WHAT WAS Barack Obama thinking during that long moment of silence, after he laid the wreath at the foot of the Survivor Tree?
Four days after US commandos killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the US president had returned to the scene of bin Laden’s greatest crime, where the Twin Towers crumbled on a day of equally flawless weather.
The president wore a black suit and black tie, in mourning for bin Laden’s nearly 3,000 victims. He and the fire department, police and port authority officers who flanked him bowed their heads and folded their hands, as if in prayer.
Mr Obama’s brow furrowed, and he took on a look of intense concentration. Impossible to say whether he wore a smile or a grimace. It was, as press secretary Jay Carney said, “a bittersweet moment”.
Then the president made a beeline for four women standing in the dappled sunlight. He embraced a girl in a black dress, and both smiled. She was Payton Wall (14), who wrote to the president on Monday to tell him her father died in the World Trade Centre on 9/11. White House staff invited her, her mother, sister and a girlfriend whose father was also killed to yesterday’s ceremony.
Mr Carney could not say whether relatives of the 9/11 victims would be allowed to see photographs of the dead bin Laden, or whether anyone brought one of the images, which Mr Obama has refused to release, to New York.
The president talked to the families behind the darkened facade of a shop near Ground Zero. No one witnessed their grief – or relief – yesterday. Like bin Laden’s corpse, it was not on display.
Earlier, the president lunched at the Pride of Midtown fire station, which lost 15 firemen – the most of any station in Manhattan. Standing in front of fire engine 54, Mr Obama told them the commandos who killed bin Laden did so “in the name of your brothers that were lost”.
Bin Laden’s death “sent a message around the world, but also sent a message here back home that when we say we will never forget, we mean what we say; that our commitment to making sure that justice is done is something that transcended politics, transcended party.”
The president’s discreet victory lap in New York lasted a little more than four hours, with none of the fanfare of George W Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” event in 2003. Mr Obama invited Mr Bush to yesterday’s ceremony, but he declined.
The visit felt like a trial run for the tenth anniversary of the attack, which the president will return for, in four months’ time.
The Survivor Tree where Mr Obama laid the wreath was planted at the World Trade Centre in the 1970s. Its damaged trunk was extracted from smouldering rubble in October 2001, less than eight feet tall. It now measures more than 30ft.