Anne-Marie Slaughter Reflects on 9/11 in PAW Essay

Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80, the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs, contributed an essay titled "It's About the People in the September 14 issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. She writes in part,

A month after I arrived in Princeton, Shirley Tilghman inaugurated the 9/11 Memorial Garden between East Pyne and Chancellor Green. One of the names on the circle of flagstones commemorating the 13 Princetonians who lost their lives that day was my classmate Bob Deraney ’80; another was Josh Rosenthal *81, a Woodrow Wilson School graduate alum whom I had met in New York through close Princeton friends. Those memorial stones were taken from different paths across the Princeton campus, a powerful image of the many ways in which all our lives intersected at Princeton and beyond. That was so much of the horror of 9/11: Behind the headlines of an event that launched two wars and elevated global terrorist networks to a threat previously posed only by other states were the heart-wrenching details of the husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, siblings, and friends lost. Al-Qaida attacked symbols of American financial, military, and political might, but ended about 3,000 individual lives and darkened tens of thousands more.