Joseph Daniels’ CEO Journey with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum: From Sorrow to Impact

The National September 11 Memorial and Museum is one of the more darkly beautiful, deeply harrowing experiences one can have when remembering that tragic day almost 25 years ago.

The story of how Joe Daniels, CEO of the project, landed the role and shepherded the project through on budget and on time is just as compelling. 

A Personal Experience

On Sept. 11, 2001, former America250 CEO Joe Daniels, who was at the time working with consulting firm McKinsey & Company on a study with American Express, boarded the E subway train to head to Amex’s offices in lower Manhattan, as he had done every day for the previous several months. 

“I got on the E train, I remember it skipped, it was supposed to run local as it's a local train, but it ran express and it pulled into the World Trade Center stop and the doors opened,” Daniels recalls. “There were a whole bunch of people rushing in. It seemed like it was rush hour, but at the end of the day everyone was trying to get out of the World Trade Center versus the morning when they were trying to get in. I remember thinking that that was a little odd, but didn't think much more of it than that. I made my way up to street level at the northeast end of the World Trade Center Plaza, which is in front of the north tower. When I came up, there was just a whole line of people staring up at the north tower.”

Daniels tells of a “gaping hole” in the north tower, with “black smoke pouring out of it. 

“A few minutes later, with all of us staring up, I remember seeing the first person jump from the building,” Daniels says. “And I remember even then thinking how bad must it be for someone who's a thousand feet in the air, a hundred stories up, to feel like the only thing they could do was jump.”

Joseph Daniels was there for the impact of United Airlines Flight 175 into the south tower just after 9 a.m. local time in New York. 

“All of a sudden, this huge fireball exploded out of the south tower when United 175 hit it at 9:03,” Daniels says. “And at that point, I remember this huge fireball, first as light and then sound. Then it was dead quiet. A split second later, this roar ripped through lower Manhattan. Everyone around me, including me, started running north. I was trying to make my way back to my apartment in the West Village.”

As Daniels trekked back to his neighborhood, he saw the hopeful people who wanted to help, waiting for patients who would never arrive. 

“I remember passing by St. Vincent's [a now-defunct hospital that was located in Greenwich Village] and seeing the huge line of doctors and nurses in their scrubs waiting outside for the injured, who for the most part never came,” Daniels remembers. “I got back to my apartment in the West Village, was able to contact my family, went up to the roof deck with a bunch of other people, and saw fighter jets flying overhead.”

Between the attacks on the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon that day, 2,977 people died in what is still the most egregious terrorist attack in terms of lost lives in United States history. 

The Memorial

The traumatic experience hit home for Joseph Daniels. He left McKinsey shortly after to take a position with the Robin Hood Foundation, a charitable organization in New York that looks to alleviate hardships driven by poverty. 

“When I was at McKinsey, I'd been doing work for the Robin Hood Foundation pro bono, which is a big poverty-fighting entity in New York. They hired me full time and I eventually made it up to be their chief of external initiatives,” Daniels shares. 

Dan Doctoroff ended up working for New York City's then-Mayor Bloomberg as Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, where Doctoroff was tasked with putting together a foundation that would oversee the redevelopment of the 16 acres (including the footprint of the Twin Towers) and the newly conceived memorial. 

Daniels joined the project in May 2005 as general counsel and quickly ascended to the role of CEO after some internal turmoil and political infighting ousted the previous president and CEO.

“The first president sort of got swallowed up in politics and was asked to move on,” Daniels says. “They made me acting president in the spring of 2006. I was only 33 at the time, but we started to turn things around.”

Daniels was made permanent president and CEO of the project in October 2006. 

“We raised over $500 million,” he says. “We were able to take on a project where there was so much division and had people come together. We opened on the day of the 10th anniversary, Sept. 11, 2011.”

That was no small task. Between political infighting, the importance of the project, and a tight time frame for completion, the odds were not in Daniels’ favor. 

“The fact that we built this memorial only 10 years after the event is amazing,” Daniels marvels. “If you look at any other memorial in our country at that scale, it's 25, 30, 40, or even 50 years. We got it done on the day of Sept. 11, 2011, where thousands and thousands of 9/11 family members came onto the plaza for the first time, and found their loved one's name etched in bronze in front of the memorial pools. We had the president and former president there. It was just an amazing thing.”