It was absurd, ridiculous. I was thinking, Run for your lives? Really? What drama queens are writing this script? But even more absurd were the Charles Jourdan red patent-leather five-inch spike-heel pumps that I thought the Teamsters would like.
Outside, people were indeed “running for their lives,” fleeing the gates and grounds of the White House and heading down the street in every direction.
I had serious trouble walking in those pumps. No way could I join the stampeding crowd. Judiciously, in my best fashionista fashion, I opted to “walk for my life” instead.
Cars were stopped in the middle of the downtown streets, left deserted, their doors open. Terrified people were running away. No orders from military aides were necessary. Somehow everyone got the memo. A plane was coming—and one did—one that would eventually hit the Pentagon.
I didn’t get very far before my cell phone rang. Which, in the middle of that chaos gave me a thrill of unexpected joy because the cell service had been down and I needed to find out where my kids were. But I never got the chance to find out.
“Where are you, ma’am? The vice president wants you.”
I wanted to say, “Can I call you back after I check on Matty and Emerson?” but I said, “Wherever you want me,” to which I stupidly appended, “Where is he?”
“Where are you?” was the smart retort. I gave my location to the serious voice coming out of my cell, and in what seemed like seconds, two uniformed guys—big guys with big guns—arrived to escort me back to the West Wing. There, I was taken to a top-secret elevator with heavy steel-reinforced walls, like the one in the opening credits of Get Smart, and we descended into the below-the-basement bowels of the White House. When the armored elevator doors opened, my military escorts led me through an underground labyrinth of hallways. A series of heavy steel doors opened onto a small airless room with a desk in the corner and a long conference table where Cheney was centrally positioned, in command and focused on the fallout of the terror attack. Three large screens overhead were playing two live newscasts without any sound.
JAMES
THE PLANE HIT THE Pentagon, and you could see the smoke rising up in the distance. Nobody had any idea what might come next, what the next target might be. People on the street were incredibly polite, almost eerily polite, but you could see the worry on their faces. I’m sure they could see the worry on mine.
I knew Mary was at the White House, but I didn’t know what was going on with her and I doubted I could reach her even if I tried. To be honest, my first thought was that I had to get across the river back to Alexandria to get my girls. The youngest was at home with Geneva, but my oldest was at her school that day, six miles from downtown Washington.
It was not an easy thing to make those six miles on that morning. It might as well have been one hundred miles away. The roads were clogged and all of Washington was on high alert, but I would have swum the Potomac to get back to my daughters. It took a while, but I actually made it back and got Matty home from school before lunch.
MARY
THERE WE WERE, deep beneath the East Wing of the White House in a bunker designed to protect the president (and designated “protectees”) in the event of an attack. Presumably it was also a “hard” target or impenetrable to all incoming “attack devices” with the probable exception of a nuclear blast. Its point of entry was a labyrinth-like series of corridors, interspersed at regular intervals with highly classified, reinforced steel doors and manned around the clock by Joint Service military staff.
If the big guys with big guns hadn’t been leading me along as if I were a puppy on a leash, I’d still be wandering down there—even though, a couple weeks earlier, I had visited this underground dungeon for my top-level security clearance training, but I might as well have been blindfolded. No chance of my committing a security breach with my sense of direction.
I am using qualifying words such as presumably and probable because the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) was originally constructed during World War II for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and no one alive remembers using it for its intended purpose, which only drew our attention to the fact, once again, that this was a unique event in our nation’s history. Not that anybody needed reminding.
Our connectivity system—apologies to readers who don’t enjoy government-speak, but this is how people in the White House actually talk—was composed of a couple of big screens (which could be used to broadcast TV or to connect with other secure government facilities) and a couple of secure phones stationed on opposite ends of a small conference table (smaller than our seven a.m. senior staff meeting table). In the corners of the room, there were very small workstations.
The room had a low ceiling, bad lighting, and was pretty stuffy, as though it contained air dating back to World War II.
Maybe it was state-of-the-art in FDR’s day, but it appeared eerily antiquated when I had a chance, finally, to catch my breath and survey our surroundings. Was this really it? Was this room adequately equipped to deal with an event of such enormity? My instinctual unease was validated almost immediately.
The equipment started choking right off the bat. Even when the big screens before us were connecting to something—TV or another government agency—they weren’t functioning in any useful way. You could get sound or visual, but not both. You could get another government agency or TV, but not both side by side.
It had instilled so much confidence, the impressive speed with which the “mil aides” had collected and carried away the VP, then rounded up the requested list of his staff and National Security Agency top aides from the smoldering D.C. streets and delivered us to the stuffy PEOC. But as soon as we arrived, that confidence began to dissolve as we faced the reality of the internal mechanics.
It’s hard to remember the days before iPads and reliable bandwidth, but since we had never had such modern wonders, we didn’t miss them. But we did feel crippled without our desks, our desktop computers, our landlines and especially our secretaries. In those days, the secretaries were often the only ones who knew how to work the computers and phones.
