Transcript for complete interview. - Voices of September 11th

Interview with John Duffy, chairman & CEO of KBW
Conducted by Mary Fetchet
had reached out to us. So there were multiple things that I think we felt like we could do to
preserve those relationships with the family. Most of the ideas came from employees here like
Jackie Day and Mitch Kleinman. They really just deserve the credit for, A) coming up and
operating whatever it is we’ve done and making it happen and continuing to make it happen.
Again we’re fortunate in that we don’t have a lot of turnover here, so we have a lot of people
working here that were working at 9/11 that are still working here. They know the families
personally and I think that has helped enormously in terms of the connectivity remaining
between the firm and the employee’s families, of the employees that we lost that day.
[Mary]: When you go back to immediately after 9/11, how did you decide to coordinate that
service and pull the families together I mean it must have been, I’m thinking of yourself as a
family member that you’ve just gone through your own son’s service, and I remember you
giving your remarks and I was so impressed by that. How did you decide what to do, and then
what was that like for you
[John]: Yeah, we were kind of making it up as we were going along. There’s no book you can
read in terms of what you ought to do after a plane flies into a building and kills three thousand
people including a quarter, a third of your work staff. I think in our heart we wanted to reach
out to all the families to let them know – and in that first memorial service, I don’t remember
the date I want to say it was about a month after 9/11, again the folks here who deserve the
bulk of the credit are people like Josephine Fink, who’s sense retired, Jackie Day, my assistant,
Mitch Kleinman, our general counsel. Mitch undertook most of the legal work in terms of what
the families needed to do in terms of following a claim, and was an enormous help. We weren’t
doing a lot of deals so Mitch probably had some time on his hands, and certainly used it in the
most productive fashion in terms of looking back at – he was doing what needed to be done. I
don’t know who – I think Peter Wirth might have been the fellow – who procured the site of the
church we used on Fifth Avenue for the first service. I think somebody had reached out to St.
Patrick’s and we couldn’t get a time slot that worked, but Peter knew the director, I believe, at
that church, the Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue where we had the first service. So Peter,
Mitch, Jackie, Josephine, and probably another half dozen names I’m forgetting were the ones
who kind of came up with the idea, procured the location, and then we talked about what we’d
want to do and we had the rector of that church speak, I gave a speech, and I did it, it was
something that needed to be done, just in terms of communicating with the surviving
employees and the families of the folks that we lost. I was a little surprised that day how many
friends or clients showed up. I mean our initial focus was really reaching out to the existing
employees and to the families of the folks that we lost, to have a service, to say you know, let’s
celebrate these lives. You know we’re all devastated, but these were all wonderful people. We
wanted to let the families know that we’d be there for them. I was really taken aback by how
many people that showed up that were not employees. And that was comforting because then
you really knew that you weren’t alone. I think we knew that already. The whole city, the whole
state, the whole country, if they knew someone that was personally affected, people wanted to
help at that point in time. We knew there were plenty of helpful volunteers out there, but again
it certainly felt comforting to see that many people show up that day that cared about us.