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Where were you 18 years ago today? What were you doing that morning? You’d be stumped if I’d asked you this same question yesterday or a week ago. But not on 9/11, a set of numbers stamped indelibly in the minds of most Americans — and many others around the globe — who were alive and old enough to store memories when the calendar hit that date in 2001. Surreally, I was in Bermuda, at the end of a long-delayed vacation, and was supposed to be en route back to Washington, where I lived then. My traveling companion and I were checking out of our hotel when the woman behind the desk said something about an airplane hitting one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. She made it sound as if some hobbyist had flown off course. I think that’s how she understood it. My companion and I shook our heads in amazement and climbed into a waiting taxi. When we pulled up to the airport 45 minutes later, a man on the curb waved us away, saying that all flights had been canceled. All flights? The weather was perfect. I asked the taxi driver and my companion to wait a few minutes and I zipped into the terminal to get to the bottom of this nonsense. That’s when and where I learned the horrifying truth. We were stuck in Bermuda for four days. Stuck in Bermuda: I know that sounds like a cartographical oxymoron, a bad joke, but I’d never wanted and needed to get somewhere as keenly as I wanted and needed to get to America just then. My country had been attacked. It was reeling. To be gone was some perverse dereliction — some betrayal. I should be standing and trembling and raging and sobbing among my fellow Americans. America showed the best of itself on and after 9/11: the extraordinary courage of passengers on United Airlines Flight 93; the valor of rescue and cleanup workers at ground zero in Manhattan; George W. Bush’s ringing proclamation that Islam was not our enemy. America also showed less admirable dimensions, especially as time went by. There were awful misjudgments, by Bush and many others. There were acts of bad faith. These compounded the toll of the terrorist attacks themselves, which altered our politics immediately and color them still. But they didn’t and don’t challenge what 9/11 stirred in me more powerfully than any day before or since: my love for this country, the protective impulse that I feel toward it, my awareness of its special role in the world and of how that makes it both a nonpareil beacon and a singular target. I balk at some of the decisions that we Americans make. I cringe at some of the values that those decisions suggest. But we are defined and bound together by this extraordinary patch of earth. It’s our home, in both the grandest and most intimate senses of the word. That’s what I felt so powerfully on 9/11 and what I remember on its anniversary, which for me is an occasion not just of unfathomable loss but of unshakable solidarity. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to friends. They can sign up here. How Prescient Are Current Polls?
The Democratic presidential candidates who are trailing far behind the front-runners for the party’s nomination have taken to telling us that at this point in contests past, the state of play wasn’t at all predictive of how things turned out. We shouldn’t write them off, they insist, because the story is still in its early chapters. Is that entirely true or partly a sales job? I went back and looked at some of the Republican and Democratic primary races from 2004 onward. By the first half of September four years ago, Donald Trump had become the front-runner in polls of Republican and Republican-leaning voters, and Hillary Clinton led among Democrats. So both parties’ eventual nominees were in the No. 1 spots that they also held at the end of the primaries. But Trump’s lead wasn’t commanding, and the candidates right behind him were ones who subsequently fizzled. In a CBS News/New York Times poll in mid-September, Trump had the support of 27 percent of respondents; Ben Carson was second at 23 percent. In a CNN/ORC poll, he had 24 percent, while Carson had 14 and Carly Fiorina had 15. Four years before that, in 2011, the Republican front-runner in mid-September was Rick Perry, who had 30 percent to Mitt Romney’s 18 percent in a CNN/ORC poll. Romney, of course, ended up winning the nomination; Perry’s campaign was over before the end of January 2012. At this juncture in the presidential primaries of 2008, the leader on the Democratic side was Clinton. In several polls, she had almost double the support of Barack Obama, who of course went on to win the nomination and become president. For instance, a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll from Sept. 13, 2007, put her support among Democrats at 39 percent; he had just 20. The Republican front-runner in September 2007 was … Rudy Giuliani, followed by Fred Thompson. The party’s eventual nominee, John McCain, was in third place, more than 15 points behind Giuliani. Four years earlier, the big race was among Democrats, who were figuring out whom to put up against the Republican incumbent, George W. Bush, in November 2004. They would ultimately choose John Kerry. But in a Washington Post/ABC News poll of Democratic voters from the same stretch of 2003 that we’re in now, he finished in a three-way tie for second with Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean. All of them were at 14 percent, eight points behind the front-runner, who was … Joe Lieberman. The Beauty of Digging Deep
You’re an Oscar-winning movie star whose wattage has dimmed to the point where, for many people, you’re an object of curiosity or even ridicule. The most attention that you’ve received over the past five years wasn’t for work that you did but for “work” that you supposedly had done, as too many people spent too much time analyzing and quipping about photographs of your face. So to make your way back, you take the role of one of the most famous performers of the last century, an icon whom you don’t resemble in the least, and decide that instead of lip-syncing to recordings of her legendary voice, you’ll do your own singing? That’s guts. Renée Zellweger — the star of “Judy,” about Judy Garland — has them to burn. I always perk up around this time of year, from mid-September through late December, when many of the most ambitious movies and flashiest performances are rolled out so that they’re fresh in viewers’ minds for award season. But I’m especially eager for “Judy.” It opens in some cities in two and a half weeks, and the first reviews have started to circulate. They say “Judy” is fine. They say Zellweger is