by Bret Baier
It was a matter of bureau pride with us. If the bosses in New York or Washington called to see if we could travel that day to report a story, we responded yes even before we knew where we were going. I was convinced that if they ever held any kind of news bureau Olympics and the event was covering spot news, my colleagues in the Fox Atlanta bureau would have been gold-medal winners. Sometimes this life was glamorous, but mostly it was just a lot of endless sixteen-hour days, and I often wondered how someone with a family could ever handle such a hectic schedule. Those rare, reflective moments didn’t last very long, however, because it was always time to head off to the next hot spot.
Despite the fact that I loved being based in Atlanta and had a wide range of stories to choose from, after covering fifteen hurricanes and tropical storms for the network, I sometimes worried I was being typecast as Hurricane Guy and perhaps undermining my chances to be assigned to the political stories I loved doing.
Don’t get me wrong. Hurricanes, tropical storms, and tornadoes are huge stories that need to be covered and covered well. Folks across the country are very interested in extreme weather events, and those living in the path of destruction certainly deserve to have their stories told. But with my previous stints in Washington and my keen interest in political news, while handling all my other story assignments I was constantly lobbying the network bosses to let me produce political pieces every chance I got.
Fox had been extremely fortunate to recruit long-time ABC News White House Correspondent Brit Hume to the network, and he and his team in Washington had launched an incredibly interesting political news show called Special Report that was really starting to catch on. Whenever I wasn’t tracking hurricanes or doing manhunt stories in the mountains of North Carolina, I was constantly looking for creative ways to get southern political stories into the mix, and specifically onto Brit’s show.
Over time, the folks in Washington and New York took notice of my pieces, often southern-fried and spiced with a healthy dose of local color. Brit was incredibly supportive and encouraged me to do as much as I could without shirking the normal news responsibilities expected out of a regional bureau.
Life was good. The Atlanta bureau was humming. I was being encouraged to produce more stories about southern politics, and at a moment’s notice I was parachuting into one exciting story after another. I was definitely a young man in a hurry and living the lifestyle where one late-night phone call could send me to the airport and three weeks on the road without a break. That is exactly what happened in November of 2000 when the network sent me to Nashville to cover the Al Gore victory—or defeat—story, depending on Election Day results.
I packed relatively light for Nashville, fully expecting it to be two days at most, win or lose. But after election night produced no clear winner, I was told to head to the center of the storm, which seemed to be the Panhandle of Florida. After a day in the Panhandle, and still relying on my two-day clothes supply as if I were tracking the uncertain path of a raging hurricane, I was instructed to divert to Tallahassee where the front lines of the Bush-Gore legal battle were taking shape.
With my interest in politics and having covered all those hurricanes and tornadoes for the network, I felt right at home in Tallahassee, working, arguably, in the middle of the nation’s largest political storm of the past hundred years. I had the great fortune of being able to work the Florida recount story with veteran reporter Jim Angle. For a month Jim and I worked side by side in the back of a U-Haul truck we rented and parked right outside the courthouse in Tallahassee. Working in extremely tight quarters, Jim and I were forced to become instant friends, not to mention instant experts on any number of election topics, including a new one on me called a voting card chad.
Jim and I soon realized that not only did we have to become experts on your everyday run-of-the-mill chads, there was an evolving bit of expertise to be had in dented chads, dimpled chads, perforated chads, and something that seemed to be driving folks crazy down in Palm Beach County called butterfly ballots. Throw in all the nuances and ambiguities of Florida election law, and the expectation that we be able to wake up at 3:00 a.m. and clearly articulate the differences between Volusia, Broward, Palm Beach, Miami Dade, and Nassau counties, and you get an idea what we and everyone else covering that monster of a story were up against.
The Bush-Gore recount was unlike any story I had ever covered. Typically news divisions will have a morning meeting to map out the day’s coverage, but with the Florida recount, by the time that first idea emanated from the morning meeting, the story on the ground had already changed at least three times. We had to constantly be on our toes to make sure we didn’t miss the latest developments that could erupt at a moment’s notice and in any one of Florida’s sixty-seven counties.
With the American presidency hanging in the balance, it didn’t get any bigger than the Florida recount. But despite all the pressure associated with covering such a historic moment in American politics, I was having the time of my life. After the Florida recount, I definitely had the bug to do political reporting full time, and that probably meant having to travel directly into the well-formed eye of just about every major political storm out there—Washington, D.C.
As I drove past Atlanta’s iconic Varsity restaurant on this brilliant September morning—still holding out hope for that always elusive postwork bucket of balls—I wondered what the bosses in Washington or New York might be wanting from me today.
As was my habit driving to the bureau, I scanned the radio dial to see if there was any buzz about anything, and I quickly picked up on a story about a plane that hit an office building in New York City. Parking in my normal space outside the bureau, I started to think that if a building in Manhattan had accidently been hit by a plane, the New York folks would probably have their hands full for the morning, leaving me to come up with my own story for the day.
