Gary Condit is probably the only American who had mixed emotions on the morning of September 11th. Days before, he had given a disasterous prime-time interview about his relationship with Chandra Levy. As I recall, he came off as nervous and evasive. It really looked like the ‘court of public opinion’ was turning against him.
On a much lighter note, Anne Heche also gave a bizarre prime-time interview just before 9/11 in which she told the public about her secret, ‘alien’ language…and, I believe, her other personalities. (The reason I remember this one, by the way, is that her ex-lover, Steve Martin was also here in Boston on September 10th. One of the rumors going around locally on 9/11 is that either Martin or Heche or both had been on one of the planes).
Am I mistaken, or had Gary Condit essentially been completely cleared of any part in Chandra Levy’s murder? On the other hand, if it’s a question of marital fidelity, isn’t it more or less proven that Condit and Levy were having an affair of some kind?
But yes, 9/11 certainly gave Condit a respite from the media.
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Until you mentioned it, I had forgotten about that Anne Heche interview, even though I had seen it on TV. I remember it now – I think it was some kind of a publicity stunt for a book she’d written. Somehow, I don’t think that book moved very many copies.
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It seems to me that the Mad Cow disease scare was getting more media attention pre-9/11 than it has since. Also, the popular media seemed to have forgotten about the various legal efforts to break up Microsoft.
Remember when summer 2001 was the Summer of Shark Attacks? It’s as if after 9/11, the sharks have packed their bags and gone away.
I seem to remember something on the radio that morning about Michael Jordan coming back out of retirement again to play for the Wizards. 'Course, that might have only been big news in this area.
In Australia, Ansett, the only other major airline company announced their collapse on 9/11. It managed to make a small bynote on the front page but was understandably completely dwarfed.
Her body had been found almost four months earlier. Condit was never a suspect to begin with; the issue was not just that he had sex with her and lied about it, it’s that he apparently wasn’t willing to help the police to the full extent in a missing person’s case. Wouldn’t have changed anything, but it’s scummy. Long before September 11, I’m pretty sure Levy’s murder had been pinned on a guy who was already in jail who’d killed another woman in a similar way.
As far as stories buried by September 11th, I’m tempted to say “Enron” and a number of Halliburton things.
Well, the shitty economy certainly got pushed off the front pages for a while. And when it came back it was blamed on 9/11 like it wasn’t tanking before that.
Messed up the year. May is four months before September when they’re in the same year.
I do think it’s funny the way that story broke down. Everybody was sure he’d had her killed or done it himself, I recall there was a TV movie or an episode of a show that was modelled on the incident, and lo and behold, the police were telling the truth when they said they thought he had nothing to do with it. I didn’t see any apologies, though…
The economy is also a good call, and in fact, it’s still not as much of a story as it would normally be. Also - I don’t know if it’s a real story, but it’s interesting: Bush took a vacation for essentially all of August 2001 (the 4th through the 30th). It was originally supposed to be a few days longer - had he waiting to go back to Washington on Sept. 3 as planned, it would’ve been the longest Presidential vacation in history.
One or two days before 9/11, a person in Silicon Valley shot and killed several people and bragged about it on video camera before killing himself, very much in Colombine style. On the tape he bragged about how he was going to be a bigshot name in the papers and how he was going to be feeding the media for a very long.
The local papers in the area had him as page one the day of 9/11. Then he was gone. We interrupt this program…
Heh, apparently Bush is actually taking a similar vacation right now - he just doesn’t like the Washington DC heat, I guess. Although the last time, he was said to be formulating policies on stem cell research and things. Now he’s spending tons of time fundraising…
If I recall, the headline on the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was “Jerome Bettis: We Stunk” (it may have been the sports section). Jerome Bettis is the top running back on the Pittsburgh Steelers (American) football team and they had played atrociously the first two games of the season. Ironically, after one week off when all football games were cancelled and another scheduled week off, the Steelers went on to win almost all the rest of their games and wound up going to the Super Bowl. I tried to keep that morning’s newspaper as an indication of how radically the world changed in my city’s views, but it got tossed out during a periodic clear out.
Not exactly forgotten, but: on 10 September, Norway had had the closest national election in living memory, and the morning and early afternoon of the 11th were dominated by squabbling about who was going to be able to put together a coalition that had a snowball’s chance in Hades of making it to the next election. (Elections here are regularly scheduled, unlike many other parliamentary democracies where they can be called at any time if a government loses support. So if a government tanks half-way through, we have to go through the negotiation/squabbling stage all over again…)
This came to a screeching halt around 3 p.m. local time. Several days passed before negotiations were restarted, and even then they were a lot more subdued.
