A firestorm over hallowed ground

The story of the folded blue jeans won’t go away.

It rankles the firefighters who read about it and say it just could not have happened, not in all the chaos of the collapsing twin towers of the World Trade Center, not with people jumping to their deaths from offices.

Yet there it is, vividly described in William Langewiesche’s much-lauded “American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center.” As Langewiesche describes the event, a fire truck is pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center. Inside the cab are dozens of folded jeans from the Gap, a store located in the center complex.

His take on the scene: “It was hard to avoid the conclusion that the looting had begun even before the first tower fell, and that while hundreds of doomed firemen had climbed through the wounded buildings, this particular crew had engaged in something else entirely, of course without the slightest suspicion that the South Tower was about to hammer down.”

The book, a compilation of a three-part series that first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, is among the most extensive looks at what happened at ground zero in the aftermath of Sept. 11. But the accusation of looting by firefighters has taken on a life of its own. Just last week, New York Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta fired off a lengthy letter to the Atlantic Monthly. In it, Scoppetta characterized the book as containing “foolish, unfounded and absurd accusations.”

“Such absurdity degrades men who valiantly died trying to save lives,” he wrote. “Such absurdity insults countless others who devoted months to the dignified and respectful recovery of all victims of the attacks. Such absurdity insults the truth.”

Langewiesche is adamant that he painted an accurate and fair portrait of what happened that day: “I know it happened,” he said recently at a Pasadena restaurant, adding that the articles had been fact-checked by meticulous researchers before they were published.

The story, on the whole, is an odd one, embroiling a journalist with impeccable credentials with a group of people who feel he demeaned the New York City Fire Department. Langewiesche sees his book as a celebration of Americans and their ability to get things done and says it is much more than the “lock-stepped misty-eyed patriotism” that television cameras sought out and nurtured after the attacks.

He also is frustrated that the jeans keep coming up as he makes a 15-city tour to promote his book, detracting from what has been described as a great journalistic coup -- being the only journalist who had complete access to ground zero in the months after Sept. 11. On that day, Langewiesche was asleep at his home in Davis (he now lives in Paris) when his wife awakened him with the news.

“They’re bombing New York,” she told him.

“Is it nuclear?” he asked.

In a matter of minutes, Langewiesche was on the phone with Cullen Murphy, Atlantic Monthly’s managing editor, talking strategy. He still had a piece to finish about the crash of Egypt Air Flight 990 (which later won a national magazine award). Every airline in the United States was grounded. Should he go to Afghanistan or Ground Zero? As he finished up the Egypt Air story, he decided on the World Trade Center. He’d been in war zones before and had trouble envisioning what he could do in Afghanistan that newspapers weren’t already covering.

“It did seem like the World Trade Center cleanup had the potential to be a more interesting piece that could not be covered by the newspapers,” he said.

Langewiesche is very much a star at the Atlantic, though he came to serious journalism somewhat late in life. From the time he attended Stanford, Langewiesche had supported himself as an aircraft pilot of everything from cargo planes to corporate jets.

He traveled extensively and wrote for Flying magazine. His luck took a turn when he submitted two unsolicited stories about the Sahara to Atlantic Monthly in 1990. Normally, such stories are sure candidates for rejection. But something about Langewiesche’s style struck a chord, and he was dispatched back to the Sahara to do more reporting for a piece the magazine ran the following year. Soon he became a national correspondent for the magazine.

When he arrived in New York, he first went to the media-credentialing area and found it overrun with hundreds of reporters trying to get access to the site. He abandoned that tack and, instead, sneaked onto the site when a National Guardsman was looking the other way. As he later wrote: “People who came to the site in those early days often had the same first sensation, of leaving the city and walking into a dream. Many also felt when they saw the extent of the destruction that they had stumbled into a war zone.”

One thing Langewiesche discovered on that first day was that a little-known government entity, the Department of Design and Construction, was bringing in the heavy equipment. Langewiesche got Atlantic’s Murphy to fire off a fax to DDC Commissioner Kenneth Holden, asking that Langewiesche be given access. In an amazingly lucky stroke, it turned out Holden was a 20-year subscriber to Atlantic Monthly and a Langewiesche fan to boot. He granted the correspondent unrestricted access to write, as the author put it, “history in the present tense.”

