The day that transformed the presidency

©New York Times,
published September 16, 2001

[AP photos] White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card Jr. gives President Bush the stunning news as Bush visits with Sarasota second-graders.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush was sitting in a second-grade classroom in Sarasota on Tuesday morning, his eyes and his smile fixed on 7-year-olds showing off their reading skills. But his mind was clearly fixed on the news he had heard just moments before: a passenger jet had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.

At 9:05 a.m., the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card Jr., stepped into the classroom and whispered into the president's right ear, "A second plane hit the other tower, and America's under attack."

The president blanched. But he stayed put, occasionally arching his eyebrows at the children. "Really good readers, whew," he said. "This must be sixth grade."

Minutes later, 900 miles to the north, a squad of Secret Service agents burst into the West Wing office of Vice President Dick Cheney, grabbing his arms, his shoulders and his belt.

"They literally propelled him out of his office," one witness said. The agents all but carried Cheney down to the White House's deepest sanctum, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a tubelike structure designed to withstand a nuclear blast. Another hijacked plane was bearing down on Washington, the agents said, and the White House was almost certainly its target.

In the space of the next 12 hours, George W. Bush was transformed into a president at the helm of a White House, and a nation, in crisis.

On Monday night, he was laughing over dinner with his brother Jeb at a seaside Florida resort, posing for pictures with the staff and dodging questions from reporters about looming battles over the vanishing budget surplus. By Saturday morning, with downtown Washington locked down by the military, he was conducting a war council at Camp David and demanding that countries around the world, starting with the Arab world, declare whether they were allies in the war on terrorism -- or targets.

As he rode Marine One from Andrews Air Force Base to the White House on Tuesday evening, Bush watched the smoke billowing from the gash in the Pentagon and seemed to recognize how profoundly his young presidency had been transformed. "The mightiest building in the world is on the floor," Bush told an aide riding with him. "That's the 21st century war you just witnessed."

An early morning run

When President Bush awoke around 6 a.m. on Tuesday at the Colony, a tennis resort in Longboat Key, there was no hint that his life -- or the nation's -- was about to be forever changed.

Eager to start his day with exercise, he took his motorcade to a nearby golf course and ran hard for 4 1/2 miles. He returned to his hotel for a shower and his daily intelligence briefings, which apparently included reference to heightened threats of terrorism. Then he took the 20-minute ride to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School, the second event in two days staged to galvanize support for an education bill languishing in Congress.

He arrived just before 9. Just before the event, Karl Rove, one of his most trusted aides, whispered news of what appeared to be a chilling accident, a plane crash into the upper floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Bush was briefed by phone by Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, calling from the White House. Bush decided to go ahead with the short school event.

But as beepers lit up with the news, reporters and a few of Bush's senior staff members slipped across the schoolyard to watch the disaster unfold in a classroom where the television networks had set up their equipment and monitors. They had just assembled when the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, slammed into the South Tower.

A minute later, Card whispered the news in the president's ear.

"It was a surreal moment," Card recalled late last week. "It was immediately obvious that it was neither an accident nor a coincidence."

Bush has not said why he lingered in the room for another six minutes, but it was a testament to either his calm or his acting ability. At 9:12, he abruptly retreated, speaking to Cheney and New York officials.

Shaky first address

Hurriedly Bush wrote a statement on a yellow pad with a black felt-tip pen. At 9:30, he appeared in a large media room, where charts about the education budget had been whisked away. With children, teachers and Florida Republicans jammed into the room, he faced the cameras, noticeably shaken.

"Today we had a national tragedy," he said. "Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country."

Then, lapsing into some informal language, he vowed "to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act. Terrorism against our nation will not stand." He said he was returning to Washington immediately.

Panic at the White House

But as he spoke, panic had spread in the White House. Cheney was swept into the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, along with his wife and Rice and other senior staff members. They were told, administration officials say, that American Airlines Flight 77 was bearing down on the White House. Bomb squads were already racing through the upper floors of the Old Executive Office Building, screaming, "Get out, get out, this is real!"

In only minutes Bush and his agents raced back to Air Force One, which hastily departed Sarasota at 9:55. No one aboard -- White House aides, flight crew members or Secret Service agents -- claimed to know the plane's destination. By then, the jetliner possibly headed for the White House had taken out one side of the Pentagon, and another seemed on the way.

