Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  By the time Bush returned to the White House, he found himself with a few minutes and wandered down to the Situation Room alone. “He looked like he wanted something to do,” thought Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief. As Clarke remembered it, Bush grabbed him and a few others and closed the door.

  “Look, I know you have a lot to do and all,” Bush said, “but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way.”

  Clarke was incredulous. “But, Mr. President, al-Qaeda did this.”

  “I know, I know, but see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred.”

  Clarke found the request disturbing, an indication of what he considered to be Bush and Cheney’s obsession with Saddam Hussein. Bush later disputed the details of Clarke’s account but told an investigating commission that he might have spoken to Clarke and asked about Iraq. To Bush, it was a logical question; Iraq was an enemy of America’s and had sponsored terrorists before, even if not al-Qaeda. It was worth checking.

  Later that evening, White House officials finished draft legislation to authorize force and faxed it to Capitol Hill. The draft declared “that the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force” against those linked to the attacks and to “preempt any related future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States.” Democrats like Daschle saw it as a blank check. Hurried negotiations ensued to find language that would satisfy both sides.

  But in terms of the public leadership Americans expect from their president in moments of crisis, Bush had yet to find his footing, and advisers were worried. Michael Gerson went to Karl Rove’s office that evening to express his concern.

  “If we think our response has been a success so far,” Gerson told him, “we’re wrong.”

  “MR. PRESIDENT, by the time we’re through with these guys, they’re going to have flies walking across their eyeballs.”

  Cofer Black, the CIA’s counterterrorism chief, was briefing Bush and Cheney on the morning of September 13. Balding, chubby-cheeked, and bespectacled, Black looked more like an accountant than the Hollywood version of a spymaster, but he was seen inside the agency as “something of a cross between a mad scientist and General George Patton,” and his tough words were a balm to a president and a vice president hungry for action.

  Still, everything at this point was an act of improvisation. Cheney pulled Karen Hughes aside and suggested Bush visit New York as soon as possible. The country needed to see its leader at the site. Bush had been reluctant to get in the way of rescue efforts, but it was becoming apparent that work was shifting toward recovering bodies rather than finding survivors. The president had been talking about going to New York the following Sunday; Hagin had been urging him to wait until Monday. The White House was organizing a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral for Friday. “Maybe we should go tomorrow after the prayer service,” Bush suggested.

  Shortly afterward, Bush called Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York, inviting reporters into the Oval Office to record the moment. As he expressed condolences and offered support, the president surprised his staff by declaring on the spot that he would visit the next day.

  “You’ve extended me a kind invitation to come to New York City,” he said. “I accept. I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon.”

  As shocked aides whispered to each other—what did he just say?—the president finished the call and took questions from reporters. They asked whether it was safe to fly, whether he had determined who was responsible, and what kind of international coalition he might assemble. Then Francine Kiefer of the Christian Science Monitor cut through the professional veneer.

  “Could you give us a sense as to what kind of prayers you are thinking and where your heart is for yourself?” she asked.

  Bush, his hands still planted on the desk, tried to find words. “Well, I don’t think about myself right now,” he said. “I think about the families, the children.” The image of the Pentagon morgue team and the sound of Theodore Olson’s voice came into his head.

  It took eight seconds for him to start again, an eternity with television cameras rolling. “I am a loving guy,” Bush said, “and I am also someone, however, who has got a job to do—and I intend to do it. And this is a terrible moment. But this country will not relent until we have saved ourselves and others from the terrible tragedy that came upon America.”

  Then he swept out of the office, his face contorted in grief.

  Later he saw Gerson. Bush was uncertain about almost losing it on live television.

  Was that okay? he asked.

  “I thought it was an important moment for the country,” Gerson told him.

  Bush apologized to Hughes. “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “You don’t need to apologize for having a big heart,” she told him.

  His aides wanted to reassure Bush, knowing how much weight he carried on his shoulders. As his speechwriters filed out of the Oval Office at one point so he could take a call from President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, John McConnell couldn’t help noticing that the president was sitting there just tapping his wedding ring against his desk in a steady rhythm, mentally lost in thought.

  The impact hit closer to home when Andy Card mentioned that Brad Blakeman, the president’s scheduling director, was missing a nephew in the World Trade Center. Bush couldn’t believe it. It had been two days, and he was only learning now that one of the aides he worked with most closely had family directly involved. Blakeman’s nephew Thomas Jurgens, a combat-trained army medic working as a court officer, had commandeered a jury van with supplies when he heard about the attacks and raced to the scene. He had not been heard from since.

  Bush picked up the phone and called Blakeman. “How come you didn’t tell me your nephew is missing?” he demanded.

  “Because you have a lot going on,” Blakeman replied.

  “We are going to pray for a safe return,” Bush said. “And I want your family to know that we are going to find the people who did this and bring them to justice.”

