43*: When Gore Beat Bush--A Political Fable

by Jeff Greenfield

  So United Flight 93, bound for San Francisco out of Newark International Airport, took off just when it was supposed to; as did American Flight 11 out of Boston’s Logan Airport, headed for Los Angeles; United 175, also headed from Boston to L.A.; and American Flight 77, leaving Washington’s Dulles International for Los Angeles. With only thirty-seven passengers on board United 93, it promised to be an easy day’s work for the seven-person flight crew. For flight attendant CeeCee Lyles, it was a particular contrast to her previous work; for six years she had worked as a police office and detective in Fort Pierce, Florida, before leaving in 2000 to take up the work she had wanted since childhood. Lyles would often recall how some in her family thought a flight attendant’s work was more dangerous than police work. Sure, if you’re threatened by a passenger who wants one more drink.

  It was just after the plane had reached cruising altitude—8:40 a.m.—when three men suddenly stood up, wrapped red bandanas around their heads, and forced their way into the cockpit. A moment later, a voice came over the loudspeaker system:

  “Ladies and gentlemen: Here the captain. Please sit down and keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board. So, sit.”

  Within minutes, several of the passengers had gotten on their cell phones or the onboard Airfones to call home and report what was happening. But as far as the plane’s passengers and those at home knew, this was a hijacking no different from the ones that had plagued the world decades earlier; presumably, the hijackers would fly the plane to Cuba or some other foreign destination, release their demands, and eventually, the passengers would be set free. Indeed, a moment later, the plane made a sharp turn and began heading southeast, destination unknown.

  It was not until CeeCee Lyles reached her sister at 9 a.m. that anyone on board had a sense of what was happening.

  “I’m watching the TV,” her sister said, “and they’re saying that a small plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. An accident, they’re saying.”

  “I’ve got to go,” Lyles said. She ran to the back of the plane, where most of the passengers and crew had been herded, and told them what had just happened at the World Trade Center. “I think we’ve got to take this plane back,” she said. “This can’t possibly be a coincidence.”

  Three minutes later, as the passengers and crew were trying to determine what to do next, Lyles’s phone rang again.

  “Another plane just hit the other tower!” her sister screamed.

  “All right, let’s roll!” passenger Todd Beamer said to the group.

  And if the passengers had had a little more time, if United 93 had been delayed even by fifteen or twenty minutes, perhaps they could have seized control of the plane, or at least taken it down before it reached its destination.

  But time had run out. Because President Gore was determined to broaden his appeal to the American middle class with a simple change in air-traffic rules, United 93 took off on time that day; which meant there was no gap between the hijacking of the flight and the three other jets—which meant that at 9:04 a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001, United 93 was two minutes away from a direct hit on the United States Capitol.

  * * *

  It was a matter of protocol that put Dennis Hastert on the floor of the House of Representatives at nine o’clock in the morning. Every fourth legislative day, the speaker of the House was required to open the session. And it was the unlikeliest confluence of events that had put Denny Hastert in the speaker’s chair. A stocky, genial, unprepossessing man, Hastert had become a well-known figure in Yorkville, Illinois, as a high school teacher and wrestling coach—so well known that he’d won a seat in the Illinois House in 1980 and a seat in the U.S. House six years later. His affable personality and his friendship with House Republican leader Robert Michel won him the post of chief deputy whip. And in 1998, when Speaker Newt Gingrich stepped down in the wake of his party’s poor showing in the midterm election, and speaker-to-be Bob Livingston was caught up in a sex scandal, Hastert became the default choice. If he was widely regarded as a figurehead—if most people thought the real power was held by the more combative, polarizing majority leader, Tom DeLay—well, Denny Hastert could live with that.

  Besides, it was not as if the political world was on the boil. After the pitched battle over President Clinton’s impeachment and the razor-thin 2000 election, a torpor had settled over Washington. There was only one story that had sent the cable news world into overdrive, and that was the disappearance of a young congressional intern named Chandra Levy, who was widely assumed to be sexually involved with Representative Gary Condit; the more feverish of talking heads were even suggesting that the congressman, a married father who spoke often of “family values,” may have had something to do with her disappearance. Otherwise, the narrow Republican majority in the House had proven disciplined enough to thwart just about every element in President Gore’s legislative package.

