May Day 2006: The Contemporary Record
This page reproduces the contemporary record of 1 May 2006: five transcripts of the American Broadcasting Corporation’s national service on the morning of Monday, 1 May 2006. The first was broadcast at 10:50 a.m., thirteen minutes after the first explosion at Grand Central Station. The second was broadcast from the departures hall at Kennedy, and ends where the recording ends. The third was broadcast two minutes later, from a studio that had just lost the line. The fourth begins after the third explosion and stops when the fourth arrives. The fifth was broadcast from the Union March. After them is the Prime Minister’s statement to the Commons declaring the state of emergency, the Corporation’s report of it, the King’s address at two o’clock, the announcement from Albany of the Lieutenant-Governor’s death, and the broadcast at 8:23 in which the Corporation finally spoke about its own. A coda from 11 June closes the story.
What the first broadcast did not know
The Register reproduces the transcript in full below. Before it, plainly, because no reader should be misled by a document whose whole character is what it lacks:
Nobody in this broadcast knows that there will be three more attacks. Kennedy is struck at 11:47, the Ferry Terminal at 12:10, the Union March at 12:15. At 10:50 the Realm believes it is dealing with one event.
Nobody knows that the interval is deliberate. The New York Investigation later found that the attackers staggered the detonations so that the state would commit its attention, its emergency services and its senior people before the second device. The hour in which this broadcast was made was part of the design.
Nobody knows the Lieutenant-Governor of New York is dead. Peg Halloran was in the concourse, boarding a train to Albany, and was not identified for hours.
Nobody knows the number. The final toll is 2,158.
And the Corporation does not know it has lost its own people. ABC staff were in the concourse at 10:37. The newsroom did not establish this until the evening, and nothing in the first transcript reflects it.
The first broadcast is not a record of what happened on May Day. It is a record of the last hour in which the Realm still thought it knew what was happening. The second is a record of the last four minutes.
The first transcript, 10:50 a.m.
AINSWORTH: It is ten fifty. We are going to tell you what we know, and then we are going to tell you what we do not know, and the second list is longer.
At twenty-three minutes to eleven this morning there was an explosion at Grand Central Station in New York. The station has been evacuated. Emergency services are on the scene in numbers. There are casualties. We do not know how many.
We are not going to give you a number. I want to be plain about why. Any number we give you now will be wrong, and the wrong number will be repeated for the rest of the day and by tonight it will be a fact. When there is a figure that means something, you will have it from us.
We also do not know what caused the explosion. We are not going to characterise it. You will have heard other people characterise it already this morning and we would ask you to set that aside. We do not know, and we are telling you that we do not know, and we will keep telling you that until it changes.
Anna Kowalski is at the cordon on Vanderbilt Avenue. Anna.
KOWALSKI: Hugh. I am about two hundred yards from the Vanderbilt entrance and this is as close as anyone is being allowed.
What I can see from here is the north side of the station and a great deal of smoke, less than there was ten minutes ago. There are perhaps forty emergency vehicles in the street and more arriving continuously. The police cordon has been pushed back twice since I arrived.
People are coming out. That is the thing I want to describe, because it is the only thing I am certain of. They are walking. They are covered to the shoulders in a pale dust, all of them the same colour, and they are being walked west by officers, and a great many of them are holding on to somebody. Not being carried. Holding on.
Nobody is running. I have not heard anybody shouting. It is much quieter here than you would think.
AINSWORTH: [Pause. Nine seconds.]
Thank you, Anna.
We will stay with this. If you are in midtown Manhattan, the request from the police is that you go away from the station on foot and that you do not use the telephone unless you have to, because the exchanges are saturated and the emergency services need them.
If you are waiting to hear from somebody, we cannot help you and we are sorry. There will be a number when there is one to give.
We are going to continue broadcasting. We will not speculate. It is ten fifty-four.
The second transcript, 11:43 a.m.
By the middle of the morning the story had become transport. Rail was stopped, the bridges and tunnels were being managed, and the airports had suspended departures with their passengers held inside the terminals. The Corporation sent Desmond Achebe to Kennedy to report on the suspension.
The Investigation later established that this was the design. The attackers had staggered the detonations so that the state, the emergency services and the press would commit themselves to the first site and to the transport system generally before the second device. The ABC committed a correspondent to an airport for the same reason everybody else did.
The recording ends at 11:47.
AINSWORTH: Departures have been suspended at both New York airports and passengers are being held inside the terminals rather than sent home. Desmond Achebe is at Kennedy. Desmond, what is it like there.
ACHEBE: Hugh, it is very full and it is very quiet.
The boards have been frozen for about forty minutes. Every departure reads the same word and it has not changed, and people have stopped looking up at them, which is the thing you notice. When a board is going to change, everyone watches it. Nobody here is watching.
There are perhaps two thousand people in this hall. Almost nobody has left. They have been told to stay and they are staying, and they are sitting on the floor against the walls and along the windows because the seating went an hour ago.
The screens up here are carrying your coverage, so everybody in this building is watching Grand Central. That is what they are all looking at. There is a family about ten feet from me, four of them, and the two children are watching it, and the parents are watching the children.