  “Thank you,” Blakeman said. “We are going to hope that he returns.”

  Bush hung up. But he was still upset. He stood up and marched out of the Oval Office to Blakeman’s office. “I want you to tell your family that I am going to find the people who did this and bring them to justice,” he told Blakeman, repeating in person what he said over the phone. Blakeman busied himself in the days to come assembling a study of how past presidents responded to crises. His nephew’s badge and gun were later found but not his body.

  The president and first lady made a quick trip that day to Washington Hospital Center to visit people wounded in the Pentagon. Bush met Lieutenant Colonel Brian Birdwell, who had been badly burned on his hands and back. Bush saluted him, and it took a painful fifteen or twenty seconds or so for Birdwell to bring his bandaged arm up to salute back. Bush held his arm up the entire time.

  When the motorcade arrived back at the White House just after noon, Card jumped into Bush’s car before he could get out.

  “We’ve got another threat on the White House,” Card said. “We’re taking it seriously.”

  Bush was mad. “Why are you telling me in here?” he asked, knowing that news photographers would notice. “You could have waited until I got into the Oval Office.”

  He marched back into the building and continued the conversation in the Oval Office. He was tired and surly. Whatever intelligence they had, he was not going to respond. If they were worried, they could send home non- essential personnel and make sure Cheney was at a separate location.

  “I’m not leaving,” Bush said irritably. “If a plane hits us, I’ll just die.”

  Then he turned to the navy steward Ferdinand Garcia. “And, Ferdie, I’m hungry. I’ll have a hamburger.”

  Karen Hughes interjected with fatalistic humor, “You might as well add cheese.”

  THE THREAT
WAS one of many in the hours and days after the attack. Over the course of just four hours that afternoon, according to a Secret Service log, the city’s main mosque reported a bomb threat, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House was evacuated because of fire alarms, the British embassy received a suspicious package, a Cessna airplane violated airspace over Washington and was intercepted by F-16s, and the Capitol was evacuated when a police dog reacted to a package. It was a city on edge.

  Bush and Cheney were confronted with a dizzying array of other challenges, from dealing with national heartache to plotting out economic recovery. They had to figure out when to allow airplanes to fly again, when to reopen the stock market, how to rebuild New York, even how to keep the auto industry from collapsing since closing the borders had blocked supplies. They had to figure out how to force the Taliban to give up Osama bin Laden and shut down al-Qaeda camps and how to make its sponsors in Pakistan realize the equation had changed.

  What Bush had going for him was a public eager to follow his lead and a world for once united behind America. “Nous sommes tous Américains,” headlined Le Monde. “We are all Americans.” NATO for the first time in its history invoked Article 5 of its charter declaring an attack against one as an attack against all. Condoleezza Rice cried when she saw a television clip of the Coldstream Guards playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” during a changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace in London.

  Bush met with his cabinet on September 14. Entering the room, he was surprised by sustained applause. Bush choked up, and tears came down his face for the second time in two days. He asked Donald Rumsfeld to lead a prayer. “We seek your special blessing today for those who stand as sword and shield, protecting the many from the tyranny of the few,” the defense secretary said. “Our enduring prayer is that you shall always guide our labors and that our battles shall always be just.”

  Colin Powell worried that the president seemed in a fragile state heading into the cathedral speech that afternoon and slipped Bush a note. “Dear Mr. President,” he wrote. “When I have to give a speech like this, I avoid those words that I know will cause me to well up, such as Mom and Pop.”

  Bush was both touched and amused and held it up for the group. “Let me tell you what the secretary of state just told me,” Bush said with a grin. “ ‘Dear Mr. President, don’t break down!’ ”

  Everyone laughed, defusing the tension.

  “Don’t worry,” Bush added. “I’m not losing it.”

  Michael Gerson, John McConnell, and Matthew Scully put together a simple, elegant, and moving speech for Bush, one they hoped would steady his presidency after the halting efforts so far. McConnell inserted a line about the war starting on the timing of others but ending at an hour of our choosing, adopting the phrase from a Franklin Roosevelt speech after German U-boats sank an American destroyer in 1941. Laura Bush thought music would be comforting, but Hughes also wanted a note of defiance, so she selected the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” not the usual fare for a mourning service. Bush agreed. “Defiance is good,” he said. When he was told that the Washington National Cathedral wanted him to follow a verger to the pulpit, as was customary, he refused. He would approach the pulpit on his own, the solitary leader he had become the moment the planes hit the towers.

  Arriving at the cathedral on a rainy day that seemed to reflect the country’s grief, Bush visited a holding room to thank the clergy leading the service. He found his friend from Texas, the Reverend Kirbyjon Caldwell.

  “May I come with you to Ground Zero?” Caldwell asked.

  “Yeah,” Bush answered, “that would be good.”

