'It Inevitably Changed Our Existence'

When 12-year-old Jonathan Clifford got home early from on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001—like so many other students on that clear autumn day—he went to his room and cried and punched his pillow.

He was confused, angry, afraid. “I simply couldn’t understand why this had happened. Why anyone would do this?” the now 22-year-old Jonathan recalls.

As the days, weeks and months passed following that tragic day, while cleanup and recovery efforts continued round-the-clock in Manhattan, an idea formed inside Jonathan’s mind. And once it was there, it was obvious.

He went to his parents, Robin and Peter, and told them he wanted to go to New York, to volunteer at Ground Zero. Robin’s cousin was a parish priest at St. Mary’s Church in Times Square and had told the Cliffords about St. Paul’s, an Episcopal chapel only blocks from Ground Zero that became both a memorial and place of rest and refuge for recovery workers in the days after 9/11.

That’s where Jonathan wanted to be.

No, Peter says. It’s where he needed to be.

“I distinctly remember looking at Robin and going, ‘We have to do it,’” says Peter. “It wasn’t a case of whether he wanted to go. He had to go.”


‘I needed to do something bigger’

When American Airlines Flight 11 plowed into the side of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, it also cleaved through Jonathan Clifford’s life.

For Jonathan, there are two halves to his life now: the one before 9/11, and the one after.

“I truly believe it was the day my innocence died,” he said, free of hyperbole. “It was the single most defining moment in my life.”

Robin believes the tragedy shattered her children’s sense of safety and security in the world, to the point where they can probably no longer remember what life was like before terror alerts and interminable airport security.

But for Jonathan it was much more than that.

He arrived at St. Paul’s in May 2002—his mother’s tears at the Trenton train station not enough to dissuade him from his mission—a stranger and spent a 12-hour shift there doing “really a little bit of everything,” he said. He served meals, restocked supplies, offered support in whatever way an adolescent boy can.

Being there in the church—every square inch of it covered in “thank you” cards and posters and paintings—crystallized all the themes Jonathan had grown up around as the son of a volunteer firefighter, in a military family: courage, sacrifice, service.

“(I realized) I needed to do something bigger ... It’s absolutely what cemented my conviction to be a public servant, to be a firefighter,” he said. “It really, really did change me and shape me into what I am today.”

He inevitably joined the Moorestown Fire Department, where his father has been a member for 32 years, and today he works in U.S. Rep. John Runyan’s office in Washinton, D.C., as a scheduler. In a way, it’s a relatively minor job in the grand scheme of “public service,” but Jonathan sees it as a chance to affect people’s lives in a positive way.

“What I’m doing now, I feel like I can affect a lot of change on a wider scale,” he said, mentioning how he helped coordinate the congressman’s recent visits to flood-ravaged areas of Burlington County.

And it’s also a foot-in-the-door perhaps for much loftier ambitions. As a child, Jonathan used to tell his parents he wanted to be president. But while many children outgrow such outsize dreams, he never did.

“It’s not unreachable. It’s certainly a lofty goal,” he said, “but not implausible.”

What if Jonathan had never gone to Ground Zero? What if his parents had refused? Who would he be today?

For Peter, it’s not an easy question to answer. While he was certainly apprehensive about sending his son “up into the unknown,” it’s difficult for him to imagine a world in which he says “no” to Jonathan over something that was so clearly important to him.

“It would have left him incomplete,” said Peter.


Forever changed, never forgotten

Peter said his son returned from New York City “a different person, a better person.”

Jonathan went back to St. Paul’s a month after his initial visit, with his entire family in tow, for a special gathering to mark the official closing of recovery efforts.

Robin and Peter got to hear from all the other recovery workers and volunteers what a special kid Jonathan was, how impressed they all were with him.

“There’s not a larger sense of accomplishment as a parent than to hear someone sing praise for your child,” said Peter. “They embraced him as much as we did here … It totally validated what (Jonathan) said to us.”

Robin remembers the feeling she had after dropping her 13-year-old son off at the Trenton train station, by himself, under high alert rail only eight months after the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history, to go to Ground Zero: “Boy, what a dumb mom.”

But any lingering doubts were washed away when he returned and when she heard the kind words these strangers had to say about her son.

“I was teaching him the right thing,” she said.

Jonathan will be the keynote speaker at the Burlington County 200 Club’s annual Sunday at Trinity Episcopal Church. The club, which Jonathan’s father, Peter, is president of, has held the service every year since Sept. 11.

Sunday will summon a complex range of emotions in Jonathan, not only for what the day means personally to him, but for what it means to the country.

“It’s forgotten too easily,” he said. “What happened, and how it inevitably changed our existence.”