Fine with me. I always had about forty-three different political stories rolling around in my head and ready to pitch at a moment’s notice, all part of my master plan to get on Brit’s show as often as possible and reinforce my case for working in Washington full time.
As I walked into the Fox Atlanta bureau on the morning of September 11, 2001, I had no idea that within fifteen minutes I would be racing out the same door with my producer Joe Hirsch on our way to Washington, D.C., two-day go-bag slung over my shoulder. How could I possibly know this would be a one-way trip and my last day working in Atlanta?
Chapter Two
Together as One
My first few weeks in Washington were an absolute blur. With nearly three thousand dead at the hands of terrorists, it was extremely difficult to process all that had taken place, let alone get a fix on what the future might hold.
When I first arrived in Washington on the evening of September 11, the Pentagon was in flames and rescue teams were still searching for survivors. Smelling the acrid smoke, seeing the flames, and looking down on the gruesome scene of that crushed outer ring, all within my first five minutes in Washington, affected me deeply. The dead at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and the passengers and crews on those four airliners were fellow Americans. We were all attacked on that horrific day, and I had been given the job of reporting on the people who were responsible for it and those planning on doing something about it.
Starting very early on the morning of September 12, I went to the Pentagon every day to do live shots for Fox affiliates across the country. Producing taped news packages, live stand-ups, and what are called talk-backs with local anchors in various markets, I stood in front of the still smoldering Pentagon and talked with Jim, Sally, Jen, Alex, Bob, and Kathy in St. Louis, Atlanta, Detroit, L.A., Miami, Honolulu, and just about everywhere in between.
Apart from the tragedy, trauma, and emotion I shared with my countrymen, from a purely journalistic standpoint, I simply didn’t want to screw it up. The American people had taken a serious hit, and I was humbled to be one of many journalists who went to work
during those days with a renewed sobriety about the importance of what we did.
As tragedy often does, the attacks brought the American people and the politicians in Washington together as I had never seen before. I will never forget the images of those members of Congress—Republicans, Democrats, and Independents—descending the east steps of the United States Capitol the evening of September 11 and singing “God Bless America.”
After I had reported for a few weeks outside the Pentagon, my bosses at Fox decided to send me inside the building to cover the Department of Defense, the emerging military campaign to root out the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and the manhunt for Usama bin Laden (UBL—the official government designation for al Qaeda’s #1 terrorist). With all branches of the U.S. military based at the Pentagon and its seventeen-plus miles of corridors and thousands of offices, I have to admit I was more than a bit confused about the best way to go about covering the place.
The long-timers at the Pentagon had given it the not-so-affectionate nickname the Puzzle Palace. Fair enough. But my preferred phrase for reporting the news there was “news by quilt.” You would get one piece of the quilt over at the Marines and another at the Army; then more pieces from the Air Force and Navy. Soon, after making your morning rounds talking to defense officials and military commanders scattered throughout the building, you would return to the media work space and assemble the pieces collected throughout the day. If you were lucky, you could stitch together, piece by piece, a whole quilt of a story that made a little more sense than the individual pieces sometimes did.
One of the most colorful pieces of that vast Pentagon quilt, of course, was none other than the secretary of defense himself, Donald Rumsfeld. During the early days of the war in Afghanistan and later, during the invasion of Iraq, Secretary Rumsfeld’s afternoon Q&A sessions with reporters became must-see TV. To those following developments in Washington closely during those days, the Pentagon briefing room became as familiar as their own living rooms.
Secretary Rumsfeld could handle a question better than just about any public figure I’d ever come across. Let me rephrase that: Secretary Rumsfeld could not answer a question better than just about any public figure I’d ever come across. He was so adept at controlling the information flow from his command post at the podium that soon everyone started referring to his non-answer answers as Rummyspeak.
If you could summon the courage to engage Rumsfeld on a particular topic you better be solid, not only on the basic premise of your question but also on any information or presuppositions you stuck in before you ever got to your question. If you violated those rules, got sloppy, or didn’t have your reportorial act together in some other way, more times than not Rumsfeld would turn the whole thing around on you before a nationwide live television audience.
During one of those briefings, Rumsfeld turned the tables on one hapless reporter by saying,
“You’re beginning with an illogical premise and proceeding perfectly logically to an illogical conclusion, which is a dangerous thing to do.”
Washington journalists are never very high on the nation’s Most Adorable list. With the distinct possibility of witnessing a totally eviscerated reporter left mumbling to himself and gasping for air, those news conferences soon rocketed Rummy, as he became known, to what many considered to be rock-star status—at least by Washington public policy standards.
