David Morris woke up in Sarasota, Florida, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, expecting "the most routine day you can imagine."
It wasn't, and Morris would find himself close to some of the most powerful people in the country as one of its most painful chapters unfolded.
The Columbia County native's long journalism career had taken him from a local newspaper in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, to chief White House Correspondent for Bloomberg News.
That sunny September morning, Morris was assigned to cover President George W. Bush's visit to Emma E. Booker Elementary School to promote the No Child Left Behind Act.
That was where Bush was famously reading to children as Chief of Staff Andy Card whispered news of the unfolding terror attacks into the president's ear.
"To this day, I am amazed at the president's reaction. He didn't want to panic the kids," Morris said of Bush's demeanor after learning about the attacks.
Morris was watching on closed-circuit television from an adjoining classroom.
"He read a little bit more — not much, but a little bit — and then thanked everybody and got up and left and walked into a world that was unlike the world 15 minutes earlier," Morris said.
The long road to Sarasota
Morris was no stranger to reporting on a breaking tragedy: He covered a 1987 press conference in Harrisburg where Pennsylvania State Treasurer Robert Budd Dwyer fatally shot himself.
Now retired, Morris reported on everything from small-town news to state government and presidential campaigns.
"I was born and raised in Berwick. My parents were both from the Berwick area, and I just couldn't wait to get out in high school," Morris said. "No matter what I was going to do, I knew it wasn't going to be in this area."
Morris went off to study journalism at Penn State University, where he reported for The Daily Collegian.
"I liked to write. I wrote for the high school paper, and so I thought, 'well, maybe I should try journalism,'" he recalled.
Morris initially covered sports, but he was inspired to switch to news thanks to another major national story.
"Watergate happened, and so that was sort of like 'okay, I'm doing this,'" he recalled.
Life in State College, meanwhile, came as something of a culture shock.
"I grew up in a small town, and there were three times as many people on campus as there were in Berwick," Morris said. "After wanting to get away, my first job, of course, was back home."
Morris took a job at the former Morning Press newspaper in Bloomsburg.
"I figured I'd stay for a year or two and then move on to greener pastures," he said.
Instead, Morris stayed for four-and-a-half years and "had the time of my life."
"I knew then that no matter what I did, it would always be something in journalism," he said.
His next stop was Wilkes-Barre's Times Leader, where Morris was soon sent to the paper's first Harrisburg bureau. That was followed by a job covering state government and politics for the Harrisburg Patriot-News, then the Associated Press.
"And that's when everything really took off," Morris said. "I realized that I really loved the pressure of deadlines, and you know, at the AP, there was always a deadline."
His work with the AP included postings to California and Washington, which is where Morris was based with Bloomberg in 2001.
An 'easy peasy' assignment
The morning of Sept. 11, 2001 dawned with a minor frustration: A "smelly and gross" red tide kept Morris from a little coveted communing with nature along the Gulf Coast.
"Any idea that I had to take a walk along the beach was ruined," he said.
Otherwise, Morris expected a clear path for the day.
"We came in the night before, so we're already on site. We're going to take a motorcade over to this school, and the president's going to read to school kids," Morris recalled. "And then we're going to fly home. You know, easy peasy."
That's not to say there wasn't some controversy in the air.
"When we flew in the night before, there were still people protesting the results of the 2000 election," Morris said. It was a reference to the heated contest in which Bush prevailed over Al Gore only after a pitched battle over Florida's results that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ending a recount in the state and effectively putting Bush in the White House.
"There were people outside chanting and waving signs that said, 'the accidental president,'" Morris recalled.
'We had one TV station on'
Inside the elementary school, however, the earliest hints of a changing world were quickly emerging.
Half of the media pool was in the back of the classroom where Bush was. The other half, including Morris, was in the next classroom, linked in by closed-circuit TV.
"My colleague Dick Kyle was in the room with the president because he was going to fly home on Air Force One with the president. I had flown in on Air Force One the night before, and we always alternated," Morris said.
The first hijacked airliner struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan at 8:46 a.m., as the motorcade was arriving at the school.
The president knew about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center before the event began, as described in this 2022 Houston Public Media interview with former Bush administration official Brian Montgomery, who also was with the president that day.
"He knew going into the classroom," Morris said.
Bush was briefed by his officials, and the visit got underway.
The journalists surrounding him were monitoring the situation.
"We had one TV station on. It was CNN with the sound turned all the way down," Morris said. "They were only reporting. There were no live pictures at the time."
"So, like everybody else, I just assumed it was a small plane," he said. "Everybody thought it was, you know, a small plane and short-lived story."
"And then they went to live pictures, and it was clear that it wasn't a small plane," he said.
The second hijacked plane struck the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. minutes later.
"When he was reading to the kids, we saw the plane hit the second tower, and it wasn't, you know, a minute or so later when the now-famous picture was taken of Chief of Staff Andy Card whispering in the president's ear," Morris said.
As he said, Bush maintained quiet composure.
"It wasn't long — you know, a couple of minutes at most — before he was ushered into the next room," Morris said.
Sudden uncertainty
"I never even got a chance to to to check with my check in with my colleague because they were whisked out to the motorcade, and at that point, they didn't know where they were going," Morris said.
"It's not that they weren't told. The White House didn't know where they were going yet either," he said.
"They just knew that the president wanted to fly back to Washington. The Secret Service was adamant that he could not fly back to Washington, and so they were wrestling over where they were going to go."
