“Looking down the Mall, as the white black smoke came across from the Pentagon. I remember it well,” the Illinois Democrat said in an interview Tuesday.
Those attacks on Washington and New York — followed five weeks later by anthrax-laced letters sent to two senators — prompted a sweeping review of doomsday planning for how to keep Congress running in the event of a terrorist attack or other calamity. The past few days have sparked anew talk about the continuity of Congress but against an entirely different threat — a threat from within, literally, a virus that two members of the House announced late Wednesday that they had been diagnosed with, setting off a round of self-quarantining by other lawmakers.