The Gores had moved back to Tipper’s childhood home, where they’d lived while he served in Congress. They still had Secret Service protection for another few months, but aside from men lurking behind trees, it was a normal suburban setting. We were just two couples sitting out on the deck on a spring night, checking out the hot tub the Gores had installed in their wooded backyard, having a lovely meal with some very good red wine. It was difficult to believe how close he had come to the presidency, and I admired how he was carrying on with his life. I don’t know whether Gore ever regretted his decision to refrain from challenging the final outcome. However, he must have wished he’d pursued a different legal strategy in Florida, challenging the statewide vote instead of “cherrypicking” the four counties he thought would give him an edge. A consortium of news organizations who reviewed the disputed Florida count a year later found Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all 175,000 rejected ballots.
A few weeks after our April dinner, Gore called to say that he wanted to surprise Tipper for their thirty-first wedding anniversary. He had scored tickets to the hottest show in New York, The Producers, and invited us to join them. His plan was for us to show up at their hotel for cocktails as part of the surprise. When we got there, he had organized champagne and hors d’oeuvres in their suite. She was still getting dressed and had no idea she was in for an evening of us or Nathan Lane. At the theater, the audience erupted in an ovation as the Gores were spotted going to their seats. They were clearly touched by the response. Al Gore had been in public life since he was barely back from Vietnam, and now he was making a tough adjustment, but gracefully.
His poignant isolation was in sharp contrast to the hubbub surrounding the beginnings of the new Bush administration. My immediate assignment was the secretary of state, Colin Powell, by far the most popular member of the new cabinet. I’d known him since he was the deputy to the national security advisor in Ronald Reagan’s White House and considered him a friend. I genuinely liked him, and had very warm feelings toward his wife, Alma. They had both been guests at our wedding. Now, as often happens in Washington, a former official was rotating back into government. I had to take a step back and figure out how to be a little more distant, and tough when necessary. It was going to be a difficult balancing act.
Powell’s first diplomatic mission overseas in January 2001 was to the Middle East, but, significantly, not to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Rather, it was to make the case against Saddam Hussein to Arab leaders. Immediately, he ran into a wall of opposition from Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak. He and others in the region were outraged by a decade of U.S. air strikes against Iraq and economic sanctions. Mubarak didn’t even show up for a joint news conference with Powell. Instead, as a sign of his displeasure, the Egyptian president sent his foreign minister to deliver an unvarnished criticism of America’s Iraq policy.
The next day, we went to Kuwait, where Powell, the president’s father, Margaret Thatcher, and other leaders from the first Gulf War were gathering for a tenth anniversary celebration of their victory over Saddam Hussein. Filmmaker Michael Moore would have had a field day. Half the former officials were now in business with Kuwait on lucrative investment deals. Powell, Schwarzkopf—the men who had decided not to go to Baghdad, and left Saddam in power—were now back warning that the Iraqi leader still could not be trusted.
While American and Kuwaiti troops performed war games in the desert, just fifteen miles south of Iraq’s border, former president Bush pledged, “We are never going to betray our responsibilities to continue to help preserve the peace of Kuwait. We fought too hard. Too many died.”
Powell’s words were tough, and in retrospect, prescient: “Iraq the aggressor sits stranded, trapped in a prison of its own making; its people and children put at risk by a regime that also puts at risk the people and children of the entire region by threatening to rebuild its army and manufacture weapons of mass destruction.”
It was a moment of sharp contrasts still imprinted on my memory—a blazing desert sun, a colorful parade of troops, and the slightly aged Gulf War victors once again hurling invectives at Saddam Hussein. The new administration was barely a month old. And the saber rattling wasn’t coming from some secret cabal of administration hard-liners, but from the supposedly moderate, dovish secretary of state. But while Powell, at least then, was claiming Iraq wanted to restock its weapons, that night I reported that the CIA had secretly reached a completely opposite conclusion. At least then, the agency had found no direct evidence that Saddam was rebuilding nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. The administration’s intelligence on Iraq was already in conflict.
After he left Kuwait, Powell’s attempt to build support for Bush’s Iraq policy was rebuffed by yet another Arab leader, Syria’s president Bashar Assad—son of the late dictator whose security men had dragged me out of a palace event. Powell wanted Assad to stop buying millions of dollars of Iraqi oil that was being smuggled out each day in violation of the UN embargo. Assad wasn’t about to give up his cheap oil, nor do any favors for the American diplomat.
The trip proved that the region’s leaders were not going to give the new president any kind of honeymoon. One of Powell’s aides told me wryly, “We started out with low expectations, and we met them.”
At the beginning of Bush’s presidency, before 9/11, terrorism was only one of several national security concerns. In fact, if the Bush administration was focused on any foreign policy objective, it was Iraq, not terrorism. During the new president’s first major speech to Congress that February, the only reference to terrorism was a two-sentence proposal about developing missile defenses—a program favored by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Tom Brokaw described the speech as “more prose than poetry” with a lot of emphasis on civility and reaching across party lines.
