In a heated interview between FOX News Sundays host Chris Wallace and former President Bill Clinton, the former president accused Wallace of carrying out “a conservative hit job” on him after Clinton was asked why he didn’t do more to put Bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when he was in office.

“All I did was ask him a question, and I think it was a legitimate news question. I was surprised that he would conjure up that this was a hit job,” Wallace said. A perturbed Clinton accused Wallace for ambushing him with questions that were off topic from his previously planned discussion about the Global Initiative project, a move to take action on poverty, disease and climate change.

“You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because [News Corp. Chairman] Rupert Murdoch’s supporting my work on climate change,” Clinton said.

When Wallace offered to return the conversation to Clinton’s project, the former president continued to talk about recent criticisms that his administration was weak on terror.

“I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president, we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him,” Clinton said. “I tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it, but I did try and I did everything I thought I responsibly could.”

Wallace told the Associated Press in a telephone interview he was surprised by the former president’s strong reaction to his questions. Please click here to read or watch the full interview.

The somber anniversary of 9/11 brings a flood of mixed emotions, combining our need to remember with our desire to move on. During the month of September, this space will be featuring several prominent Americans sharing their perspectives on 9/11 and our place in the world five years later:

Read as General Hugh Shelton, Chairman on the Joint Chiefs on Septmber 11th; Tom Daschle, then Senate Majority Leader; RIchard Norton Smith, Presidential historian and biographer; Dr. Peter Salgo of New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital; peace activist Arun Gandhi; and Keppler Speakers founder Jim Keppler reflect on that tragic morning five years ago.

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by Gen. Hugh Shelton, 14th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

On September 11, 2001, as I flew over the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center en route to the Pentagon and a smoke filled office, my thoughts were of what a great nation we, as Americans, are privileged to live in. But now, we faced the painful task of deciding which of these rights, privileges and freedoms, that make our nation the envy of the rest of the world, we would be willing to sacrifice in order to preserve our way of life. And, again, I was reminded that the price of freedom is vigilance.

by Tom Daschle, former U.S. Senate Majority and Minority Leader

We had a leadership meeting scheduled the morning of 9/11. Just as we commenced, Sen. Patty Murray pointed to a huge cloud of black smoke out the window. We rushed to the window as it was announced that a plane had flown into the Pentagon.

I was quickly taken to the Capitol Police headquarters along with the other leaders. We were on the top floor, and I recall someone pulling down the shades thinking it would add to our security. In a small room on the top floor, I stood in a single file line with the rest of the leaders waiting for my turn to call my wife to see if she had been able to reach our family. It was decided that the leadership must evacuate the city, so I was taken to a “secret, undisclosed location”

Once at the location, the leaders spoke via conference call with the President and Vice President as we watched both towers collapse. There was a high state of anxiety, anger, and a very deep and emotional sense of sadness as the amazing stories of victims were reported throughout the afternoon.

Later, a decision was made to return to the Capitol and for Speaker Hastert and I to make a statement regarding Congress’ determination not to allow the terrorists to shut down our government. Standing on the Capitol steps, we were surrounded by Members of Congress from both sides and both houses. Someone began singing “God Bless America” and instinctively, we started to hold hands and join in.

It was the most emotional day of my life…filled with anger…with anxiety for my country and my family…with concern over what would happen in the days that followed…and with pride…in our decision to unite and respond.

By Richard Norton Smith, presidential historian and biographer.

On September 11, 2001 I was preparing to lead a historical tour, ten days hence, of New York, the Hudson Valley and New England. The next day each member of the tour group received a letter of reassurance: the trip would go ahead as scheduled. Coming at a moment when no one had the slightest idea how or when commercial aviation would be restored, this was pure bravado. But it was a tangible, if modest, gesture of solidarity at a time when we were all New Yorkers.

Although more than a few had qualms about boarding an airplane, to their lasting credit, none of the thirty-two passengers who had signed up for the tour withdrew. They were richly rewarded. Even a shell-shocked New York was electrifying. A hundred languages and a thousand traditions testified to freedoms unimaginable to the zealots in their caves. One day we visited Teddy Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill, where I reminded my fellow travelers that precisely one hundred years had passed since another terrorist act, the assassination of President McKinley, had catapulted TR into the White House at the dawn of the American Century.

In such settings history offers more than perspective. It gives a reassurance grounded in the example of earlier Americans who faced and overcome challenges every bit as daunting as the prospect before us. At the Hyde Park estate of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, group members old enough to have experienced the Great Depression and World War II recalled the magic of FDR’s Fireside Chats, and the transcendent unity stamped on the days following Pearl Harbor.

Five years on, politics have regained center stage. Voices are raised, fingers pointed. Yet even this provides ironic evidence of just how badly the terrorists miscalculated. It is often said that jihadists, not content to kill Americans, want to kill the American way of life. What is more American than the right to disagree? A country is not a cult. Robust debate - especially in wartime - is a sign of democratic strength, not weakness.

