Hey Ontario, come on down to BetMGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive, The Price is Right Fortune Pick. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show, only at BetMGM. Access to The Price is Right Fortune Pick is only available at BetMGM Casino. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConX Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hi, Alison here. Today, as we look back on the 20th anniversary of 9-11, we're bringing you part two of our series, America's Song. If you haven't yet heard part one, please go back and listen to that first. Otherwise, here it is.
previously on America's Song. I was known as the singing policeman, 9-11 singing cop. 55,000 people had the same heartbeat, and he rose to the occasion. This was the dream that I was meant to have. God Bless America was powerful then, but now we're divided as a country. We spent a couple of days with Daniel Rodriguez in New York. He opened up about his past and what brought him to sing God Bless America at that World Series just after September 11th. The performance changed his life, but we're starting to learn that it only pushed down his own grief.
We wanted to know more about his life since that day, and how he's doing now. So a month after that first trip, Jerry, producer Bishop Sam, and I flew to California to meet him at his home. He lives in a little town called Sierra Madre, about 20 miles northeast of downtown LA. It ain't Brooklyn. It's not Hollywood either. Peacocks roam the streets. Daniel moved here in 2017 with his third wife, Marla Cavanaugh. She's a soprano singer from New Zealand. Daniel grabs a beer.
We sit down in their living room, get cozy, and Daniel goes into a story about flying to New Zealand. I'm going to the other side of the world. And I get to Auckland, and I change planes in Auckland to this tiny little plane. It's not that small. It's a tiny little plane, like me sitting next to the pilot. Marla rolls her eyes and covers her mouth. I love how natural they are together. It's like the soprano and the tenor are singing a duet. And the airport is like closing.
This story seems like it's gotten better over the years. She knows all his stories, how he disarms people. Marla and Daniel got married in 2008 and had a daughter the next year. It was a few years after that that Marla says she began to worry about him. She says he became sullen, and he often wanted to be left alone. So for a while, I was just making everything work. But I remember just calling my mom and saying, I don't know what's wrong with Daniel, but he's not himself. He's just not right. After 9-11, Daniel became a symbol of strength with his beautiful voice and patriotic song.
But he couldn't hold that note. And of course, neither could the country. From the Washington Post, I'm Jerry Brewer. And I'm Kent Babb. And this is America's Song. Chapter 2, A Prayer for Our Country. After 9-11, when Daniel started appearing on TV, he also went on to make a record and he went out on tour. He even met his idol, Placido Domingo, through Rudy Giuliani's connections. He actually ended up studying under Placido. And after that, he was done being a cop. Daniel became famous, singing God Bless America.
But it would also complicate his story. He's even changed the way he sings it. But before we get into the why and what happened, it's helpful to have a little context about the song's history. God Bless America was written by Irving Berlin. He always said that God Bless America was his thank you to this country. That's Cheryl Kaskowitz, a historian of the song. He was a Jewish immigrant who'd come to the U.S. as a child, landed in the Lower East Side, fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. Berlin wrote a first draft of it in 1918 during World War I with references to war. Instead of to the oceans white with foam, it was make her victorious on land and foam. But later, he stripped away those lyrics. He made it more general about the landscape.
And he converted it from a march to a song with a style that better fit this feeling of gratitude. He turned it into a love song, a ballad. So Berlin handed over the song to a famous singer at the time, Kate Smith. Smith hosted an hour-long variety radio show on CBS. She debuted the song in 1938. And she sang the song over and over and over at the end of nearly every radio broadcast. During World War II, she sang the song to raise money for war bonds.
And then a surprising thing happened. The song that had started as a wartime march and later became a love letter to America became a protest song. It was sung at labor protests. It was sung at civil rights protests. Anti-communism, for sure. Counter-protests to anti-war protests. The song's broad appeal and vague patriotic lyrics meant that almost anyone could sing the song in support of almost any cause. But that meant the song was so easy to politicize and co-opt in ways that didn't honor Berlin's original intentions or wistful vibe.
In a 1940 interview, he said, it's not a song about a flag or liberty or something like that. It's a song about home. By 9-11, it was a song everyone knew. It seemed to strike a chord in that moment and kind of shed its previous associations and became something new. After 9-11, it felt like the song was everywhere. Actually, that evening, just hours after the attacks, members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, held an impromptu gathering on the east steps of the Capitol. It wasn't the entire Congress. It was just those who got word haphazardly that we were going to gather on those steps. Jeff Flake was a new member of Congress at the time and was there on the steps that night. It just started softly and everyone joined in. It was quite a moment. But boy, it sure gained in resonance after that.
