Most everybody in the country who was watching television that day probably has a memory of either Karen giving that first White House statement—announcing that the president was in an undisclosed secure location and holding a National Security Council meeting by phone—or they remember watching the smoky holes in the ground that had been, only minutes before, the very epitome of financial and military might.
But my memories of 9/11 are very different. I become reticent when the topic of 9/11 comes up—because I didn’t see what the rest of the country saw in real time until one year later. On the first anniversary of the attacks, I lay on Maria Cino’s TV room floor with my girls and wept.
In some ways, it still hasn’t sunk in.
• • •
On our way back to the White House, I ditched security and snuck up to my West Wing office to get my running shoes, and without thinking I grabbed the little pottery animals my girls had made me, which I kept on my desk (and still do). Then I ran into Karen’s office down the hall and grabbed the first family token I saw—a framed photo of her son and husband. As far as I knew, it would be days before we’d see our beloved peeps again.
It all started moving quickly after that. My next distinct memory, a touchstone that delineated day from night, was the president’s return to the White House and the gathering of his political/communications staff outside the Oval Office—Karen, Dan Bartlett, Karl Rove and I. Each of us bolted there with our notes, things we thought the president might want to say, things we’d jotted down over the course of the long day on paper that was rumpled and stained with grease and barbecue sauce from the ribs and drumsticks we devoured, which had been left over from a congressional barbecue that had never taken place that day.
In his hands, the president had his own notes. We looked over his shoulder, and there we saw fragments of remarkably organized policy propositions he had assembled during his roller-coaster flights across the skies of the USA. He wanted to do a live Oval Office address to the nation as soon as it could be set that night.
Needless to say, I was not only impressed but I was also comforted by his coherence and clear vision—and humbled by my own shakiness. The president was light-years ahead: he already knew what he wanted to say and communicate.
The truth is, he didn’t need us communicators. I am not saying this sycophantically—but honestly. I remember feeling overwhelmed (in a happy way) by what a clear grasp he had not only of the gravity of the threat we faced but of the response that was needed. He had the language and tone and voice already.
What he’d already wrapped his mind around were the contours of the Bush Doctrine: if you harbor terrorists, we’re going to treat you like a terrorist. What he wanted us to think about was a template, a way to measure our progress as the struggle against terrorism unfolded that could be communicated to the country. Combating this enemy wouldn’t look like the Gulf War or any war Americans had ever experienced. And our success or progress would happen in a way that people couldn’t see—CNN wouldn’t be there to record footage of the storming of beaches. It would happen in the “shadows,” which the terrorists owned. How could we make it easier to chart progress so Americans would feel secure? Disrupting financing routes, or gathering one thousand disparate bits of intelligence, or breaking up invisible terrorist cells—this was hardly the stuff of compelling visuals.
As it turned out, the public understood our plans (people are way smarter than policy nerds give them credit for). What was less clear were the terrorists themselves. Who was this shadowy enemy? What kind of soldier hides among civilians or dresses in women’s clothes? How is a chain of command hiding in caves wreaking such havoc? What do people without a sovereign state want?
Addressing that ongoing information deficit is what later led to the formation of the White House Information Group (WHIG), which was much maligned by partisans and the press. One of the best ideas of WHIG (I think it was Dan Bartlett’s idea, or maybe it was just lifted from the intel guys) was an FBI-like Most Wanted poster lining up head shots of the al-Qaeda hierarchy, with big X’s over the photos of the ones we had captured or killed. Osama bin Laden meet Tony Soprano.
One problem with the al-Qaeda Most Wanted poster was, given the shadowy countenance preferred by terrorists, we didn’t have a lot of their photos. It’s not like there were libraries of high school senior photos or Facebook head shots sitting around. So many of the Most Wanteds were blank squares. And even when we did have photos, they all looked alike. Now don’t go all PC on me. There is not a lot of sartorial variety with the kaffiyeh look.
• • •
After the Oval Office address to the nation, we reassembled in the small stuffy PEOC. Unlike the daytime “nation under attack” atmosphere, the combo of a couple of hours with no planes crashing into American symbols of power and having the president anchor the table infused the room with a sense of calm. This group possessed such vast institutional expertise and wisdom that if you were a Catholic you would have crossed yourself.
Which I did. And I wasn’t even a Catholic at the time. But I was so grateful, so humbled, that I don’t know how else to describe it.
Say what you want about establishment Washington, this was an assemblage of people who knew what to do. They had the expertise and guts to figure it out quickly, even though it was a whole new world (dis)order. There was a seamlessness in how it all came together, how we worked together in many ways more flawlessly than we did setting up the new administration in the first place.
Nobody faltered or hesitated. Sure, there were the to-be-expected differing views and the occasional shouting matches—which President Bush desired and inspired, actually. Our team was in place, and it was security smart, Washington savvy. The principals all knew each other, and their deputies knew each other. When there’s a crisis, you don’t want a bunch of jockeying newcomers in charge.
