October 7, 2002
Part I: Suddenly,
a time to lead
By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The United States launched its
counterattack on Osama bin Laden's terror network in Afghanistan
one year ago today. Bill Sammon, senior White House correspondent
for The Washington Times, tells the inside story of President Bush's
war on terror in his new book, "Fighting Back" (Regnery).
"A second plane hit the second tower. America
is under attack."
White House Chief of Staff Andrew
Card leaned over and whispered these words into President Bush's
right ear at 9:07 a.m. September 11.
"I looked at him, and that's all he
said," Mr. Bush recalled months later, in a series of extensive
interviews with The Washington Times in the Oval Office and aboard
Air Force One. "Then he left. There was no time for discussion or
anything."
The old phase of the Bush presidency
234 days of sparring on tax cuts, stem-cell research, media
recounts of the Florida ballots was suddenly, irretrievably
over.
Now there was this new phase, beginning
incongruously inside a classroom in Sarasota, Fla., as the president
watched a teacher put her second-graders through a reading drill.
"And I can't remember anything the
lady was saying from that point on," Mr. Bush recalled. "I might
have been looking at her, but I wasn't hearing.
"And my mind was registering what
it meant to hear 'America is under attack' and to be the commander
in chief of the country at that moment."
• • •
George W. Bush awoke that morning
before dawn in a bed whose last famous occupant had been Al Gore.
Blinking into consciousness, the president of the United States
was alone in a massive, luxury penthouse suite at the Colony Beach
& Tennis Resort on the island of Longboat Key, Fla.
To his left was a wall of windows
overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, where a pair of heavily armed boats
patrolled the murky surf. To his right was Sarasota Bay and, beyond
it, the city of Sarasota, where he was scheduled to give an unremarkable
speech on education reform.
Swaddled in the finest Frette linens
and matching duvet, the president was stretched out on the same
king-sized bed where Mr. Gore had slept nearly five years earlier,
on the eve of his vice-presidential debate with Jack Kemp in nearby
St. Petersburg.
As was his custom, Mr. Bush had gone
to bed early after enjoying a relaxed Tex-Mex dinner with his brother,
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and a dozen other Republican officeholders,
party leaders and aides.
The president swung his 6-foot frame
out of bed and soon left the penthouse to begin a brisk, four and
a half mile run at the neighboring golf course at 6:32 a.m.
He called out for Bloomberg News Service
reporter Dick Keil, at the clubhouse in the press pool, to jog along
with him on his second loop in the dark humidity. The two chatted
about running, dogs, Little League baseball and off the record
Washington politics.
"The representative of the press acquitted
himself quite well," Mr. Bush announced as they returned.
"I was beggin' for mercy out there,"
Mr. Keil told his colleagues.
The president briefly bantered with
the reporters before going back to his suite. He breakfasted on
fresh berries and fruit juices, showered and put on a pale blue
shirt, a crimson tie and a charcoal, two-button woolen suit.
He received his usual intelligence
briefing, though not a just-completed staff report on how to dismantle
the al Qaeda terrorist network headed by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden.
Aides also updated the president
on overnight political developments, including a thick sheaf of
articles, columns and editorials from The Washington Times and other
major newspapers.
The front page of The Washington
Post hammered the White House on three favorite Democratic themes:
tax cuts, arsenic levels in drinking water and a dearth of human
stem cells for medical research.
The New York Times chose the "darkening
economic outlook" as its top story for the fourth day in a row.
"Pressure mounted on President Bush to drop his cautious approach
to dealing with the weakening economy," it intoned.
"There's beginning to become an undercurrent
in Washington that Bush was to blame, Bush's tax cuts were to blame
for the deficit," Mr. Bush recalled of the time frame. "I was prepared
to fully fight off criticism based upon the sound economic theory
that a tax relief plan is good for actually restarting the economy."
An accident report
But on this Tuesday the president
wanted to make progress on another top priority education
reform. So after posing for pictures with resort maintenance man
Kenneth Kufahl and local VIPs, he climbed into a Cadillac limousine
and set out at 8:39 a.m. on the nine-mile trip to Emma E. Booker
Elementary in Sarasota.
