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Stories of veteran service and sacrifice straight from the people driving today’s most important veterans causes and veterans organizations around the world. The show shines a spotlight on their inspiring projects making a real difference for veterans and their families, and along the way we'll hear the stories that drive them to do their best every day as they work to support veterans and their memory.
00:00:06:03 - 00:00:29:21
Speaker 1
Hey, it's Matthew Cudmore and welcome to Story Behind the Stone, a show where he talks service, sacrifice and story. On today's episode, we're joined by Doctor Elizabeth Hillman, president and CEO of the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City, which walk 2.4 million museum visitors and over 11 million memorial visitors in 2025 alone. Doctor Hillman is a leader whose life has been defined by a commitment to education, to service and military justice.
00:00:29:22 - 00:00:48:20
Speaker 1
With the current focus on expanding audiences and engaging next generation leaders. In her role at the Memorial and Museum, talk to him and began her career in the US Air Force and served on active duty for seven years as a space operations officer at Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Base and instructor of history at the US Air Force Academy, and before coming to the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
00:00:48:20 - 00:01:14:00
Speaker 1
Doctor Hillman was the 14th president of Mills College, the first women's college west of the Rockies. Today is the president and chief executive officer of the 9/11 Memorial Museum. She channels that lifetime of diverse leadership experience into preserving the history of September 11th, honoring its victims and engaging the next generation and understanding its enduring impact. Doctor Hillman, it's an honor to speak with you, especially as we approach the 25th anniversary of the 9 11 attacks.
00:01:14:01 - 00:01:14:20
Speaker 1
Welcome to the show.
00:01:14:21 - 00:01:16:16
Speaker 2
Thank you. Matthew, it's great to be with you.
00:01:16:17 - 00:01:33:05
Speaker 1
Doctor Hillman, your work spans a wide array of roles. I had to leave a lot out in the introduction. A lot of degrees as well. Tell us a little bit about your journey. If you can encapsulate it and how your extensive experience is informed. Your role leading the 9/11 Memorial Museum since 2022.
00:01:33:06 - 00:01:49:08
Speaker 2
I've had the good fortune to work with a lot of terrific people, including in the armed forces, in the museum world, in the academic world, including in my family. My dad served in the Army Air Forces during World War two. I ended up studying military history, maybe because of my interest in what he did. I was an engineer as an undergrad.
00:01:49:08 - 00:02:11:07
Speaker 2
I chose that because I wanted to go to an expensive school and the Air Force giving out 70% of its scholarships and engineering electrical engineering specifically. So I said, sign me up. While I'm not, I'm not much of an engineer. And my second major was history, which was a much better indicator of what I would later do. I did learn a lot, you know, studying engineering, and then my first work in the Air Force, as you mentioned, was as a space operations officer.
00:02:11:07 - 00:02:27:17
Speaker 2
I worked at the Pentagon for a little while in the Strategic Defense Initiative organization. And then I was in Colorado Springs, where so much of the space business of the Air Force happened. Now, of course, there's the Space Force, which shows that that was just a pie in the sky for all the advocates of the Air Force in space when I was in the service.
00:02:27:17 - 00:02:44:11
Speaker 2
But I learned a tremendous amount. I met so many different kinds of people in the armed forces. I was exposed to a lot of history. I actually worked for the historian at the CIO office in the Pentagon for a little while, and then I had a chance to teach history at the Air Force Academy, and I taught military history, world history, women's history, American history.
00:02:44:11 - 00:03:02:06
Speaker 2
And I realized I wanted a chance to study more. So I went back to school, I separated from the Air Force, went back to school to study law and history because I wasn't sure that I wanted to be a history professor. I thought I might be a little more on the shelf. If I was a history professor. I thought maybe I'd be a lawyer and then I would be out and, you know, in the mix a little bit more.
