aide Karen Hughes experienced the same difficulty getting through to the presidential plane. “The military operator came back to me and in—in a voice that sounded very shaken—said, ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry. We can’t reach Air Force One.’ ”
Given such contradictions, there is no way of knowing how Bush and Cheney or Bush and anyone else actually interacted that day. That issue, as will be seen, is central to the crucial matter of how the military responded to the hijackings.
Reporters traveling with the President watched the collapse of the towers on flickering television screens. At about 10:30, after the second tower fell, word came from the White House of a “credible,” anonymous phone threat to “Angel,” the insiders’ word for Air Force One. Tension rose accordingly. Armed guards were posted at the cockpit door, and agents checked the identification of almost everyone on board. Reporters were told not to use their cell phones. F-16 fighters were soon to begin escorting Air Force One, and did so for the rest of the day. One escort plane flew so close, the President’s press office would state, that Bush saluted through the window—and the F-16 pilot dipped a wing in reply. The warning of a threat to “Angel” had been just a baseless scare, but made a good story.
The President worried aloud about having literally vanished into the blue. “The American people,” he reportedly said, “want to know where their dang President is.” It was decided that he would land at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to make a television appearance. “Freedom itself,” Bush said in a two-minute taped address at 1:20 P.M., “was attacked this morning by a faceless coward. And freedom will be defended.” This was less than the reassurance he had wished to communicate, not least because the tape first hit the airwaves running backward.
Then the President was off again, this time heading for Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Once aboard, in a conversation he did succeed in having with Cheney, Bush said: “We’re at war, Dick. We’re going to find out who did this and kick their ass.” And: “We’re not going to have any slap-on-the-wrist crap this time.”
A rear admiral at Offutt, the underground headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command, would say he thought the President “very much in control … concerned about what was happening … calm … articulate … presidential.” In mid-afternoon, Bush took part in a videoconference with National Security Council members in Washington—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, CIA director Tenet, and FBI director Robert Mueller.
The President, however, was by now preoccupied with the thought that his continued absence from the capital made him look bad. The Secret Service was still advising him to stay away from Washington. His staff wanted him to address the nation again from Offutt. Bush, however, would apparently have none of it.
“I’m not going to do it from an Air Force base,” he reportedly said. “Not while folks are under the rubble.” And, in another account, “I don’t want a tin-horn terrorist to keep me out of Washington.” Press secretary Fleischer agreed that the President’s whereabouts was becoming “an increasingly difficult issue to deal with.”
Air Force One at last made the return trip to the capital. From the helicopter carrying him to the White House, Bush got his first glimpse of the reality of 9/11. There in the evening light was the Pentagon, partly veiled in black smoke, a deep gouge in its west side. “The mightiest building in the world is on fire,” Bush muttered, according to Fleischer. “That’s the twenty-first century war you’ve just witnessed.” Then he was down, landing on the South Lawn and walking back into the White House almost ten hours after the attacks had begun.
Political Washington had begun to show a brave face to the world. More than a hundred members of Congress had gathered on the steps of the Capitol in a display of unity. “We will stand together,” declared Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert—now back on the Hill—and he and colleagues broke into a chorus of “God Bless America.” An hour and a half later, once he was anchored back in the Oval Office, Bush delivered a four-minute address to the nation. It is said that he had an audience of eighty million people.
“Evil, despicable acts of terror,” the President said, “have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger.” Though he could not have known it, he ended by citing the same passage from the Twenty-third Psalm to which United 93 passenger Todd Beamer had turned in a moment of terror: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil …”
The address also included something Bush had added himself just before going on air. “We will make no distinction,” he said, after assuring Americans that those behind the attacks would be brought to justice, “between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”
Afterward, in the underground bunker where Cheney and others had spent the day, Bush met with key officials—the group he was to call his “war council.” The words “al Qaeda” and “Osama bin Laden” had been on everyone’s lips for hours, and CIA director Tenet said al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan were essentially one and the same.
There was talk of reprisals and then, according to counterterrorism coordinator Clarke, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld came out with a remarkable comment. “You know,” he said, “we’ve got to do Iraq.”
PRESIDENT BUSH almost always went to bed early, and September 11 was no exception. He balked when the Secret Service asked him and the first lady to spend the night on a bed in the underground bunker, an old pullout couch. “The bed looked unappetizing,” he recalled, “so I said no.” The couple retired to their usual bedroom in the residence, only to be woken around 11:30 P.M. by a new security alert. “Incoming plane!” an agent told them. “We could be under attack. Come on. Right now!”
The President of the United States, he in T-shirt and running shorts and Mrs. Bush in her robe—with their dogs Barney and Spot—were rushed down to the basement to be confronted again by the unappetizing couch. The “incoming” plane, however, turned out to be merely a chartered airliner bringing FBI reinforcements from the West Coast. Back went the Bushes to their private quarters.
Two hundred and twenty-five miles away in New York City, in the glare of halogen lights, men worked on through the night in the tangle of steel and rubble that had once symbolized American prosperity. They were still looking hopefully for the living, and the hand of one more survivor—the last, as it turned out—would eventually appear through a hole to grasp that of a rescuer. It belonged to a young female clerk who had worked at the Trade Center and, though seriously injured, she was to recover.
That consolation aside, there would henceforth be only the dead, or fragments of the dead.
The pile at the scene of the attacks “heaved and groaned and constantly changed, was capable at any moment of killing again.” The air smelled of noxious chemicals, and strange flames shot out of the ground, purple, green, and yellow. Fires were to burn on, underground, for three months to come.
An American apocalypse, a catastrophe with consequences—in blood spilled and global political upheaval— that continue to this day.
PART II
DISTRUST AND DECEIT
TEN
ONE CONSEQUENCE, A NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON, is that countless citizens do not believe the story of September 11 as we have just told it.
We have striven in these chapters to recount what is firmly known. We have teased out detail, sorted the reliable from the dross, often gone back to original sources. Yet many would say our account is skewed, too close to the “official version,” or just plain wrong.
9/11 is mired in “conspiracy theory” like no previous event in American history—more so even than President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Doubt and disbelief as to what really happened on 9/11, a
