by Peter Baker
Speaker Dennis Hastert had been urging Bush to address a joint session of Congress, much as Franklin Roosevelt had done after Pearl Harbor. Karl Rove and Karen Hughes agreed, but Michael Gerson opposed it, and Bush was reluctant without something to say. Gerson and his fellow speechwriters, Matthew Scully and John McConnell, were told to produce a draft by 7:00 p.m. They objected that it was impossible but were given no choice.
As the three men huddled over a computer screen, they tried to frame the emerging war and the enemy they now faced. Each contributed memorable lines. McConnell, for instance, came up with the idea of predicting terrorism would be relegated to “history’s graveyard of discarded lies.” When Bush read the draft and saw another line quoting Roosevelt, he ordered it removed. “I don’t want to quote anyone,” he said. “I want to lead. I want to be the guy they quote.” He was not happy either with a line about not yielding or resting, seeing that as too negative, but let it remain. He agreed with Hughes, who was pushing to keep a line urging Americans to “live your lives and hug your children,” over the objections of the speechwriters, who thought it trite. Hughes also suggested Bush hold up the badge Arlene Howard had given him.
With his black Sharpie pen, Bush could be a tough editor of speeches. He was far more involved in crafting them than Cheney, who generally did not invest as much energy in the art of speech making. Bush had set ideas about writing he remembered from a Yale language class. He liked active verbs and emphatic statements; he hated passive construction. He refused to begin a sentence with the word “it” and scratched out throat-clearing phrases like “I am here to say” or “As I mentioned before.” He did not like “I think” or “I believe.” He took out adjectives. He wanted a beginning, middle, and end and was intolerant of repeating the same point. For lyricists like Gerson, Bush’s Texas cadence and vernacular could be a challenge.
In this case, though, Gerson’s concern was more prosaic. The speech had no real takeaway, no news. Then Rice showed up with several paragraphs laying down an ultimatum to the Taliban.
“Is this news enough for you?” she asked.
Yes, he said. That would do.
WHILE BUSH THOUGHT about how to reassure and yet prepare the country for a new era of warfare, Cheney found himself absorbed by the danger of a biological attack. It showed up in the intelligence briefings with unnerving regularity, and it was all the more frightening because the impact could be more powerful than hijacked aircraft. Indeed, it had been a preoccupation of Cheney’s since long before September 11. As soon as a few moments allowed on his schedule, the vice president summoned experts to a conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on September 20.
Cheney listened impassively but intently as the specialists told him about a two-day exercise called Dark Winter conducted by several academic institutes at Andrews Air Force Base in June examining what would happen in the event of a smallpox outbreak in Oklahoma. The former senator Sam Nunn played the president, the former White House aide David Gergen played the national security adviser, the former deputy defense secretary John White played the defense secretary, the former CIA director James Woolsey and the former FBI director William Sessions reprised their old jobs, and Governor Frank Keating of Oklahoma played himself. A handful of reporters participated, including Judith Miller of the New York Times. The results were ominous. Within thirteen days, the disease had spread to twenty-five states and fifteen other countries; within months, three million people were infected and one million dead. The exercise concluded that government response plans were inadequate.
“What does a biological weapon look like?” Cheney asked the experts.
Randall Larsen, a retired air force colonel who had studied biological warfare, pulled a test tube from his briefcase. “Sir,” he said dramatically, “it looks like this.”
The test tube contained what he said was a weaponized powder of Bacillus globigii, a biological agent. It was harmless but nearly identical to Bacillus anthracis, which causes anthrax, and no more difficult to make. “And by the way,” Larsen said, “I did just carry this into your office.”
As Cheney delved deeper into the dark side, Bush prepared for a speech that he knew would define the remainder of his presidency. For his first rehearsal in the family theater of the White House, he was wearing a sweat suit and was in a casual mood. When he came to the point where he was to hold up the badge, he held up a water bottle instead. By his final practice, though, he seemed different, more sober, more serious, as if steadying himself. A cap had fallen off a back tooth, but he ignored the discomfort.
After he practiced the speech on the afternoon of September 20, Bush went upstairs to rest but ended up on a series of phone calls. By evening, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain arrived, straight from a transatlantic flight. Bush was glad to see Blair, who was rapidly becoming his closest friend on the world stage. Bush’s steady demeanor surprised Blair. “He was unbelievably, almost preternaturally calm,” Blair recalled. Worried about a precipitous reaction to the attacks that could alienate the rest of the world, Blair asked Bush about Iraq. Bush reassured him that Saddam Hussein was not the immediate problem. Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, found it ironic that Margaret Thatcher had warned Bush’s father after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait not to “go wobbly,” and now, as he saw it, another British prime minister was telling another president Bush, “This is a time to wobble.”
The two leaders joined advisers for a dinner of scallops, veal, and salad. Bush, relaxed, picked up the thin ring of pastry on top of the scallop.
“God dang, what on earth is that?” he asked.
The server, misunderstanding, said it was a scallop.