The situation created professional and personal urgency for Morris.
"I'm trying to do two things. I'm trying to check in with my office in Washington to see what they need from me and how I can be the most help," he said.
"The second thing I'm trying to do ... shortly after all of this, there were reports that a plane had hit the State Department. It turned out to be false. But my wife, who was also a journalist at the time, worked like half a block away from the State Department. So I'm trying to reach her."
Morris, like so many Americans, found the phone lines jammed — then frustrated when the call went through and wife, Jodie, didn't pick up.
"It kept going to her voicemail, and I'm trying not to panic. I'm trying to focus on the job I need to do, worried about her," he said.
She had taken the day off, he remembered.
"She was sleeping in. I woke her up and said, 'You need to turn on the TV."
He then was able to fully focus on the job at hand.
"The great thing about a notebook and a phone is you know you don't have time. You don't have time to worry. You don't have time to get upset. You don't have time to fret. You don't have time to play the what-ifs," Morris said.
"You're just straight ahead doing everything you can to find out what's happening and why it's happening and where it's happening," he said. "Because now we're hearing about a plane going down somewhere in Western Pennsylvania, and it's like where does it just stop?"
Morris' efforts became part of Bloomberg's main national story for the day, including the president's Sarasota visit, the Andy Card exchange, and what was known of Bush's whereabouts.
"And then I did a sidebar on how in an instant everything had changed," Morris said.
The Election 2000 protesters now belonged to a seemingly distant past.
"That all went away," he said.
Morris has no photos of himself from the day, incidentally.
"Selfies weren't a thing then, and for some reason the photographers who were there were more interested in focusing away from me," he said.
What he does have is a White House photo, accompanying this story, of himself in the front row at an Oct. 11, 2001 news conference with Bush.
Morris keeps that in his office. It reminds him of many things, including Bush's gravitas and demeanor in the weeks that followed.
"President Bush had a tremendous sense of humor, and we had a lot of interaction," Morris said. "He was still pretty much the same person that he had been before this ... but it was not a time to joke."
Making his way home
Morris' colleague was one of the journalists who became part of history in another way, traveling aboard Air Force One with Bush for part of what would be a long, harrowing flight around the country.
"Dick Kyle left Sarasota on Air Force One. They flew to a couple of Air Force bases. At the first stop, the pool was reduced to, I think, three people, and Dick was not on that list. So Dick was stuck at an Air Force base," Morris said.
He was stuck in Sarasota, meanwhile, because all commercial aviation had been grounded.
"I reported from Sarasota for two or three days, and finally we chartered buses and drove back," he said.
Flowers, crosses, and flying with the president
Morris was with Bush in New York in the days that followed, covering the president in places that are burned into his memory.
"We went to fire halls where three-quarters of the firefighters who went out on that call that morning didn't come back," he said.
"We went to an elementary school near Ground Zero, where Bush met with young kids, and the teacher had them express their feelings about 9/11 by making art, and some of the art was, you know, flowers and crosses, and some of the art was burning buildings with people jumping out of them," Morris recalled. "To this day, I can see some of those as clearly as if it just happened."
Amid the grief and chaos, the following month brought a moment of calming familiarity.
On Oct. 30, 2001, Bush was at Yankee Stadium to throw out the first pitch as the Yankees took on the Arizona Diamondbacks in Game 3 of the delayed World Series.
"By then things had started feeling more like normal than they had in a long time," Morris said.
But not completely.
"When we flew home that night on Air Force One, after the game, we were instructed to lower our window shades so that the lights couldn't be seen," Morris said.
"Air Force One is always escorted by fighter jets, but you don't usually see them. They're just far enough away that you can't see them. That night going home, they were right on our wings," he said.
"That was one time that it occurred to me that I was flying on the world's biggest target," he said.
"I just saw an interview from a New York Times photographer about that same sentiment, not from 9/11, but from more recent events, that you know you're on a plane that has the greatest defense capabilities in the world, but it's also the target for, you know, anybody who wants to make a name for a cause or take a stand for a cause, and that's the first night it ever really bugged me," Morris said.
Processing a tragedy
Morris' professional instincts put him on autopilot during the height of his work on 9/11 and in the weeks that followed.
"You know, it's going to sound callous, and it's not meant to be — it's just the reality — when I was in the moment on that day, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about 'What does this mean for our country? What does this mean for democracy?' My focus was 'Who the heck can I get on the phone to tell me what's going on?'"
"And as long as I was reporting, I was fine," he said.
He isn't reporting anymore.
Morris retired as the managing editor of The Kiplinger Letter in 2017. He and Jodie live in rural Benton, having left the bustle of Washington behind.
He's been composing bluegrass songs and writing about the genre as a full-time avocation since. It's one of the things that has allowed him to reflect on everything he heard and saw during 40 years of journalism, particularly 9/11.
Among them is "Tenth Day of September," which "follows the events through the eyes of a person who lost someone that day, and is wishing they could all go back to the day before."
The song was recorded by Dave Adkins and released in time for the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
It also stands as a tribute to John Miller, a friend and fellow musician who had pitched the idea over a decade ago and co-wrote the song. Miller died in 2023.
"I guess it's a bit of closure for me — closure on the fact that, you know, 9/11 was horrible, and closure on the fact that, you know, John's not here, but he lives on in the song," Morris said. "I like to think that the memories of people we lost on that day live on in the song."