That daily, high-stakes, high-wire briefing room atmosphere, with the good chance of seeing a reporter completely Rummified live and nationwide, soon made those sessions popular television fare, and not just to devotees of C-SPAN. The briefings sometimes surpassed the popular soaps Days of our Lives and As the World Turns in the daytime television ratings. As a result, reporters covering the Pentagon in those days felt intense pressure to deliver a coherent question and come across as halfway respectable.
Once, one of my esteemed Pentagon colleagues, Jim Miklaszewski of NBC, tried to press Rumsfeld on evidence that did or did not link Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda. The exchange launched a quote that went round the world:
Jim Miklaszewski: There are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations.
Secretary Rumsfeld: There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things that we know we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns; the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
Jim, ever the quintessential and fearless pro, boldly dove back in to attempt a redemptive follow-up. Playing along with the rules of Rummyspeak, he proceeded to ask the secretary if the answer to his particular question might be found in the “unknown unknown” category. Rumsfeld, employing the tools of any self-respecting rock star, simply refused to answer.
Like most of my Pentagon colleagues, I mixed it up many times with Secretary Rumsfeld during my years there. A common line of questioning during my early days dealt with the whereabouts of Usama bin Laden: “Do you know where he is? Do you have a track on him? Are you close to catching him? Where was the last ‘known known’ place he was seen?”
Rumsfeld’s answers to me were always the same—always colorful, but never of much true news value: “It’s like running around the barnyard chasing a chicken. Until you get it [the chicken], you don’t have it.”
Although my first question at news conferences was typically on the news of the day, more times than not my follow-up would always be a variation of the “Where is UBL?” question. I asked the UBL question so many times, the second I started to segue to my follow-up I would hear groans from several of my briefing room colleagues.
Once, in 2002, when we were traveling with Rumsfeld to Afghanistan, about three hours into the flight one of his aides came back to where the reporters were to tell us the secretary would like to have a press availability. Dutifully, we grabbed our notebooks and recorders and made our way to the front of the plane where Rumsfeld was sitting behind a desk in his very cramped office.
After a brief statement about the purpose of the trip, Secretary Rumsfeld opened it up for questions. Associated Press reporter Bob Burns, a fantastic guy and great reporter, asked about Pakistan and whether that nation was playing both sides of the street in efforts to track down bin Laden and other members of al Qaeda. Rumsfeld answered with one of his classic nonanswer award winners, and then he turned to me.
I could sense all those crammed-in reporters collectively cringe, knowing that even flying across the Atlantic my “Where is bin Laden?” question was about to be unfurled. I figured if I couldn’t extract any decent answers at sea level, perhaps 35,000 feet up might do the trick. But sensing a wave of familiarity washing over my colleagues, I decided to switch it up a little. “Mr. Secretary,” I asked, “do you think Usama bin Laden knows where you are right now?”
Not only did Rumsfeld start laughing, all the reporters did, too. I think I cleared a major hurdle that day with all those veteran defense reporters. From that day forward whenever I asked my Usama question the mumbles and groans never rose above a certain decibel level.
During the remainder of 2002 I made several trips to Afghanistan and saw firsthand some amazing scenes. Once, traveling with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers, we visited a rural area a few hours outside Kabul where an army unit was helping a small village get back on its feet after years of Taliban rule. A school for boys and girls was being constructed. A water system was going in. Farmers were being helped with several agricultural projects. On and on.
To my surprise, the man who seemed to be in charge was a young American Army captain. From the way the villagers approached him with problems and the way they responded when he spoke, if I didn’t know any better I would say he was the unofficial town mayor. He didn’t speak their language very well, but somehow he was able to communicate with them just fine. With his sunny disposition and calm demeanor, you could see he was having a huge impact on this dusty corner of t
he world.
As I got a bit nearer and saw this soldier up close and interacting with the villagers, I was amazed to see he was a Midwestern boy in his twenties. He looked like he was sixteen years old and barely shaving. And he was running this entire town. Truly an amazing sight; it was pure, from-the-gut, on-the-ground, inspirational leadership at its best, and totally impressive to observe. From my vantage point that Soldier-Mayor-Midwest Kid had everything it took to run just about any company or represent any congressional district in America.
That was just one of many scenes I witnessed of young soldiers who were making a huge difference in the lives of people in Afghanistan. That episode made me double down in my efforts to tell as many of their on-the-ground stories as I possibly could.
To be sure, there are always mistakes, mishaps, and even horrible decisions made by military and civilian leaders during wartime, and I covered plenty of those as well. But I made a special point to keep an eye out for those young soldiers, men and women from all over America, who were making a real difference in the lives of people halfway around the world and representing us in extremely difficult circumstances.
When I first arrived in Washington in September 2001, I had no idea my move was going to be permanent. My first few weeks in D.C. I lived in a Holiday Inn just a block from the Fox bureau, not far from the U.S. Capitol. After a few weeks it seemed like the folks in the Washington bureau wanted me to stick around; at least no one told me to go back home to Atlanta.