CBS’ Jim Axelrod’s Visit to Museum Brings Perspective to His Life, Career

Like so many Americans, 13 years later, I still have such vivid memories of 9/11. I can tell you about the beautiful, cloudless, high-pressure sky that greeted what looked to be a perfect September Tuesday. I can tell you about sitting in the snarled traffic outside the Lincoln Tunnel for hours. I can tell you about the sick feeling that enveloped my bus as all the passengers looked across the Hudson River to see the smoke and horror.

But unlike so many, I have a little different take on the day.

9/11 is also my wedding anniversary. I had caught a later bus so I could spend a little extra time with my wife. Otherwise I would have been able to get to lower Manhattan and do my job reporting for CBS News. Instead, I was stuck on a bus unable to get to this enormous story unfolding just miles away. It’s not a reaction I’m particularly proud of, but rather than focusing solely on the devastation, destruction, and lives lost, I was also thinking about how I was missing the most important story of my career.

And that’s how I’ve thought of the day in a narrow professional sense for years. I missed the big story. I eventually got back to my home in New Jersey, grabbed my car, drove north to Westchester County, into the Bronx, found a livery cab and got to work. By the afternoon, I was in lower Manhattan reporting on the rescue and recovery efforts of first responders. But that was hours after the towers had come down. So for the last 13 years, whenever I would think about 9/11, I would think to myself, “kind of missed that story.”

Until this year.

Read the full post on our Tumblr blog here.

By Jim Axelrod, CBS News Reporter