NEW YORK, Nov. 9 -- Talk magazine features an exclusive account by Chelsea Clinton about being in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11 at the time of the terror attacks on the World Trade Center.
She said the experience has changed her and robbed her of a sense of security she didn't know she had.
"When the World Trade Center collapsed on Sept. 11, I was 12 blocks away, (and) nothing has been the same since," Clinton wrote in the December/January issue of Talk magazine, on sale Friday in New York.
"I don't know much these days, or at least that's how I feel. Before Sept. 11 I wouldn't have believed I had many innocences left: My life had already presented me with so many different challenges and exposed me to so much suffering," Clinton said in her article called "Before and After."
"I had seen people who had lost everything they loved to war, famine and natural disasters. I had mourned with the victims of the USS Cole, seen lives devastated by floods, and wrecked by earthquakes, despite all that, I woke up that Tuesday feeling good about where I was in my life and happy about where I was going. Now that sense of security of gone," she wrote.
Clinton had been staying with her high school friend Nicole Davison in her apartment near Union Square for a few days in September before she went to England to study at Oxford. After they had coffee together, Davison went to work and Clinton returned to the apartment.
Davison called Clinton with the news of the first plane that crashed into the World Trade Center. Clinton turned on the television and watched the second plane crash into the second WTC tower, and tried to reach her mother in Washington, but after speaking to her assistant, the phone line went dead.
Chelsea Clinton is the daughter of former President Bill Clinton and U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.
Panicked, Chelsea Clinton left the apartment and found herself running toward downtown "in the direction everyone else was coming from," in search of a public telephone. She was desperate to call her mother and her father, who was on a speaking tour in Australia.
Chelsea Clinton was downtown in line at a pay phone when she heard the rumble of the second tower collapsing. Later she found Davison and another friend, and the three spent the day walking uptown. Chelsea Clinton wrote that she had an "irrational medley of thoughts" running through her head.
"I worried that with the (federal) tax cut, we wouldn't have enough money to repair New York and D.C. and to help the families of the thousands I knew must have died," she wrote.
She said she prayed and thanked God that her mother represented New York. She said she also was grateful that New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani -- who had run against Hillary Clinton before dropping out of the Senate race -- was leading the city through the crisis.
Chelsea Clinton described the joy she felt when she was reunited with her mother the day after the attacks and with her father the day after that. "It was only after I had seen both of them that I finally felt secure again in my skin," she wrote.
Now in England, Clinton said it's difficult being away from America at this time and that every day she encountered some sort of anti-American feeling.
"For more than 21 years, I lived with the assumption that I was safe, with a sense of security so profound I didn't even know I had it," Clinton wrote. "Today, I find myself shocked into a new awareness of how much I loved the country I grew up in."
The newest issue of Talk magazine goes on sale nationwide on Nov. 16.NEWLN: Content: 01000000 03000000
