Recent Chief William Feehan Commentaries

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“He is the Fire Department”
Remembering 9/11, we tend to remember the whole event rather than the personal stories. More than 2,753 individuals died in New York City, Shanksville, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon that day. New York suffered the loss of 343 firefighters. One of them was 42-year veteran First Deputy Fire Commissioner William Feehan. It was reported that Feehan was so knowledgeable that he...
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September 10, 2021
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The Latest... And Often Greatest
Revelations
In 1927, Sinclair Lewis gave America a character it did not want to recognize in the mirror: Elmer Gantry. Gantry is loud, magnetic, insatiable —...
The Story of Chips, and The Cost of Looking Away
It’s just a photograph: a wartime dog sitting alert, ears up, wearing a military harness. But the story about a World War II sentry dog...
It’s Time to Talk About Respect
A cancer has been growing in our national life, so embedded in our culture that we’ve stopped acknowledging it. In the 1940s and the decades...
Adversity and Perseverance
“How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.”— Yvon Chouinard “Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem”—Eric Hoffer “Retreat, Hell!...
Who Decides What’s Seen?
There are moments when a single arrest tells us more about the state of the country than a thousand speeches. The recent detention of Don...
The Death of Shame
Over the past several months, I’ve written commentaries revisiting moments in our history when individuals confronted serious challenges and rose to meet them — to...