The telephone queues are the longest I have seen anywhere. Forty or fifty people at each bank. The exchanges are saturated, as you said earlier, so most of them are getting nothing and going back to the end of the line to try again.
The airline staff are extraordinary, and I want to say this plainly because they have no information at all. Nobody has told them anything. They have nothing to give these people and they are standing at the desks anyway, and they are being spoken to politely, which after two hours is not nothing.
I can see the Pan American terminal from where I am standing, through the glass, perhaps a hundred and fifty yards to my left. It is as full as this one.
There is no sense of panic here. I would go further than that. There is a kind of patience in this hall that I do not think I have
The transcript ends there because the recording does.
The second device detonated in the Pan American terminal at 11:47. The line from the departures hall went dead in the same instant and did not come back.
The Corporation did not know what had happened to Desmond Achebe until the evening. He is not mentioned in any broadcast until 8:23, when Ainsworth came back into the building to read it himself. Ainsworth continued presenting the national service for a further six hours without referring to him on air, which was a decision taken in the studio within a minute of the line dropping and was not discussed until years afterwards.
The third transcript, 11:49 a.m.
Two minutes after the line from Kennedy went dead, the national service returned to the studio in New Westminster.
No correspondent was reachable. Ainsworth carried the service alone for some minutes, and this is the passage from that period that the Realm remembers.
AINSWORTH: There has been a second explosion. It was at Kennedy International Airport, at about a quarter to twelve, and we believe it was in or near the Pan American terminal. That is the whole of what we have.
There was an explosion at Grand Central Station at twenty-three minutes to eleven. There has now been an explosion at Kennedy at about a quarter to twelve. Those are two things that have happened. I am not going to join them together for you. When somebody who knows joins them together, we will tell you, and we will tell you who said it.
The line from Kennedy has gone. I do not know anything further about the line, or about the
I do not know anything further.
I want to say something about what we are not going to do. We are not going to tell you what to do this morning. That is not our job and we would be bad at it. When the police or the emergency services ask us to pass something on, we will pass it on, and we will say who asked. Everything else you will decide for yourselves, and you are better placed than we are.
What I will say is this. We do not know what is happening. We do not know whether anything further is going to happen. The not knowing is the reason to be careful today, and it is the only reason I can give you.
We are going to stay here. It is eleven fifty-one.
The break in the fourth paragraph is in the original. Ainsworth begins a sentence about the Kennedy line, stops, and starts again on a shorter one. It lasts under two seconds and he does not falter again for the remaining six hours of his shift.
It is the only moment in the ABC’s May Day coverage in which the Corporation is audibly not in control of itself, and it is generally credited with doing more for the ABC’s standing in the Realm than the rest of the day’s broadcasting combined. He never says the correspondent’s name.
The fourth transcript, 12:12 p.m.
The third explosion struck the Whitehall Terminal at the Battery at 12:10, extending the day from rail and air into the harbour.
Anna Kowalski, who had been at the Grand Central cordon since shortly after the first explosion, rejoined the service by telephone. This transcript begins two minutes after the terminal and ends three minutes later.
AINSWORTH: There has been a third explosion. It was at the Whitehall Terminal at the Battery, at about ten minutes past twelve, and what we are told is that it was in a boarding hall at what is the busiest crossing hour of the day.
Grand Central at twenty-three minutes to eleven. Kennedy at about a quarter to twelve. Whitehall at about ten past. Three explosions, three places, one morning. I am still not going to join them together for you and I am aware of how that sounds by now. When somebody with the authority to say it says it, you will hear it from us with their name attached.
Anna Kowalski is still at the cordon at Grand Central. Anna, what is it like where you are.
KOWALSKI: Hugh, the thing I would report is that there are fewer of them here than there were.
An hour ago this street was full of ambulances and fire appliances, and a great many of them have gone. They went east and south. They were needed at the airport and I imagine they are needed at the Battery now, and what that means standing here is that the response at this station is thinner at half past twelve than it was at eleven.
Nobody has done anything wrong. There is one service and it is being moved to where it is wanted. But you asked me what it is like, and what it is like is quieter, and the quiet is not because there is less to do.
AINSWORTH: Thank you. Anna, stay where you are, and we will come back to you.
To listeners in the harbour districts and in lower Manhattan, we have nothing from the authorities to pass on to you at this moment. When we have something we will give it to you and we will say who gave it to us.
I would say only what I said before, which is that we do not know what is happening this morning, and
The transcript ends there because the broadcast was interrupted.
At 12:15, five minutes after Whitehall and while Ainsworth was still speaking, the fourth device detonated at the Union March.
Nobody had thought of the March. Three transport sites read as an attack on transport, and a march is not transport. The Investigation’s finding that the day was directed at movement and assembly together was months away, and the Register records that no institution, the Corporation included, made the connection in the twenty-eight minutes available. It was obvious afterwards and it was not obvious then.
The fifth transcript, 12:24 p.m.
The fourth and last device struck the Union March at 12:15.