The song springs up almost organically in other places. The reopening of Broadway, the New York Stock Exchange, the National Prayer Service in Washington, D.C. And then it gets used by baseball in a way that only baseball could use it. September 11th changed our lives. It also changed tradition at the ballparks. Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack was replaced with patriotism. At the start of the 2002 season, Major League Baseball mandated that all teams replace the traditional song played during the seventh inning stretch. Take Me Out to the Ball Game was out. God Bless America was in. And like so many things, it just became part of this post-9-11 landscape. Something we just did.
and baseball teams kept on playing it for years. And in 2003, the meaning shifted again. The U.S. declared war in Iraq, and the song started to hit the ear differently for a lot of people. In 2004, Carlos Delgado was a first baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays and a peace activist. So when they played God Bless America during the seventh inning stretch, he didn't stand like the rest of his teammates. Instead, he very silently sat in the dugout. In the Toronto papers, he called the Iraq War the stupidest war ever.
So this is 12 years before Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest police brutality and racial inequality. But Delgado's protests didn't resonate at the time. I think partly because a Puerto Rican baseball player in Toronto didn't penetrate America's consciousness. His teammates didn't even notice at first. Delgado wasn't the only one to feel God Bless America was coercive. In 2009, the Yankees put in a new policy of their own. Ejected from Yankee Stadium for trying to use a bathroom? It happened to a Queens man. He apparently violated a stadium rule most of us have never even heard of. The Yankees had made it mandatory for fans to remain in their seats during the playing of God Bless America. They even put up chains across the aisles to keep people from getting up.
At one point, a fan attempted to use the restroom while God Bless America was being played. Then two off-duty cops grabbed him. The two officers pinned both his arms behind his back and ejected him from the stadium. The fan later sued the Yankees and won. In his lawsuit, he claimed that one of the officers told him that if he didn't want to stand during the song, he could, quote, get out of the country. You know, I start to wonder about how all these shifting meanings affected Daniel. Daniel was all about unifying people after a tragedy. But that wasn't what the song was about anymore. It turns out that this shifting meaning eventually caught up with Daniel and put him in the middle of a confrontation.
In 2010, he was asked to perform at what he thought was a motorcycle rally at Ground Zero. I walked in there, and it was an anti-Muslim, anti-mosque rally. It was a rally protesting a proposal to build an Islamic community center and mosque in Lower Manhattan. Some called it the Ground Zero Mosque. We are engaged in a civilizational struggle. There was people pro-mosque and anti-mosque, and it was really just like a yell fest, like a riot, almost like a riot. And I get up, and I do God bless America.
For the first time, I realized that when I was saying God Bless America, it didn't mean what it meant when I sang it all the other times, you know, coming back after this tragedy of 9-11 and, you know, a prayer for our country, because that's the way I would introduce it, is a prayer and a prayer for our country. The anti-Muslim sentiment heard at that rally continued to fester. In 2015, Donald Trump started his campaign for president, and he tapped into that xenophobia and nationalism. Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on. Daniel saw this happening, but he was just doing his thing, singing about being patriotic. At the same time, he was also picking up security jobs to supplement his income. And he says he started working for his old boss, Rudy Giuliani, who would go on to become a Trump surrogate during the 2016 campaign. Daniel says he was Giuliani's driver during that time. I was driving Rudy to the airport to meet the Trump plane when he was campaigning.
And Rudy was actually writing, you know, writing speeches. Daniel didn't engage in the emotion swirling around Trump's campaign. He had a friendly relationship with Giuliani. It's really clear that Giuliani is the boss to Daniel. He even called him that. Still does. And Daniel was a worker who was grateful to the boss. I don't have political conversations with anyone. So when I had a conversation with Trump, it was like, you know, you got a great voice. The people that I talk to, the people that I've had, you know, a few moments with are definitely not the people that I see on television. It's just it doesn't it doesn't translate to me.
He tried to stay numb to the politics and tried to be what he's always been, a singer, holding a patriotic note for as long as he can. During that time, there was something going on with Daniel. Marla picked up on the change. I just remember 2015. I remember just calling my mom and saying, I don't know what's wrong with Daniel, but he's not himself. Daniel had these intense bouts of road rage. One time, he got out of the car and threatened an old man. Another time, he lost his patience with his young daughter as she was getting ready for school. She was so upset by it. She said, I don't want to see angry daddy.