  Hastert gaveled the House into session and began to step down from the rostrum. He had a visit with the House physician scheduled; nothing serious, but with his weight and elevated cholesterol, regular checkups were something he built into his schedule. Just as he reached the House floor, one of his closest aides, Sam Lancaster, burst into the chamber.

  “I just saw it on TV—a plane hit the World Trade Center!”

  Hastert lumbered out of the House chamber, heading for his second-floor office.

  And then he heard the rumble.

  * * *

  It was, they agreed, a perfect late-summer day: the bright-blue sky, the sun glinting off the reflecting pool, the Washington Monument brilliantly white across the National Mall. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle exchanged pleasantries about the weather with his visitors, John and Annie Glenn. The former Ohio senator and his wife had stopped by for a visit, with Daschle and Glenn once again shaking their heads at the close-run 2000 election. At the end of that campaign, with Ohio just about dead even, Glenn—the most popular political figure in the state—had offered to cut a series of radio and TV ads for Al Gore. But the campaign had turned him down, pleading a lack of resources. Gore had lost Ohio by three points, and that had damn near cost him the White House.

  “Well,” Daschle said, “I know something about near-death experiences.” He had won his House seat back in 1978 by 139 votes.

  “It’s like DiMaggio said,” Glenn chuckled. “You know, ‘I’d rather be lucky than good.’ And you sure got lucky in May.”

  The November elections had produced a 50–50 tie in the Senate; with the Gore victory, that might have meant that Vice President Joe Lieberman would be the tie-breaking vote that gave the Democrats control. But, like Lyndon Johnson and Lloyd Bentsen before him, Lieberman had hedged his bets by running for vice president and for senator. That meant he’d had to resign his Senate seat, and Connecticut’s Republican governor had named Representative Chris Shays, another Connecticut Republican, as his successor, triggering a strong dose of resentment from Democratic senators at Lieberman for costing the party a Senate majority. Then, on May 24, liberal Republican senator Jim Jeffords went home to Vermont to announce that he was leaving the GOP—he was fed up with the party’s intransigent opposition to every part of Gore’s agenda, especially the president’s proposal to support education for the disabled. That departure—and Jeffords’s decision to vote with the Democrats on organizing the Senate—meant that Lieberman would now cast the tie-breaking vote after all, and the low-key South Dakotan Daschle found himself Senate majority leader.

  Now Daschle was heading across the hall from his office to Room 219, where the Democratic leadership team was waiting: Harry Reid, Jay Rockefeller, Barbara Boxer, Bill Nelson, Byron Dorgan, Barbara Mikulski. The Republican majority in the House was still arguing for massive tax cuts; the Gore White House was pushing back on shoring up Social Security; the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, as well as the unions, was growing increasingly impatient with the president’s small-bore proposals. For God’s sake, we’re looking at fi
ve trillion dollars in surpluses over the next decade—when are we going to start acting like Democrats? So it wasn’t going to be the most pleasant hour or so, but it came with the territory.

  “Senator!” Marty Paone, secretary to the majority, bolted into Daschle’s office. “Turn on the TV! They say a plane hit the World Trade Center.”

  “Small plane? Commercial?” It was John Glenn, with a lifetime of flying behind him.

  “They don’t know … they’re thinking maybe pilot error?”

  “Pilots don’t fly into skyscrapers,” Glenn said. “There was a B-52 that hit the Empire State Building back in the 1940s, but it was a very foggy day—not like this … ”

  “If that’s all we know,” Daschle said, “I should—”

  But John Glenn was looking out of Daschle’s window, across the expanse of the National Mall, and he was saying, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God … ”

  * * *

  The dome of the United States Capitol is 288 feet high, 96 feet in diameter. It was made out of 8.9 million pounds of cast iron. United Flight 93 was a 757-222: 155 feet long, twelve feet four inches wide, weighing 255,000 pounds, carrying more than 11,000 gallons of jet fuel. Had the plane struck the dome head on, it would have reduced the Capitol to a smoldering shell.