The tradition is formally the Nine Hours March, commemorating the Nine Hours Settlement from which the Realm’s labour movement dates itself, and nobody has called it that in ordinary speech for a century. It is the Union March, and the word carries the trade unions and the Union itself at once, which is the joke the movement has never tired of.
It is not one march. Trade columns form up in each of the five boroughs and march in together, the building trades and the transport trades and the dock, garment and public trades each behind their own banners, meeting as they go. The device was placed at a junction where two columns had just joined: the building trades of Brooklyn and the transport trades of Queens, at the moment the two crowds became one.
Ellen Ruiz had been assigned to the march that morning as routine civic coverage.
AINSWORTH: There has been a fourth explosion, at the Union March, at about a quarter past twelve. Ellen Ruiz was with the march this morning and is on the line now. Ellen.
RUIZ: Hugh. I was about two streets back from it, with the Queens column, and I want to tell you what people did.
The device was at the junction where our column met the Brooklyn one. I did not see it. I heard it, and then everybody around me stopped, and then, and I am not exaggerating this, they went toward it.
Not all of them. That is the part I have to be accurate about. The stewards at the front of our column put their arms out and held people, and there was shouting, because the stewards were saying there may be another one and the marchers were saying let us go. That argument was still going on when the first of them got past and started running up the street.
There are men and women in work clothes carrying people out of that junction right now. There are stretchers being made out of banner poles. Somebody has organised the marchers who did not go forward into a line to keep the road clear for the ambulances, and it is being kept clear.
I have been covering this march every May for nine years and I have never seen it do anything except walk.
AINSWORTH: Ellen, thank you. Stay safe and come back to us.
That is four explosions this morning. Grand Central, Kennedy, Whitehall, and now the Union March. I am not going to join them together for you. When the authorities do it you will hear it here with a name attached to it.
What Ellen has just described is the first thing anybody has told me today that was good, and I am going to leave it where she put it.
It is twenty-six minutes past twelve. We are staying here.
A fifth device existed, and it was not at the march. It had been left that morning in a lecture hall at King’s College, in the middle of a working day, where a student saw it, understood what it was and reported it. It was the only one of the five that did not go off, and the reason for its placement has never been established.
Whether a device was also placed at the march has never been established either, and it does not alter the judgement on the stewards. They held their columns back on a correct assessment of the danger at a junction where a second device would have killed the people they were holding, and they were entitled to make it on what was known at a quarter past twelve.
The division in that street has never been settled inside the labour movement. Those who went forward saved people. Those who held the line were acting on a correct assessment of the danger, and were holding back their own members from a junction where a second device would have killed them. Both halves of the argument are true, both are still made, and the movement’s own commemorations have never chosen between them.
The Prime Minister’s statement, 1:15 p.m.
Al Gore was at Parliament when the first device detonated and did not leave it. Cabinet met through the early afternoon, and at a quarter past one the Prime Minister rose in the Commons to declare a state of emergency in the Province of New York.
He made the statement to the House rather than to a camera, and said why in his first sentence.
Mr Speaker, I am making this statement in this House and not from a television studio, because this House is sitting, and the fact that it is sitting is the most important thing I have to tell the country this afternoon.
Four explosions have been committed this morning in the Province of New York. At Grand Central Station at 10:37. At Kennedy International Airport at 11:47. At the Whitehall Terminal at 12:10. At the Union March at 12:15.
I am not going to tell the House who did this, because I do not know. Nobody in this Realm knows this afternoon, and I would say to anyone who tells the country otherwise today, in this House or outside it, that they are guessing, and that guessing in front of a frightened country is not a small thing to do.
I have declared, on the advice of Cabinet, a state of emergency in the Province of New York.
That instrument does four things. It releases money and materiel to the emergency services without the ordinary approvals, because the approvals take days and the injured do not have days. It permits the requisition of transport and premises for casualty and rescue work. It places the polity and federal services engaged in the response under a single command, so that two services do not arrive at the same street and none at the next one. And it authorises, on Cabinet advice, a military cordon around the bombed districts.
I will come to the cordon, because the House is entitled to hear about it from me and not from anybody else.
For the first time in the history of this Realm, soldiers of the Royal American Armed Forces are deployed on domestic ground in support of the civil power. I have ordered it because four sites in one city have been destroyed within ninety-eight minutes, because the ground at each of them is structurally unsafe, and because the civil authorities in New York do not this afternoon have the numbers to hold four perimeters and search four sites at once. That is the whole of the reason.
Those soldiers are not police. They will not police. They will hold ground that is unsafe and they will assist the search, and they will do nothing else. The order stands for fourteen days and then expires, and if the Government wants it after that the Government will come to this House and ask.
Now I will say what this emergency does not do, and I want the House to hold me to every line of it.
It does not suspend this Parliament. It does not suspend any court in the Realm. It creates no power of detention. It creates no power over speech, over assembly, or over the press. It does not touch the franchise. It does not reach one yard beyond the Province of New York. And it takes nothing from any person in this Realm that they had when they woke up this morning.
