A divided America comes together to commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11

People gather at the National September 11 Memorial in New York on Friday during the 25th anniversary commemoration of the attacks. ADAM GRAY/AFP/Getty Images

You could hear the silence all across the country. It all but screamed.

It was the kind of silence that had eloquence, the civic equivalent of the John Cage composition when a full orchestra sits in a symphony hall for 4 minutes and 33 seconds without playing their instruments.

It was the kind of silence that came after the gasps of horror as the second jetliner, on live television, hit the south tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, 25 years ago .

It was the kind of silence that came with four former presidents standing Friday morning at what shortly after the attack was swiftly named Ground Zero, saying nothing and yet saying everything.

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Joe Biden , Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton – a bipartisan assemblage, each man greyer than when last we saw him – appeared together, in respect and remembrance, their silence in Lower Manhattan more powerful than the proclamations and declarations they once issued.

The stillness was part of a tradition, and was in compliance with the formal rules of the memorial site itself, for there, as thousands of pilgrims have attested, words get in the way.

If there were a soundtrack as a busy, boisterous people returned to their daily ministrations after the morning rites of the anniversary of the terror attacks, the title might be borrowed from Felix Mendelssohn: a song without words.

Former first lady Dr. Jill Biden, former president Joe Biden, former first lady Laura Bush, former president George W. Bush, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, Vice-President JD Vance and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani attend a ceremony commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York on Friday. Barry Williams/The Canadian Press

For this Sept. 11 was a day, like the same date a quarter-century ago, when words failed, when mere human utterances could not capture the grief, the horror, the utter terror.

But as the day progressed, there were, inevitably, stirring sounds amid the mournful C-major triad bugle tones of Taps and the seven commemorative moments of silence.

There was the tolling, as if from a church bell, of the names of the victims, the great majority of them dead in New York, but substantial numbers at the Pentagon outside Washington, and on a Pennsylvania field.

There, in the brilliant sunshine, perished the brave who stormed the cockpit of hijacked United Flight 93, forced it to crash out of view of a shocked world, and spared the capital, and perhaps the Capitol, one final indecency, indignity and image of grief among so many of that date which will live in infamy.

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And, there were spare words, at the Pentagon from Donald Trump , unusually restrained: “We will honour their lives, we will cherish their beautiful memories, and we will protect this nation and its freedoms.” He and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who spoke of “Islamic terrorists,” tied the attacks to the current war in Iran. Condoleezza Rice, then the national-security adviser, expressed “deep personal remorse” for not understanding at the time the threat of terrorism.

A quarter-century – about the informal definition of a generation – is a long time.

It is the distance between the innocence of Dec. 6, 1941 – the day before the original “date which will live in infamy,” as Franklin Delano Roosevelt described the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that pushed the United States into the Second World War – and Dec. 6, 1966, when American troops were assessing the damage from a brutal Viet Cong attack on Tan Son Nhut Air Base as the U.S. was deepening its engagement in the Vietnam War.

From left: Iris Weinshall, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, former president Bill Clinton, former first lady Michelle Obama and former president Barack Obama also attend the ceremony. Hiroko Masuike/The Canadian Press

More than a third of the current American population wasn’t alive during the terror attacks. For them, the episode was an event as far in the past as the American Bicentennial of 1976 was when the planes were hijacked.

“For many living Americans, there’s no recollection of anything like 9/11,” the Brookings Institution senior fellow Rashawn Ray said. “It’s one of the few incidents that synchronized, organized and galvanized Americans to come together. It’s a moment when we were in a period of political division but put it aside.”

Friday, too, was one of those moments, but, in a severely divided country, for a day only. It was a moment, also, in the Newfoundland town of Gander , today a reminder of ties of solidarity now frayed.

“People all over the world rallied,” said Tonya Cross Hansel, a University of Texas, Arlington, scholar in disaster mental health and trauma recovery. “Everyone alive, and even those not yet born at the time, feel some connection to this. We still want to commemorate the heroes. We still want to feel part of a community.”

The images of that day are imprinted on the retina of the country: The slow glide of the planes. The blood-red flames flaring from doomed buildings. The hopelessness of those seeking desperate escape but finding sure death in their plunges from skyscraper windows. The look on Mr. Bush’s face as Andrew Card leaned in to tell him what was transpiring while he was reading The Pet Goat to Grade 2 pupils in the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla.

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“When I whispered in his ear that a second plane hit a second tower and America was under attack, he recognized what his oath of office was all about,” Mr. Card, then the White House chief of staff, said in an interview for this essay. “He didn’t slip into a dark phase, but he changed. It took him from being a domestic president concentrating on education and tax cuts to the leader of the free world.”

A period of hushed national mourning, renewed national purpose and profound national reflection was immediately at hand. Enhanced airport security, civil-liberties compromises, lengthy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were in the future.

That day, there were first responders rushing into danger. Today, the entire country responded.

Countless times, Mr. Bush, and countless others, said a variation on these five words: “We promise never to forget.”

So Friday, Americans and others around the world paused, in quiet homage to what Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel could not have imagined when, in 1964, they released the anthem The Sound of Silence , with lyrics that haunt us even more today, as they speak of how “the vision that was planted in my brain/Still remains/Within the sound of silence.”