But there were some things you can’t know until you go through them. And one of the things we learned by going through it was that the apparently hermetically sealed WWII-era PEOC was set up with an insufficient circulation and ventilation system. Or, at least, with a system that wasn’t sufficient to support an overpopulated prolonged stay. As the room got hotter and hotter, stuffier and stuffier, we thought our dizziness was a result of a massive intake of our only PEOC food source, M&M’s—and the subsequent blood sugar crash. Turned out, we were breathing our own expelled carbon dioxide, asphyxiating ourselves.
Another occasion that strained the VP’s customary unflappability.
“Fresh air. Now.”
JAMES
AFTER 9/11, my attitude really changed. I was genuinely happy that Mary was at the White House, really proud that she was working there. I felt like our family was contributing in a concrete way. She worked all the time, probably more than ever. But suddenly, I was okay with it. I knew she was doing important work, and I totally supported it.
Hell, I found myself feeling a little envious, wishing I could help in some way. Like everybody, I was consumed with patriotism during that period. I was ready to put my two stripes back on and head off with the marines. I told people at the White House, “Look, whatever you need. I’ll go to Pakistan and churn out press releases or whatever.” It was a different time. It changed my whole outlook.
MARY
WHEN YOU ARE TRAVELING at warp speed, the edges of your life, anything peripheral, are a blur. The days following 9/11 were unlike any other days I could remember. It had something to do with the focus of our jobs. The way the White House had to pull together and concentrate on this one thing—and all the attendant repercussions of it. For me, it was the longest expanse of being in the moment I’ve ever experienced. It wasn’t just days or weeks. I was in the moment for months at a time, and there wasn’t any other option really. There were things to do, things to think about, serious business. I wasn’t resentful. I wasn’t emotional. And for the first time since I got to
the White House, I wasn’t even feeling guilty about my kids.
Above all, I knew I had to be disciplined. Like training for a marathon, which was what it turned out to be. I had to eat right, sleep right, and take better care of myself. Beyond that, there wasn’t much time to dwell on myself, have emotions or even daydream about getting a pedicure or massage. Sometimes I was away for days at a time, shuttling from one undisclosed location to another.
I worried about Nee Nee, who seemed to be precipitously and progressively worse whenever I was able to see her. I begged her to let us help—to see another doctor or any doctor and to stop being so dignified and stoic and secretive. James would report that she seemed too weak to play with the kids, after feeding and dressing them. It got so bad she couldn’t open a can.
But no matter how many times I tried to raise the subject with her, she wouldn’t tell me what was wrong or how sick she really was.
“Nee Nee, let me have somebody help you,” I begged her. And whatever it was, whatever was wrong with her, I asked her to stay with us—and we’d look after her. And she did stay—until her last day, one month after the attacks. In those days at the White House, I never left for any personal reasons. But for Nee Nee’s funeral I never even said I was leaving. I closed my office door, turned off my cell phone and drove alone to the same Pentecostal church in D.C. where she used to take Matty, where they’d sing and sway—Matty loved it. Now that church was crammed full of Nee Nee’s mourners, her friends and family and faith community, a raucous, loving and loud group. People stood up spontaneously during the service to tell a story about Nee Nee, or sing a song, say a prayer, or simply break down. I have never cried so hard in my life. I wept and wailed. It felt like we were burying the only mother my girls had really had—and my own mother too.
Nee Nee’s send-off was the sweetest, most life-affirming event I ever attended in Washington. My only regret, as the years passed, was not taking Matty, who’d been Nee Nee’s companion nearly every day of her little life. When I was growing up, my parents never allowed us kids to attend funerals. So I didn’t give bringing Matty to Nee Nee’s too much thought. I assumed she wasn’t old enough to understand the ceremony without being haunted or disturbed by it. But I was wrong about that. Matty would have understood and loved it as much as I did.
JAMES
I REMEMBER GROWING UP during the Cold War, how we would obsess about what might happen next, no matter how farfetched. Would they bomb Baton Rouge? Would they send submarines up the Mississippi River?
After 9/11, the same sort of speculation and uncertainty ran rampant. Only it seemed scarier as an adult, perhaps because I had my two girls to look after, my wife was off in some undisclosed location and Washington undoubtedly was a target. We didn’t know if there were sleeper cells. People were duct taping their windows and garage doors. The rumor mill was churning at full speed.
In the days after the attacks, I certainly wasn’t talking to anyone about politics. First off, it wasn’t an election year. But that hardly mattered. Smoke literally was still coming out of the Pentagon. You couldn’t fly. Washington pretty much remained on lockdown.
I would walk down to my office in Old Town Alexandria to work the phones, or people would come by the house. Either way, we all were just trying to figure out what exactly had happened and what came next. No one talked about anything else. Everything was sober and quiet and uncertain.
I was always waiting to hear from Mary—or at least to hear more about Mary. The girls would ask about their mother, and I’d tell them everything I knew. She’s fine. She’s with the vice president.
They had friends at school whose parents were killed in the Pentagon and whose families were grieving. It was a strange time. A strange and sad time.