phenomenal. But it’s not her acting per se that’s drawing my interest now. It’s her complexities, her courage and the obvious discrepancy between how she’s perceived and who she apparently is. We’re so quick these days to reduce people, tucking them into tidy categories and neat boxes, and many public figures put themselves there, sticking to their brands as much as possible. It simplifies things. It reduces uncertainty. Zellweger’s career hasn’t been anything like that. Her tiny frame and whispery voice belie outsize daring. After “Jerry Maguire,” her big breakthrough, she could have done cutesy-poo until the cows came home. She could have done sweetheart roles galore. But she did “Nurse Betty,” playing a stalker in a fugue state. She did “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” which had Britons in an uproar until they got an earful of the English accent that she’d worked so hard on and they had to acknowledge its accuracy and her charms. She did “Chicago,” though she had no history as a singer or dancer. She did “Cold Mountain,” with yet another accent. Those performances and others across the years — in “A Price Above Rubies,” “Mrs. Potter,” “Down With Love” and “White Oleander” — demonstrate more range than she was often given credit for. And all of them seemed to be forgotten when she got a little older and tougher to cast and her eyes and cheeks maybe looked different, if only for a short while. Zellweger, who’s 50 now, was dismissed as another starlet who couldn’t make peace with aging, a psychologically frail slave to movie-industry vanity and insecurity. She was written about and even written off as flaky, sad. It stung, she admitted in a long interview with Jonathan Van Meter for a profile, “Hollywood Almost Broke Renée Zellweger,” the cover story of last week’s New York magazine. To respond with “Judy,” which could so easily have been the cinematic equivalent of a “Kick Me” sign, is beyond fierce. Sure, she needed to take a risk to alter her trajectory, but not one this enormous. Forget how Zellweger looks on the outside. Her greatest gifts are within. On a Personal Note
Celebrity profiles like Van Meter’s of Zellweger are an odd genre, attended by calculations that other kinds of journalism aren’t. The celebrity and his or her representatives try hard to make sure that nothing remotely unflattering is written, saying yes or no to writers and publications based in part on whether they’re deemed genial and trustworthy. Van Meter conceded in his article on Zellweger that he’d met and interviewed her several times before. They’d even developed a bit of a friendship. If you’re the writer who’s assigned one of these profiles, you know that if you produce something too negative, you could be shut down by other subjects in the future. But if you produce something undeservedly fawning, you’ve erased the line between journalist and publicist and denied your readers your smartest appraisal, along with the truth. Meantime, your subject strategically metes out access, carefully chooses the setting of your encounters and weighs every word that he or she speaks. You have to adjust for all of that and somehow get a glimpse beyond and behind it. I know because, over time, I’ve written scores of these profiles. At The Detroit Free Press, where I worked before I joined The Times in 1995, I was the chief movie critic for a while, and my responsibilities included profiles of people in the movie biz. I hung out with Sandra Bullock in her trailer on the set of “While You Were Sleeping.” Mel Gibson had a bit of a meltdown as I interviewed him in a hotel suite in Beverly Hills. (I’d asked him about repeated public accusations that he was a homophobe.) At The Times, for either our Culture section or our Sunday magazine, I’ve done major profiles of, and spent extended time with, Ang Lee, Laura Linney, Mark Wahlberg and Debbie Reynolds, among others. But two other celebrity profiles from my Times years are more firmly lodged in my memory, because despite the author-subject dance that I described above, I believe I got a reasonably unfiltered look at the person I was writing about. One, from decades ago, was this magazine piece on Vanessa Redgrave. It was one of the strangest and most surprising journalism experiences I’ve ever had, because I traveled to London on the promise of just one 90-minute sit-down with her, which wasn’t going to be enough. At the last minute, her representatives agreed that I could also poke my head backstage after an evening’s performance of a play that she was in to say hello. When I did, she asked me how our time together was supposed to proceed — she apparently hadn’t been brought up to speed or didn’t remember that we had a single meeting set up for the next day or the day after. I mentioned that meeting, but not as our only approved encounter, and said that she should have dinner with me right then if she was free. Off we went to eat, and for the following days, I was pretty much glued to her side. The other profile that stays with me, from just a few years ago, was this Culture section piece on Jodie Foster. It’s a quick read, but if you have time for just a portion, please check out the beginning, where I described her fear of failure. Even Foster, a two-time winner of the Oscar for best actress, has confidence issues. “If Mother Teresa is propelled to do good works because she believes in God, I am propelled to do good works because of how bad I feel about myself,” she told me, reaffirming an important truth that I explored in a recent newsletter about the former Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck and that I alluded to in today’s reflection on Zellweger: Our assumptions about people are often far, far off the mark of their reality. “For the Love of Sentences” will return next week. To nominate favorite sentences or brief passages from recent articles in The Times, please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence. I’m excited to participate in the first-ever New York Times Food Festival, which will take place on Oct. 5-6 in and near Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan. You can find a full description of the event and a schedule of activities here. It includes panel discussions with experts in the food industry; I’ll be involved in two of them. They’re listed here. If you’re going to be in or near New York City then, please consider joining us. Have feedback? If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week’s newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at bruni-newsletter@nytimes.com. Read the full Opinion report here.
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