43*

by Jeff Greenfield

  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?

  At 5 p.m., an ashen-faced but composed President Gore stepped into the East Room to deliver a televised address to the nation. With him were former presidents Clinton and Bush, as well as Texas governor George W. Bush—flown to Washington from Dallas on a military jet.

  “This day, September 11, 2001, will forever live in our memory as the most deadly assault on the United States in our history,” President Gore began. “Thousands of innocent citizens, of all ages, races, and creeds, are dead in the heart of our greatest city. Hundreds more are dead in the building that houses those who wear the uniform of our country and defend our freedom.

  “And in the halls of the Congress, where I was once privileged to serve, we do not yet know the full toll of who we have lost.

  “But this much I pledge to you: September 11 will also go down in history as the day when the United States demonstrated to the world that we will survive this assault on freedom; that we will respond massively to those who unleashed this barbarous assault; and that we will emerge from this tragedy stronger and more united than ever. Our answer to our enemies will be swift, remorseless, and overwhelming. They will learn what our enemies have learned through two centuries of struggle. And they will learn—starting right now—that they have fatally misjudged the courage, resilience, and will of this great nation.

  “Now, I would like to ask the former presidents who have come here, and members of Congress as well, to join me as we march down Pennsylvania Avenue to pay homage to those who have fallen, and to reaffirm our determination to meet this challenge, as we have met every challenge before.”

  With that, the president beckoned to those behind him and to his silent, somber audience. They filed out of the East Room and out of the West Gate of the White House and began to march in absolute silence down Pennsylvania Avenue. At 8th Street, a congressman—no one later remembered exactly who—began to sing “God Bless America,” and within seconds the president and those marching behind him joined in. They sang “America the Beautiful” and then, as they reached the Capitol grounds, lit by floodlights powered by dozens of emergency generators, they bowed their heads in silent prayer and sang “God Bless America” once again. That evening, it appeared that the president’s plea for national unity would be honored.

  But appearances can be deceiving.

  * * *

  Had the courageous passengers aboard United 93 had more time—even ten minutes more—the history of the United States might well have taken a very different turn.

  Had that plane and its thirty-three passengers and seven crew members crashed into a rural area of southeastern Ohio or the middle of Pennsylvania or even a Maryland suburb, the focus of national grief and anger would have been on lower Manhattan, with its three thousand dead, the tens of thousands more who had somehow escaped the collapse of the Twin Towers, the 343 firefighters and twenty-three police officers who had died trying to save others.

  But the nation’s focus now was two hundred miles south; the shocking images of the wounded Capitol building dominated every newscast, every front page, with a cost that would not be fully understood for months.

  There was, at first, the wrenching reality of the near-destruction of the Capitol. At every other moment of national crisis, this was the place where the nation had sought—and found—solace and ceremony. The murdered presidents, from Lincoln to Kennedy, had lain in state there; it was on the East Front steps that Franklin Roosevelt had told America in 1933 that “the only thing we have to fear is … fear itself,” and it was inside the House chamber on December 8, 1941, that he had pledged, on the day after Pearl Harbor, “We shall gain the inevitable victory—so help me God.”

  But now the Capitol was gravely damaged; on that evening of September 11, when President Gore and the members of Congress had walked to the site, the gathering had less the appearance of a stalwart band of fighters and more the look of the residents of a hurricane-ravaged town, stunned, shocked by the force of what had just hit them.

  Moreover, that image of a broken symbol was instantly embraced around the world by enemies and adversaries of the United States. In the Arab streets, from Ramallah to Cairo, in Muslim nations from Pakistan to Morocco, T-shirts appeared, emblazoned with the Capitol in flames. “Allahu Akbar!” some proclaimed. SUPERPOWER? was the mocking question asked on posters that began appearing in the streets of Damascus and Karachi.

  For the president, and for the Congress, there were immediate, urgent matters to resolve: where to convene the nation’s political leaders for the speech that would reassure the citizenry and the world—and where to find a temporary home for the legislative branch of the government. The answer to the first came quickly: On Thursday, September 20, a joint session of Congress was convened at Constitution Hall, the seventy-two-year-old headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution, across from the Ellipse that faces the White House. The neoclassical design and limestone exterior mirrored the look of official Washington, and its 1,234-seat orchestra was more than large enough to accommodate the members of Congress, the Cabinet, and the other dignitaries who attended such events. All 2,200 seats in the tiers above the orchestra were filled; in each of the fifty-two boxes sat families and colleagues of the fallen: New York City police and firefighters, Pentagon personnel, families of the House and Senate members. Behind the president sat Vice President Lieberman and acting speaker Tom DeLay—a reminder that Speaker Hastert had been one of the victims of the strike on the Capitol.