MARY
WE MADE OUR FIRST trip to Ground Zero about a month after the attacks. The vice president hadn’t wanted to go to Ground Zero before that, for the same reason George W. Bush didn’t go to New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. The extra chaos of an official White House visit wasn’t what the overworked and traumatized response team, or anybody else, needed. No gains from a high-level visit could justify the distraction.
It was Cheney’s first public outing since the attacks—and timed to piggyback on the annual Al Smith dinner, where he was previously scheduled to speak. It meant triple security. It meant the commotion of choppers landing, a complicated security plan, armed escorts and coordinating with Mayor Rudy Giuliani to meet at the emotionally traumatizing site of the still-smoking hole of Ground Zero. I couldn’t even fathom the cavity that was once the towers. And the smell was wretched.
But the vice president and staff agreed: if there was any comfort we could bring to New Yorkers at such a terrible time, it would be an appearance at their cherished Al Smith gathering, a premier annual event that attracted Catholics and politicos from all over the state and, at the same time, didn’t discriminate on the basis of religion or party credo.
While the VP did the rounds of the dinner reception and appeared to be making a room of shell-shocked prominent New Yorkers feel better, a mad scramble was under way back at Air Force Two. We received incoming intel that a bio or chem attack was detected in the nation’s Capitol. It wasn’t the first such report, since the early versions of the detection devices regularly registered false positives. But all we were being told at the time was that we were not allowed to return to D.C. as an attack capable of wiping out the entire city and beyond had been detected.
What? We can’t go home?
You’d think by then that we’d be used to this—not being able to go home or hearing false reports of total annihilation—but the craziness of the “new normal” was starting to unravel my nerves. It seemed there were far too many recurring opportunities to have crazier-than-usual conversations with myself, such as Wow, it’s a good thing I duct taped the garage* before I left! And aren’t I an incredible mom for stocking that so-safe safe room with tons of canned goods! But then my mind would wander uncontrollably to the tangential truth of the matter—that our miserable, dirty, germ- and bug-infested junk-filled mess of a garage was about as fit or safe for human habitation as a bio attack—and how I knew that someday we’d really fix it up and use it as a real garage in which to park an actual car. Wait, isn’t it actually fortuitous that I haven’t gotten around to fixing up the garage yet, because, lucky us, since there’s no car in there, the girls have more play space. But was it really okay that they were playing in that disgusting zone with all those broken toys? Then I promised myself that if by some miracle the whole neighborhood wasn’t poisoned when I got back I’d get right over to Goodwill Industries and give those broken toys away.
Because, good God Almighty, my beloved miracle babies were about to bake alive in a pile of old junky toys and be charbroiled with the spiders! But wait, did I remember to leave them a can opener by the lifetime supply of Progresso soup cans?
Boom! Snap out of it, girl! Eventually, I got ahold of myself.
And pardon me if the above conversation with myself lessens your confidence in those on whom your safety and security depends. But your mind would wander too, I promise, if you thought you were never going to see your home and family again—or if you did, it would be like coming home to Charlton Heston in The Omega Man or to my go-to movie reference point and constant vision, Mad Max.
The world we lived in was constantly too bizarre to believe. It was not at all farfetched to think all of our families would be dead and that we were never going back home.
Meanwhile, back at the Waldorf, the vice president was still comforting the crowd and, despite all he knew—which was way more than we did—he never lost his focus. He and John McConnell had sweated bullets over what would become the VP’s first major speech after 9/11, which was delivered to a room of heartbroken notables and worthies with full-on press coverage. The rest of the Office of the Vice President, who would usually b
utt in—vetting and editing Cheney’s speeches (and essentially ruining John’s perfectly assembled presentation)—were distracted when the germ/gas attack report came over the chatter waves.
Important as it was at the time, the speech seemed a tad secondary to impending mass murder and chemical warfare, but in the end, it was better for the lack of our interference.
And it opened with some really good jokes.
“It’s nice, for a change, to be at a disclosed location . . .”
“And the Waldorf is a lot nicer than our cave.”
The speech quickly pivoted to the moving, dramatic and really painful times we were all living through, and the incredible strength that the city of New York had shown in the face of tragedy. “We have to assume there will be more attacks,” Cheney said, “that is the only safe way to proceed. And I want to assure each of you that in the face of these dangers we are doing everything we know how to do. For the first time ever, the country has a strategy of homeland security and a cabinet officer to carry it out.”*
Our office had, in fact, been assigned the job of recommending to the president the best and most expeditious way of creating a domestic-security operation commensurate to the immediate threat. Even before the 9/11 attacks, after our energy policy assignment was completed, we’d been working in this area and recommending the right individual to run the new cabinet-level department.
Following the attacks on our own shores, securing the homeland obviously became a priority. The groundwork had to be done in just over a week, only days away, by September 20, when the president was scheduled to update the nation—and the world—in an address to a joint session of Congress. On the continuum of big deal speeches in the history of our country, this one was off the charts. And it would be the most serious and consequential speech of Bush’s career after less than a year in office.
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