  But what happened was bad enough.

  As the hijacked plane flew down the National Mall, a half-dozen crew members and passengers, armed with boiling water and knives, overpowered the hijackers guarding the cockpit and burst inside. First Officer LeRoy Homer and passenger Todd Beamer grabbed Ziad Jarrah and began pulling him out of the pilot’s seat. With Jarrah still grasping the controls, the plane angled upward seconds before it reached the Capitol, its fuselage striking the Statue of Freedom and dome a glancing blow. But that was enough to send tons of cast iron crashing down on the Capitol grounds and onto the House and Senate chambers as well. The plane itself careened sharply to the left and crashed into Lower Senate Park; the explosion sent flaming debris into the Russell Senate Office Building, which promptly caught fire. Some pieces of the dome, now in effect airborne missiles, flew due east some thousand feet and struck the Supreme Court.

  The spectacular summer day had brought several dozen House and Senate members to the East Front of the Capitol—posing for pictures with their constituents, chatting with members of the press, informally lobbying one another. There was no time for a warning, no chance to run.

  Within minutes, television sets across the country, then across the world, were displaying a once unimaginable split screen: in New York, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center enveloped in fire, thousands fleeing downtown as plumes of smoke billowed through the narrow canyons; in Washington, the Capitol, its dome partially sheared off, the House and Senate wings enveloped in smoke and rubble, fire trucks and ambulances crowding the East Front, rescue workers scrambling over the ruins, looking for the dead and injured.

  From his stateroom aboard Air Force One, President Al Gore watched as well. The Secret Service had pulled him out of Miami International Airport as soon as the second plane hit the World Trade Center, moments before Flight 93 struck the Capitol dome. As the Secret Service, the National Security Council advisor, and counterterrorism head Richard Clarke debated where the president should set up base—was this part of a broader attempt to decapitate the federal government, and were other hijacked planes in the air, ready to hit the White House?—Gore turned to his chief of staff, Ron Klain.

  “We’re going back to Washington, Ron,” the president said.

  “Sir, the Secret Service says there’s no way we can know—”

  “We’re going back to Washington,” Gore repeated. “I want the congressional leaders—both parties, House and Senate—in the Cabinet Room waiting for me.”

  “Mr. President, we don’t know right now who, how many … ”

  Gore was silent for a moment.

  “I remember when I was in the Senate, there was a protocol for a national emergency—nuclear war was the big fear. Congressional leaders were supposed to get to that bunker in West Virginia—you know, near the Greenbrier, built into a mountain. But now … if we don’t even know who the hell is alive … .”

  The president looked again at the TV monitor, watched on half of the screen as one of the Twin Towers collapsed in on itself, while on the other half a small army of rescue workers scrambled in and out of what remained of the Capitol. The phone at his console buzzed; he punched the speakerphone button and heard Richard Clarke’s voice, telling him what he already knew—the Al Qaeda attack they had feared for months, for years, had come.

  “I want that nailed down as fast and as solid as we can,” Gore said, “before there’s any panicked talk about the Russians or the Chinese or Iraq or whoever. And Dick—I know what you and the others are going to say, but I’ve got to get back to Washington—no delays, no hesitancy. The world has got to know that we’re still standing. But I think we both know what we’re looking at here.”

  “Sir?”

  “We’re going to wake up tomorrow … in a different country.”

