Commerce Secretary Reflects on 9/11 Loss

WASHINGTON – Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick emotionally recounted the tragic day of September 11, 2001, when he lost his brother, his close friend, and numerous employees at Cantor Fitzgerald due to a terrorist attack.

Now 64, Lutnick shared with Miranda Devine that, on that fateful Tuesday morning, he was dropping his eldest son off for his first day of kindergarten.

“At 8:48 a.m., there’s a photo in front of his school. Just two minutes later, hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center, where Cantor Fitzgerald occupied the 101st to 105th floors,” he shared.

While at the school, his phone began ringing incessantly. “I had a flip phone, but nobody was on the line,” Lutnick said. He felt frustrated, thinking, “Can’t they leave me alone for an hour while I take my child to school?” Then a manager approached him with devastating news—the plane had struck the building.

Later, Lutnick discovered the caller was his younger brother, Gary. “He couldn’t reach me, but he managed to talk to my sister. He said, ‘Oh, thank goodness you’re not there,’ and, ‘I’m here telling you to say goodbye,’” Lutnick recalled.

After dropping off his son, Lutnick rushed to lower Manhattan, desperately trying to find information about his staff. “I started grabbing people as they came out of the North Tower, asking what floor they were on,” he said. He noted the complexity of the building’s exits—“There were probably 20 ways out. I just wanted to see if any of my team had made it.”

“The highest floor I heard from was the 92nd,” he continued. “Then, a loud sound echoed, and we all wondered what it was.” It turned out to be the South Tower’s collapse.

“It felt like a scene from Titanic when things start falling apart. It was the loudest crash I’d ever experienced,” Lutnick added. Panic surged as he navigated his surroundings, suddenly realizing the scale of destruction.

“I made a right turn on Vesey Street, passed by a cemetery I’d never noticed before, and then I was in a whirlwind of debris. I dove under a car as everything turned dark and silent,” he described. “I thought, ‘I’m dead. I can’t believe I’m dead,’ but then I realized, ‘Oh, I’m alive… but blind.’”

After some time under the car, Lutnick encountered a police officer with a flashlight. “I grabbed onto his collar, urging him to get us to safety, but he was in shock,” Lutnick said. Once they were out, he called his wife to tell her he was still alive.

Tragically, 658 of Cantor Fitzgerald’s 950 employees in New York perished in the attacks. “I cried every day until October 21, 2004,” Lutnick recalled. “You can’t fathom losing 658 people. It stays with you.”

Thirty-five days after the attacks, he attended countless funerals—estimating he went to “20 per day.” “I became somewhat of an expert,” he noted. “I’d sit in the second row to greet widows and their families, then head to the next church as soon as I could.”

With the remaining staff and new recruits, Lutnick worked to rebuild Cantor Fitzgerald. He committed to donating 25% of the company’s salary for five years to support the victims’ families. “We gave those families $180 million,” he stated. “My brother Gary was killed, as was my best friend Doug Gardner. I was driven to rebuild the company to care for them.”