A great many people have been killed. I am not going to give the House a number, for the same reason the broadcasters have declined to give one, which is that any number I gave now would be wrong and would be repeated all week. The mourning of this Realm is not mine to lead, and the King will speak at two o’clock, and the churches are already open. My responsibility this afternoon is narrower and I intend to keep to it.
I will report to the House again this evening and every day this House sits.
The Corporation’s report
The Prime Minister has declared a state of emergency in the Province of New York and ordered the first deployment of the Royal American Armed Forces on domestic ground in support of the civil power in the history of the Realm.
Al Gore made the statement from the floor of the House of Commons at 1:15 p.m., three and a half hours after the first explosion at Grand Central Station and an hour after the fourth at the Union March. He said he was speaking in the House rather than to a camera because the House was sitting, and that its sitting was the most important thing he had to report.
The emergency releases money and materiel to the emergency services without ordinary approvals, permits requisition of transport and premises for casualty work, places polity and federal services under a single command, and authorises the military cordon.
The Prime Minister devoted the central passage of the statement to what the emergency does not do. It does not suspend Parliament or any court, creates no power of detention and none over speech, assembly or the press, does not touch the franchise, and does not extend beyond the Province of New York. He asked the House to hold him to every line.
On the cordon he said the soldiers are not police and will not police, that they are there to hold unsafe ground and assist the search, and that the order expires in fourteen days unless the Government returns to the House to ask for it.
He declined to say who was responsible. He said nobody in the Realm knew this afternoon, and that anyone telling the country otherwise today was guessing, and that guessing in front of a frightened country was not a small thing to do.
John McCain, the Leader of the Opposition, replied for two minutes. He supported the emergency without reservation, said the House would not divide on it and should not, and asked the Prime Minister for one undertaking: that the fourteen-day limit on the cordon be treated as a limit and not as a first instalment. Mr Gore gave it.
Mr McCain then asked the House to consider that the last of the four devices had been placed where people had gathered to march, and said that whatever else was decided in the coming weeks, the Realm should be slow to conclude that the answer to an attack on public assembly was less public assembly. He was heard in silence.
The King is to address the Realm at two o’clock.
John McCain was commissioned Prime Minister six weeks later, on 11 June, after Gore’s resignation. The undertaking he asked for on the afternoon of 1 May was one he inherited the responsibility of keeping.
The King’s address, 2:00 p.m.
Ten minutes after the Corporation filed that report, Ernest V addressed the Realm.
The text is reproduced in full in the Register’s account of the day and is not duplicated here. What belongs on this page is where it sits in the sequence and what it shares with the two documents above it.
He was in Britain and did not travel. He wrote it alone, in a study, in under an hour, having begun nothing until the fourth site was struck, and it was never submitted to American ministers. The broadcast was live and the strain is audible.
It contains the day’s other silence. The King stopped, mid-passage, for long enough that engineers at more than one network believed the line had failed. Two of the most remembered moments of 1 May are pauses: a presenter’s nine seconds at 11:49, and a monarch’s rather longer at two o’clock. Neither has ever been explained by the man who made it.
And it makes, in seven words, the move that both the other documents of the afternoon make at length. Rice’s Continuity Proclamation spends four of its seven operative passages on what is not being done. Gore’s statement is remembered for its list of what the emergency does not do. The King’s version is:
Nothing has been suspended. Nothing will be.
Three officers of the constitution, within two hours, defining the Realm’s response by what it refused to take. None of the three had seen the others’ text.
He asked one thing of the country: not to look for the murderers among their neighbours. The backlash that followed fell on the Realm’s Russian and Slavic communities, who had no connection to the attackers and were burying their own dead from the same four sites. He was in New York on the Friday and walked all four.
The announcement from Albany, 2:19 p.m.
Peg Halloran had been missing for close to four hours, and hope had persisted for most of them.
The announcement was made from Albany by the Premier of New York, and not from New Westminster, because she was the Province’s own. The Corporation carried it live. Ainsworth read the words and added nothing to them, which after four hours of saying what was not known was the loudest thing he did all day.
It is my duty to tell the people of this Province that Margaret Halloran, Lieutenant-Governor of New York, was killed this morning at Grand Central Station. She has been identified. Her family have been told, and were told before you were.
She was on the ten forty-two to Albany. She was travelling alone, on an ordinary service, with no escort and no reserved carriage, as she always did, because she was coming here to open the session of this Assembly and she did not think that required anything more than a ticket.
She was a nurse. She began in the public health service of this Province, she worked thirty years through its wards and its clinics, she ended by running them, and she came to the Crown’s service by a road almost nobody has taken. That is the first thing to say about her after her office, and I think she would have wanted it said in that order.
The office of Lieutenant-Governor of this Province is vacant. I am not going to dress that up.
It has been vacant since twenty-three minutes to eleven this morning, and we did not know it until twenty minutes ago. For most of today the Province has had no representative of the Crown and has gone on being governed regardless, which is worth saying aloud, because it is the answer to the question some of you are about to ask.