The PEOC technology was inadequate, we were getting hotter and stuffier by the second, and no one knew for sure what was going on aboveground. But the ad hoc assemblage didn’t miss a beat. The VP and Condi Rice sat together at the conference table, facing the screens, and for the most part, the senior staffers stood behind them, or kneeled next to them for direction. Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta sat across the table, thoroughly engaged in identifying any still-airborne civilian aircraft. The order to ground them had gone out immediately, but that’s easier said than done. You can’t just parallel park one thousand jumbo jets in midflight.
Meanwhile, POTUS had been evacuated from his No Child Left Behind event in Florida. He was really not happy that all the security experts insisted he not return to Washington immediately, an unhappiness that grew with each failed attempt to connect with us. His secure connection from Air Force One to Cheney in the PEOC kept dropping.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was literally incommunicado, unresponsive, his whereabouts unknown, despite the VP’s repeated attempts to get through to the DOD and his old friend. We discovered later that he was pulling his injured and dead colleagues out from the smoke and debris of the Pentagon carnage.
Secretary of State Colin Powell was in transit from Lima, where he’d been meeting with the president of Peru, and he was hard to reach. The congressional leadership had their own security protocols, and they weren’t so easy to connect with either.
Many minute-by-minute accounts or “ticktocks” of the whole long mind-blowing day have been published already. I don’t need to add to them, except to say we should have been far more terrified than we were. In truth, I don’t think we had the luxury or the time to be terrified.
But I could sense the VP’s preternatural unflappability was still being strained
by the escalating connectivity problems. As is always the case, he didn’t need to raise his voice to make his frustration—and expectations—crystal clear. (I’m not sure I’d like to witness what DEFCON 1 Cheney looks like.)
“Fix it. Now.”
Later on, I saw a widely circulated photograph, which subsequently became one of the iconic freeze-frames of that horrific day. It captures the conference table in the PEOC at the moment our frenetic activity screeched to a halt. We were all stone-cold still, staring with disbelief at the big screens, aghast, wordless.
The World Trade Center towers—the instantly and universally recognized symbol of superpower accomplishment—were crumbling in a cloud of dust and disintegrating before our eyes.
No one said anything. What was there to say?
We just went back to work.
JAMES
I STILL DIDN’T KNOW anything about Mary. As long as I was able to focus on tracking down my daughters and making sure they were safe, I’d been able to keep my mind occupied. But once I got the girls home and flipped on the TV, that’s when the real fear settled in. People were talking about putting tape over your windows and crazy stuff like that. There were rumors about more attacks, speculation that the White House was still a target. In the middle of all this, I had no idea where Mary was, what she was doing, who she was with and whether they were safe. I can’t remember a time when I felt as uneasy and as helpless. There was nothing I could do.
Finally, the phone rang. There was a man on the other end, and he said, “Mr. Carville, this is lieutenant commander so-and-so . . .” I felt myself tense up. I had no idea what the rest of that sentence might hold, whether he was calling with good news or bad.
He said something like “I am authorized to tell you that your wife is safe and is in a secure location. Other than that, I can’t tell you anything else.”
That was it. That was all I really knew about Mary for days. As I recall, we might have gotten some clothes together for her and dropped them off at the White House. But I never heard a word from her and never got any more updates. It was massive uncertainty.
Four or five days later, she came home. She never did say exactly where she had been. I never asked. For all I know, she was holed up inside some fucking mountain in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t really care. I was just relieved to see her walk through that door.
MARY
LAMENTING OUR TECHNICAL DEFICIENCIES was not an option. We pushed ahead, attending to the myriad critical tasks that were cascading on us nonstop, such as working through the proper orders and chains of command to take out any nonresponsive civilian aircraft, reaching global leaders to assure them—with authority and confidence—that the terrorists’ objective to “decapitate” the U.S. government was unsuccessful, calming the financial markets.
From the get-go, overriding all the other issues, was the necessity to communicate with the American people.
Who goes out? Who should address the people? Obviously the first and best choice was the president, but his security was paramount. The VP, attending to the relentless incoming barrage of one crisis after another, couldn’t leave the PEOC.
When? Obviously, ASAP; but we realized that we could make a very bad situation much worse by saying anything without verifiable facts. Any incorrect information would have to be later “adjusted,” which would undermine the confidence we were striving to project.
What venue? Our first choice to demonstrate the U.S. government was fully functional would be the White House briefing room, but the Secret Service gave us their version of a belly laugh to that proposal—that is to say, they just cold-stared at us. No press would be allowed in that unsecured area, nor would we be allowed in.
What words? This task was not as obvious as you might think. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing ourselves, or conceive what might be coming next, or anticipate the president’s orders in response to all of it. How could we comfort a nation likely more shocked than we were, since they had even less information than we did?
