Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  The motorcade pulled up to Emma E. Booker Elementary School at 8:54 a.m. As the president headed into the building, Karl Rove told him a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Bush assumed it was a small propeller plane. But then Condoleezza Rice called and said it was a commercial airliner. Thinking back to his days in the Texas Air National Guard, Bush assumed the pilot must have had a heart attack. “This must be a horrible accident,” he said.

  Bush entered a classroom accompanied by the principal, Gwendolyn Tosé-Rigell, and met the teacher Sandra Kay Daniels. He sat down, and Daniels led the students in a reading exercise. He was in a good mood, smiling, following along. But then he felt a presence behind him on his right. Andy Card was leaning down to whisper in his ear.

  “A second plane hit the second tower,” he said in his distinctive Massachusetts accent. “America is under attack.” Then Card stepped back.

  Bush’s face tightened, his mouth narrowed, and his eyes hardened. A second plane meant this was no freak accident. This was an act of war.

  For whatever reason, he did not jump up and leave the room. Acutely aware of the television cameras trained on him and the students in front of him, he remained seated as the mostly African American students read The Pet Goat, a children’s story. Bush picked up a copy and opened it, but his eyes were staring at the back of the room. He forced a weak smile as the children read, but grew distracted, and his mouth curled up with an intense expression.

  Bush could see reporters’ cell phones going off in the back of the room. It felt strangely like a silent movie, he thought. Bush caught sight of Ari Fleischer, the press secretary, holding up a notebook on which he had written out in block letters: “DON’T SAY ANYTHING YET.”

  Minutes passed as the students read and Bush focused on what was happening to the country.

  “Whoo, these are great readers,” Bush said, trying to stay in the moment. “Very impressive. Thank you all so much for showing me your reading skills.”

  He kept up the banter a few more seconds, asking if the children spent more time reading than watching television. Several hands went up. “Oh, that’s great. Very good.”

  Then he signaled the end. “Thanks for having me. Very impressive.”

  The five minutes between Card’s whisper and Bush’s unhurried exit would become the most criticized five minutes of his presidency and the subject of endless mockery. Told that America was under attack, why did he not get up and leave? Critics found a metaphor for a president who did not know what to do. Bush later explained he wanted to maintain an air of calm, both for the children in the room and for the national television audience. But it was a moment of transition. Bush was a man who cherished order and structure; he believed in showing up on time and leaving on time, and he did not like disruptions to the schedule. It clearly took a few minutes for it to dawn on him how much his life, and his presidency, had just been turned upside down.

  AT THE WHITE HOUSE, it had been a slow morning with the boss away. “Nothing much is happening,” Peter Wehner, the speechwriter, e-mailed his boss, Michael Gerson. Vice President Cheney arrived at 7:57 a.m. for a typically full schedule of meetings. Sean O’Keefe, the deputy budget director, stopped by the vice president’s office to talk about a spending issue. John McConnell, the speechwriter, followed him in to ask about an upcoming speech.

  Cheney’s secretaries, Debbie Heiden and Ashley Snee, had the television on in the outer office. When they saw the news about a plane hitting the tower, they called in to the vice president. “Turn on the TV right away,” Cheney heard.

  He flipped it on and saw the north tower of the World Trade Center billowing smoke. Like Bush, he assumed it was a small plane. “Boy, it’s going to be a bad day at the FAA today,” Cheney said. “This is a tragedy.”

  Cheney watched as the second plane smashed into the south tower, and it became clear this was no accident. He jumped up and marched to Andy Card’s office next door.

  “I want to talk with him when he calls in,” Cheney told the chief of staff’s secretary.

  He returned to his own office and picked up the direct hotline. “I need to talk to the president,” Cheney said, then hung up to wait for the call to be put through.