00:03:02:06 - 00:03:28:18
Speaker 2
And I ended up going into academics anyway. So I ended up teaching in law schools and got into academic administration and stayed active in some law reform efforts, worked on fighting sexual violence and sexual assault and harassment in the armed forces in particular, but also in the Academy, in the sciences and medicine. And I ended up in administration, which most people will tell you, you get congratulations and condolences when you moved from the faculty to the administration of a college or university.
00:03:28:18 - 00:03:44:11
Speaker 2
And I understand that. But it was a great privilege, you know, to have a chance to work with people trying to teach the next generation of people who are going to make things go. And I love that opportunity. So I had a chance to do that in law schools. And then at the liberal arts college at Mills College in California.
00:03:44:11 - 00:04:11:11
Speaker 2
And then this opportunity came up and just the chance to reach so many people. I love history, I find so many lessons in it all the time, in its depth and breadth and sort of endless complexity, and in making it understandable to people is something that museums do. So I felt like moving from higher ed to a museum was a great way for me to connect my interest in helping people understand and for me, myself, to make sense of my world and the chance to really reach a lot of people.
00:04:11:11 - 00:04:25:14
Speaker 1
It's a global landmark, a memorial and museum, and you must see so many slices of life. There's the 9 11 community, first responders, families, New York City visitors from all over the world. What do you kind of observe as you see those people and their interactions with the memorial and museum?
00:04:25:15 - 00:04:44:05
Speaker 2
Matthew, you just hit on one reason I was so excited to come back to New York and to have a chance to be here at the 9 11 Memorial and Museum in Lower Manhattan, at the site of those terrorist attacks on 9 11 and now 25 years since, to see the communities that it created, the rebuilding that happened down here, it's truly extraordinary.
00:04:44:05 - 00:05:03:22
Speaker 2
We are very much part of New York City, where the National September 11th Memorial and Museum, we tell the stories of all the attacks that happened that day and how we got to that moment, which was is a global story, not simply a New York or a national story. And then what has happened since, which is likewise a global story with a lot of military service that you've helped people aren't about to and the work that you've done.
00:05:03:22 - 00:05:21:03
Speaker 2
But the impact on New York to understand 9 11, you really do. You have to start to understand New York. It was an act of indiscriminate violence that killed people from all walks of life and all stations of all sectors of the economy, all sorts of different people. And our city here is a is a city of the world.
00:05:21:04 - 00:05:37:08
Speaker 2
Half of the people who visit us today in the museum are from outside the country, and people from more than 90 countries were killed on 9 11. The attacks themselves and their consequences and the city, they really reflect each other in terms of who was affected and how hard it hit at the heart of the city.
00:05:37:09 - 00:05:41:22
Speaker 1
If I can ask a personal question, where were you on that day? On that morning, would you recall.
00:05:41:23 - 00:05:58:16
Speaker 2
Like most people who were alive that day, I watched it on TV. I had left New York about a month before I had moved to Philadelphia. I was just about to start teaching, and my sister was still living here in New York. My partner at the time was on her way up to do some research here in the city.
00:05:58:16 - 00:06:20:13
Speaker 2
It was on a train into Penn Station that day, ended up walking uptown to where my sister lived up in Washington Heights. But I wasn't right here. I had separated from the Air Force by that point in time. I wondered, should I look to join again? You know what? What does this mean for me? And what does this mean for the country as it happened, as a veteran, as a parent, as a citizen, I've realized since what an impact 9 11 had on my life.
00:06:20:14 - 00:06:27:21
Speaker 2
And since I've been here, I've had a chance to learn the effects that it had on people who were right here and so much closer than I was.
00:06:27:21 - 00:06:41:01
Speaker 1
I don't know if it's at a majority yet of your visitors, but if your students, certainly they were born after the attacks, they have no lived memory of that day. How do you even begin to wrap your arms around describing this to someone who wasn't there?
00:06:41:03 - 00:06:59:03
Speaker 2
Your description of that captures one of the challenges. The unfathomable nature of that day is a little bit difficult to describe to somebody who didn't experience it, because by our nature, we create boundaries of expectation. We we have a certain range of things that we think might happen. And when something happens to the outside of that range, we're really shaken.