Meanwhile, Daniel was also having sinus issues. He went to the World Trade Center clinic. When doctors looked at Daniel's scans, they found polyps all over his sinuses. He says he even had a hole in his skull where his brain was exposed. An infection could have easily killed him. Daniel attributes these health issues to breathing the dust and debris at ground zero. Daniel had facial and nasal surgery to remove the polyps in 2016.
It was incredibly invasive. And when he woke up... For the first time in my life, I felt that, you know, strange men on a plane had done something that had directly affected me. That was the first time I ever... You got really angry. I said, and I was very emotional. I said, they hurt me. You can see the scars from the surgery at his hairline. Daniel had been diagnosed with PTSD. He takes an antidepressant every day.
It's very hard for him. One of our ongoing conversations is about the importance of him continuing therapy because it's very hard for him to find a therapist that's suitable. Why's that? Well, he's a good talker and getting to the real stuff is really hard and it's painful. You're like, why did I invite them? Therapists that cry when I tell them anything that's really... There are lots of really great therapists. You don't just have to go to those ones, right?
After hearing more about what Daniel has been through in the years since 9-11, the physical and emotional trauma, it became even more poignant to me that this is a guy who tried so hard, despite all of this, to stay politically neutral. And we saw that again one night back at his house. We were hanging out with Daniel and Marla and some of their neighbors one night. Yeah, the karaoke machine was out, which is a little intimidating when Daniel's around. But I was still ready. I was going to go up and do my best Kanye. I never got the chance, though.
It was late, the drinks were flowing, and one of their friends, Karina, who's Cuban, was talking to me about the political situation in Cuba. Eventually, things turned to American politics and to Donald Trump. Karina starts pushing Daniel to weigh in, but he doesn't take the bait. He just stands up and says he's going to bed. But then, he comes back.
Everything that's being said is one extreme for another. There is no one. Why? There is no one being heard in the middle that's saying, let's forget about the radical rights. But we can't forget about something. Let's forget about the radical rights. And let's think about what is best for the country. Yeah, listen, that's super idealistic and somewhere over the rainbow, bro. That is not the fact we have to fight like the Cubans. Let's just wait because eventually they're going to let you be free. And that just hasn't happened. Do you understand? It gets worse and worse. So some people have to fight.
We didn't really understand the significance of this fight until the next morning, when we hiked up Mount Wilson. It's near Daniel and Marla's house. Despite that fight, Daniel was in good spirits. He was joking, self-deprecating, talking about how he's not in shape. Marla and Bishop ended up walking ahead of us. It's very still as well, isn't it? Yeah, you'd never know. We were like 14 miles northeast of downtown LA. It's like a different world. So, can you just like, maybe give a, just a run through what happened last night?
I heard a reflection from Daniel that I hadn't really heard him say before last night, but he had to get to that point for me to hear it. What was that reflection? Just, you know, about how important it is for him to feel like he's in the middle and he's not alienating anyone. How he wants things to be less polarized. Marla told Bishop that for Daniel to be a healing voice, he had to suppress so many feelings.
Like Daniel, I didn't sing any 9-11 funerals, but I did sing at a 2004 commemoration in Central Park. And in order to do that, I had to check myself into therapy to prepare and have tools to be able to sing. Because you're not just singing happy songs, you're singing songs that are cathartic, hopefully, for everyone present. Daniel, he was singing one of the most iconic songs. A time in history that shook the whole world. I watched that performance and it's like, even I say, how did he do that? He was able to kind of be numb, I think, and yet connect it. He was able to step into that moment and give it everything he had. Do you think it takes a toll on him to be numb and connected? Yes, I do. I do. And I think that's, you know, where we're getting to now, 20 years later. Out of everything that's happened since 9-11, this past year has been especially difficult for Daniel. He's been in isolation a lot, like the rest of us.
He's had to reflect. He's starting to open up more. Daniel doesn't like to talk politics, but as a former police officer and a 9-11 first responder, he was affected by what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. We wanted to ask him about it. But before we did that, he started talking about his relationship to Giuliani and how the boss went from being America's mayor to Donald Trump's embattled lawyer. I know Rudy for almost 26 years. And in all that time, until this, I loved the man.