  As he headed into the main cathedral, he found an extraordinary assemblage of the nation’s leaders—former presidents, senior members of Congress, the cabinet, and the military, Democrats and Republicans, even his vanquished foe, Al Gore, all united in this moment. The one not there was Cheney, who had flown to Camp David to preserve the line of succession should the unthinkable happen again.

  When Bush saw three soldiers crying, he knew Powell had a point and resolved that whatever he did, he would not look at his parents when he spoke. “We are here in the middle hour of our grief,” he began. “So many have suffered so great a loss, and today we express our nation’s sorrow.” Bush summoned an eloquence and capacity for inspiration that had eluded him on the day of the attacks. “Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history,” he said. “But our responsibility to history is already clear—to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil. War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing.”

  He spoke for a mere seven minutes, but it was one of the signal moments of his presidency. He did not cry, but when he sat back down, the first president Bush, without looking at him, simply reached over across Laura Bush to squeeze his son’s arm in a fatherly gesture of love and pride. Both Bushes were stirred as the battle hymn concluded the service. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword, His truth is marching on…

  After the service, the president strode out of the cathedral and got into his armored limousine with Laura and Kirbyjon Caldwell to head to New York.

  Bush noticed a bulge in Caldwell’s sock. “What is that?” he asked.

  “That is my phone,” Caldwell said.

  “Oh,” Bush said. “Kind of looks like a gun.”

  Caldwell harked back to Bush’s work in a Houston poverty program as a young man. “That must have taken you back to your Fifth Ward days,” he joked.

  Bush laughed, glad for a light moment on a heavy day.

  AS AIR FORCE One approached New York, Bush could see the giant scar in the middle of a great city. It was worse than the pictures, worse than he could have imagined.

  The plane landed at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, and Bush boarded Marine One for the short helicopter flight into Manhattan. After an overnight rain, the day had turned bright and sunny, much like the one three days earlier. The helicopter flew low and fast toward the city, and as the Statue of Liberty came into view, the air turned noxious, filled with a stench of ignited jet fuel and burning bodies. “You could literally smell the carnage,” Caldwell recalled.

  The helicopter touched down at the Wall Street landing pad, and Bush joined Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki for the motorcade to what was already being called Ground Zero. As they turned the corner onto West Street, piles of ruins came into view. The rubble was still burning despite the rain. Dust and debris covered everything and everyone. As Bush emerged from the vehicle, sloshing through wreckage still wet from rain and fire hoses, he thought it was “like walking into hell.”

  Rescue workers chanted, “U-S-A, U-S-A!”

  “Make ’em pay, George!” someone yelled.

  “Whatever it takes!”

  One rescue worker pointed at Bush and said, “Don’t let me down!”

  Bush was taken aback. He could sense the palpable thirst for vengeance. Don’t let me down. Whatever it takes. The words stayed with him for years.

  Bush encountered a former New York firefighter named Rocco Chierichella, who had jumped into his car in Pennsylvania and raced to Manhattan to help.

  Chierichella put his arm around Bush’s shoulder, turned him around, and pointed to a pile of ash.

  “Mr. President,” he said, “look what they’ve done to us. You can’t let them get away with it.”

  Bush whispered in his ear. “You must have patience. I’m going to get every one of them.”

  No remarks were scheduled, but an advance person, Nina Bishop, approached Karl Rove. “They want to hear from their president,” she said. Rove agreed and sent her to find a bullhorn while he tracked down Andy Card, who suggested it to the president.

  Bush climbed onto a crushed fire truck, helped up by Bob Beckwith, a
sixty-nine-year-old retired firefighter who had put his old uniform on and rushed to the scene to help search for survivors. Once Bush was up, Beckwith started to climb down.

  “Where are you going?” Bush asked.

  “I was told to get down,” Beckwith said.

  “No, no, you stay right here,” Bush said.

  Bush draped his arm around Beckwith as he started to speak into the bullhorn: “I want you all to know that America today, America today is on bended knee in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn. This nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut.”

  Someone kept shouting, “I can’t hear you!” It was Chierichella.

  Instinct kicked in. “I can hear you!” Bush responded. “The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

  Presidencies are built on random, unscripted moments, and this was the most iconic of Bush’s. For all of Michael Gerson’s poetry, for all of the solemnity of a cathedral service, those few seconds of unvarnished bravado in the face of tragedy would most move a nation.

  Joe Hagin had agreed with New York officials that the president would stop by the Jacob Javits Convention Center for a half hour to meet people waiting for word of missing relatives. A half hour turned into two hours and twenty minutes as Bush worked his way through the tableau of grief, hugging people with bloodshot eyes holding up signs that said, “Have you seen my brother?” He embraced a little boy clutching a teddy bear and signed pictures of the missing so their family members could prove to them that they met the president when they were found—even though he knew most never would be.