Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  “That is correct. And it’s my understanding they’ve already taken a couple of aircraft out.”

  “We can’t confirm that,” Rumsfeld said. “We’re told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that did it.”

  Rumsfeld ordered the nation’s defense readiness condition elevated to DefCon 3, the highest since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. But several members of the Bush team realized they should make sure the heightened alert status did not alarm the Russians. Rumsfeld, Rice, and Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, all talked with Russian officials, who, as it happened, were conducting military exercises. Vladimir Putin would later make much of being the first foreign leader to call Bush on the day of the attacks to offer support, although he did not initially get through to the president. Rice took the call. “We have canceled our exercises,” he told her.

  AIR FORCE ONE raced west at full throttle, hitting 630 miles per hour, surprising even some of its crew who did not know it could go that fast. Bush was sobered to look out the window on the left side and see F-16 fighters escorting him, so close he could spot the stubble on the chin of one of the pilots, who saluted him.

  The plane headed to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. It was an aggravating flight. Without its own television stream, the plane picked up feeds from local stations as it flew over various cities and then lost them again. Phone calls got cut off. But Bush saw one of the towers fall and thought to himself that no American president had ever seen so many of his people die all at once before. Three thousand had been killed in the deadliest sneak attack in American history, all on his watch. At the time, he thought it was even more.

  The plane landed at Barksdale about 11:45 a.m. East Coast time, and Bush was further taken aback to see the base filled with armed bombers and guarded by rifle-toting troops. “It was surreal,” he remembered later. “It was like flying in the midst of a combat zone.” With no motorcade waiting for him, Bush climbed into a military vehicle that drove off at great speed.

  “Slow down, son,” Bush called out. “There are no terrorists on this base.”

  Bush taped another statement to be played to the nation and called Rumsfeld. “The ball will be in your court,” Bush told him.

  But the statement was no more reassuring than the earlier one. David Frum, the speechwriter, thought Bush “looked and sounded like the hunted, not the hunter.” The communications at Barksdale were inadequate, so at Cheney’s suggestion Bush took off again for Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, headquarters of Strategic Command, or Stratcom, which was equipped to run a war if need be. On the plane, Bush kept up a running argument over returning. “We need to get back to Washington,” he told his Secret Service agent. “We don’t need some tinhorn terrorist to scare us off. The American people want to know where their dang president is.”

  He also grilled Michael Morell, his CIA briefer.

  “Who do you think did this?” Bush asked.

  “There are two terror states capable, Iran and Iraq, but both have everything to lose and nothing to gain,” Morell said. “If I had to guess I’d put a lot of money on the table that it was al-Qaeda.”

  “So when will we know?”

  “We could know it soon, or it could take a while.”

  Barksdale was not the only place with communications problems. The White House bunker was supposed to have an open phone line with the Situation Room upstairs, but it kept cutting out. Richard Clarke in the Situation Room kept calling back asking for Major Mike Fenzel. The person answering the phone just grunted and passed the phone.

  “Who is the asshole answering the phone for you, Mike?” Clarke asked.

  “That would be the vice president, Dick,” Fenzel said.

  While the working assumption was that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, it did not take long for Iraq to come up. During a meeting at the Pentagon at 2:40 p.m., just five hours after the building was hit, Rumsfeld broached the idea of attacking Saddam Hussein, even though there was no evidence of his involvement. Stephen Cambone, a Rumsfeld aide, scribbled notes, using abbreviations for Hussein and bin Laden: “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. @ same time—Not only UBL.”

  At the White House, the air in the bunker had grown stale and heavy with carbon dioxide. Secret Service agents tried to clear space around Cheney. David Addington asked nonessential people to leave. Cheney had grown concerned that the president’s brief statements were not enough to let Americans know that their government was operating. He was loath to make a public appearance himself, knowing it would fuel the impression that he was really running the show. “We were at war,” he said later. “Our commander in chief needed to be seen as in charge, strong, and resolute—as George W. Bush was. My speaking publicly would not serve that cause.” So he assigned Karen Hughes to conduct a briefing.

