U.S. Department of Commerce
09/11/2025 | Press release | Archived content
From 9/11 to Charlie Kirk’s murder, America faces evil — and defeats it with its goodness
Twenty-four years ago Thursday, evil took 2,977 innocent lives in the deadliest terror attack ever carried out on American soil.
Among those murdered were my brother Gary, my best friend Doug, and 656 other colleagues and friends of mine from Cantor Fitzgerald.
I'm only alive today because that fateful Tuesday was my oldest son's first day of kindergarten.
That morning, instead of going to our offices in the 101st through 105th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, I joined my wife in taking our son to school.
At some point, my phone started ringing but disconnected each time I'd answer.
I only later learned that it was my brother Gary trying to call from the building to say goodbye.
Once I heard that a plane had struck the World Trade Center, I raced downtown.
I arrived at the base of the building and started grabbing people as they came out the doors, hoping that some of my people were able to escape. None did.
If you think about all the people you work with, I guarantee you don't appreciate how important they actually are to you.
We all underestimate how central our colleagues are in our lives. Most people spend more time with their co-workers than they do with their families.
People don't often articulate the love they feel for their colleagues, or even think it's accurate to call it love. But it is.
When they're ripped from you in an instant, your heart collapses.
Losing my colleagues - my partners, my friends - showed me the depths of that love.
I cried every single day until Oct. 21, 2004.
When I went to bed that night, I remember telling my wife it was the first day I hadn't cried.
The grief never completely leaves.
There's too much to process. Too much death and pain to fully comprehend at once.
So much so that when someone would mention the name of a co-worker who died that day, it was like they were killed then and there.
That pain would flood back all over again because I hadn't fully processed each of the hundreds of deaths.
Even now, I still get emotional when I speak about 9/11 because it is a wound that never fully heals.
Today, after rebuilding Cantor Fitzgerald from the ground up, I serve as our nation's 41st secretary of Commerce.
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