  * * *

  In those first frenzied moments, through the early hours, the exact dimensions of what had happened were impossible to measure. Millions of television screens that had focused on the burning towers of the World Trade Center suddenly switched to images of the U.S. Capitol in flames, smoke and rubble enveloping the East Front, bodies of the dead and maimed scattered across the grounds. The Senate side had taken the worst of the crash, but no one knew who had been inside the chamber or the office building; Speaker Hastert had opened the House session moments before Flight 93 hit; now no one could find him. It was clear that the Supreme Court had been struck by huge amounts of debris—the Vermont-marble portico of the West Front and the sixteen columns that supported it had collapsed onto the First Street entrance—but the court’s term wasn’t set to begin for a month, so perhaps the building had been vacant; it took an hour before a correspondent at CNN remembered that the annual Judicial Conference of the United States was to convene that morning, with dozens of federal judges and the presiding officer—Chief Justice William Rehnquist—gathered under the same roof.

  The voices of the men and women on television, usually so in control, in command, so skilled at responding to crises with the proper blend of concern and reassurance, now spoke as if they themselves had been stunned into semi-consciousness by what they were witnessing, and they offered up scraps of factoids to fill the silences. Not since the British burned the Capitol in 1814 … A nightmare out of a Tom Clancy novel has become a living nightmare at this moment … The heart of America’s financial power, and the heart of its political power, suffered simultaneous, devastating attacks today … A day as dark as any in the history of the Republic … There is growing fear that many of our most important political leaders may have perished … What can only be a deliberate, maliciously crafted plan to destroy …

  Over and over, the same taped images played: an aerial shot of the World Trade Center’s North Tower aflame as—incredibly—a huge jet flew into the South Tower; New Yorkers running wildly through the streets, fleeing immense clouds of smoke that cascaded through the narrow canyons of lower Manhattan, then the Capitol Campus, strewn with wreckage and blood, hundreds stampeding across the grounds.

  At 10:15 a.m., a little more than an hour after the Capitol had been struck, a disheveled thirty-eight-year-old high school teacher from Waukesha, Wisconsin, named Kevin Andersen walked into CNN’s headquarters, across from Union Station. He had been shepherding an honors high school class on a visit to Washington and was heading to the Capitol for a visit and photo op with Senator Russ Feingold; Anderson had paused to shoot some video of his students just as the plane hit. Ten minutes and $25,000 later, CNN was airing the first video of the exact moment when United 93 hit—the first of a dozen amateur videos that aired again and again, in tandem with the video of United Flight 175 hitting the World Trade Center. So compelling were these images that in the
shock and the mourning that followed, few if any understood what else this day had wrought: Apart from killing thousands of Americans in the heart of its financial center, and hundreds more in the heart of its political center, the attack had also set the stage for what would evolve over the next year into a full-blown constitutional crisis.

  In the Aftermath

  At first there was only the chaos and confusion of a capital that had never been prepared for such an attack, at least not since the end of the Cold War. President Gore’s memory was correct: Back in the 1960s, when fears of a nuclear attack were prominent, an emergency relocation center had been built into the side of a mountain in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, right next to the Greenbrier Hotel, complete with chambers for the House and Senate to meet. But that bunker had been decommissioned in 1992, after its discovery by the press. And now, with the Capitol severely damaged, there was no secure location for members to meet, no protocol for what was to happen. Retreat to their offices? But the Russell Office Building had been badly damaged, and there were fragments of cast iron that had flown across Independence Avenue, striking the Longworth House Office Building. In a classic act of locking the barn door after the horses were stolen, battalions of soldiers armed with automatic weapons and driving armored personnel carriers blocked all access to the Capitol grounds, leaving members and their staffs with no place to convene. Angry arguments erupted between congressional officials and senior military officers, before Gore, on his way back to the capital, asked all members of Congress to come to the White House for a 5 p.m. emergency meeting.

  At four o’clock, the president landed at Andrews Air Force Base and flew to the White House lawn in Marine One, with three other helicopters acting as decoys. Several F-16 fighter jets patrolled the skies over Washington—along with military planes flying over New York, the only airborne aircraft anywhere in the United States, now that the FAA had ordered all commercial flights grounded. For two hours, members of Congress had been making their way to the White House, and as they filed into the East Room they exchanged what scraps of information or misinformation they had: Was Speaker Hastert dead? Where was Tom Daschle? Were there really dozens of their colleagues killed, injured, and missing? And what had happened at the Supreme Court?