  Others were gathering in his office, including Scooter Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Joshua Bolten, Richard Clarke, and Mary Matalin. They agreed to coordinate federal agencies from the Situation Room. On the television was Peter Jennings in shirtsleeves for ABC News. The phone rang and it was Bush, now in a holding room at the Florida elementary school. He was going to make a statement and then head immediately to Air Force One.

  In the holding room, Bush pulled out his Sharpie pen and scratched out some words on a yellow pad. He was sitting at a student desk, back to the television. While everyone else stared at the images, Bush focused on the notepad. When the television replayed the footage of the second plane hitting the south tower, Dan Bartlett pointed and exclaimed, “Look!”

  Bush, on the phone with Robert Mueller, the FBI director, turned and looked for just a moment, very matter-of-fact, before swinging back to work on his statement. He began reading it aloud.

  “Today, we’ve had a national tragedy,” he said. “Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in a terrorist attack on our country.”

  Bartlett interjected. “We don’t know for sure it was a terrorist attack.”

  “Sure it is,” Bush said. “What else do you think it is?”

  Fleischer and Scott McClellan, the deputy press secretary, agreed.

  “I’m just saying we have not confirmed anything yet,” Bartlett said. “We don’t know who is responsible.”

  “Then just say ‘apparent’ terrorist attack,” McClellan said.

  On the notepad, Bush wrote that the FBI was working to catch those responsible. “We will punish them,” he wrote, then crossed out that line. Instead, he wrote, “Terrorism against Amer will not succeed.”

  A few minutes later, Bush strode into the school gymnasium filled with students and teachers who did not realize what was happening. He told them about the “apparent” terrorist attack and vowed to “hunt down and find those folks who committed this act,” choosing an oddly casual way of describing mass murderers. “Terrorism against our nation will not stand,” he added, misreading the notes, which said “will not succeed,” and in the process unconsciously echoing words his father had used when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. It was a shaky performance that left advisers worried that he had not been reassuring or commanding enough.

  Barely a minute after he was done, Bush headed out the door. Just after 9:30 a.m., his motorcade took off for the airport at what seemed like eighty miles per hour. “We were flying, faster than any motorcade I can remember,” recalled the White House photographer, Eric Draper.

  A minute later, back in the White House, Secret Service agents burst into Cheney’s office. “Mr. Vice President, we’ve got to leave now,” barked Special Agent Jimmy Scott, racing around the desk.

  The Secret Service had gotten a report of an airplane heading toward the White House. The agent grabbed Cheney’s belt from behind with one hand and his shoulder with another and physically rushed him out of the room. “Doors flew open, Secret Service guys came in, and he vanished,” O’Keefe remembered. Oddly, Cheney grabbed a copy of the Economist on the way out, thinking for a moment that he might be taken somewhere for a long wait with nothing to do. Rice and Bolten were left staring at each other in shock.

  The agents, bristling with guns and urgency, had maneuvered Cheney into the tunnel beneath the White House by 9:37 a.m., just as the plane smashed into the Pentagon instead. Some concluded later that the hijackers tried to find the White House but from the air could not see it amid taller nearby buildings and struck at the military headquarters instead. If so, it saved Cheney’s life because the plane would have hit the White House before the agents got him into the tunnel.

  The rest of the White House was evacuated. “
Women, take off your heels and run!” agents shouted. Outside the gates, frightened aides were told to take off their White House badges in case there were snipers looking for targets. Not knowing what to do, some simply walked home in a daze. Others, alerted by colleagues, headed two blocks to the offices of Daimler Chrysler, where Tim McBride, a veteran of the first Bush White House, sent his own staff home and ordered sandwiches to create a makeshift White House headquarters for seventy-two dislocated presidential aides.

  In the tunnel under the White House, Cheney paused when he came across a television, bench, and telephone. While he waited, word arrived of the crash at the Pentagon.

  “Get me the president,” he ordered an agent.

