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As New York and Washington were under attack on Sept. 11, 2001, a film crew happened to come upon John Kerry leaving the Capitol. The brief moment of footage, included in a BBC documentary called ''Clear the Skies,'' tells us something, perhaps, about Kerry in a crisis. The camera captures Congressional aides and visitors, clearly distraught and holding onto one another, streaming down the back steps of the Capitol building in near panic, following the bellowed instructions of anxious police. Off to one side of the screen, there is Kerry, alone, his long legs carrying him calmly down the steps, his neck craning toward the sky, as if he were watching a gathering rainstorm. His face and demeanor appear unworried. Kerry could be a man lost in his thoughts who just happens to have wandered onto the set of a disaster film.
''I remember looking up at the sky as I walked down the steps,'' Kerry told me recently, when I asked him about the film clip. He said that he and other members of the Senate's Democratic leadership had just watched on television as the second plane hit the World Trade Center, and shortly after that they heard the sonic boom of an explosion and saw, through a large window, the black smoke rise from the Pentagon. ''We'd had some warning that there was some airplane in the sky. And I remember seeing a great big plane -- I think it was a 747 or something -- up there, but it wasn't moving in a way that, you know, I was particularly concerned. I remember feeling a rage, a huge anger, and I remember turning to somebody and saying, 'This is war.' I said, 'This is an act of war.'''
After leaving the Capitol on that terrible day, Kerry walked across the street to his office in the Russell Senate building, where he made sure that his staff had been evacuated and was safe. Reluctant to leave Capitol Hill, he watched TV coverage in his office and saw the second tower fall. He called his older daughter, Alexandra, who was living in New York, and his wife, Teresa, who was in Washington. Those who saw Kerry that morning recall mainly that he was furious, an emotion, those close to him say, that comes easily to him in times of trial. He thought it was a mistake to shut down the Capitol, to show terrorists that they had the power to send the United States government into hiding.
''You know, my instinct was, Where's my gun?'' Kerry told me. ''How do you fight back? I wanted to do something.'' That evening, sitting at home, he called an aide and said he wanted to go to New York that very night to help the rescuers; he was ultimately convinced that such a trip was logistically impossible. In the days ahead, Kerry would make two trips to ground zero to see what remained of the carnage.
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