WATCH: David Muir Gets Rare Once-in-a-Lifetime Access to the Statue of Liberty's Torch — and the View from the Top Will Leave You Breathless

For America's 250th birthday, ABC News anchor David Muir was granted one of the rarest and most extraordinary privileges ever extended to a journalist — a climb all the way to the torch of the Statue of Liberty, the highest and most restricted point of one of the most iconic structures on earth. Standing atop the copper flame that has welcomed generations of newcomers to the shores of freedom since 1886, Muir looked out over New York Harbor and experienced, in a way almost no living American ever has, the exact view that greeted more than 12 million immigrants as they sailed toward a new life in the United States. The winds were strong, the harbor stretched endlessly in every direction, and the weight of history was impossible to ignore.

12M+
Immigrants welcomed through New York Harbor, 1892–1954
~40%
Americans who can trace ancestry through Ellis Island (NPS)
3.8M
Visitors to the Statue of Liberty every year
1886
Year France gifted Lady Liberty to the United States

The journey to the torch began on the ferry to Liberty Island, where Muir spoke with Captain Hamilton Clancy — a man with a uniquely personal connection to Lady Liberty, whose grandfather once served as superintendent of the island. Clancy spoke movingly about the courage of the immigrants who made the crossing, calling them the bravest people he could possibly imagine. Inside the statue's museum, Muir met Tony Soraci, the grandson of Italian immigrants and one of the workers who participated in the landmark 1980s restoration project that prepared the statue for her centennial. Soraci helped preserve the original torch — so badly damaged after a century of exposure to the open ocean that it could not be restored and had to be replaced with an exact replica — and walked Muir through the remarkable effort it took to save what could be saved of Lady Liberty's first 100 years.

"She'd been up there for 100 years — she's out in the middle of the ocean." — Tony Soraci, restoration worker and grandson of Italian immigrants

Climbing the statue's famous double helical staircase toward the crown alongside National Park Service historian Matt Housch, Muir got an up-close look at the extraordinary engineering that has kept Lady Liberty standing for nearly 140 years — copper panels so thin they are barely thicker than two pennies stacked together, held together by thousands of rivets, with the dark interior surface contrasting sharply against the green patina the world sees from the harbor below. French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, Housch explained, deliberately positioned the statue so that every arriving ship in New York Harbor would encounter Lady Liberty's face the moment it rounded into view — a design choice made long before anyone could have imagined that the greatest wave of immigration in human history was just around the corner. From the torch itself, Muir described winds strong enough to feel the entire structure sway — a feature, not a flaw, built deliberately into the design by engineers who understood that a monument meant to last centuries had to be able to move with the forces of nature rather than resist them.

What makes the moment so powerful — and so perfectly suited to America's 250th anniversary — is not just the view or the history or the engineering. It is the reminder that the Statue of Liberty is not merely a monument to what America is, but to what America has always promised to be: a place where the brave enough to cross an ocean, leave everything behind, and start again could find a life worth living. For the roughly 40 percent of Americans who can trace their own family lines back through Ellis Island, Muir's climb to the torch is not just a television segment — it is a homecoming. And for the 3.8 million people who visit Lady Liberty every year, it is a reminder that the torch is still burning, still visible, and still means exactly what it always has.