at that moment. Within minutes, the full story became evident, and Morris Levison, with mouth agape, stared transfixed at the television, along with the rest of America, for the next several hours.
At 9:38AM, American Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Moments later, the President was hustled aboard Air Force One. All semblance of safety protocol concerning being seated, seatbelts, announcements, etcetera were subservient to the overriding concern to get wheels off the ground as quickly as possible. The door to aircraft was barely shut when the it began to taxi quickly down the tarmac, and the plane went into a "full thrust" takeoff while people were still trying to find seats. As Communications Director Dan Bartlett later recalled, "It was like a rocket. For a good ten minutes, the plane was going almost straight up." President Bush sat in the huge armchair behind his L-shaped desk. The mood on board was very tense. No one in the Secret Service department, or any of Bush's aides, was told where the plane was flying. Pilot Colonel Mark Tillman requested that an armed guard be stationed at the cockpit door.
For the next few days, the TV never went off in Mo Levison's hotel room. It was the most television he'd watched in years. He became on a first-name basis with most of the room service staff. It was an act of will to tear himself away from the horror that he was seeing, but he tried to do it at least twice a day. Leaving Los Angeles anytime soon was not going to be an option. All air travel in the United States was grounded indefinitely, and getting a flight back to New York was going to be a trick. The phone lines to the New York metropolitan area were overwhelmed. He and the other five hundred or so people who were staying in the hotel were together in their loneliness.
The fourth and final hijacked plane, United Flight 93, which almost certainly was bound for the White House or the Capitol building, crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after passengers on the plane, aware of the day's previous hijackings, attempted to wrest control of the aircraft from the hijackers. The time of the crash was 10:06AM, and that was the end of the plot, although no one in the American power structure knew it.
Mere moments after the initial shock of what he had seen had worn off, Mo had a series of chilling thoughts. There were relatives and friends who worked in the Twin Towers. His cousin Lenny Cohn, his mother's brother's oldest son, worked as a securities analyst for Cantor-Fitzgerald, whose offices were spread around a few of the top floors of the North Tower. Lenny was three years older than Mo, and they weren't especially close, but they had spent a great deal of time together as children, and Mo had always liked Lenny's father, who was his Uncle Ray.
A bigger blow to the solar plexus was the thought of Rachael. Rachael, who worked in one of the towers, was Rachael Samuels, or that was what her name would always be to Mo. If it could be said about any woman in Morris Levison's life, Rachael was "the one that got away." He hadn't talked to her since he had gotten an email from her that she was working in New York and living in Connecticut with her new husband. Mo Levison could have been her new husband if he wasn't so maddeningly non-committal about things pertaining to long-term relationships. It wasn't that he was blind or stupid. He knew that it was unlikely that he would ever again find the combination of intelligence, looks, and relative youth in any future potential marriage partner. And she would have married him! He should have, but he didn't. Rachael wanted children, her window was closing, and it wasn't going to happen with Mo Levison anytime in the reasonably near future. So she had made the determined decision to stop seeing Mo, at least in that way. It was doubtful that she would ever stop seeing Mo Levison, because they both believed in and fought for many of the same causes.
And so it was, for the past several years. Mo would get a painful punch to the gut every time Rachael would appear in a hotel lobby or a 2nd floor ballroom at the same conference he was attending; within the last year she had started coming to these events with another man. In Chicago in June, she had introduced the man as her fiancée. Rachael had gone out of her way to remain friendly. It only hurt more. Mo knew he had blown it—one of those life changing "blown-its." All he could hope for was that this guy would turn out to be a closet creep and she would discover the error of her ways six months down the road and he would have his do-over. But life didn't seem to work like that, and Mo knew it.
Now he sat on the edge of the bed, flipping the remote from CNN to Fox to MSNBC while trying to reach somebody–anybody–in New York. He didn't even know which tower she worked in. He couldn't remember her new married name. The phone lines to New York were busy, busy, busy. He felt small.
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