Bush said it looked like a halo over an angel.
Over dinner, Bush expressed concern that others were using September 11 for their own purposes, naming in particular Israel and Russia, both of which were fighting Muslim militants. Bush told Blair he had pressed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel not to go after Yasser Arafat. “I said Arafat is not bin Laden and you do nothing,” Bush said. Likewise, Vladimir Putin seemed to be angling to escalate his military operation against Chechen rebels. At home, Bush said his advisers feared another attack and worried Hollywood might be the next target since Islamic radicals believed it was dominated by Jewish executives spreading decadent material around the world.
Blair said they needed to keep public opinion behind them and urged him to focus on al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
“I agree with you, Tony,” Bush said. “We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.”
The speech was not long away, and Blair tried to excuse himself to give Bush time to collect himself. But Bush would not let him go, insisting he stay and talk. He did not want to be alone. The presence of a friend was reassuring.
As they got into the White House elevator to head to the motorcade, Blair asked Bush if he was nervous. This would be the biggest speech of his presidency to date.
“No, not really,” Bush answered. “I have a speech here and the message is clear.”
Indeed, Bush looked to Blair as if he were comfortable not only with the speech but, more broadly, with his new mission.
Bush arrived at the Capitol and privately greeted congressional leaders, who were struck by his presence and confidence. Bush had made an important transition from the awkward uncertainty of September 11 to the leader of a wartime nation, some thought. “He looked more like a commander in chief than ever before,” Tom Daschle reflected. “It was as if he had actually grown a suit size or two.”
Mounting the rostrum in the House chamber, Bush began to turn the nation from grief to determination. He explained to Americans who had never heard of al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden what he saw as the roots of the attacks. He vowed tolerance for peaceful Muslims. And he laid down his ultimatum to Afghanistan’s leadership.
“Tonight, the United States makes the following demands on the Taliban,” he int
oned. Among them was to hand over al-Qaeda leaders and shut down their training camps. “These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share their fate.”
Bush defined al-Qaeda as an enemy of American freedom, ignoring bin Laden’s own statements about specific grievances against the United States, such as the troops still present in Saudi Arabia a decade after the Gulf War. “Americans are asking why do they hate us?” Bush said. “They hate what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”
Joining Blair in the House gallery were Tom Ridge, who had agreed to head the new White House Office of Homeland Security, and Lisa Beamer, widow of Todd Beamer, whose reported words “Let’s roll” came to stand for the determination of the passengers who attempted to retake United Airlines Flight 93 and inspired the nation. Bush warned that the war would be long and arduous, sometimes visible, and sometimes in the shadows. He held up the police badge Arlene Howard had given him. “I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it,” he said. Then, summoning a Churchillian tone, he uttered the line he had resisted but that would become a memorable statement of resolve: “I will not yield. I will not rest. I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.”
He spoke for forty-one minutes and was interrupted thirty-one times by applause, and if the nation was not sure what to think of him when he started, many millions came to agree with Daschle by the end. The speech hit all the right notes and generated a standing ovation. Even some of his harshest Democratic critics believed he had hit a home run. As Bush made his way out of the chamber, he encountered Daschle, and the two embraced, the conservative president and the liberal senator swept up in the emotion of the moment. Unwittingly, they created a symbolic statement of national unity as newspapers transmitted pictures of “The Hug” across the world.
Afterward, Bush learned that the speech had drawn rapt audiences across the country; even a game between the Philadelphia Flyers and the New York Rangers at First Union Center in Philadelphia was suspended when fans insisted on watching the president speak on the Jumbotron rather than proceed with the third period.
After all the stumbling moments, the scripted statements that came across as stilted or forced, Bush now seemed to be in the zone. Nine days after the calamity, he had found his voice. He was almost exuberant afterward, in a way he rarely was following a speech.
“What do you think, Barty?” Bush asked Dan Bartlett.
“You did a great job,” Bartlett responded.
“I’ve never been more comfortable in my life giving a speech,” Bush said.
He called Gerson, who made a point of never actually attending the big addresses he helped write. The president was upbeat. “I have never felt more comfortable in my life,” Bush repeated.
The next morning, Bush got on the phone with Daschle. “Did we get into trouble last night for hugging each other?” he asked lightly. After all, this was a town where that could cause either of them political grief.
“I don’t think so,” Daschle responded. “It just seemed like the natural thing to do. I think that was what the American people expected.”
9
“The first battle of the war”
In the weeks after September 11, Vice President Cheney, the commanding presence at every table, suddenly became a disembodied voice emanating from a video screen. The fear of a “second wave” consumed the White House, and Cheney spent much of his time removed from the building to maintain presidential succession in case the worst happened. To avoid overlap, a special color-coded schedule showed the future locations of Trailblazer and Angler, as the Secret Service called the president and the vice president.
