“What! Are you kidding?” Becky said. “I haven’t even found the box with my clothes in it yet.” Nor did she know where the vice president lived or how to get there. But she made it on time to the Naval Observatory, the home of American vice presidents since Walter Mondale first lived there in 1977.
The event was to honor and recognize some American artists. We met many new friends that evening, including Bill Coleman, who became a marvelous mentor to me. Bill was one of the first black fighter pilots in World War II, and later became a clerk to Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, and then transportation secretary under President Gerald Ford. Over the years, Bill and I had many conversations about the law, and he expressed hopes for me to eventually move onto the Supreme Court.
Besides the great privilege of working in the White House, I enjoyed the opportunity to participate in other, less stressful activities with the president. For example, we occasionally played golf together on the South Course of Andrews Air Force Base. Always competitive, the president wanted to win—and so did I! But even on the golf course, work was never far from mind. Walking off a green after putting on July 3, 2001, the president told me that he had decided to appoint Bob Mueller as the new director of the FBI. Bob would take over the bureau in early September.
On our first Fourth of July in Washington, First Lady Laura Bush hosted a festive birthday party for the president at the White House. Although George W. Bush’s birthday is on July 6, Mrs. Bush decided to combine the celebrations. This annual celebration at the residence would become a favorite for Becky and me during our time in Washington. My family and I attended the warm, personal affair, replete with Texas-style food. After dinner, the party moved out to the Truman Balcony overlooking the South Lawn, which by then was crowded with more invited guests. As the president and First Lady stepped out onto the balcony, the crowd on the grass below cheered and then spontaneously began singing “Happy Birthday.”
As if on cue—and perhaps it was—a majestic fireworks display commenced over the Washington Monument. It was one of the most impressive sights I have ever witnessed.
When Congress recessed for the summer on August 4, the business aspects of the White House slowed down slightly. Nevertheless, I was surprised one day when the president tracked me down by phone. Thinking that some new crisis had arisen, I grabbed a pad and pen. “Hey, Fredo.” The president used his favorite nickname for me. Bush had endearing nicknames for almost all of the people close to him.
“Yes, sir.”
“Fredo, do you want to play horseshoes this afternoon? My brother Marvin is here, and we can get Andy Card; should be good.”
“Of course.”
At 5:30 p.m., the president, his brother Marvin, Andy, and I met at the horseshoe pit that had been installed near the White House swimming pool during Bush 41’s administration. Marvin and I teamed up against the president and Andy, and the competition was intense. I played surprisingly well, and Marvin and I won the first two matches easily.
“Have you been practicing?” President Bush asked me several times.
I could tell the president’s strong competitive nature was surging, so Marvin and I concentrated even harder on every shot, barely pulling out victories in the final two matches.
As we left the horseshoe pits, the president slapped me on the back and said, “Yes, sir, Fredo, you really showed me something today with your play.”
I smiled and simply said, “Thank you, sir.”
When the president left for a few weeks of vacation, the daily pace at the White House slowed even more. I took advantage of the lull by inviting some of my staff lawyers to join me in playing doubles on the White House tennis courts. Although it was sweltering hot with oppressive humidity, the lawyers did not want to miss the rare privilege of playing at the White House.
Despite these occasional light moments, the summer was anything but stress-free. Terror threats had been ramping up all summer long, and nearly every government agency in Washington was on heightened alert. As far back as the beginning of the Clinton administration, the United States government was wary of the al-Qaeda terrorist group and its leader, Osama bin Laden. That was part of the reason Bush had carried over from the Clinton administration two key players—Richard Clarke, counterterrorism advisor under Clinton, and George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Both Clarke and Tenet regarded threatened attacks on American interests as real. And terrorism threats were part of the president’s daily briefing. Who could forget the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center or many other acts of terrorism in recent years? These included the al-Qaeda bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia (which killed nineteen US Air Force service members in 1996), the bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole that killed seventeen Americans as their ship sat docked in Yemen a year before we took office.
An open, gregarious, wonderfully likable fellow who cared about his agents, George Tenet was not given to exaggerations. As early as February 2001, Tenet was sounding alarms. He told the Senate, “The threat from terrorism is real, it is immediate, and it is evolving . . . Usama Bin Laden [sic] and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat . . . He is capable of planning multiple attacks with little or no warning.”5
By Memorial Day, Tenet was even more emphatic, reporting to the president that he was worried about increased chatter the CIA was picking up from terrorist groups around the world regarding something big happening soon. He had received information that a notorious al-Qaeda facilitator, Abu Zubaydah, was developing an attack plot, but the threat was thought to be overseas against American interests or against Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, or Italy, the site of the G8 summit just two months away.6
By July, according to Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft had been briefed by senior counterterrorism officers who told him “that a significant terrorist attack was imminent and that preparations for an attack were in the late stages or already completed.”7 Sitting in the National Security Council meetings and the meetings with the principals committee, I was convinced that al-Qaeda was a serious threat, but no one was pointing to any plots or attacks within the United States. The assessment remained that the targets were likely to be overseas, rather than on our homeland. The threats continued to be troubling, but lacked specificity throughout the summer.