But as we later learned from the 9/11 Commission Report, that winter, counterterrorism officials were already picking up repeated, but fragmentary, threat reports. By summer, the system was “blinking red.” In May, I did a story with Nightly News senior investigative producer Robert Windrem on America’s continuing vulnerability to terror. We reported that top Bush administration officials feared that they could not prevent a terror attack, despite six years of training and disaster drills.
In that report, we showed a draft executive order the president was considering that would create an Office of National Preparedness under FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to coordinate responses to chemical, biological, or nuclear attacks. It would link more than forty agencies and put Dick Cheney in charge of planning a national response to terror.
Mayors, governors, and Congress had been complaining that money and time were being wasted. We also showed a satellite photo that military experts said revealed a chemical weapons laboratory built by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Paul Pillar, a deputy chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, told us that the United States would still be the most vulnerable terrorist target “simply because of who we are, how big we are, how open we are.” Paul Bremer, who chaired a commission on terrorism (and who later became our viceroy in Iraq) said that night, “There is a threat of terrorism escalating now to higher levels of casualties.” We raised the question of whether the Bush plan to expand FEMA’s reach was enough to deal with the expanding terror threat.
But no one in or out of government connected the dots. In fact, a widely read New York Times article in 1999, a year after the embassy bombings in Africa, had discounted suggestions that bin Laden was even a terrorist leader. There was little consensus in government or journalism about the nature of the threat. As the 9/11 Commission Report points out, the intelligence community did not produce a new consensus report on how it assessed the risk of terror attacks (known as a “national intelligence estimate”) during the entire three-year period leading up to 9/11. Former National Security Council official Richard Clarke has testified that the new administration did not begin revi
ewing their counterterror policy until April 2001, three months after they took office. Condi Rice and other top officials have vigorously disputed Clarke’s charge that they were inattentive, but the record shows they did not agree on a counterterror plan until September 4, one week before bin Laden struck.
More recently, while covering the postmortems in the aftermath of 9/11, I’ve asked myself whether we could have sounded more alarms about Osama bin Laden. During the spring of 2001, Bob Windrem and I continued to talk to intelligence officials and file occasional stories on bin Laden, but we were also assigned to other stories on a variety of subjects. I analyzed Bush’s first one hundred days on environmental policy and health care. After the president decided to limit federally sponsored stem cell research during a week when I was substituting for Tim Russert on Meet the Press, I learned everything that I could about stem cells. And during the first few weeks in April, the president had his first foreign policy crisis: a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese jet fighter that was trying to force it to land on an island off the mainland. For a while, the crew was held in what could have turned into an extended hostage situation. The U.S. ambassador negotiated a deftly worded agreement, and the administration was given high marks for artful diplomacy.
In May, I got to chase the hottest political story of the moment when we learned that Vermont senator James Jeffords would be defecting from the Republican Party. With Republicans barely controlling the Senate, his decision would put the Democrats in charge. Not surprisingly, the Republicans were furious. Overnight, all of the power and patronage that came with their committee chairmanships were going to evaporate. Within an hour, I was grabbing a change of clothes and scurrying to catch the same commuter flight Jeffords was taking to Vermont, where he would be making his announcement the next day. The airport scene reminded me of the crush of reporters chasing Bill and Hillary Clinton through New Hampshire in 1992. Jeffords and his beleaguered wife could barely get to the gate as the media pack pursued them for a comment. Then the throng of national, and even international, reporters descended on Burlington, Vermont.
It was a circus, but also a great political story that fit perfectly with Vermont’s history of independent thinking. The state had been the first to outlaw slavery, to elect a socialist to Congress, to produce politically correct ice cream, and to legalize same-sex civil unions. Vermonters like to say they’re not liberal or conservative, just independent. Polls there bear that out, showing independents consistently outnumbering Democrats or Republicans by two to one.
Still, there was a lot of fallout. Jeffords’s defection made the president look weak. Senate Republicans, especially those who were losing committee chairmanships, were furious over their fall from power. Moderate Republican senators, like Olympia Snowe of Maine, didn’t hesitate to blame White House arrogance. She told me Republican moderates had tried repeatedly to meet with the president to air their policy complaints, but couldn’t get past his palace guard.
At the same time that spring, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was spinning out of control. A task force led by former Senate majority leader George Mitchell reported that Israel should stop building settlements on Palestinian land and should reopen borders Israel had closed between its country and the territories. The closures were creating serious hardships because Palestinians in the territories could not get to their jobs in Israel. On the other hand, the Mitchell group said Palestinians should stop firing on Israeli areas, and should condemn violence. The report was ignored by both sides. Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, knew that George Bush would not pressure him to comply. And Yasser Arafat was still offering no sign that he was prepared to crack down on terror.
By August, Prince Bandar, the veteran Saudi diplomat, delivered a tough message to Condi Rice. As paraphrased in A Time of Our Choosing: America’s War in Iraq by Todd S. Purdum and the staff of The New York Times, Bandar told Condi that the president’s uncritical support for Sharon was leaving the Saudis with no choice but “to pursue policies based on our own national interest, regardless of their impact on you.”