A Council of State will be constituted under the provincial instruments to exercise the vice-regal functions until the Crown appoints. That is not a thing that can be done this afternoon and it will not be done this week. It requires summonses, oaths and a quorum of people who are today occupied with the dead.
So I will tell you what the vacancy does not do. The Assembly of this Province sits. Its courts are open. Its Ministry governs and is answerable to it. Nothing in the ordinary law of New York requires the Lieutenant-Governor’s hand between now and the Council’s constitution, and nothing that does require it is urgent. If that changes, I will come to this Assembly and say so.
This Assembly met at noon. It will not sit today. We are going to adjourn, and we are going to do it now.
The Council of State was not constituted for a further two weeks. For that fortnight the Province of New York had no representative of the Crown, during an emergency, with a military cordon operating in its largest city, and the arrangement held because nothing arose that required a vice-regal hand. Constitutional writers have treated the fortnight as the most instructive thing the day produced: the Realm discovered by accident that a Province can be Crownless for two weeks and no one outside the law faculties will notice.
The Assembly adjourned within minutes. The chair she had been travelling to occupy was empty and was noted from the floor, and one member, rising to move the adjournment, said six words that are still quoted in the Province:
She was on her way to us.
Ernest V later insisted that Halloran’s name go into the ordinary list of the dead rather than be set apart, on the ground that the dead should not be arranged to flatter the living. She was given a state funeral, which he attended, and then her name went in with everybody else’s.
The last transcript, 8:23 p.m.
Hugh Ainsworth had gone home. He had presented the national service from before the first explosion until a little after six, had said nothing on air about the correspondent whose line had died at 11:47, and had been driven home.
Word came from Jamaica Hospital in Queens in the early evening. He came back into the building and read it himself.
AINSWORTH: Good evening. I came back in to read this one because it is about us, and I did not want anybody else to have to do it.
Desmond Achebe, who was reporting for this Corporation from the departures hall at Kennedy this morning, is alive. He is at Jamaica Hospital in Queens. He was seriously injured and he is expected to live.
I am not going to tell you more than that about his condition, for the same reason I would not give you a number this morning: because the people who know are his family and his doctors, and because he is a man in a bed and not a bulletin.
I want to say why you have not heard his name until now, because I think we owe you that.
This Corporation does not report on its own people until it knows. We did not know. From a quarter to twelve this morning until an hour ago we did not know whether that man was alive, and if I had told you that, at any point in the afternoon, I would have been asking a frightened country to worry about a broadcaster while it was carrying its own dead out of four buildings. That was the judgement. It was mine and I would make it again.
And I am not going to report him as good news without reporting the rest. Colleagues of ours were in the concourse at Grand Central this morning and they were killed. We have known for some hours. We are not naming them tonight, because their families are being told tonight, and the names belong to them first. We will name them, and we will name them the way we would name anybody.
Desmond, if that ward has a radio on, and I am told it has.
You were describing the patience in that hall this morning and you did not get to the end of the sentence. I have thought about it on and off all day. You were right about it. There was a great deal of it about today, in the airports and the stations and on that march, and most of it belonged to people nobody will ever name.
Finish the sentence when you are well.
It is twenty-five minutes past eight. We are staying on until the morning.
Coda: 11 June 2006
Six weeks later the ministry fell, and not because of the attacks. It fell because of what the attacks revealed about the years before them: the unread intake, the material on the attackers that had reached the Royal American Constabulary before 2006 and had never been opened.
Gore survived the confidence vote and resigned anyway.
He made no speech. He did not defend his record, did not itemise what his ministry had done in six weeks, and did not mention the war he had refused. On the step at Government House, asked by reporters whether he wished to say anything, he said one sentence and then got into the car.
There is a great deal I would like to say, and none of it would be any use to you.
That is all anybody ever got.
Al Gore has resigned as Prime Minister, six weeks after the May Day attacks and days after surviving a motion of confidence by a margin of eleven.
He went to Government House shortly after eleven this morning and tendered his resignation to the Governor-General. Condoleezza Rice then sent for John McCain, Leader of the Conservative and Crown Union, and commissioned him to form a government. Mr McCain accepted and has begun forming an emergency coalition; Joseph Lieberman, of the outgoing party, is expected to be Deputy Prime Minister.
Mr Gore gave his reason in the written notice tendered to the Governor-General: that a government surviving on a handful of votes could not conduct a national recovery, and that a contest over his own person during an emergency would cost his party more than his departure would.
He made no statement to Parliament and no address to the country. Asked on the steps of Government House whether he wished to say anything, he said that there was a great deal he would like to say and that none of it would be any use, and left.
He has attended nineteen funerals since 1 May. He was received at all of them, by accounts from the families and from the parishes, with kindness.
I have accepted the Governor-General’s commission and I will form a government that includes members of more than one party, because the country does not need a contest this summer and I do not intend to give it one.
I want to say something about my predecessor, and I am aware that not everybody behind me wants it said.
The file that was not opened was not not-opened by Al Gore. It sat unread through his ministry and it sat unread through the years before it, under governments of both parties, and I sat in this Parliament for every one of those years and I did not ask about it either. If the House wants a man to blame for six weeks ago, it has a wider choice than it has been making.