Soon the motorcade was on a causeway
approaching the city. Sailboats lined the bay, a brilliant blue
sky arced overhead and shimmering office towers rose in the distance.
What could possibly go wrong on a
day such as this? It was 8:46 a.m.
Mr. Bush and his aides, including
Mr. Card, arrived nine minutes later at the elementary school on
Martin Luther King Jr. Way, which police considered the most crime-infested
street in the county.
"We're on time," the president remembered.
"I like to stay on time; I like to be crisp."
Personal assistant Blake Gottesman
gave him some final stage directions.
"'Here's what you're going to be doing;
you're going to meet so-and-so, such-and-such,'" Mr. Bush recalled
being told. "And Andy Card says, 'By the way, an aircraft flew into
the World Trade Center.'
"And my first reaction was
as an old pilot how could the guy have gotten so off course
to hit the towers? What a terrible accident that is. The first report
I heard was a light airplane, twin-engine airplane."
The president entered a holding room
at the school and picked up a secure telephone to speak with National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice at the White House. She was sitting
in her office, watching live coverage of the stricken north tower
as it belched black smoke into a cloudless sky.
"There's one terrible pilot," Mr.
Bush muttered.
Turning to Mr. Card, he speculated
that the pilot must have suffered a heart attack. Mr. Bush, who
had yet to see the TV images, drafted a statement pledging federal
assistance.
He rejoined his hostess, Principal
Gwendolyn Tose-Rigell. A black woman and a Democrat, she had voted
10 months earlier for Al Gore. Mrs. Tose-Rigell privately considered
Mr. Bush a "phony."
Still, she was honored by the presidential
visit, so she smiled, made introductions and led Mr. Bush into Sandra
Kay Daniels' second-grade classroom.
The president's entrance set off a
flurry of snapping and clicking from news photographers' cameras
at the back: Ksht, ksht, ksht, ksht.
No alarm bells
"Good to meet you all," Mr. Bush
said to the class after greeting Mrs. Daniels.
The president noticed a little girl
over to his left, in the front row, her face frozen with fear. He
stopped, cocked his head and drew back in a playful half-crouch.
"You OK?" he asked with a reassuring
smile.
The petrified child nodded.
"That's good," Mr. Bush chuckled.
This seemed to break the ice and the
entire room let out a relieved laugh.
"It's really exciting for me to be
here," the president said. "I want to thank Ms. Daniels for being
a teacher."
He gave her an expectant look, as
if to say, "Well, take it away." He had been in the room for just
under a minute, but he had a schedule to keep.
"This morning we do have a lesson
that we've been preparing for you," Mrs. Daniels told the president.
"Good," Mr. Bush said, sounding pleased.
It was 9:03 a.m.
"Are you ready, my butterflies?" Mrs.
Daniels asked her second-graders.
In a rapid-fire voice, the teacher
began to command her pupils to sound out words "the fast way." The
children responded like grunts in boot camp, calling out in clear,
loud, unified voices.
As he watched, smiling, the president
began to ponder the statement he would need to make about the plane
crash.
"I was concentrating on the program
at this point, thinking about what I was going to say," Mr. Bush
told The Times. "Obviously, I felt it was an accident. I was concerned
about it, but there were no alarm bells."
"Get ready to read all these words
on this page without making a mistake," Mrs. Daniels was saying.
"Look at the letter at the end and remember the sound it makes.
Get ready."
"Kite," the children said.
"Yes, kite," the teacher said. "Get
ready to read this word the fast way. Get ready."
"Kit."
"Yes, kit."
Mr. Bush heard a noise behind him.
It was the sound of a door closing, the door through which he had
entered. Someone must have walked in, although he didn't bother
looking. His eyes were on the reading drill.
"Sound it out," the teacher repeated,
unsatisfied. "Get ready."
"Kit," the children said, still a
little weakly.
"What word?"
"Kit!" they practically shouted.