00:06:59:04 - 00:07:20:01
Speaker 2
And that's certainly what happened on 9 11. So conveying that full sense of it is very hard. But I will say it's not for lack of interest or lack of terrific tools that we reach new generations. So my own kids were born after 9 11. 100 million Americans are too young to remember 9 11. We have teachers in our summer institutes for educators who were born after 9 11.
00:07:20:01 - 00:07:44:03
Speaker 2
We have firefighters now who were born after 9 11, some of whom are leaders in their departments here in New York City, but also around the country and around the world. 25 years since a lot has happened. We have service members who were inspired to serve on 9 11 because they had a parent who was killed in some instances, who have now retired from military service and moved into their military career position in whatever economic sector they landed in.
00:07:44:03 - 00:08:05:08
Speaker 2
So it is a long time. But the stories of 9 11 unbelievably compelling and nearly 3000 people killed that day. Their names are on the bronze parapets around the pools that are in the footprints of where the towers stood on the 9 11 memorial. And those names. Everyone has a story and everyone has so many family members.
00:08:05:08 - 00:08:34:08
Speaker 2
Those family members come back to help us read the names. You know, the only people who speak at the commemoration on 9 11, or the family members who read aloud the names of everybody killed that day. And so the fact that those family members continue to be interested in coming back, the fact that the community turns their eyes to that commemoration each day, and the fact that we've had 28 million visitors to the museum, 100 million to the memorial since opening, that's a great sign that there are people interested in trying to figure out what this was and what it meant.
00:08:34:09 - 00:08:42:02
Speaker 1
Is there a story on your memorial name, on the memorial that sticks out to you, that you gravitate towards, or that's particularly resonated with you?
00:08:42:03 - 00:09:00:19
Speaker 2
There are so many. But yes, of course, some become very bright and vivid when I encounter them, and often that's driven by people I meet in the 911 community who that draw me to a particular name. A visitor who remembers a flight attendant on one of the flights that was hijacked by the terrorist, and they talk about who that person was.
00:09:00:19 - 00:09:19:12
Speaker 2
That's happened to me. Two names in particular, Welles Crowther. It was a 24 year old equities trader in the South Tower on 9 11, and also was a volunteer firefighter who helped many people to safety before he was killed. And we have an artifact in the museum that is one of the red bandanas, not the one he wore that day, but one that his family gave to us.
00:09:19:13 - 00:09:39:07
Speaker 2
He wore a bandana every day. He kept it in his pocket. It was a habit that his dad had convinced him he should have docked, and his family didn't know what had happened to him, and he hadn't been found in the wreckage after the terrible collapse of the towers. But his mother read a story about survivors who said that a man in a red bandana had helped them, and she realized that was Welles.
00:09:39:07 - 00:09:59:10
Speaker 2
And then she connected to those family members, started to build one of many communities that arose after 9 11, where people who found themselves in a shared position of threat and suffering and challenge, some of whom survived, many of whom did not, and Welles worked with those firefighters who were helping people in the impact zone in the South Tower where the plane had hit.
00:09:59:10 - 00:10:27:01
Speaker 2
And he helped people who were above the impact zone find the available stairwell, get to that and get out of the tower. But he stayed with the firefighters until the South Tower collapsed because people were gravely injured there, and he was helping them. That's the kind of story incredibly powerful. He went to Boston College. Boston College celebrates him and his legacy of service, his family, wonderful people all affected in different ways by what happened to Welles, have worked to sustain his legacy and help other people be inspired by that.
00:10:27:01 - 00:10:48:06
Speaker 2
Another example, when the King and the Queen of England came to visit us in the spring of this year, they were here on April 29th. We put a rose every day in the name of everyone who has a birthday on that day. Usually the average is about eight birthdays on every day. Every day of the year. Somebody was born who was killed on 9 11 by those terrorist attacks that day.
