Osama Bin Laden dead: 'Justice done,' but greatness has always been

Mike Lupica
The Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/
Monday, May 2nd 2011, 6:25 AM

He was the executive vice president of Phoenix House on that September morning 10 years ago when everything changed in the life of his family and the life of his country.

Kevin McEneaney was giving a speech to drug-abuse counselors in Columbus, Ohio, and it was a little before 9 in the morning when he saw people in the room, his words now, "beginning to move toward televisions."

So a long way from his home in the city, that is how McEneaney found out what we were all finding out that morning, that our buildings had been hit. His brother Eamon was high up in one of them, up near the sky in the north tower, working for Cantor Fitzgerald.

Eight years before that, when a bomb had gone off at the World Trade Center, Eamon McEneaney had formed a human chain of people and walked them down 105 floors to safety.

"After that," Kevin McEneaney said last night, "my brother always said that Bin Laden was coming back. That he was the guy."

He had finally come back that morning. By the end of the morning, Kevin McEneaney had watched the towers fall and no one had heard from his brother. And he knew. It was the beginning of the three days it would take him to get home, to a different New York and a different world.

Now, nearly 10 years later, President Obama was about to address the country and announce that Osama Bin Laden was finally dead. And before the President could use the word "justice" last night to describe the mission carried out by U.S. Special Forces on the other side of the world, Kevin McEneaney was using that same word on the telephone.

Eamon McEneaney was once as great a college lacrosse player at Cornell as this country has ever produced. He was a son and a brother and a father and a husband and a hero to 65 other people that day in February of 1993 when the bomb went off in the basement of the north tower. And when Bin Laden came back, as Eamon always said he would, Eamon McEneaney was one of more than 3,000 killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

"It is a statement of finality, and it is a statement of justice," his brother said last night. Kevin McEneaney said all this in a quiet, even voice, and in the background you could hear the President's voice on his television.

"But it is a measure of justice," McEneaney said. "We can stop thinking that one of the great, evil people in the history of the planet was just gone, that he'd just disappeared. It doesn't bring anybody back. It doesn't bring my brother back. But, yeah, there is a sense of justice tonight."

A few minutes later the President said, "Justice has been done." Then he was saying this to the families of the victims, "We have never forgotten your loss."

Finally, the President, late on a Sunday night, just short of four months from the 10th anniversary of the planes hitting the buildings, said this: "[The killing of Bin Laden] is a testament to the greatness of our country."

It is. But the greatness of the country did not take nearly 10 years to show itself. The greatness of the country began to show itself that morning, and the next morning, and the morning after that, as the families the President of the United States talked about last night began to pick themselves up, to get on with things. The greatness of the country began to show itself in the way people came from all over the city and all over the country to begin to pick up the pieces in downtown Manhattan.

The President at the time, George W. Bush, said that we would somehow bring Osama Bin Laden back "dead or alive." Of course there were the reports of the time several years ago when our soldiers were supposed to be closing in on Bin Laden and then he got away. All this money spent on intelligence and technology and billions spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and we all wondered if Bin Laden would ever be found. Dead or alive.

"You start to wonder if anything will ever happen," Kevin McEneaney said. "There are the Guantanamo trials and all the rest of it and you started to wonder if justice would ever be done, if this guy was living in some mansion some place on the other side of the world hooked up to a dialysis machine."

Late last night McEneaney, who had a brother taken from him, said, "I had absolutely put this out of my mind. I really started to think the guy was just going to go on forever."

But he did not. All this time later, there was some finality in the McEneaney family, the families of more than 3,000 others. All this time after Kevin McEneaney saw people moving toward televisions in Ohio, there was the President on his own television, talking about justice, at last.