The notion of the vice president disappearing to an “undisclosed secure location” captured the public imagination, first as a chilling sign of the way life had changed and later as fodder for a thousand late-night jokes. In truth, the infamous undisclosed location was often no more mysterious than the vice president’s residence. Since it was several miles up the road from the White House, as long as no one knew that was where he was, that was good enough. “The whole goal was to keep them separate,” said Neil Patel, a top Cheney aide. Scooter Libby would join the vice president in the office on the third floor of his official residence on the Naval Observatory grounds, and a couple of other aides like Patel would squeeze into a tiny office to the side or borrow space in a larger office on the main floor where Lynne Cheney’s staff was located.
More often, the secret hideout was Camp David, for once in its history serving as a de facto headquarters and refuge from danger rather than the scene of family holidays and the occasional Middle East summit. Accompanied by Libby, a personal aide, secretary, military aide, doctor, and either Patel or David Addington, Cheney would fly up by helicopter on Sunday nights, then fly back to Washington on Friday evenings. He and his staff got their own cabins, and they would join each other for breakfast and lunch in Laurel Lodge, then work out of the president’s office space all day. Cheney would usually retire for dinner by himself in his cabin. Sometimes he used a secret military compound bristling with satellite dishes and antennas known as Site R and located not far from Camp David on the Pennsylvania border. And his vacation house in Wyoming served the same purpose at times.
The attention to security affected almost everything. The president’s and the vice president’s schedules were no longer distributed by e-mail, and the passwords to access them were restricted. Cheney, who at first had still escaped to the grocery store, now lived in a tighter security bubble than any vice president before; his motorcade no longer stopped at traffic lights, and his armored vehicle was equipped with a protective suit in the event of chemical or biological attack.
The physical constraints took Cheney away at the very moment when he was most engaged. He participated in most meetings via a secure video hookup that proved disconcerting. A curtain would be set up behind him so no one would know his location; once, it was jostled, and aides recognized the backdrop as Cheney’s own home. In another surreal moment, the vice president nodded off on-screen.
The phrase “undisclosed secure location” quickly entered the cultural lexicon. One day when he emerged from what aides called “the Cave” to return to the White House, one of Cheney’s domestic policy advisers, Ron Christie, gave him a recording of a Saturday Night Live sketch in which the vice president’s secret location was revealed as Kandahar, Afghanistan, and he was presented as a “one-man Afghani wrecking crew” demolishing the Taliban and al-Qaeda single-handedly. The comic Cheney, played by Darrell Hammond, explained how he could do this with a weak heart by tearing open his shirt to reveal a metal device attached to his chest.
“I got me a bionic ticker!” the impersonator crowed. “This thing regulates my heartbeat, it gives me night vision and renders me completely invisible on radar!”
Then, pushing a button, he said, “Check this out.” Coffee began pouring from the mechanical heart. “I brew my own Sanka! Oh yeah, now that’s good coffee.”
What a difference a few months had made. Before September 11, the running joke on Saturday Night Live had been Cheney’s monotonous demeanor: giving a speech on energy policy, the ersatz Cheney said he had personally demonstrated conservation by putting his personality into an “energy-saving mode.” Cheney, unsurprisingly, enjoyed the revamped version, describing the bionic-heart skit as one of his favorites.
Even beyond the vice president’s absences, the West Wing in the weeks following the attacks was almost unrecognizable. Large, menacing men swathed in black and armed with assault rifles and shotguns suddenly showed up everywhere. Tours were cut off. Access to the West Wing was restricted. The staff table at the White House mess was larg
ely empty many days, as if aides were “either unable or unwilling to be seen” taking a break from work. “We were all under an almost suffocating amount of tension and stress,” as Christie put it. Staff members went to work thinking they might never get married or have children because there was a decent chance they might be killed—all very dramatic sounding years later and yet the way it felt at the time. “You had brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, spouses, telling people you can’t work there anymore,” Joe Hagin said. Bush’s schedule was thrown out, and it took three weeks for his schedulers to get it back in order. The White House chef began preparing comfort food for the president, a lot of Black Angus beef fillet with gratin of silver corn or garlic-scented chicken breast with asparagus.
Each morning greeted Bush and Cheney with a new Threat Matrix, a compendium of potential horrors, as many as a hundred threats a day culled from a broad array of intelligence sources. They included everything from wiretap surveillance to anonymous tips; almost nothing, it seemed, was left out, no matter how far-fetched. In the post–September 11 world, no one wanted to take a chance of missing anything. But the shotgun approach undercut the usefulness of the reports since separating the real from the phantom was virtually impossible. The president and the vice president understood it was in part a “cover-your-ass kind of bureaucratic procedure,” as Cheney put it. But bombarding the commander in chief and his number two with endless reports of possible mayhem and tragedy naturally influenced the approach they took to defending the country. “It had a huge impact on our psyches,” Condoleezza Rice recalled. George Tenet later said it was impossible to read what crossed his desk “and be anything other than scared to death.” Laura Bush remembered the effect on her husband. “He didn’t bring it all home,” she said, “but he brought enough that I could see the lines cut deeper in his face and could hear him next to me lying awake at night, his mind still working.”