Vice President JD Vance will represent the United States at Friday’s 25th anniversary 9/11 commemoration at Ground Zero alongside the son of a fallen firefighter whose memory will be honored with a new Coast Guard vessel.
Matthew Palazzo, an active-duty Coast Guard machinery technician second class, will stand with Vance, 40, at the solemn ceremony in lower Manhattan. The event will bring together all living former presidents — Bill Clinton, 78, George W. Bush, 79, Barack Obama, 63, and Joe Biden, 81 — for the quarter-century mark of the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.
President Trump, 79, will not attend the Ground Zero gathering. Instead, he will lead a separate commemoration at the Pentagon, where American Airlines Flight 77 struck the military headquarters and killed 184 people.
The younger Palazzo, who enlisted in the Coast Guard in 2020, never met his father. Jeffrey Palazzo, a member of Staten Island-based FDNY Rescue 5, raced to the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and perished when the towers collapsed. He and ten colleagues from his rescue company, collectively known as the “Staten Island 11,” were among the 343 FDNY members killed that day.
The elder Palazzo held an additional distinction: he was a Coast Guard reservist stationed at Station Rockaway at the time of his death. His son’s decision to follow him into service came nearly two decades later, carrying forward a family legacy that spanned both firefighting and maritime duty.
The Coast Guard will commission the Fast Response Cutter Jeffrey Palazzo in New York on Saturday, one day after the anniversary ceremony. The 154-foot vessel, the newest addition to the service’s patrol fleet, will be based in Guam, extending the fallen firefighter’s name across the Pacific theater he never served in life.
More than 2,700 people died in the al Qaeda attacks in New York City alone. The total death toll across all three attack sites — the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 crashed — reached nearly 3,000.
The Ground Zero ceremony has evolved into an annual gathering of national leadership, though the presence of five current and former presidents together marks an unusual convergence of American political history. Vance, in his eighth month as vice president, assumes the highest-ranking official role at the site where his predecessors have stood on previous anniversaries.
The Fast Response Cutter class represents a new generation of Coast Guard patrol vessels, designed for missions including search and rescue, drug interdiction, and maritime security operations. The Jeffrey Palazzo will join sister ships stationed across the globe, from the Caribbean to the Western Pacific.
Matthew Palazzo’s dual presence — at the presidential ceremony and the ship commissioning — places him at the center of both public mourning and institutional remembrance. His father’s service with Rescue 5, one of the FDNY’s elite specialized units, placed Jeffrey Palazzo among the first responders who entered the towers as thousands fled.
The “Staten Island 11” designation has endured in New York firefighting lore as a marker of the concentrated loss that devastated the borough’s emergency services community. Rescue 5, based on Staten Island’s Clove Road, lost nearly its entire on-duty complement that morning.
The Guam assignment of the Jeffrey Palazzo carries particular resonance for a vessel named for a New York reservist. The Pacific territory sits roughly 8,000 miles from the Rockaway station where the elder Palazzo served, a geographic span that underscores the national scope of the Coast Guard’s operations.
Vance and the former presidents will observe the traditional moments of silence at Ground Zero, timed to the impacts of the two hijacked jets and the collapses of each tower. The ceremony begins at 8:30 a.m., with family members of the dead reading names through the morning.
The Pentagon commemoration, led by Trump, follows a separate schedule with its own moments of silence marking the attack on the military headquarters. The division of presidential presence between the two sites reflects both logistical demands and the protocol of current and former officeholders.
The Jeffrey Palazzo commissioning ceremony on Saturday will include Coast Guard leadership and Palazzo family members, formalizing the vessel’s entry into active service. The ship’s crew will eventually assume responsibility for patrol operations from the Guam base, extending the firefighter’s legacy into decades of maritime missions he never anticipated.
The 25th anniversary arrives as a generation with no memory of the attacks enters adulthood, making the presence of figures like Matthew Palazzo — born after his father’s death — increasingly central to the act of transmission. His uniformed service bridges the historical event and its continuing institutional consequences.
Vance will return to Washington following the Ground Zero ceremony, with no additional public events scheduled for the anniversary weekend.
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