After Erin Oâ??Conner, a thirty-eight-year-old editorial assistant to NBC newscaster Tom Brokaw, saw the televised footage of the FBI shutdown of the AMI building, she began searching the Internet for information about anthrax, especially the cutaneous form. Ten days earlier Oâ??Conner had developed a nasty sore on her chest, near her left shoulder, plus a fever and swollen glands in her neck. She went to an internist who gave her a Cipro prescription and suggested she might have been bitten by a spider, although she mentioned a letter containing white powder sent to Brokaw that she had recently openedâ??it warned of a looming â??unthinkableâ? attack. After Oâ??Conner left his office, the internist reported her case to the city health department, which set in play a chain reaction: an alert to the FBI WMD coordinator in Manhattan, who contacted NBC security, which retrieved the suspect letter, postmarked September 25, St. Petersburg, Florida, and brought it to the cityâ??s public health lab for analysis. The result: no anthrax spores whatsoever. It was a hoax. According to the health departmentâ??s protocol for suspicious powders, no follow- up of Oâ??Connerâ??s case was required.
Compared to the constant reverberations from the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Oâ??Conner found it easy to dismiss a hoax anthrax letter. Her husband, a city policeman, had lost twenty-three of his NYPD brothers in the disaster. Her NBC job put her in the middle of a flood of breaking news about the terrorist attacks: revelations about al Qaeda operatives and the plane hijacking plot, the identification of perpetrators and victims, and the search for the missing. At the center of New York coverage was Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who from the first had taken a stand at Ground Zero.
Oâ??Connerâ??s boss had also risen to the occasion on 9/11, betraying no fear as he reported from the site. In his 1997 bestseller The Greatest Generation, Brokaw wrote about the valor of ordinary Americans during the Second World War; television viewers appreciated his valor in the face of terrorism. After 9/11, when national news consumption was at an all- time high, practically obsessive, Brokawâ??s ratings edged out those of his two rivals, anchors Dan Rather at CBS and Peter Jennings at ABC.
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