In the final months leading up to 9/11, I filed stories ranging from the violence in the Middle East to Dick Cheney’s energy task force and the crippled status of nuclear power in America, twenty-five years after Three Mile Island. I went to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro and visit Elian Gonzalez and his family on the first anniversary of the child’s return home. I did stories for Nightly News on the death of Maureen Reagan and the exploits of the Bush twins. But above all else that summer, the tabloid world was obsessed with the story of a congressman and his missing intern. We went along with the pack.
To many people, there was something irresistible about the behavior of Gary Condit and Chandra Levy. Her disappearance, most likely while out jogging, was probably the result of a random crime, but the coincidence of her connection to a married politician was too enticing to be ignored. Immediately, the police zeroed in on Condit because they believed he had been less than forthcoming about the relationship when they first interviewed him.
Understandably, the young woman’s parents, frantic with worry, rushed to Washington from their home in California seeking media attention to spark a wider search. Soon camera crews were trailing them everywhere, including back to California. How could this possibly have a happy ending?
Gary Condit was an obscure congressman who had briefly appeared on my radar years earlier, when we interviewed him for a story on the unhealthy mix of politics and money. Then he was just another politician from the Agriculture Committee attending an inaugural party financed by lobbyists. Now he was the reluctant lead player in a summertime soap opera. Network camera crews set up housekeeping on his front step. At the Capitol, producers chased him down corridors and through underground tunnels, and even into the men’s room.
The news media feeding frenzy is hardly a new phenomenon, but when you’re caught up in it, it can be relentless. Now the network couldn’t get enough of Gary Condit and Chandra Levy. During a three-month period from May to June, I did twenty stories on Nightly News about the search for the missing intern.
Why was I assigned? Most likely because there was a declining appetite for stories about foreign policy or intelligence gathering. With so much rumor and innuendo about the Chandra Levy story floating around the Internet and cable shows, they wanted a senior correspondent on the case to sort through all the rumors and false reports. To check out leads, we had a team of producers tracking developments. Although the story was a family tragedy for the Levys, for the news media it was the journalistic equivalent of junk food, or a bad beach novel. Inevitably, the story raised echoes of that other Washington intern. But this time, a young woman had gone missing, representing every parent’s nightmare.
Still, that does not excuse the disproportionate attention the case received on television. We rationalized it by talking about the public policy implications of possible misbehavior—or worse—by an elected official. But Tom Brokaw, who was away on a ten-week sabbatical that summer, got it right. Even though he was not responsible for the decision making, he has since called the Condit summer one of the periods he most regrets at Nightly News. I also wonder what leads we might have stumbled across on bin Laden and his nineteen hijackers if we hadn’t been so absorbed in searching for the missing intern.
On September 10, 2001, I reported on a hidden scandal, runaway teens selling their bodies for drugs, food, or money in Portland, Oregon. A new report estimated that 325,000 children in seventeen cities were being sexually exploited at home or sold for sex to strangers each year. It was a disturbing story, and a serious subject. But it would not compare to the horrors we were about to experience.
The next morning, I was only a few blocks from work when the office called and told me a plane had slammed into the World Trade Center. My first thought was that a small plane must have lost its way. Perhaps the weather was bad in New York. By the time I parked and ran into our bureau, we were already on the air, on both the b
roadcast and cable networks. None of us had any idea that we would continue broadcasting live on all NBC networks, uninterrupted by commercials, for four days.
At 9:03 a.m., the second plane crashed into the South Tower. Instantly, we all realized that the first plane had not been an accident. America was under attack for the first time since Pearl Harbor. As I watched the top floors of the Trade Center in flames on the television monitors, I felt sick to my stomach. I remembered that al Qaeda had had a plot in the Philippines in 1995 involving hijacked airplanes to be used as weapons. Part of me wanted to call my parents to give and seek comfort. But at the same time, something inside me kicked into gear. It is the automatic response mechanism of a reporter reacting to a story; to a certain extent, no matter how great the horror, the mechanism works. I knew my job was to call sources and find out who was responsible, and why. It sounds cold, but that is what we do. The emotional part comes later, when we pause, take a deep breath, and are hit suddenly with the impact of what we’ve been reporting.
Already, intelligence officials had only one suspect: Osama bin Laden. By 9:32, less than a half hour after the second attack, I had enough sources to report that bin Laden’s organization was the most likely group capable of that kind of simultaneous, highly coordinated attack on America.
Like the rest of the country, and our government leaders, we had no idea how extensive the plot was, or what target might be next. Air traffic controllers froze all takeoffs and tried to account for aircraft already in flight. At ten a.m., Tom Brokaw, Katie Couric, and Matt Lauer sat and watched, trying as best they could to explain the unexplainable, as the horrifying images unfolded live in front of our eyes. In the Washington newsroom we were grabbing phones, frantically calling sources, speed-dialing to find out if there were any other missing planes. A few minutes after ten, my colleague Jamie Gangel reported that intelligence officials said the explosion and fire at the Pentagon had been caused by a plane diving into its west wing.
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