00:10:48:06 - 00:11:06:14
Speaker 2
There was a rose in the name of a man who had died at the Pentagon, Robert Russell, and he was born at the same year as King Charles. He was turning the same age that the King and the Queen, their age. Contemporaries of this army veteran who was killed while he was working as a civilian analyst in the Pentagon that day by the attacks.
00:11:06:14 - 00:11:24:01
Speaker 2
So in that instance, the birthday rose gave me a chance to share with their Majesties as they visited and paid their respects to the victims. All of the victims, not only the British victims, although there were dozens of British victims of 9 11. And talk about that because he would have been 77 on that day. April 29th, 2026.
00:11:24:02 - 00:11:28:10
Speaker 1
Is there anything that has stuck with you over the years that someone said about the memorial?
00:11:28:11 - 00:11:47:02
Speaker 2
You know, the quotation I turn to is the one that's on a wall in the museum, and it's from Virgil's in the ad and it says, no day shall erase you from the memory of time. And that really encapsulates the mission of the memorial and the museum. We're here to make sure that people don't forget. We're here to commemorate the people who were killed that day.
00:11:47:03 - 00:12:03:00
Speaker 2
Make sure we don't forget how they died or how they lived. And we tell stories of how they lived in the museum and in our public programs, in our educational programs. We want to educate the world about what happened then, how we got there and what it's meant since. And we want to inspire an end to hatred and intolerance.
00:12:03:00 - 00:12:11:18
Speaker 2
That's really what we want to do. I think that the memorial piece of that is essential to that. Remembering how badly things can go and how much we can recover from.
00:12:11:19 - 00:12:21:04
Speaker 1
The reach of the Memorial Museum. It's massive. It's touching millions of lives annually. Tell us a little bit about your team and the culture that keeps everyone moving forward day in and day out.
00:12:21:05 - 00:12:59:20
Speaker 2
After 9 11, everybody who was involved in the rescue, recovery and relief operation, in the rebuilding, in the memorialization efforts, everybody brought their absolute best to that job. It was more important to them than anything they'd ever done in their professional lives, whether they were firefighters searching for lost firefighters, whether they were builders and demolition experts and mental health workers, whether they were creating the boxes that brought the trees to the Memorial Plaza, literally, the people who very carefully designed those, if they were the engineers who worked on the many studies of how the towers collapsed and what happened, and what can we learn from the steel and how can we model this?
00:12:59:20 - 00:13:26:13
Speaker 2
And if they were the counterterrorism folks who were trying desperately to find the people responsible, to try to bring justice to the people who had been killed and their families and the others who survived but had been injured and harmed by this. I think that same sense of purpose and commitment to excellence is evident. And the people who work at the memorial and museum, they really bring their best every day, our security team, to keep everybody safe and the place secure and have everyone feel comfortable.
00:13:26:14 - 00:13:51:02
Speaker 2
Our government and community affairs team that reaches out to the World Trade Center Health program participants to the first responder community, to the military communities, to all the families and organizations of family members out there. Our museum content team who build more content, who acquire more artifacts, who tell different stories. Education team that creates lesson plans and professional development for teachers.
00:13:51:02 - 00:14:09:21
Speaker 2
I actually think everybody brings their best to it. Even there's a there's an amazing pool cleaning video that we do. You know, pools have half a million gallons of water in each of them. There's a lot of people on the plaza every day. There's sometimes a lot of stuff in the air. When we had all that smoke, we've had smoke more than once, but when it was the worst, it actually caused us some trouble with the water.
00:14:09:21 - 00:14:24:22
Speaker 2
We have to clean the pools, you know, the water picks up what's in the air, too, and we make sure that it's safe for people. We clean it, but we have cleaners in the pool. I think they do an incredible job to. We're polish those bronze parapets every night. People don't all act in the best interest of public spaces.