  Bush was in the car heading to the airport when Rice called to tell him about the Pentagon attack. He arrived at Air Force One at 9:45 a.m., bounded up the stairs, and told his agents to make sure his wife and daughters were safe. Laura Bush, hosted by Ted Kennedy on Capitol Hill to testify on behalf of the education program, had been rushed by her security detail to Secret Service headquarters. Their daughters would not be secured for another hour. Lynne Cheney had been brought to the tunnel outside the bunker, joining her husband.

  Bush called Cheney. “Sounds like we have a minor war going on here,” Bush said. “I heard about the Pentagon. We’re at war.” He added, “Somebody’s going to pay.”

  Cheney, standing in the tunnel, told Bush to stay away from Washington until they could determine it was safe. Bush argued, but Cheney, Andy Card, and Edward Marinzel, the lead Secret Service agent traveling with the president, prevailed upon him. Eric Draper, the photographer, could see frustration on Bush’s face, but he still tried to pump everyone up. “This is what they pay us for, boys,” he said.

  Air Force One rocketed into the air at 9:54 a.m. without a destination, the pilots aiming to get as high as possible as quickly as possible. By the time they leveled out, they were at forty-five thousand feet, far above normal cruising altitude. Bush, his coat now off, emerged from his cabin. “I just heard Angel is the next target,” he said, using the code name for Air Force One. Bush could feel the plane bank sharply to the west and away from Washington.

  CHENEY HEADED INTO the bunker three stories under the East Wing, a pair of massive steel doors closing behind him with a loud hiss, forming an airtight seal. Officially known as the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the bunker was first built in 1934 along with the East Wing; Franklin Roosevelt converted it into an air raid shelter in 1942 during World War II. It was equipped with secure telephones, kept in drawers under the conference table, that looked as if they were from the 1960s, two television screens embedded in the back wall and another couple on a side wall, several bunks for sleeping, and days’ worth of food and supplies. But it had never been used in an actual crisis and was “shockingly low-tech,” as Joshua Bolten put it.

  At some point shortly after stepping into the bunker, Cheney said he talked with Bush again about fighter jets being scrambled to protect Washington. Both he and Bush recalled the vice president asking for authority to shoot down hijacked airliners if they did not follow instructions. “You bet,” Bush recalled answering. Rice on the ground and Karl Rove in the air recalled overhearing a call like that, and a military aide remembered Cheney calling Bush shortly after entering the bunker. But none of about a dozen sets of logs and notes kept that day recorded the call, leading some to wonder later whether Cheney did get permission before deciding what to do about further attacks.

  When a military aide reported that United Airlines Flight 93 was eighty miles away and heading toward Washington, he asked Cheney whether it should be shot down. In “the time it takes a batter to decide to swing,” as Scooter Libby put it, Cheney said yes.

  When the plane was believed to be sixty miles away, the aide asked again.

  Cheney repeated the order.

  Finally, the aide came back a third time.

  “Just confirming, sir. Authority to engage?”

  “I said yes,” Cheney replied, his voice betraying irritation.

  Silence came over the room as the gravity of the moment sank in. The vice president had just ordered military warplanes to shoot down a commercial airliner with scores of innocent passengers on board.

  Cheney never flinched. “I don’t want it to sound heartless, but there was no alternative,” he explained later. “It wasn’t the kind of thing you agonized over.” Thousands of lives were at stake.

  On the other side of the table, Bolten, who had not heard any earlier conversation with Bush about shoot-down authority, quietly suggested the vice president call the president to inform him about the order. That call was logged at 10:18 a.m., and Bush ratified the vice president’s decision. Bolten later said he was not questioning whether Cheney had permission to give the order but merely thought the president would want to know it had been issued.

  A few minutes later, a report came back that United Airlines Flight 93 had crashed. Cheney wondered whether he had just shot down a civilian plane.

  In fact, the United jet had gone down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m., before any order was given. Passengers had staged a revolt. No one knew that yet, but it occurred to Cheney that maybe it was not his shoot-down order that brought down the plane. “I think an act of heroism just took place on that plane,” he said to no one in particular.