  He wanted to make sure she had the best information when she did. By now, he knew just one plane had gone down, but he was still unsure whether it was because of his order.

  “Call the NMCC,” Cheney told his aide Eric Edelman, referring to the National Military Command Center, “and make sure we didn’t shoot that plane down. We only get one chance to have the first take on the story, and if we get it wrong, we’ll pay an enormous price. So make sure we didn’t shoot it down.”

  Edelman made the call. The military staff at the center said no, there was no contact between air force fighters and the plane that went down in Pennsylvania.

  Edelman reported back.

  “Go ask them again,” Cheney instructed.

  “But, sir, I just asked them.”

  “Go ask them to check again.”

  Edelman got back on the phone and asked the military center to double-check. No, came the response, we had nothing to do with it. Edelman reported back to Cheney again.

  Still unsatisfied, Cheney said, “I want you to go make sure.”

  Edelman made a third call and for the third time came back with the same answer.

  Only then was Cheney satisfied.

  BUSH LANDED AT Offutt at 2:50 p.m. East Coast time and headed into a command center like the one in the movie WarGames. At 3:15 p.m., the president convened a secure videoconference with top advisers. Appearing on separate video feeds were Cheney, Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and Robert Mueller, who had been FBI director for just a week.

  “We’re at war,” Bush began. “We will find these people and they will suffer the consequence of taking on this nation. We will do what it takes.”

  Tenet told him it did indeed look as if al-Qaeda were responsible. A check of the manifests of the four hijacked planes had found three passengers who were known members, and electronic surveillance had picked up congratulatory communications among al-Qaeda figures.

  Even as they discussed the response, a voice interrupted the videoconference to announce that a plane from Madrid was not responding to radio calls; permission to shoot it down was requested. When is this going to end? Bush thought. He authorized lethal action if necessary. Soon the voice interrupted again to report that the Madrid flight had landed in Lisbon.

  Bush understood it was not going to end and that his presidency as he knew it was over. “We are at war against terror,” he declared. “From this day forward, this is the new priority of our administration.”

  After the conference, he ordered his plane back to Washington so he could address the nation from the Oval Office. “If I’m in the White House and there’s a plane coming my way, all I can say is I hope I read my Bible that day,” he said.

  Before taking off, he called Theodore Olson, the lawyer who had handled Bush v. Gore and later became his solicitor general. Olson’s wife, Barbara, a lawyer and well-known political figure in Washington, had been on the plane that hit the Pentagon. Bush promised Olson he would find the people responsible.

  After landing at Andrews Air Force Base, Bush boarded his marine helicopter to fly the last few miles to the White House. As it banked over Washington, he
saw the plumes of smoke still emerging from the Pentagon. “The mightiest building in the world is on fire,” he muttered. “That’s the twenty-first-century war you just witnessed.”

  Marine One touched down at 6:55 p.m. on the South Lawn, where picnic tables and chuckwagons had been set up only that morning for a congressional picnic that was to be held that evening. Bush met with aides for a few minutes and then headed to the bunker, which he had never visited before. He found Laura waiting for him and hugged her, then caught up with Cheney.

  At 8:30 p.m., Bush sat at his desk in the Oval Office as cameras transmitted his first extensive remarks on the crisis. The speechwriters had hashed through multiple drafts, but in the end Hughes put her pen through most of it. Bush did not declare war that night, because he wanted to reassure Americans, and he uttered lines that made the speechwriters cringe, such as “These acts shattered steel but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.” The speechwriters called it the “Awful Office Address.” Michael Gerson, who had been stuck in highway traffic near the Pentagon when the hijacked plane hurtled into the building, thought it was “unequal to the moment” and made Bush look “stiff and small.”

  But one line from the speechwriter Matthew Scully survived: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them.”