00:14:24:22 - 00:14:39:12
Speaker 2
Sometimes they do things that can be face and damage the materials that are out there. The plaza is open to the public. It's free and open to the public. Every day we have people who polish. Those bronze parapets make them look great again every night. So I think everybody brings their best to this place.
00:14:39:12 - 00:14:48:09
Speaker 1
When you look at the young people in the future leaders visiting the site today, what is the most important piece of wisdom or learning that they carry forward into their own lives?
00:14:48:10 - 00:15:16:16
Speaker 2
You know, no one anticipated 911 precisely. People had different ideas of things that could go wrong, but the people who were most affected by 9 11 did not wake up that day expecting what they were going to face. Nor did the people who worked in the aftermath of 9 11 to console the people who were most harmed and who had lost loved ones, to help people heal, who had suffered tremendously because of the stress and trauma they experience that day, and then to rebuild the city in the extraordinary way that it's been rebuilt.
00:15:16:17 - 00:15:38:02
Speaker 2
I think one of the lessons that people can take away young people, especially, is that it is possible to come back no matter what happens, and that people can come together with courage, with compassion, with unity in the aftermath of exceptionally difficult events. It doesn't mean that there aren't challenges that continue over time. The health effects of 9 11 is one example of that.
00:15:38:02 - 00:16:05:05
Speaker 2
At the beginning, not everyone fully understood the health consequences of breathing that dust that was created by the collapse of two 110 story towers. It caused incredible harm almost immediately to many people and then to many other people over the long run. We now have more firefighters, many more who have died from 9 11 related illnesses and injuries than were killed on 9/11 itself, and 343 firefighters were killed on nine 9 11.
00:16:05:06 - 00:16:28:00
Speaker 2
We have many times the number of NYPD officers who have died of exposure as were killed on that day. Likewise for the community that suffered simply because of its proximity. So many of those first responders and construction workers and recovery workers who came to help, they paid the price, virtually all of whom say, I would do it again in a heartbeat because it was so important that I'd be there then.
00:16:28:00 - 00:16:47:22
Speaker 2
But many people suffered because they were going to school, or they worked nearby, or they lived nearby because of that toxic dust. That's a long tail of a very bad day in New York, and that there have been communities built up around that to advocate, to demand compensation, to get recognition and to create better health outcomes for the community.
00:16:47:22 - 00:17:06:03
Speaker 2
That gets support through the World Trade Center Center Health program and through the Victims Compensation fund. So it's good and bad stories. And I think that's that's another piece of what young people can take away. There are ways to navigate challenges. They can bring people together, can find constructive solutions to some of the harm that happened. It's where you want to be.
00:17:06:03 - 00:17:11:09
Speaker 2
If you have a choice in that, you want to be part of making the future while still reckoning with the past.
00:17:11:09 - 00:17:21:05
Speaker 1
With this year marketing the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, what can in-person and first world visitors do to engage with memorial and Museum? What can I look forward to?
00:17:21:06 - 00:17:43:08
Speaker 2
We'd love for people to be able to come to the museum itself. We realize not everybody can. So there's an anniversary in the school's digital learning experience that our education team releases every year. You can register Ford on our site 9 11 Memorial. You have a chance to listen to survivors, first responders, eyewitnesses, family members who share their experiences of what has happened.
00:17:43:09 - 00:18:02:01
Speaker 2
I have stories that we tell in a new exhibition that we're opening. So for people who can come to the museum, we have a new exhibition that will open to the public on September 12th. It's called in their honor 25 years of 9 11 inspired service. And it's about all the ways that people decided to change the arc of their lives to make the world better.
00:18:02:01 - 00:18:29:02
Speaker 2
Serving in the armed forces, serving in as mental health therapists, as educators, founding nonprofits to support aviation safety, advocating for health care for people who have been harmed by trauma, by loss by 9 11 dust. Creating ways to remember quilts that remember all sorts of ways in which people chose to serve. If you can't come to the museum, once we open this exhibition, there's a great online component of this that's called The Feathers of the Phoenix, one of the nonprofits.
