Betty McCollum

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Betty McCollum was walking to her office on a beautiful morning in Washington, D.C., listening to Minnesota Public Radio.

The 47-year-old Democrat was eight months into her first term in the U.S. House, representing Minnesota’s 4th Congressional District.

She switched to National Public Radio, where she heard the first reports.

A plane had crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

When she arrived at her office in the U.S. Capitol building, she and her staff turned on CNN to monitor the situation.

“I thought, this is just not good, and we’re all thinking it was an accident or something,” McCollum said.

They watched as a second plane hit the South Tower.

Jets and helicopters scrambling

Something prickled on the back of her neck. McCollum’s office was near one of the Capitol Police stations, so she walked out into the hall to see if they had any information.

“And all of a sudden, their walkie-talkies started going off, and I figured, well, they’re getting the information. This is New York,” she said.

McCollum went back to her office, opened the window, and could hear jets and helicopters scrambling outside. She decided to evacuate the office and go to a staff member’s home.

As they were leaving the Capitol, she heard people saying the Pentagon had been hit by a third airplane.

There was speculation about the Capitol being targeted, but because cellphone service was disrupted, McCollum couldn’t call her family. Later, her sister learned she was safe when she heard McCollum on the radio.

Then McCollum found out about the fourth plane crashing in a field in Pennsylvania, later learning that a Minnesotan, Tom Burnett, was onboard. United 93 had also been hijacked, but passengers fought back, crashing the plane before it could reach its target, believed to have been the U.S. Capitol building.

‘We were still there and we were still working’

McCollum was paged by Capitol Police at about 2:30 p.m. Eastern, directing her to come to headquarters for an update. There, she heard that the House and Senate planned to get together on the Capitol steps that night to show people “we were still there and we were still working and we were working hard to protect our democracy.”

But House members were encouraged to think twice about going. If anything were to happen, senators could be appointed by governors; House members have to be directly elected.

“They were kind of like … ‘We can’t tell you what to do, but maybe some of you should hold back in case something happens because then we’d have a constitutional crisis,’” McCollum recalled.

Regardless, she said all the members who received word came to the Capitol steps. About 150 bipartisan lawmakers came together on Sept. 11, 2001, and sang “God Bless America.”

“And then we just went home and just contemplated what a tragedy the day was,” she said.

‘People just weren’t prepared’

Today, McCollum is the longest-serving member of Minnesota’s congressional delegation and the only one still serving from 2001.

Twenty-five years later, she reflected in an interview with Forum News Service on that day and how it’s impacted her work as a congresswoman.

When people run for Congress, she said they don’t necessarily run with the thought that “your country is going to be attacked and that you might be voting to go to war.”

“I realized that when you take an oath of office to defend your country from enemies, both foreign and domestic, that you need to step up to the plate and do that job,” said McCollum, 72.

‘People just weren’t prepared’

McCollum described that time as “sheer panic.”

“People just weren’t prepared,” she said. “We thought we were an island. That the oceans protected us. We have our fantastic neighbor to the north, Canada, and a great neighbor to the south in Mexico, and so we’re fine. But the world has changed, and the terrorism threats are still real.”

She said voting for war, even immediately after the 9/11 attacks when she voted to go to war with Afghanistan, has never been easy. She didn’t vote to go to war in Iraq in 2002.

“I have a lot of family members who served in the military, and people come home sometimes broken in spirit, and sometimes with broken bodies, and then some people don’t come home at all,” she said. “When you vote, you’re asking people in a volunteer army to put their lives on the line to defend this country … that’s a very solemn vote that you make.”

McCollum serves as the top Democrat on the House’s defense subcommittee — a committee she said she wouldn’t have thought to join before 9/11.

“People like myself, who are not hawks, we need to be in the room,” she said. “The defense committee has to have a mix of different opinions, people who think diplomacy and development should happen first and foremost. But when you have to, you need to defend your country.”

She said that role on the defense subcommittee is challenging right now because of the president’s decision to go to war in Iran earlier this year, “which is needless and is putting our national security and our economic security at risk.”

“We should be willing to put our elections on the lines when we vote for wars, and not just rubber-stamp it, or speak out when we see what’s happening in Iran,” McCollum said.

Anniversary of the attacks

On Friday, the 25th anniversary of the attacks, McCollum said she will be thinking about how the U.S. needs to rebuild its relationship with “not only other democracies, but with other nations in the world.”

Earlier, she recalled NATO declaring an Article V and, in general, the “overwhelming” support the U.S. received after 9/11 from NATO allies, small countries, and “even countries where we don’t have the best relationships.”

“We should be a force for tamping down violence, not starting it,” McCollum said. “We should be a force for working with democracies to defend human rights. And right now, I’m very sad that we’re not doing that, because that’s what our military is for. It’s for defending our nation and defending our democracies, and then working with like-minded partners around the world.”

“We should not go to war alone ever, because that means, in my opinion, you don’t have the support for what you’re doing,” she said.