Moments after he was aloft, Bush opened a line to Cheney and kept it open. "That's what we are paid for, boys," Bush told the vice president, according to an aide. "We are going to take care of this. When we find out who did this, they are not going to like me as president. Somebody is going to pay."

'Air Force One is next'

By 10:30, a call had come to the White House that "Air Force One is next." What sent chills through the White House is that the caller had used code words that showed familiarity with how the president moves about the country.

"To get bound into the secure facility and hear the code name for Air Force One, there's something headed for Air Force One -- I don't think you can underestimate, at that moment, that you're sorting lots of information and you're trying to deal with the consequences," Rice said.

And then there were the false reports that only heightened the anxiety: a car bomb at the Pentagon, a transponder code from an aircraft coming across the Pacific from South Korea that suggested a hijacking was under way, four flights from the Atlantic that Cheney and Rice were warned might be hostile.

"They pretty quickly made the decision to scramble aircraft," one witness to the discussions said.

Slow responses

But in the White House Situation Room and at the Pentagon, the response seemed agonizingly slow. One military official recalls hearing "words to the effect of, "Where are the planes?' "

The Pentagon insists it had air cover over its own building by 10 a.m., 15 minutes after the building was hit. But several eyewitnesses, including a reporter for the New York Times who was headed toward the building, did not see any until closer to 11.

As they worked, Cheney and Rice, still in the tunnel command center, saw the horrifying collapse of the second twin tower.

"There was just a momentary pause in activity," one witness said. "Just total silence. But no one talked about it, not even an "Oh, God.' They just went back to work."

Cheney advises Bush

At 10:41, with Air Force One headed toward Jacksonville to meet jets scrambled to give the presidential jet air cover, Cheney was urging Bush to avoid a quick return to Washington. He wanted the president at Offutt Air Force Base outside Omaha, which he knew from his days as secretary of defense had an extraordinarily sophisticated strategic command communications center.

At 11:45, the plane landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, La., an intermediate stop. A White House official asked the small pool of reporters in the back of the plane to keep their cell phones shut off because the signals could allow someone to identify the plane's location.

White House officials told reporters that they could say only that the president was at "an unidentified location in the United States," a requirement that was lifted after reporters learned that local television stations had already reported the landing.

Bush appeared before the reporters for just two minutes, declaring, "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward."

But he looked nervous, and the tape of the appearance was jumpy and grainy. "It was not our best moment," one administration official conceded.

Bush may have thought so too; he told his aides: "I want to go back home as soon as possible. I don't want whoever this is holding me outside of Washington."

But Cheney and the Secret Service urged Bush to stay away, and Card said, "Let's let the dust settle."

At the time, administration officials said there had been two reports of unaccounted-for international flights, and two domestic flights were possible threats.

"That's a potential of four missiles in the air, and we were concerned that if Air Force One landed in a predictable place, one of those planes could hit it on the ground," said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The official added that the hijackers had shown "they had the capacity to fly planes into still objects."

On to Offutt

From Louisiana, Air Force One flew northwest, to Offutt. Bush disappeared into what looks like a small cinderblock bunker that leads down to an underground facility, where he convened the first meeting of his National Security Council, via teleconference.

Rice recalled that the president opened the meeting by saying firmly that the day's terror amounted to "an attack on freedom, and we're going to define it as such."

"And we're going to go after it," she recalled him saying, "and we're not going to lose focus. And we're going to minister to the country and deal with the horrors that people are experiencing and the consequences, and we're going to get through our period of mourning. But we're not going to lose focus and resolve on what happened here and what this means for the United States of America, in its leadership role, to mobilize the world, now, to deal with this scourge."

President Bush exits at Andrews Air Force Base.

Bush back in Washington

The meeting ended shortly after 4 p.m., and again Bush insisted that he return to Washington. Political aides and the communications staff also wanted Bush to return, but the Secret Service again cautioned that he should not go back. This time, Bush insisted that he had to deliver a prime-time TV address from the Oval Office, not a bunker.

Bush arrived at the White House around 7 p.m. At 8:30, he addressed the nation, saying, "None of us will ever forget this day, yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world."

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