  Just like that, Bush declared a sweeping new doctrine in American security, one that he had not discussed in advance with Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, or Colin Powell. This would not be “pounding sand,” as he often characterized what he saw as Bill Clinton’s feckless responses to terrorist attacks of the past. This would be going after anyone and any nation that had anything to do with it, including Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda had bases, and possibly even Iraq, which was a designated state sponsor of terrorism.

  After another meeting, Cheney, his wife, and his top aides headed out to the South Lawn, where they boarded a white-topped marine helicopter and took off at 9:57 p.m. Like Bush hours earlier, Cheney saw the damaged Pentagon, a searing image that to him evoked the War of 1812, the last time foreign forces attacked the American capital.

  The Cheneys headed to what would be called an undisclosed secure location—in this case, Camp David, where they landed at 10:30 p.m. and settled into Aspen, the president’s cabin. Liz Cheney and her family had already been brought to the camp. As a general rule, only the president lands or takes off from the South Lawn; even when Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, George H. W. Bush, rushing back to town, refused to land on the South Lawn. But Cheney was implementing protocols he had learned during the 1980s, keeping the president and the vice president apart in case of a devastating attack. He returned to the White House during the day but slept much of the next week at Camp David, the beginning of a months-long period of quasi-seclusion.

  As for Bush, Carl Truscott, head of his Secret Service detail, told him to sleep that night in the bunker. Bush saw an old couch with a fold-out bed that he imagined Harry Truman himself had put in. “There is no way I’m sleeping there,” he declared, and headed upstairs to his own room.

  As he lay in bed, images of the day flashed through his mind, planes crashing into the symbols of the nation’s might, passengers realizing the end was near, some even fighting back, firefighters and police officers rushing in to help, buildings collapsing into so much dust. Why had this happened? What was the right response? How could he balance reassurance with resolve? How could he find a shadowy enemy that waged a secret war from caves halfway around the world? Lying next to him, Laura sensed him staring into the darkness.

  Then the president noticed a silhouette in the door and heard heavy breathing.

  It was a Secret Service agent. “Mr. President! Mr. President! You’ve got to come now. The White House is under attack.”

  Bush threw on a pair of running shorts and Laura a robe. He scooped up Barney, the Scottish terrier, while she grabbed Kitty the cat, and they called for Spot, the springer spaniel, to follow. The first lady was virtually blind without her contacts, so the president led her down the hallway.

  Agents armed with assault rifles rushed them down to the bunker. Neil Bush was there, as were Andy Card, Condoleezza Rice, and the president’s housekeeper. Bush heard the slam and hiss of the pressurized metal doors closing behind them.

  After a minute or two, an air force enlisted man announced, “Don’t worry, Mr. President, it’s one of ours.”

  An F-16 had the wrong transponder code on. The president in his running shorts and the blurry-eyed first lady in her robe trudged back upstairs with their pets and tried to rest.

  8

  “Whatever it takes”

  When the Bushes woke the next morning, the first lady noticed piles of strollers on the lawn. Tourists visiting the White House had abandoned them and grabbed their children when the building was evacuated. It seemed nothing would ever be the same again. Suddenly the White House was brimming with guns, and military units were in the streets of the capital. Many people who worked for them were afraid to come back. And her husband was to be tested in a way he never expected.

  President Bush had not fared well the day before. His decision to remain in the Florida classroom listening to children read, his peripatetic journey from air base to air base, his long disappearance from the public stage, and his unsteady statements had not sent a reassuring message in a moment of crisis. His advisers understood that and were defensive. Karl Rove tracked down the presidential historian Robert Dallek and the columnist William Safire, after they were critical of the president’s slow-motion return to Washington, to tell them that Air Force One had been targeted. Dallek interpreted the call as an act of intimidation against anyone questioning the president. At the very least, it reflected a recognition that impressions harden quickly, and if the memory that day was of Bush in a seeming flight from danger, it could hobble his presidency.

