1. September11:War and remembrance
INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR 67
Rameses Bautista
Mechanic, Continental Express
Bautista’s wife, Marilyn, an accounts payable clerk,
was one of 295 people killed at at Marsh & McLennan
Cos. in Tower One
Since 9/11 it’s very quiet. Everything that we used to do
together, I am doing by myself. Every time I came home
from work she would be in bed, and I would put my arms
Philip Purcell
Chairman and CEO, Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley was the World Trade Center’s biggest
tenant. Of 3,700 employees on multiple floors in
both towers, 13 perished
To me 9/11 means the bravery of ordinary people, the
caring of ordinary people. You expect it from people
like the police and the firemen. But we had somebody carry
another person down 66 flights of stairs. We had all kinds
of stories like that. It makes you feel great about the people
you work with every day.
It made us understand the value of preparation. We were
extremely well prepared — that’s why we had the result we
did. Other than the people’s performance, the preparation
is what helped us get virtually everybody out. We had or-
ganized ourselves in the event of another terrorist attack
since ’93. We had had people marching down stairs and
doing things people thought were nuts. We had an awful
lot of backup that people would say was profligate spend-
ing. And now, looking back, everybody would say you’ve
got to have different kinds of backup than we in the past
thought were appropriate, and more of it.
We’ve learned that you should not have all of your criti-
cal trading people in the same location. We didn’t learn that
personally as much as we did observing others. You’ve got
to have live trading somewhere else — not just the kind of
backup most people have had historically, a data center that
would keep the computers running and that you would test
every six months or so, but “hot” backup that is live every
day. You need to have two sites live, all the time.
I was born and brought up in Utah, and Utah is a pret-
ty flag-waving state. And I’ve lived out of the country.
Those two things make you pretty patriotic. But 9/11
brought home the vulnerability in your own country to an
attack. And I think that is very different than just being
patriotic. There’s actually a real threat that I think most of
us had dismissed.
It puts a lot of things in perspective. Everybody I know
who has been directly hit by this who is a serious business
person is much more concerned about taking care of their
people than they were — and gets much less upset about
run-of-the-mill cares in the business environment. Maybe
the market decline isn’t a good example, because that’s big
enough to care about. But stuff that you used to get all
twisted in knots about, at least for me, I don’t get twisted in
knots about anymore.
“Some of it has to do with
Matty. And with all of the
firefighters that died, a lot of
them from my neighborhood.
Maybe I’m trying to do
something to honor them
in some way, but it’s more
than that. I mean, the city
needed firemen.”Former Pershing Securities v.p.
John Henley, firefighter,
at Engine Co. 233
Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn
August 7, 2002