The Labor Day holiday marked the end of summer and the return to normal within the White House. On September 5, 2001, President Bush welcomed his friend Mexican president Vicente Fox and his First Lady, Marta Fox, to the White House. The two presidents had met previously in Mexico at San Cristòbal, Fox’s family farm, and both shared real hope that they could carve out new immigration reforms and improve relations between our countries. Becky and I attended the arrival ceremony on the South Lawn, and it was a proud moment for all Mexican Americans. As I looked out at the large audience of Mexican Americans, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of personal pride in my heritage. Later I attended the private meeting between the presidents in the Oval Office, and that evening Becky and I attended our first official state dinner, the first of the Bush presidency. That alone made it special. Bush had invited an eclectic assortment of guests that evening, including Clint Eastwood, Alan Greenspan, Plácido Domingo, William Rehnquist, and Emilio Estevez, as well as politicians such as John McCain and Joe Biden. After dinner, fireworks filled the skies above the Washington Monument. This was no small demonstration—the fireworks were supposed to last for ten minutes but continued longer than twenty, after which “the sky was so bright you could barely look at it,” as Karen Hughes later recalled.8 Condi quipped, “We were testing the new missile defense system.” Andy Card later described the first state visit as “a fairy-tale day.” I found it inspiring that such an occasion was held in honor of the president of Mexico, given our country’s rich Mexican heritage.
President Fox gave a speech in the US House chambers the following day, the first Mex
ican president ever to address a joint session of Congress. He was received warmly by both Democrats and Republicans. Later that afternoon, President Bush and President Fox flew to Ohio, where they spoke at the University of Toledo about immigration and the shared interests between our two countries. In his comments, President Bush said, “Fearful people build walls; confident people tear them down.”9 President Fox later commented that he firmly believed George W. Bush “had the opportunity to become the Latino Lincoln—giving hope to 12 million Mexican immigrants and, not coincidentally, realigning Hispanic voters into the Republican Party for a century.”10
My work schedule on Monday, September 10, was relatively routine. I began the morning with the usual senior staff meeting, followed by my counsel’s office staff meeting. During the day, I met with the president of the American Bar Association, chaired a strategy session with the lawyers on my staff regarding judicial nominations, and I participated in a meeting with White House and Justice Department officials concerned about an antitrust policy issue. I put some finishing touches on a speech I was to deliver the following morning in Norfolk, Virginia. My last meeting of the day was in the Situation Room on the basement level of the West Wing; the gathering discussed national security issues relating to North Korea. Routine. Nothing exceptional. Just another day in the White House.
It was dark by the time I finished, and as I left the West Wing that evening and walked to my car parked adjacent to the White House on West Executive Avenue, I had no idea how my life was about to change—indeed, how every American’s life was about to be affected—within the next twelve to fourteen hours.
CHAPTER 15
THE NEW PRIORITY: DEFEATING TERRORISM
The headlines and photos in the morning papers on September 12, 2001, told the horrendous and sobering story. President Bush had stressed the night before that our priorities had changed and defeating terrorism was job number one. That didn’t mean that my lawyers and I could stop our other work to focus on terrorism; we were still responsible for counseling the president on judicial appointments, legislation, and a wide range of other issues, but everyone understood that we were now advising a wartime president. We also worried over the very real threats of imminent attacks, that our nation could be hit again with a follow-up attack. Preventing further terrorist attacks became a perpetual preoccupation for all of us.
Beginning with our senior staff meeting at 7:30 a.m., I attended one meeting after another, the first being the principals meeting in the Situation Room. The meeting that Wednesday included—as it frequently would from then on—CIA director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, and the recently appointed FBI director Bob Mueller, who had been on the job little more than a week. A meeting of the full National Security Council followed at 9:30. Tenet confirmed what we all suspected: Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization, al-Qaeda, was behind the attacks. Tenet’s threat report was daunting. Any hope that we could lower our guard, that the final attack had been delivered, quickly dissipated as the principals listened intently to the CIA director’s intelligence concerns.
Every meeting raised a raft of legal issues with which our lawyers had to grapple: What were the rules of engagement against a terrorist organization? Did the doctrine of self-defense define how imminent or dangerous a threat had to be before force could be used?
Some of our lawyers suggested that President Bush should publicly state that we were at war. Others urged caution because a declaration of war triggers all sorts of domestic statutes and international treaty obligations. To note just one, a formal declaration of war allows the president to collect “signals” intelligence—which could include radio, television, telephone, Internet, cell phones, and computers—outside the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for a period of fifteen days. Collection of such data would become a major issue in the years ahead, and it was already on our radar that first Wednesday following the attacks. Everyone recognized that being able to obtain accurate and timely intelligence would be key to protecting our nation from further attacks.