During its brief life, the World Trade Center served as a magnet for people drawn from every corner of the planet in search of the greatest of freedoms – the freedom to be oneself. As such, it was a metaphor for America. If we remember that, then we can never forget the heroes of September 11, or of subsequent battles in a clash that increasingly feels like the long twilight struggle of the Cold War.

by Dr. Peter Salgo, associate director of the Open Heart ICU at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

The events of that morning will remain etched in my memory.

I was making rounds in the intensive care unit when my beeper went off and Heidi, soon to be my wife, called to say that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. I assumed it was a small aircraft since the Hudson River airspace is used as a corridor for small planes.

“No” she said, “I think it was an airliner”.

It then occurred to me to look outside the window which framed the New York Skyline. There, etched against a crystalline sky, was the World Trade Center engulfed in smoke. I said something unprintable, and realized that we were going to get busy in a hurry. I also realized that virtually none of our patients was healthy enough to leave the ICU.

The second tower was hit just as the other ICU directors and hospital administrators realized that we would have to make drastic changes to the way the hospital was planning to run that day. All elective operations were canceled. The recovery room was turned into an ICU. Spare doctors were dispatched to the ER to wait for casualties.

Our beeper system went down. Its transmitter was located on the top of the WTC. Radio and television stations went off the air; their towers were on the WTC as well. Cable TV in the patients’ rooms worked, so did cell phones, intermittently, and we all watched the horror unfold in the streets of lower Manhattan from improvised viewing areas and patient rooms.

We waited through the morning. We worried about supplies. Manhattan Island was “locked down,” nothing was allowed in, and nothing could go out. We needed to feed our employees and patients (peanut butter and jelly seemed in vast over-supply) and we didn’t know how our staff was going to get home or whether they could get back the next day. In the end, those who were at work stayed at work. Others got in as they could.

Still we waited. Rumors circulated of other attacks, car bombs, terrorists in the streets. These turned out to be false. Other reports of casualties came in. We heard of the deaths of hundreds of firefighters, policemen and other emergency workers. These reports proved to be all too accurate.

We learned that thousands of lives were in peril in the Towers, and we wondered if we could help all that needed us.

But as the morning waned and the afternoon turned to evening it became clear that we would wait forever. The salient feature of that day was death. Not injury or illness, but sudden and terrible mortality that we were powerless to prevent.

by Arun Gandhi

I had just retuned from a trip to Chicago on the night of September 10. The next morning I switched one Good Morning America, as I normally do, and prepared breakfast for me and my wife.

My wife left the kitchen momentarily and I was clearing the dishes when Charlie Gibson announced “It seems like an aircraft has rammed into the World Trade Center.” It was assumed by all at that point that the aircraft was a small one that went astray. But moments later they had the cameras focused on the scene and it became obvious that it was not an accident but a deliberate act. While the commentators were still speculating about the first aircraft we saw the second ramming the other tower and by then it was apparent that this was the work of hijackers.

Pandemonium broke loose and I screamed at my wife to come quickly to see what was happening. What I was seeing is the unimaginable escalation of violence and it boggled my mind. Even as we were still digesting the events of the World Trade Center, news flashed of an aircraft ramming the Pentagon and another that crashed in Pennsylvania. By then I was in such a state of shock that I was speechless. It seemed as though all hell had broken loose. Still in a daze my wife and I got ready to go to our office on the campus of Christian Brothers University, but as we drove there we found the streets deserted and the campus unusually quiet. The staff at the office arrived as usual but none of us were in a mood to work especially since we did not have access to news. Within an hour I dismissed the staff and we went home to remain glued to the television to be updated on the unleashing of horrors that one could not imagine.

It is a day that will remind me forever of the warning issued by my grandfather, Mohandas K. Gandhi, exactly a century ago to the date when he said the world will yet see untold horrors perpetrated by man if we do not abandon the culture of violence that so dominates us. It was on September 11, 1906, that he told a crowd of 6,000 Indians that salvation for humanity lies in the culture of nonviolence. He said brute force will prevail over brute force only when it is proved that darkness can dispel darkness.

For centuries mankind has suffered violence that has lode us deeper and deeper into a mire of darkness. It is time that we seek the light that can dispel the darkness.

by Jim Keppler, president and founder of Keppler Speakers.

My colleague Joel Gheesling and I spent the morning of 9-11 watching our client, Deborah Norville, speak to a group of Newsweek editors at a hotel across the street from the White House. I was seated next to Newsweek editor-in-chief Rick Smith, and didn’t think anything of it when his assistant pulled him out of the meeting during Deborah’s speech.

Deborah’s talk was great, but everyone in attendance forgot everything she said when Smith took to the stage to announce the terrorist attack. Joel and I then joined Deborah in front of a television backstage, where we watched the collapse of the twin towers. We exchanged knowing glances, Joel was originally scheduled to have been at a World Trade Center event that morning.

I had stopped at the Pentagon earlier that morning, and now we were both currently standing just yards away from what seemed at the moment to be the next likely terror target—the White House. After spending the morning helping Deborah assemble a crew for her TV broadcast, I drove home and passed the burning Pentagon. Oddly, there was no traffic, so I stopped on the side of the road—taking in a sight I knew I would never forget.