The Eleventh Day

AT THE SCHOOL in Florida, the President’s reading session with the children finally came to an end. “Hoo!” he exclaimed. “These are great readers … Very impressive! Thank you all so very much for showing me your reading skills … Thanks for having us.”

Why had Bush continued to sit in the classroom—for more than five minutes—after being told of the second strike on the Trade Center? Why, many were to wonder, had he not responded instantly— even with a single terse presidential instruction—when Card told him the second crash indicated a terrorist attack?

Two months later, the President would offer a sort of explanation. He had gone on listening to the schoolchildren, he said, because he was “very aware of the cameras. I’m trying to absorb that knowledge. I have nobody to talk to … and I realize I’m the commander-in-chief and the country has just come under attack.”

Once out of the classroom, Bush joined aides watching the TV news, saw the Trade Center burning, and talked on the phone with Cheney and Rice. He decided to make a brief statement, then fly back to Washington.

Unknown to the President, though, as he mulled what to tell the national audience, crisis was spiraling into calamity.

FIVE

SIX TIMES, MAYBE MORE, THE PHONE HAD RUNG THAT MORNING IN THE office at the Justice Department of Theodore Olson, the solicitor general. The caller was his wife, Barbara, and she finally got through some time after 9:15. Mrs. Olson, a prominent attorney who often made television appearances, was no shrinking violet. Now, though, she sounded hysterical.

Olson knew his wife was flying to California that day. He had seen the television coverage of the Trade Center attacks, had thanked God there had not been time for his wife’s flight to get to New York. Now Barbara was on the line—from American 77.

Her flight had been seized, she said, by men “with knives and box cutters.” After an interruption—Mrs. Olson was cut off—she came back on the line and spoke with her husband for about ten minutes.

The pilot, she told him, had announced that the flight had been hijacked. Had Flight 77’s legitimate pilot, Charles Burlingame, remained alive and told his passengers what was happening? Today, there is no way of knowing. Mrs. Olson, who by now sounded calmer, consulted with someone nearby and said she thought the plane was headed northeast. She could see houses below, so the plane must—she realized—have been flying fairly low. She and her husband talked of their feelings for each other, and Olson assured her that things were “going to come out okay.” In his heart, he thought otherwise.

Nothing more would be heard from anyone aboard Flight 77. Ted Olson tried to reach the attorney general, John Ashcroft, only to find that he, too, was out of Washington and in the air. Olson spoke with the Department of Justice Command Center and provided his wife’s flight number, but the effort went nowhere. With the minutes rushing by, the solicitor general of the United States proved no more effective than had flight attendant Renee May’s mother, calling American Airlines to report her daughter’s desperate call.

Flight 77 had been flying on undetected, for ground controllers worked on the assumption that it was still flying not east but west. Then at 9:32, controllers monitoring radar at Dulles Airport, outside Washington, spotted an unidentified airplane speeding toward the capital. Reagan National, the airport situated alongside the Potomac River in Washington itself, was notified. So were Secret Service agents, who were by now fretting both about the safety of the Vice President—still in his White House office—and of the President, still at that school in Florida.

ISOLATED FROM THE ONRUSH of events, but very aware of the catastrophe in New York, the President was launching into his thank-you remarks to the teachers and fifth-grade students—remarks rapidly reshaped to take account of the attacks and suggest that the nation’s leader was at the helm:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America. I unfortunately will be going back to Washington.… Today we have had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.… I have ordered the full resources of the federal government to go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and find those folks who’ve committed this act. Terrorism against our nation will not stand. Now, if you’ll join me in a moment

of silence.… May God bless the victims and their families and America.

Bush was gone from the school moments later. A Secret Service agent emerged at a run to tell local police officers, “We’re under terrorist attack. We have to go now.” The presidential motorcade sped off, heading for the Sarasota airport. Before it got there, however, events would torpedo the plan to return to Washington.

FROM THE TOWER at Reagan Airport in Washington, a supervisor had been talking urgently with the Secret Service’s Operations Center at the White House. “We’ve got an aircraft coming at you,” he said, “and not talking with us.” It is less than four miles from the airport to the White House. Within three minutes, by 9:36, according to the Secret Service record, the agents who had been waiting in Cheney’s outer office—submachine guns in hand— acted. “They came in,” the Vice President remembered, “grabbed me and … you know, your feet touch the floor periodically. But they’re bigger than I am, and they hoisted me up and moved me very rapidly down the hallway, down some stairs, through some doors, and down some more stairs into an underground facility under the White House.” He was on his way to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a fortified bunker originally built for President Roosevelt in World War II, where he was to remain for many hours.

DULLES CONTROLLERS had reported that the suspect airplane was headed toward the restricted airspace around the White House, known as P-56. It was ten miles out, still pointed that way, when radar at Reagan National picked it up. Then it turned south. A National Guard cargo aircraft pilot, asked if he had it in sight, could see it clearly. It looked “like a 757 with a silver fuselage” descending, Colonel Steve O’Brien would recall.

Then, squinting through the haze, O’Brien saw the plane begin to turn back again toward the city. Suddenly, horrified controllers in the Reagan control tower no longer needed the reports of the National Guard pilot. There the airliner was, in plain sight and less than a mile away.

A fire engine captain and his crew on Interstate 395, en route to a training session, saw the plane in steep descent, banking right. A policeman on a motorcycle on Columbia Pike saw it, flying so low that its fuselage reflected the shapes of the buildings beneath. A Catholic priest, on his way to a graveside service at Arlington Cemetery, saw it—flying no more than twenty feet above the road, he said. Steve Anderson, an executive for USA Today, who saw it from his 19th floor office, couldn’t believe his eyes.

“I heard an airplane, a very loud airplane, come from behind me,” said Richard Benedetto, a reporter for the paper, “an American Airlines airplane. I could see it very clearly.”

“I was close enough—about a hundred feet or so—that I could see the American Airlines logo on the tail,” said Steve Riskus. “It was not completely level but … kind of like it was landing with no gear down … It knocked over a few light poles on its way.”

“I looked out my driver’s side window,” said insurance company employee Penny Elgas, “and realized I was looking at the nose of an airplane … I saw the end of the wing closest to me and the underside closest to me … I remember recognizing it as an American Airlines plane … The plane seemed to be floating as if it were a paper glider.”

AT THE PENTAGON, on the south bank of the Potomac, the news from New York had set some people thinking. “What do we have in place to protect from an airplane?” someone had asked Pentagon police chief John Jester. “Nothing,” he replied. There were measures in place to counter a terrorist attack on the ground, but there was no antiaircraft system. Jester raised the “Protection Condition” to “Alpha,” all he could do in the circumstances.

Controller Sean Boger, in the little tower beside the Pentagon heliport, wondered aloud why it was that no airplane had ever hit the Pentagon—even by accident. The vast complex was, after all, only a mile from Reagan National. Then, out of nowhere, Boger saw “the nose and the wing of an aircraft just like, coming right at us.”