  The president’s speech met with near-universal favor. There was solemn, sustained applause for the widow of United 93 passenger Todd Beamer, whose “Let’s roll!” had become a national rallying cry; a standing ovation for the family of the Capitol Police sergeant who had pulled six House members to safety before being killed by a falling piece of rubble. There were cheers for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had flown from London (and whose presence led a half-dozen TV talking heads to note that the last attack on the Capitol had been at the hands of British troops during the War of 1812).

  The speech itself drew repeated standing ovations: its invocation of America’s traditions; its indictment of Al Qaeda as “a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam”; its injunction that “the malevolent spirit of their now dead leader continues to spawn new horrors”; its declaration of a new Office of Homeland Security, “to be led by New York’s heroic mayor, Rudolph Giuliani”; the pledge to “rebuild our Capitol by the time we celebrate the nation’s birthday on July 4, 2002.” And then there was its concluding promise: “Fellow citizens,” President Gore said, staring directly into the camera, “we shall meet violence with patient justice, assured of the rightness of our cause and confident of the victories to come.”

  The second matter to be resolved was far more difficult: Where could the Congress meet? The answer came from Elaine Kamarck, one of President Gore’s closest advisors, who had stepped out of the White House for ten minutes of fresh air after three straight all-day, all-night crisis meetings.

  “It’s right there, across the street from the Treasury building,” she said to Chief of Staff Ron Klain. “It even looks like it could be part of the Capitol.”

  “It” was the seventy-five-year-old national headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one o
f the most powerful lobbying organizations in the country, one deeply devoted to low corporate tax rates, accelerated depreciation schedules, and a gentle regulatory environment. With its three-story Corinthian columns, its Indiana-limestone facade, its spacious Hall of Flags auditorium, and its many meeting rooms, the building came as close as possible to meeting the needs of a suddenly homeless Congress. And with the joint importuning of a Democratic president and a Republican House, along with the pledge of “just compensation,” the Chamber agreed to let the Congress use the building as its temporary home.

  “It’s really not that much of a stretch,” Representative Barney Frank remarked during a CNN interview. “The Chamber has half the House on permanent retainer as it is.”

  The relocation to a temporary home, however, only underscored just how devastating the attack on the Capitol had been.

  There was the mundane but vital business of Washington—the requests, demands, pleas from citizens in dealing with the behemoth that was the federal government; “constituent services,” it was called. My Social Security check has gone missing. Medicare won’t reimburse me. What happened to my veteran’s benefits? My son needs an emergency discharge from the Army. Now, hundreds of thousands of these requests in the files of congressional offices had either been lost or rendered inaccessible. On the legislative side, there was simply no way to measure how much had been lost—how many tons of paper, how many gigabytes’ worth of bills, amendments, congressional research memos, committee-hearing transcripts, and all the other fuel of the work of Congress.

  But the human cost was incalculably greater.

  Twenty-nine members of the House were known to have been killed when United Flight 93 sideswiped the Capitol Dome; eight others were missing and presumed dead, including Speaker Hastert.

  On the other side of the dome, nine United States senators had died, among them Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and all six members of his leadership team, who had perished when hundreds of pounds of cast iron slammed into Room 219, where they had gathered for that morning’s meeting. As longtime congressional watcher Norm Ornstein first noted, five of them—Daschle, Dorgan, Mikulski, Bill Nelson, and Harry Reid—came from states with Republican governors; their power to appoint replacements for the deceased members meant there was a real chance that the terrorists had potentially given control of the United States Senate to the Republicans.

  The news from across 1st Street, at the U.S. Supreme Court, was equally unsettling. Chief Justice William Rehnquist had been struck by a piece of marble when a stray part from United 93 dislodged the cornice over the Supreme Court’s main entrance; he had died instantly. With him was Justice Antonin Scalia, who had made a last-minute decision to join the Judicial Conference in order, he had joked, to do “some serious cocktail time lobbying on originalism.” Scalia was in critical condition at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where his prospects for survival were, according to National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg, “no better than fifty-fifty. His return to the court,” she added, “is at this moment dubious at best.” Because the court was legally able to function with a quorum of six members, the removal of two conservative justices would leave the court with seven members, shifting the balance of power from a 4–4 liberal-conservative split (with Sandra Day O’Connor as the occasional swing justice) to a 4–3 liberal majority.

  Still, in those first days after the attacks, there was reason to believe that the sheer magnitude of what had happened had shocked America’s leaders into shelving the political concerns these deaths had triggered, and perhaps even putting aside the toxic politics that had dominated the last days of the twentieth century and the first days of the twenty-first.

  * * *

  On Saturday, September 22, President Gore summoned the congressional leaders of both parties to a weekend gathering at Camp David. By Sunday night they had hammered out a response to the impending political crisis.