In the coming months, Langewiesche’s uniform was that of the construction worker -- jeans and work shirt, hard hat and respirator draped around his neck. His new home became the Washington Square Hotel in the heart of Greenwich Village. Each day he would wander the site, not taking any notes for a number of weeks but simply observing the process. He blended into the world of heavy-equipment operators, firefighters and police as they worked to remove 1.5 million tons of steel and debris, which Langewiesche described as the unbuilding of the World Trade Center.

Through it all, he said, he walked the fine line of not saying he was a reporter but not denying it either. He attended planning meetings and cruised the site for hours on end. He became a fixture -- at least with certain workers -- at ground zero.

One person he did not meet was Rhonda Roland Shearer, who, over the nine months of cleanup, would give out, by her estimate, $3 million worth of donated equipment and supplies -- everything from respirators to warm winter clothing. The artist and widow of Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould would also become a vocal critic of Langewiesche, promising to write her own history of what went on in the months after Sept. 11. To that end, she has recruited a small army of workers from the site, virtually all of them finding fault with Langewiesche’s work.

In her enthusiasm to discredit Langewiesche, Shearer has compiled an almost line-by-line dissection of “American Ground,” much of it strident. What she and others on the site say is that, if anything, Langewiesche was almost too invisible -- that he was unknown to them until the articles began to appear in the Atlantic.

For instance, in one part of the book, he talks about the retrieval of $250 million in gold and silver ingots from a vault owned by the bank of Nova Scotia. In that passage, he said there was evidence “that others had been there before,” attempting to pry open the vault’s door and to cut in from above. Lt. Bill Keegan, the New York police officer who supervised retrieval of the ingots, said there was no evidence that anyone had tried to break into the vault. “There had been absolutely no damage,” he said. “We turned the combination and the door popped open.”

But Keegan’s larger question is why Langewiesche didn’t simply check with him: “Don’t you have to talk to the lieutenant in charge? I was there every single day for nine months and I never once met this man.”

As for the case of the new jeans, Fire Lt. Russ Regan was present at the site when the fire engine in question was pulled from the wreckage.

“There were some jeans on the truck and in the truck, but so was everything else,” he said. “The truck was 40 to 50 feet below street level. There was everything everywhere -- jeans, asphalt, dirt and rock. You name it. It’s mind boggling to think that someone would say that.”

The firefighters, of course, feel they have reason to be upset with Langewiesche, who painted them as the most sanctimonious of the three “tribes” that inhabited ground zero, the other two being police and construction workers. He said they came to believe they were heroes even though, in his view, they were not. But he doesn’t fault them, because the media subjected them to “the hurricane force of hype.” “It’s very hard for them to have withstood the hype,” he said. “I know I couldn’t have.”

As for Shearer, Langewiesche said he doesn’t know her and never talked to her.

“I think there was a feeling among people who reacted negatively that I was going out of my way to pick on the myth of the heroic fireman,” he said.

The book, meanwhile, has generally won accolades and is selling briskly, hitting the low 200s on Amazon’s bestseller list. Publisher’s Weekly likened it to John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” while the New York Times ran two reviews, one critical, the other laudatory. Certainly, it is a good piece of work in the eyes of Holden, who gave Langewiesche the access he needed during the cleanup operation. “I think it’s excellent,” he said. “It’s a well-written, highly accurate atmospheric depiction of what went down at the World Trade Center. But it’s clearly still a highly emotional issue with some people.”

Murphy, the Atlantic managing editor, said the fact-checking for the stories took five months, using researchers who “tracked down every detail through independent channels, and in the most sensitive cases through more than one.”

“He has never had an agenda except to explain to his readers what he has seen or learned as reliably as he can,” said Murphy.

As for Langewiesche, he has already moved on to another project, one that he is not at liberty to discuss just yet. He said he expected people to be upset by his book, but that is the price of taking a different tack: “If you’re singing out of tune from the rest of the choir, it will make people upset.”