  But he was frustrated not to get a precise report. “You must know whether or not we engaged, whether or not a fighter engaged a civilian aircraft,” Cheney said into the phone to the Pentagon. “You have to know the answer to that.”

  As it turned out, in the confusion of the day, Cheney’s order never got passed along to the pilots in the air. F-16 fighters scrambled out of Andrews Air Force Base so quickly they had no missiles. The pilots resolved that if they did receive orders to stop a hijacked plane, they would ram their jets into the target. One of the pilots, Lieutenant Heather Penney, was prepared to do it even knowing that her father, a United Airlines pilot, might be on board.

  Cheney looked up to see his deputy national security adviser, Eric Edelman. “Mr. Vice President,” Edelman said, “Steve Hadley asked me to come down here.” Hadley and Richard Clarke thought Cheney should be evacuated to a remote site in case the White House was still a target.

  Cheney, who had been telling Bush to stay away, refused to go himself. “You know, I have got communications with the president here and I have been on the phone with him and this place was meant to be able to operate in a nuclear environment. And if I leave now and go off to one of these other sites, with my helicopters, it will be forty-five minutes before we get on the ground and reestablish contact. There is just too much going on right now. We don’t understand the full dimensions of this. So I am staying here. Convey that back to Hadley and Clarke.”

  Edelman turned around and started to leave.

  “Where are you going?” Cheney called after him.

  “Well, sir, I am going to carry out your instruction,” Edelman said.

  “No, I need you here,” he said. “Call Hadley.”

  So Edelman got Hadley on the phone and told him the vice president was staying. Cheney tried to join the secure videoconference Clarke was running out of the Situation Room, but the audio was impossible to make out.

  Cheney was exasperated. “Get that off the screen,” he finally ordered. “Put up CNN so I can actually find out what is going on around here.”

  He told Edelman to get on the phone and monitor the Situation Room conference call. But after trying to listen for a while, Edelman finally gave up.

  “This is like listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks in the bottom of a swimming pool,” he fumed.

  Screw it, Cheney said. Get off the phone.

  By this point the south tower had collapsed. At 10:28 a.m., Cheney looked up to see the north tower crumble in a smoky heap. Everyone in the room gasped, shock etched on their faces—all except for Cheney, who stared stoically at the television.

  J
ust then came a report of another plane heading to Washington.

  “Take it out,” Cheney ordered. “If it looks threatening, take it out.”

  In the end, it turned out to be a medevac helicopter.

  Cheney worked with Norman Mineta, the transportation secretary, to ground the four thousand planes in American airspace. Among them was one carrying the president’s parents, forced to put down in Milwaukee. With three separate pads of paper in front of him, Cheney kept track of how many planes were still in the air as Mineta called out tail numbers. Other erroneous reports arrived of a bomb at the State Department, a fire on the Mall, airplanes heading toward Camp David and the Crawford ranch, and so forth. Falling back on his continuity-of-government exercises, Cheney ordered officials to find congressional leaders and fly them to a prearranged secure location.

  At 10:39 a.m., Cheney got hold of Donald Rumsfeld, who had rushed outside to help with victims when the Pentagon was hit. Cheney updated him.

  “There’s been at least three instances here where we’ve had reports of aircraft approaching Washington—a couple were confirmed hijack,” Cheney told him. “And pursuant to the president’s instructions, I gave authorization for them to be taken out.”

  The vice president was not sure Rumsfeld was still there. “Hello?”

  “Yes, I understand,” Rumsfeld said. “Who did you give that direction to?”

  “It was passed from here through the center at the White House.”

  “Okay,” Rumsfeld said. “Let me ask the question here. Has that directive been transmitted to the aircraft?”

  “Yes, it has,” Cheney said.

  “So we’ve got a couple of aircraft up there that have those instructions at this present time?” Rumsfeld asked.