And he had the votes. He won that division and he went anyway, and he went without making a speech about it. I have been in politics thirty years and I am not sure I would have had the character to do that, and I would rather say so now than be asked about it in ten years.
That is the last thing I will say about him. The rest of what I have to do is not about him.
Neither man ever discussed the other’s conduct again in public.
The New York Investigation was established under McCain within days and ran for two and a half years. What Gore had refused in the weeks after the attacks, and did not mention on the step or at any time afterwards, is treated in the Register’s account of the day and remains sealed until 2031.
What happened next
Ernest V addressed the Realm at 2:00 p.m. and took no operational part in the day. Peg Halloran, Lieutenant-Governor of New York, was confirmed dead at 2:19.
✎ Editor's Note · Why these transcripts, and why in full
The Register reproduces these broadcasts because of what they establish rather than what they report.
The refusal to give a casualty figure, and the decision to explain the refusal on air, became settled ABC practice afterwards and is now taught as it. So did the formula of saying what is known, then saying what is not, and saying which list is longer. The Corporation’s conduct in this hour is the reason its coverage of the following weeks was trusted, and it was decided in about ninety seconds by people who did not know what they were in the middle of.
The nine-second pause is in the original and is not an artefact of transmission. The ABC has never edited it out of the archive recording and has never explained it, and Ainsworth, who presented the national service for another eleven years, declined every invitation to discuss it.
Ainsworth gave the time at the end of every passage he read, through nineteen hours on air. Listeners came to wait for it, and the Corporation has never dropped the habit.
The Corporation never joined the four sites together itself, on the day or afterwards. It reported each explosion, reported when the authorities connected them, and named who had done the connecting. The discipline held from 10:50 until the service closed, and it is the single fact most often cited when the ABC’s independence is questioned.
The Register’s own account of the day is at the May Day Bombings. This page is a source, not a summary.
Trivia
- In-Universe Al Gore survived the confidence vote and resigned anyway. He made no speech, did not defend his record, did not itemise what his ministry had done in six weeks, and did not mention the war he had refused.
- In-Universe Asked on the steps of Government House whether he wished to say anything, Gore said there was a great deal he would like to say and that none of it would be any use. It is all anybody ever got, and he never added to it.
- In-Universe Taking office, John McCain told the country that the unread file had sat unread through governments of both parties, that he had sat in Parliament through those years without asking about it either, and that if the House wanted a man to blame it had a wider choice than it had been making. His own benches did not want it said.
- In-Universe McCain also said that Gore had won the division and gone anyway without making a speech about it, that after thirty years in politics he was not sure he would have had the character to do the same, and that he would rather say so then than be asked about it in ten years. Neither man discussed the other's conduct in public again.
- Design The coda closes the record on a silence, as the day itself did. The Corporation reports that the Prime Minister offered no account of himself and does not speculate about why, because it does not know and will not know: what he refused in the weeks after the attacks remains sealed until 2031.
- In-Universe Desmond Achebe survived the Kennedy explosion. He was seriously injured and was taken to Jamaica Hospital in Queens, and the Corporation did not know he was alive until the early evening.
- In-Universe Hugh Ainsworth had presented since before the first explosion, gone off air after six and been driven home. When word came from the hospital he came back into the building and read it himself, saying he did not want anybody else to have to.
- In-Universe The Corporation's stated rule on reporting its own people dates from that broadcast: it does not report them until it knows, and it does not report a survivor as good news without reporting the dead in the same breath.
- In-Universe Ainsworth declined to give detail of Achebe's condition on the same reasoning he had refused casualty figures that morning: the people who knew were his family and his doctors, and he was a man in a bed and not a bulletin.
- In-Universe ABC staff killed at Grand Central were not named on the day. Their families were being told that night, and the Corporation said the names belonged to them first and would be published the way it would publish anybody's.
- In-Universe Achebe's last words before the line died were an unfinished sentence about the patience in the departures hall. At 8:23 that night Ainsworth addressed him directly on air, told him he had been right about it, and asked him to finish the sentence when he was well.
- In-Universe Peg Halloran was travelling alone on an ordinary service with no escort and no reserved carriage, because she was going to Albany to open the Assembly and did not think it required more than a ticket. It is why the Crown's representative in New York was standing in a public concourse at 10:37 like everyone else who died there.
- In-Universe The announcement of her death was made from Albany by the Premier of New York rather than from New Westminster, because she was the Province's own. Ainsworth read the words on the national service and added nothing to them, which after four hours of saying what was not known was the loudest thing he did that day.
- In-Universe The Premier named her as a nurse immediately after her office, saying she had begun in the Province's public health service, worked thirty years through its wards and clinics, ended by running them, and come to the Crown's service by a road almost nobody has taken.
- In-Universe The office of Lieutenant-Governor of New York was vacant from 10:37, when Peg Halloran was killed, and nobody knew it until 2:19. For most of that day the Province had no representative of the Crown and went on being governed regardless.