Internationally, if the United States declared war, that would trigger obligations on the part of our allies to also join in a declaration of war against the enemy. That’s what allies do—or are supposed to do, anyhow. Domestically, many contracts have an exclusion clause pertaining to “acts of God” or “conditions of war” that might cause some businesses to deny services or cease performing according to their prior agreements. So using the phrase declaration of war mattered greatly.
Perhaps, the lawyers pondered, it might be better to declare that the terrorists had attacked our freedoms or that we had suffered a terrorist assault, and the United States would wage war against terrorism.
The enormity of our legal tasks became apparent as we debated the domestic and international implications of a declaration of war by our Congress. We discussed whether the United States had ever declared war against a non-state actor, since al-Qaeda had no sovereign territory to attack. What precedents did we have involving other nations? What legal questions surrounded the targeting of non-state actors? Would a congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force be sufficient, or did we need a declaration of war? One question led to another, with few easy answers.
In the Oval Office after another of many meetings, with these issues in mind, I attempted to caution the president about prematurely saying that we were at war, or even using phrases containing the word war, before knowing the full legal implications. Bush was having none of that. “You lawyers can call it whatever you want,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, we are at war.”
At 11:30 a.m., the president met with congressional leaders from both parties in the Cabinet Room at the White House. I sat on the back row, in my usual spot, with my back to the Rose Garden just behind and to the right of the president. Bush was at his best, strong and forceful, and definitely not parsing his words. “These guys are like rattlesnakes,” he said, speaking of al-Qaeda. “They strike and go back in their holes. We’re not only going to go after the holes, we’re going after the ranchers.” He explained that the United States would punish anyone providing haven to terrorists, as well as the terrorists themselves. “This is a different type of war than our nation has ever fought,” he said. “We will use our resources to find the enemy, we will rally the world, we will bring patience and focus and resources . . . we will not let them win the war by changing our way of life. This is more than a particular group, it is a frame of mind that threatens freedom—they hate Christianity, they hate Judaism, they hate everyone who doesn’t think like them.”1
At that meeting, the congressional leaders were eager to give the president the tools he needed to defend the country and to punish those responsible for killing innocent Americans. Although we had not yet prepared a formal document, they expressed bipartisan support for a congressional resolution authorizing the president to use all necessary force to defend our country. Speaker Dennis Hastert promised he would guide financing bills through the House of Representatives to help cover the anticipated additional costs of military action. Senate majority leader Tom Daschle asserted that Democrats would support the president, but emphasized that he expected consultations by the White House.
One touching moment occurred when aging Democratic senator Robert Byrd reminded everyone that he had served under eleven presidents, as far back as John F. Kennedy. He looked directly at President Bush and said, “I congratulate you on your leadership in this very difficult, unique situation . . . There is still an army who believe in this country, believe in the divine guidance that has always led our nation. Mr. President, mighty forces will come to your aid.”2
The meeting with congressional leaders ended on a positive note, with members of both parties encouraging the president to address the American people in a joint session of Congress as soon as possible. Bush agreed; that was definitely something he wanted to do—when the time was right.
/> As chief of staff, Andy Card guided all of us during the awkwardness of our “new normal.” The United States was the most powerful country on earth, yet we had failed to prevent an attack by a group of Islamic radicals, many of whom had trained in bin Laden’s terrorist camps in Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations in the world, and some of whom had been operating unimpeded in the United States for months. So reflecting the adage that we simply did not know what we did not know and that almost anybody could be suspect, Andy instructed senior staff to inform our people to behave as though we were at war. “Exercise extra care to prevent the leaking of classified or sensitive information,” he said. Even the distribution of the president’s schedule would be limited. All West Wing tours were canceled indefinitely. “And exercise care in talking about sensitive information on the telephone. Shred all classified and sensitive papers. Assume that the enemy is monitoring our trash.” We should be cautious even around the White House cleaning staff and others who moved through the building performing services and doing chores; they might have ulterior motives. “Do not allow any sensitive or classified paper to lie on your desk unless you are in the room,” Andy instructed. His bottom line was obvious: trust no one.
Andy also asked us to encourage staff members to take advantage of stress counseling provided by the White House. While most of us seemed to be functioning fairly well without a pervading, pernicious sense of fear, the trauma all around us with which we were dealing at work and at home was real. I didn’t engage with the counselors myself, but I appreciated the concern.
The White House also provided home-to-work-and-back government transportation for senior staff for a while. Both Andy and the president had been frustrated on 9/11 when they could not reach key staff members. Moreover, Andy wanted to ensure we had access to transportation in the event that we needed to move to a secure location at a moment’s notice.
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