We were missing our best wordsmith, Karen Hughes, who could represent President Bush with unquestioned authority. She never, never, ever took time off. But that day, her wedding anniversary, she had taken an opportunity—afforded by the president’s travel—to spend a few extra morning hours with her husband, a sensible Lone Star State man who was wishing he was anywhere on the globe but Washington, D.C., that year, or any year. Karen had been trying to make her way to the White House all morning through the traffic-choked streets. And connecting with us by telephone was near to impossible.
After many failed attempts to reach her—and many dropped calls to POTUS—the VP tasked Anna Perez, Condi’s top aide, and me to draft a statement and to just get it done. I considered making the point that only Karen could speak for the president, but I determined that Cheney didn’t need to consider why that was so.
The VP issued the broad concepts of what needed to be said in the statement, and Anna and I were to find the perfect words. That sounds easy, but the words are less an issue than the “voice.” Since we had no idea who would be issuing the statement, it wasn’t easy to come up with words to fit. Given a little more time, I would have had a massive insecurity attack over this—and it would have been an epic one—but miraculously, Karen appeared in the PEOC just in the nick of time.
She grabbed the seat where Anna and I had been pecking at the keyboard and, with lightning speed, cranked out the perfect combination of words to convey resolve, authority and comfort in a “voice” that sounded more like President Bush’s than his own.
It wasn’t the first or the last time that I thought, Damn, that girl is good.
Then we had to confront the issue of how to get the statement out.
Again, easier said than done, as there was no obvious secure broadcasting facility to assemble at and hook up with the media. We were absolute—and unanimous—in our conviction that we couldn’t just issue a disembodied press statement. Once we discovered a secure site in the Justice Department, we had to figure out how to get there safely—without getting our media colleagues or ourselves blown to smithereens. Not that I was thinking that way.
• • •
The next thing I knew, Karen and I—heavily guarded—were escorted into an armored-to-the-teeth caravan and were careening through the desolate streets of D.C. And the next thing I remember was praying with Karen in a holding room adjoining the ad hoc press center in the DOJ. Or, to be more precise, she was praying and I was choking up.
She prayed for grace.
I was neither religious nor antireligious in those days. But I remember vividly how she expressed her faith in that moment. It has clarity to me, piercing sharpness in the midst of a blurry day. Before she went to speak to the entire world, Karen simply and humbly bowed her head and said, “Give me grace, give me grace.”
It was an act of pure faith, something I was unfamiliar with then. I had seen acts of faith, I’m sure. Maybe I had seen them almost every day, but I hadn’t really understood how faith works. Karen wasn’t sappy or hysterical. She wasn’t Tammy Faye Bakker or any of those corny images propagated about people who are “religious.” She was simply strong and deeply faithful, and it was an inspiring moment for me. And it left an impression with subsequent significant consequences.
After praying, she lifted her head, walked to the podium and was 100 percent totally Karen Hughes, counselor to the president of the United States. No drama, no fireworks, just steady Karen. She gave the statement, took no shit, and left.
Much of the remainder of that day—which went long into the night—lacks clarity for me. It was a rush of responsiveness, of staying on top of my assigned duties and of focusing on the moment. And in truth, I haven’t tried to recall it in detail.
Except for two things I can’t forget, hard as I’ve tried.
One: I never called home. It was unthinkable to commandeer
one of the few secure phones for a personal call. Nobody did.
But no matter how clogged up my brain was, I knew on a primal level—and didn’t want to think about—that my kids were within spitting distance of the Pentagon, that James was across the river from them, that traffic wasn’t moving, and that they all would be petrified about my whereabouts and safety. If I thought about those things, I got woozy.
The only way I could maintain some semblance of equilibrium was to compartmentalize and find sanity in my certain knowledge—on an equally primal, cellular level—that James would somehow get to the kids, keep them safe and be able to “feel” that his wife was okay.
It was hours later that I learned from an anonymous military aide that James had been located and assured that I was okay—and told that I may not be coming back anytime soon.
That was good enough for James. Neighbors told me later that they saw him running up and down the block in our neighborhood waving a beer in each hand and screaming, “Mary’s safe! Mary’s okay!” or some Cajun utterance to that effect.
To the thoughtful military aide whose name I never knew, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The other haunting memory that still closes off my throat more than a decade later was getting word from Haley Barbour that our dear mutual friend, Barbara Olson, was on the plane that was commandeered and crashed into the Pentagon.
Only a few short months earlier, I had been trying to talk Barbara into replacing me on Crossfire. In the PEOC, when we heard the news, nothing was said—quiet took over the room—but none of us could stop thinking about her husband, Ted Olson, the Solicitor General of the United States, our longtime colleague and friend. We were told Barbara called him from the plane just before it went down.
As the days unfolded, we and the rest of America learned of friends who were gravely injured or perished in either New York, Pennsylvania or the Pentagon. They were buried or burned alive, or they jumped from the burning buildings.
Love & War Page 15