- In-Universe The Council of State was not constituted for a further two weeks. For that fortnight the Province of New York had no representative of the Crown, during an emergency and with a military cordon operating in its largest city, and it held because nothing arose that required a vice-regal hand.
- In-Universe Constitutional writers treat that fortnight as the most instructive thing May Day produced: the Realm discovered by accident that a Province can be Crownless for two weeks and no one outside the law faculties will notice.
- In-Universe The Assembly at Albany met at noon and adjourned within minutes of the announcement. The chair Halloran had been travelling to occupy was empty and was noted from the floor, and the member who moved the adjournment said six words still quoted in the Province: she was on her way to us.
- In-Universe Three officers of the constitution defined the Realm's response by what it refused to take, within two hours and without seeing each other's text. The Continuity Proclamation spends four of seven operative passages on what is not being done, Gore is remembered for the list of what the emergency does not do, and the King's version is seven words: nothing has been suspended, nothing will be.
- In-Universe Two of the most remembered moments of 1 May are silences. Hugh Ainsworth stopped for nine seconds at 11:49 after the line from Kennedy went dead, and the King stopped for long enough at two o clock that engineers at more than one network believed the line had failed. Neither man ever explained his own.
- In-Universe The King wrote his address alone in under an hour, having begun nothing until the fourth site was struck, and it was never submitted to American ministers. He asked the country not to look for the murderers among their neighbours, and the backlash fell on the Realm's Russian and Slavic communities anyway, who were burying their own dead from the same four sites.
- In-Universe Al Gore declared the state of emergency from the floor of the Commons rather than to a camera, and said why in his first sentence: the House was sitting, and its sitting was the most important thing he had to tell the country.
- In-Universe The most quoted passage of Gore's statement is the list of what the emergency does not do. It suspends no Parliament and no court, creates no power of detention and none over speech, assembly or the press, does not touch the franchise, and reaches not one yard beyond the Province of New York. He asked the House to hold him to every line.
- In-Universe Both principal documents of the day are shaped as denials. Four of the seven operative passages of the Governor-General's Continuity Proclamation state what is not being done, and the remembered part of the Prime Minister's statement is the list of what the emergency does not do.
- In-Universe The May Day cordon was the first deployment of the Royal American Armed Forces on domestic ground in support of the civil power in the history of the Realm. Gore told the House the soldiers were not police and would not police, and that the order expired in fourteen days unless the Government came back and asked.
- In-Universe Gore refused to name anyone responsible, telling the House that nobody in the Realm knew that afternoon and that anyone saying otherwise was guessing, and that guessing in front of a frightened country was not a small thing to do.
- In-Universe Replying for the Opposition, John McCain asked that the fourteen-day limit on the cordon be treated as a limit and not a first instalment, and Gore gave the undertaking. McCain was commissioned Prime Minister six weeks later and inherited the responsibility of keeping it.
- In-Universe McCain also asked the House to be slow to conclude that the answer to an attack on public assembly was less public assembly. He was heard in silence.
- In-Universe The Union March is formally the Nine Hours March, commemorating the Nine Hours Settlement from which the Realm's labour movement dates itself. Nobody has called it that in ordinary speech for a century, and the word Union carries the trade unions and the Union itself at once, which is the joke the movement has never tired of.
- In-Universe It is not one march. Trade columns form up in each of the five boroughs and march in together behind their own banners. The fourth device was placed at a junction where two columns had just joined, at the moment the two crowds became one.
- In-Universe Some marchers went toward the blast and some were held back by their own stewards, who were shouting that there might be another one. The stewards were right: a fifth device existed and was made safe that afternoon after a member of the public reported it.
- In-Universe The division in that street has never been settled inside the labour movement. Those who went forward saved people; those who held the line were acting on a correct assessment of the danger. Both halves of the argument are still made and the movement's commemorations have never chosen between them.
- In-Universe Stretchers at the Union March were made out of banner poles, and the marchers who did not go forward organised themselves into a line to keep the road clear for ambulances.
- In-Universe Told that the marchers had turned back toward the blast, Ainsworth said it was the first thing anybody had told him that day that was good, and that he was going to leave it where the reporter had put it.
- In-Universe The ABC never joined the four May Day sites together itself. It reported each explosion, reported when the authorities connected them, and named who had done the connecting. The discipline held from 10:50 until the service closed and is the fact most often cited when the Corporation's independence is questioned.
- In-Universe Nobody thought of the Union March. Three transport sites read as an attack on transport, and a march is not transport. No institution made the connection in the twenty-eight minutes available, and the Investigation's finding that the day was directed at movement and assembly together was months away.
- In-Universe From the Grand Central cordon at half past twelve, Anna Kowalski reported that there were fewer emergency vehicles than an hour earlier, because they had been sent to Kennedy and the Battery. Nobody had done anything wrong; there was one service and it was being moved to where it was wanted. The quiet was not because there was less to do.
- In-Universe The third explosion struck the Whitehall Terminal at the Battery at 12:10, in a boarding hall at the busiest crossing hour of the day.