He's done a lot for me as far as my career is concerned, you know, but I have to say that something changed. Is that heartbreaking? Complicated? No, it's heartbreaking for me, yeah, because, you know, I used to take Rudy to, you know, we used to go walking down the street. We'd park the car and going into Fox News or going into, you know, one of these talk shows, and we'd walk down the street, and it was like, Mr. Mayor, Giuliani, what's up? And, you know, and you saw the love of the city for Giuliani. You saw that. He said, you're our mayor. You know, I mean, he was so loved.
Now, now we'd really have to do security because now there would be people who would want to do him harm for all the things that he's that he's represented and all the things that have gone on with this administration. So it's heartbreaking for me because I love him. We reached out to Giuliani for an interview, but we didn't hear back. On the morning of January 6th, 2021, Giuliani spoke to a large crowd at the Washington Monument. So let's have trial by combat. After Trump spoke, the crowd marched to the Capitol building where Congress was certifying electoral votes and insurgents stormed the Capitol.
Daniel was horrified by what he saw on television. I don't know how this is going to sound, but I believe that they would have been justified in opening fire on those that were using weapons against him. I'm glad they didn't, but that's how angry I got. That's how angry I felt. At some point, if I were standing there, like one police officer that was basically being beaten down, I probably would have defended myself and I would have taken life because I'm going home in retrospect.
I felt that everything that we had gained from September 11th, everything that flag represented from September 11th was gone. There was no love of country. There was no love at all. It was just mayhem and madness and death. Daniel made a life out of singing God Bless America. This short, simple song, Irving Berlin's ballad of gratitude to the country. Now, Daniel's troubled. He's troubled about how we all hear it.
Now, you know, I worry that I'm singing God bless America. And I shouldn't say I worry about it, but, you know, it's in the back of my mind that I'm singing God bless America. And there's going to be people there that are not thinking about the troops. They're not thinking about America as a whole. They're thinking about our part of America. God bless our part of America. God bless, you know, God bless the Republican part of America or the Democratic part of America. And because there's so much division nowadays, it's not our, it's my. And that's why I've changed the word to our, trying to get it back to our home, sweet home.
We just sat with that. And then we left it to Bishop, who sounded amazed, because we weren't listening to Daniel the performer, but to Daniel the human being. I just want to say that, like, this is amazing, who you are right now, with us. You know, like this, I finally feel like I'm talking to the real Daniel right now. Or I've just been listening mostly. But it's been a pleasure, and it's taken so long to get here. Why do you think? Why do you think it's taken so long? I've spent all my life being the performer. I've spent all my life...
I spent all my life weaving the stories, knowing them backwards and forwards. But there comes a time in your life when I have my own desire to get to the root of who I am and to try and really stop just telling the stories and uncover things that I didn't know about myself or never faced about myself. And if I really ever want to be that healer again, if I really ever want to make a difference in other people's lives, then I have to start by making a difference in my own. I need to be that person beyond the artist. I need to be the man, Daniel Rodriguez. And I barely know him. Well, nice to meet you, Daniel. Just as you're beating yourself. Nice to meet you, too. We started this whole thing, Jerry, because you thought of this former cop who made you feel proud of the country. And you wanted to know if you'd ever feel that ever again. Well, what do you think? It makes me feel less hopeful.
and somehow more hopeful too. When I think about Daniel, it's his persistence that strikes me. Daniel's never stopped trying to be that person who makes us feel love of country, even though it's harder and harder for us and for him. I'm not as hopeful as I was 20 years ago, but I want to be just as persistent about loving America as Daniel is about singing to America. America Song was reported by Kent Babb and me, Jerry Brewer. Additional reporting, audio production, and sound design by Bishop Sand. Editing and audio direction by Robin Amor.
Additional editing by Renita Jablonski, Maggie Penman, Rena Flores, Allison Michaels, Emily Kodik, and Joe Tome. Project editing by Julie Vitovskaia and Greg Manifold. Special thanks to Amanda Soto, Carly Dawn Sadoff, Virginia Singarier, Matthew Callahan, Justin Metz, Amy Britton, Dan Steinberg, Matt Rennie, and Matt Vita. The clip of Irving Berlin performing God Bless America, courtesy of The Ed Sullivan Show, and Sofa Entertainment. To see photos of Daniel and of Game 3, go to wapo.st slash 911.
Hey Ontario, come on down to BetMGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive, the Price is Right Fortune Pick. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show, only at BetMGM. Access to the Price is Right Fortune Pick is only available at BetMGM Casino. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Did you know you can play the Washington Post's games for free? Find the crossword, keyword, ridges, and on the record in the Washington Post app or at washingtonpost.com slash games. No subscription required.