Twenty-Five Years On: Four Former Presidents at Ground Zero, Trump on Iran at the Pentagon, and a Seventh Silence

At 8.46 on Friday morning, the moment the first aircraft struck the North Tower, the reading of the names paused in Lower Manhattan for the first of seven silences. There have always been six: the two strikes, the Pentagon, the field in Pennsylvania, the two collapses. The seventh, observed after the ceremony and now permanent, is for the people who died later, of the cancers and lung diseases that came from the dust. CBS put that number at about six thousand responders, survivors and volunteers; the ceremony's own organisers spoke of ten thousand, a difference that depends on who is counted, and on the fact that, as one firefighter said from the podium, "last week we lost another three people".

Ground Zero

The New York ceremony does not have political speeches, which is why it could hold what it held. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, all four living former presidents, sat together on the plaza. Vice President JD Vance represented the administration. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Governor Kathy Hochul and Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor on the day, were there. Yo-Yo Ma played, with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. And for four hours, children and grandchildren read 2,983 names, the dead of 2001 and of the 1993 bombing, with the personal additions that have become the ceremony's real text. One reader spoke of never having met an uncle. Another of "25 years of an empty chair". A grandson said his grandfather had "blessed us with the Knicks" and "cursed us with the Jets".

Two of the family remarks will be quoted for a while. Terry Strada, whose husband Thomas worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, asked: "How can it be 25 years and still we have no justice for the role that Saudi Arabia played in your murder?" And Michael Massaroli Jr., whose father also died at Cantor, asked Americans to stop using the day "to spread hate" against Muslims and others, and was applauded. Mamdani, in a video released before the ceremony, called it a day of "immeasurable loss" and asked the city to "build a city worthy of their courage".

The Pentagon and Shanksville

President Trump marked the day at the Pentagon with the First Lady, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, as the 184 names of those killed there were read. Condoleezza Rice, who was national security adviser in 2001, said from the same podium: "Those of us in authority on that day did not see the danger in time to prevent the attack." Trump's remarks turned to the present war. "The Islamic Republic of Iran will never, ever have a nuclear weapon," he said, and he framed the campaign that began in February, and that resumed in earnest this week, as an extension of the country's answer to the attacks. That is a contested reading, and the day was not the place to contest it, but it is the first time a president has used the anniversary to justify a war in progress since 2003.