- In-Universe With two sites struck the ABC still declined to join them. Ainsworth reported an explosion at Grand Central and an explosion at Kennedy as two things that had happened, and said he would not join them together until somebody who knew did, and that the Corporation would say who.
- In-Universe The Corporation drew a line it has kept since: it relays what the police and emergency services ask it to relay, and says who asked, and does not otherwise tell the Realm what to do. Ainsworth stated it on air at 11:49 on the ground that instruction was not the ABC's job and that it would be bad at it.
- In-Universe Asked in effect whether more was coming, Ainsworth said only that the Corporation did not know, and that the not knowing was itself the reason to be careful, and that it was the only reason he could give. The Ferry Terminal was struck twenty-one minutes later and the Union March four minutes after that.
- In-Universe The break in the 11:49 broadcast is in the original. Ainsworth begins a sentence about the Kennedy line, stops, and starts again on a shorter one. It lasts under two seconds, he does not falter again in six further hours, and he never says the correspondent's name.
- In-Universe The two-second break is the only moment in the ABC's May Day coverage in which the Corporation is audibly not in control of itself, and is generally credited with doing more for its standing in the Realm than the rest of the day's broadcasting combined.
- In-Universe The ABC sent a correspondent to Kennedy because departures had been suspended and passengers were being held in the terminals, which had become the story. The Investigation later found the interval between the attacks was designed so that the state, the emergency services and the press would commit to transport before the second device.
- In-Universe Desmond Achebe reported from the departures hall at Kennedy that the screens were carrying the Corporation's own Grand Central coverage, so everybody in the building was watching the first attack while standing in the second target.
- In-Universe The recording from Kennedy ends mid-sentence at 11:47. The line went dead in the same instant as the second detonation and did not come back, and the Corporation did not know what had happened to its correspondent until the evening.
- In-Universe Hugh Ainsworth presented for a further six hours after the line from Kennedy dropped without referring to Desmond Achebe on air. The decision was taken in the studio within a minute and was not discussed until years afterwards.
- In-Universe Achebe's last complete observation was that the airline staff had been given no information at all, had nothing to offer anyone, and were standing at the desks anyway, and were being spoken to politely, which after two hours was not nothing.
- In-Universe The ABC refused to give a casualty figure on the morning of May Day and explained the refusal on air: any number given then would be wrong, and the wrong number would be repeated all day and be a fact by nightfall. The refusal became settled Corporation practice and is now taught as it.
- In-Universe The broadcast formula of saying what is known, then what is not, and saying plainly which list is longer, dates from 10:50 a.m. on 1 May 2006 and was decided in about ninety seconds by people who did not know they were in the interval between two attacks.
- In-Universe The nine-second pause after the correspondent's report is in the original recording and is not a transmission fault. The ABC has never edited it out of the archive and has never explained it. Hugh Ainsworth presented the national service for another eleven years and declined every invitation to discuss it.
- In-Universe The correspondent at the cordon reported that the people walking out of Grand Central were covered to the shoulders in the same pale dust and that a great many were holding on to somebody. Not being carried. Holding on. It is the most quoted description of the day.
- In-Universe The Union March is not mentioned in the broadcast. It was still proceeding, and it did not occur to the Corporation, the police or anybody else that it was relevant. It was struck at 12:15.
- In-Universe ABC staff were in the Grand Central concourse at 10:37. The newsroom did not establish this until the evening, and nothing in the morning broadcasts reflects it.
- Design The transcript is reproduced with a note before it setting out everything the broadcast did not yet know, so that no reader mistakes a document defined by its gaps for a record of the day. The Register carries it as a source; the account of May Day itself is elsewhere.
- Real-World Our own broadcasters have the same two recordings from 11 September 2001 and have never known what to do with them either. The problem is identical: the tape is the most valuable primary document of the morning and the most intrusive, it contains the voices of people who did not consent to be historical, and every decision about replaying it is a decision about whether a country is remembering or consuming.
- Real-World The convention of continuing to broadcast rather than cutting away is real and is the harder of the two choices. Our own networks stayed live through the second impact and have been arguing about it ever since, and the argument is not about whether the footage was true but about what showing it did to the millions of people who had not chosen to see it.
- Real-World What has no equivalent here is a public broadcaster carrying no advertising, funded by an endowment and a parliamentary grant, and therefore under no commercial pressure whatever on the morning of a catastrophe. Ours were competing for an audience while it happened. The ABC was not, and the difference is audible in the transcripts.
See also
- The May Day Bombings, the Register’s account of the day
- Al Gore, who declared the emergency and resigned six weeks later
- John McCain, who replied for the Opposition and succeeded him
- The Province of New York, whose Lieutenant-Governor was killed
- Condoleezza Rice, Governor-General, who issued the Continuity Proclamation
- The American Broadcasting Corporation, whose conduct this hour largely settled
- The Church of America, which became the Realm’s ritual body of grief in the days that followed
- Al Gore, Prime Minister, who declared an emergency that afternoon
- Pan American World Airways, which lost forty-one of its own people at Kennedy
Categories
Institutions · The May Day Bombings · The American Broadcasting Corporation · Primary Sources