00:18:29:02 - 00:18:49:18
Speaker 2
And one of the endeavors that people took to heart afterwards was trying to help the kids who had lost parents and family members to the 9 11 terrorist attacks. And one of the camps that was created was called America's Camp. The artistic director of that camp created Phoenix the Bird, like the Phoenix of Feathers, created by campers that expressed their sentiments about 9 11.
00:18:49:18 - 00:19:08:00
Speaker 2
And each one of those feathers tells a story. The Phoenix itself and the feathers are in our online exhibition of this particular artifact, which is in that special exhibition, and you can learn more about how many of the kids who were most affected by 9 11 were inspired to serve by what happened that day.
00:19:08:02 - 00:19:14:13
Speaker 1
For those visitors tuning in to the 25th anniversary, is there anything special or different about this year's anniversary?
00:19:14:14 - 00:19:33:19
Speaker 2
When there's a milestone like the 25th anniversary, we do add some additional elements to make it a special experience for the family members who are with us. It's only family members who speak during the commemoration. The reading of names on 9 11. There's also, though, some ceremonial elements. There are bells that we ring at particular moments. This year we're adding a seventh bell.
00:19:33:20 - 00:19:58:02
Speaker 2
The firefighters ring a bell at each of the six moments at which were critical on 911, when each plane hit the Twin Towers, when the Pentagon was hit, when the flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and when each of the towers fell. Those are six bells this year, after all the names are read of people killed on 9 11, the firefighters will ring a seventh bell and we'll have a seventh moment of silence.
00:19:58:02 - 00:20:18:09
Speaker 2
And that's for all the people who have died of 9 11 related illness or injury since 9 11. And because of that, we're also inviting the rescue, recovery, relief community that survivors, the people most affected to join us on the Memorial Plaza on 9 11 at the commemoration. In the past, we've only had family members there, and we've only read the names of family members.
00:20:18:09 - 00:20:27:17
Speaker 2
With those six moments of silence this year, we're adding a seventh moment of silence and welcoming that community to join us because 911 belongs to them to.
00:20:27:19 - 00:20:33:15
Speaker 1
How do you see the future of the Memorial Museum evolving over the next 5 or 10 years?
00:20:33:16 - 00:20:58:16
Speaker 2
Well, we're thinking about the next 25, and we're in a campaign to make sure we can actually stay sustainable, stay on top of the best ways to reach new generations. I don't think any museum can feel complacent in how we're going to reach people, understanding that the ways in which we learn, the ways in which we acquire information, the ways in which we think are actually changing because of technology, because of the ways in which the world shifts around us.
00:20:58:16 - 00:21:15:02
Speaker 2
And so we're interested in staying on top of what educators who are out there now are seeing in their classrooms. That's one reason we stay so close to educators and listening to our visitors and everyone telling us what are the most important stories for us to tell, what are the ways in which we need to tell them? But we're in a campaign.
00:21:15:02 - 00:21:29:11
Speaker 2
If you want to help us come to never forget, and we'll make sure that the next 25 years we can do as faithful a job as we have in the last 25 to make sure that we never forget, and that we're ready to tell the stories of 9 11 to the learners of the future.
00:21:29:14 - 00:21:42:09
Speaker 1
Doctor Elizabeth Hillman, president and CEO of the 9 11 Memorial Museum. I want to thank you so much the work that you and your team are doing every day, and especially in advance here of the 25th anniversary. Thank you so much for chatting with me and coming on the show.
00:21:42:10 - 00:21:49:02
Speaker 2
Thank you. Matthew.
00:21:49:04 - 00:22:02:04
Speaker 1
Thanks so much for tuning in. Story. Behind the Stone is available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on the Wreaths Across America Radio Network on iHeartRadio. Audacity and tune in to search for wreath.
00:22:02:06 - 00:22:03:07
Speaker 1
Thank you for tuning in.