  Bush began a series of meetings to fashion a response to the attacks. As he sat with top officials reviewing the damage, he grew increasingly angry and suddenly turned in the direction of Attorney General John Ashcroft.

  “Don’t ever let this happen again,” Bush said.

  It was not clear whether he meant that as a message specifically for the attorney general or for everyone in the room, but Ashcroft “took it personally.”

  George Tenet reported that he was certain now that Osama bin Laden’s network was behind the hijackings. Going after it would require expanded powers and money, he said.

  “Whatever it takes,” Bush said.

  He turned to Robert Mueller, the new FBI director.

  “Give me a brief,” Bush instructed. “Where are we on what’s happening?”

  Mueller agreed that al-Qaeda was to blame, noting that hijackers could be heard over air traffic control radio calling on Allah. He reported on the latest in the investigation. But as the conversation moved forward, Mueller grew concerned by talk of aggressive action at the expense of traditional procedures.

  “Wait a second,” he said at one point. “If we do some of these things, it may impair our ability to prosecute.”

  Ashcroft cut him off. “We simply can’t let this happen again,” he said, echoing Bush. “Prosecution cannot be our priority. If we lose the ability to prosecute, that’s fine, but we have to prevent the next attack. Prevention has to be our top priority.”

  Ashcroft paused to see if Bush agreed and, deciding that he did, plunged ahead. “The chief mission of U.S. law enforcement is to stop another attack and apprehend any accomplices and terrorists before they hit us again,” he said. “If we can’t bring them to trial, so be it.”

  At 11:30 a.m., leaders of Congress joined Bush in the Cabinet Room. To some, he seemed drained both mentally and physically. But as he briefed the lawmakers, he took a decisive tone. “This is the beginning of war in the twenty-first century,” he began. “It will require a new strategy.” He talked about rescue efforts in New York, mentioned emerging details about the passengers on United
Airlines Flight 93 who fought back, and broached the need for additional law enforcement powers, emergency spending, and authorization to use force.

  “We will answer the bloodlust of the American people that is rightly at boil,” Bush said. “We’ll spend our capital wisely and make it stick. We’ll be patient. We are at war. The dream of the enemy was for us not to meet in this building. They wanted the White House in rubble.”

  Bush laid out his evolving new doctrine that stated that harboring terrorists would be held just as accountable. “These guys are like rattlesnakes,” he said, falling back on Texas aphorisms. “They’ll go back into their hole. Not only will we strike the hole, we’ll strike the rancher.” At the same time, he emphasized that Arab Americans should not be scapegoated.

  Tom Daschle grew concerned by the talk of war. Not that he did not regard what happened as a singular assault on the United States, but he noted that the term “war” had been used indiscriminately over the years—the war on poverty, the war on cancer, the war on drugs. Daschle felt they should avoid once again using a term that might not result in a tangible victory.

  “War is a very powerful word,” he told Bush. “This war is so vastly different. Take great care in your rhetorical calculations.”

  Some Bush advisers were quietly stunned. Careful about calling it war? If this was not war, what was? But Bush chose not to engage in a debate.

  He got more support from the other Democratic leader, Representative Richard Gephardt. “Mr. President, the most important thing here now is that we trust one another,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we are going to agree on everything—we never do—but our commitment to the American people is to keep them safe, and to do that, we have to really work together and basically put politics aside in making these decisions as much as we can.”

  Late that afternoon, Bush traveled across the Potomac River to the Pentagon. The building was still burning, and crews were still pulling bodies from the wreckage. Bush put his arm around Rumsfeld’s shoulder. He shook hands and reaffirmed that America would “not be cowed by terrorists.” Making his way back to his car, he found soldiers from the morgue detail who had approached Joe Hagin, the deputy White House chief of staff, to meet the president. Bush talked at length with the men in their protective suits and rubber gloves and boots. “He went down that line, took a long, long time with them,” Hagin recalled.