  “We’ve lost nine senators,” Gore said to the leaders of both parties, “and five of them are from states with Republican governors. We’ve also lost two Supreme Court justices; I learned last night that Justice Scalia will be unable to return to the bench. What I propose is that, as much as possible, we offer up a clear signal to the world that we’re responding to this with one voice.” In a joint television appearance Sunday night, Gore and the congressional leaders urged the governors to appoint the chiefs of staff of the deceased senators as their temporary replacements and to schedule special elections in November to replace both the senators and the House members who had perished.

  “Given the political realities in those states,” the president said, “this will likely lead to a Republican Senate majority when Congress reconvenes in January, but that pales in comparison to the proof our agreement will offer that our system is alive and flourishing.”

  The president also agreed to an extraordinary break with tradition in replacing Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia. He would choose one nominee and pick the other from a five-person list submitted by the Republican leadership. Three days later, the president stood in the Rose Garden to announce the two new Supreme Court nominees: José Cabranes, the sixty-year-old liberal judge from the Second Circuit—who would become the first Hispanic on the high court—and fifty-seven-year-old J. Harvie Wilkinson, a conservative favorite from the Fourth Circuit. There were grumblings from the left (“Why are you letting the right wing pick a justice? That’s your prerogative!”) and from the right (“Why are you enshrining a liberal court for the next decade?”), but the compromise met with widespread approval.

  So did the decision to scale back the work of the Congress for the rest of 2001. The House and Senate would meet only to keep the essential machinery of the government running: continuing resolutions to fund the departments, a supplemental appropriation for military operations in Afghanistan and for the new Office of Homeland Security, and a vote to increase the debt ceiling so that the government could pay its bills. “You know,” Majority Leader Trent Lott said, “it’s not as if anyone could seriously vote against paying bills we already owe and risk the credit of the richest country in the world.”

  On the editorial pages of America’s newspapers, there were approving words for bipartisan cooperation, complete with references to the British coalition government during World War II. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote of the need for a “Grand Bargain.” “In an age when the world is flat, any report of discord in our wounded land will only inspire our enemies.” Similar sentiments appeared on the editorial pages of the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune. The tone of what was called “National Concord” was underscored by the powerful acts of civic mourning: the interfaith service at Washington’s National Cathedral and the Concert for America, at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where Bruce Springsteen sang the song he had written for the occasion, “The Fallen.”

  But if anyone thought the collaborative atmosphere of those first days would last, they were seriously misreading both American history and the particular circumstances that would soon afflict the president.

  * * *

  In the two decades before September 2001, powerful media voices had arisen, voices far less committed to the instincts of older media, far more willing to speak quickly and loudly. On September 14, Rush Limbaugh devoted a full hour of his radio broadcast to a single theme: “What Has Al Gore Been Doing for Eight and a Half Years?”

  “This is a man who has been in Washington since the 1970s!” Limbaugh thundered. “For eight years, as vice president, he sat on the National Security Council. Every member of his national security team has been on the job for years, some for decades. Yes, every one of us should stand behind the president when he sends our men into battle against the forces who attacked our country. But that should not stop the Congress—and, yes, the liberal media, if they dare—from demanding answers to some very hard questions.”

  By midafternoon the Drudge Report was
flashing a red siren on its home page with a huge headline blaring, NINE YEARS OF NEGLECT? The next morning, Senator Jesse Helms, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called for hearings to find out “how this catastrophic failure of intelligence could have happened on the watch of a president who has spent eight and a half years at the center of executive power. Just six months ago, he told the Congress and the nation that the enemies of America had no place to hide. Those words ring hollow today. They were, in fact, hiding in plain sight.” On the House side, acting speaker Tom DeLay, who had pushed the House into impeaching President Clinton three years earlier, proposed a select investigative committee “to probe the catastrophic intelligence failure, wherever it may lead.”

  From senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and others came dutiful denunciations of Helms and DeLay for “playing politics at a time of national tragedy.” But the response from most Democrats was muted. Clearly, there had been a disastrous intelligence failure; the fact that four commercial airliners had been simultaneously hijacked, by men whose ties to terrorism were being quickly revealed, was proof enough. But there was another reason many on the liberal side of the spectrum were decidedly less eager to come to the president’s defense: the New Yorker article by Sy Hersh, appearing one day before September 11, that had examined in critical detail the Predator drone attack that had killed Osama bin Laden. In the wake of September 11, the comments and warnings of dissenting intelligence and defense officials in that article had taken on a whole new, darker dimension. Wasn’t it a dangerous precedent to invest a clandestine intelligence-gathering agency with this kind of life-and-death power? Hersh had ended his story with a quote from a “veteran intelligence operative” who had warned, “There is no more dangerous, less predictable force than ‘blowback’—when a covert operation triggers violence against the civilian population of the instigator. I wake up every morning in fear that we will feel the force of that blowback right here at home.”