The ‘safe to breathe’ lie that haunts 9/11 — and Christine Todd Whitman

Former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman will be 80 years old in a few weeks, with much to celebrate as she marks the moment.

She was twice elected governor and brought a Republican legislature with her both times. She cut income taxes by 30%. She turbo-charged the drive to save the state’s dwindling green space, earning her a seat in the cabinet of President George W. Bush, running the Environmental Protection Agency. She is a woman of grand accomplishment, a pioneer.

And she had the guts to compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, way back in 2015, before it was stylish. So count me among those who would clap and hoot when she blows out the candles at her party.

But … but … but …

She also assured us, one week after the 9/11 attacks, that it was “safe to breathe” the air at ground zero. And we know now that was a mistake of epic proportions; that the dust covering Lower Manhattan was a toxic stew of asbestos, lead, mercury, arsenic, dioxin, and polychlorinated biphenyls. It scorched the lungs of thousands who breathed it, leaving them disabled, and planted the seeds for cancer in thousands more.

“The number of people who have died of 9/11-related health conditions has far surpassed the number of people who died on the day of the attacks,” the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund states in its most recent annual report.

As the illnesses began to pile up, Whitman became an object of scorn to those who felt she had been flat-out lying, bending to pressure from the White House, which was eager to get Wall Street back to work.

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She was called before Congress to answer for this in June 2007, soon after Democrats had taken control of the House, and they were ready to pounce. It was a sweltering day in Washington, nearly 90 degrees, and she had to brave a mob of furious protesters screaming at her as she arrived. This was to be the darkest day of her career.

“Our government has knowingly exposed thousands of American citizens unnecessarily to deadly hazardous materials,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat whose district included ground zero. “And because it has never admitted the truth, Americans remain at grave risk to this day.”

But was Whitman really that much of a monster? I had covered her for years as a columnist at the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., and I had my doubts. Even today, no one has ever proved she lied about what she knew, or knowingly put people in harm’s way. If she were that evil, it seemed to me, it would be a first.

Still, this episode will rightly be remembered as the low point for Whitman. She may not have been a monster, but she was surely a wimp. She stood back and let Vice President Dick Cheney spin the EPA’s scientific findings out of shape, as the EPA’s own inspector general established two years later. The EPA’s recommendation that homes and businesses hire professional cleaners to eradicate toxins was removed altogether.

The changes to the EPA’s draft news releases were made by the Orwellian-named President’s Council on Environmental Quality, which was effectively run by Cheney. The CEQ had final control of press releases, and the IG report spells out each change it made, every time diminishing the danger and adding reassurance about safety at ground zero. Whitman didn’t make a peep of protest.

Whitman may not have been a monster, but she was surely a wimp.

Worse, Whitman personally sounded the infamous all-clear before she could have known it was safe, according to the IG report. In the careful bureaucratic parlance of Washington, the report said she “did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement.”

She didn’t know for certain she was sending people to their doom, as critics like Nadler claimed. But she was going along with the spin, yielding to Cheney. And many people died who might have stayed away.

At that 2007 hearing, Whitman was having none of it, and was more defiant than I had ever seen her. She was not a liar, she insisted. She based her decision on the best science she had at the time. She had no regrets, and said she was still not sure the toxins at the site were causing illnesses.

It was an absurd claim, even then. A preliminary study released a year earlier by the Mount Sinai World Trade Center Screening and Monitoring Program showed that 70% of the first 9,000 workers examined had reported some kind of respiratory problem after working on the debris pile. Whitman claimed she hadn’t read it.

I reached out to Whitman, and she offered a written statement saying, “Everyone at the EPA did the best they could with the information, tools, and knowledge available at the time.” But she declined to answer a more personal question: Does she feel she did anything wrong when she issued the all-clear?

My guess is that deep down, she does.

Tom Moran is the author of the Substack Jersey Lowdown and former editorial page editor of the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.