Soon concluding the first half of
the lesson, Mrs. Daniels instructed: "Boys and girls, pick your
reader up from under your seat."
The children bent to retrieve their
textbooks. In his peripheral vision, Mr. Bush noticed someone taking
advantage of this pause to approach. He swiveled slightly to the
right in his chair and was surprised to discover it was Mr. Card,
who had not been in the room. His chief of staff was walking right
up to him in the middle of a public event.
Didn't he realize the cameras of the
national press corps were capturing this breach of protocol? Sure
enough, the shutters came clattering to life: Ksht, ksht, ksht.
"Open your book up to lesson 60 on
page 153," Mrs. Daniels went on, oblivious to the curious little
drama being played out in her classroom at 9:07 a.m.
Now Mr. Card was leaning over to whisper
something. The president cocked his head to listen. The shutters
went into spasms: Ksht, ksht, ksht, ksht.
The children flipped through their
books for the correct page. Mr. Bush's smile had vanished. Mr. Card's
drew closer, his mouth inches from the president's right ear.
The tops of their heads were practically
touching. Ksht, ksht, ksht, ksht, ksht.
Mr. Bush strained to hear. This had
better be good.
Partisan calculations
Stanley Greenberg was in his element
earlier that morning in Washington. Armed with a fresh sheaf of
polling data, the Democratic pollster painted a gloomy picture indeed
for one George W. Bush.
"In this poll, 45 percent say he's
in over his head," Mr. Greenberg told the press corps at a breakfast
meeting in the basement of the St. Regis Hotel on 16th Street NW.
"There is a fundamental doubt about his competence.
"But they also want him to succeed,"
the pollster said with a trace of disappointment. "The public is
not looking for a failed president."
James Carville, former political strategist
for Bill Clinton and the media star among the three partners who
ran the partisan Democracy Corps, jumped in to critique the new
president's communication skills.
"Somethin' tells me that Bush ain't
Clinton," Mr. Carville said with a laugh. "I mean, it's ... a strong
power forward against a weak guard, and they don't match up."
"I feel so sorry for this poor guy,
George Bush," broke in moderator Godfrey "Budge" Sperling, the 86-year-old
columnist of the Christian Science Monitor who had hosted these
"Sperling Breakfasts" for print reporters since 1966.
"I know," political consultant Bob
Shrum, Democracy Corps' third partner, said gleefully.
"He's in terrible shape here," Mr.
Sperling added with mild sarcasm.
"He's not formidable, politically,"
Mr. Greenberg said.
"You know, I certainly hope he doesn't
succeed," Mr. Carville said. "I'm a partisan Democrat. But the average
person wants him to succeed."
Mr. Carville, who took delight in
his nicknames "Ragin' Cajun," "Corporal Cueball," "Serpenthead"
insisted that the Bush presidency already was an abject failure.
"They're not succeeding in the economy.
They're certainly not succeeding abroad," he said. "My line is:
We're busted at home and distrusted around the world."
And, Mr. Carville pointed out, there
was the possibility of some unforeseeable political calamity.
"What I learned during eight years
with Clinton is: You always think that somethin's gonna blow you
up one day," he said.
Mr. Carville didn't mean it literally,
of course. But so deep was his antipathy toward the new president
that he openly wished for something to blow up Mr. Bush politically.
Never mind that his own wife, Mary Matalin, was a political aide
to Vice President Richard B. Cheney.
"There's one thing Bush has never
been able to do," Mr. Carville said. "The real skilled politicians
are able to go take 10, 12 percent out of the other guy's pocket.
The Reagan Democrats. And Clinton got the sort of suburban Republican
women. I mean, they got all of their party and their ability was
to draw a little bit from the other side.
"Bush has yet to instill any fear,"
Mr. Carville concluded. "He's yet to get one vote other than what
he should be getting. And in fact some of those are startin' to
have doubts. If he starts losing any of those voters, his political
strength will be sapped bad."
Mr. Shrum's cell phone rang as Mr.
Sperling brought the breakfast to a close. It was his assistant,
who had instructions not to call unless it was an emergency.
Mr. Shrum was so dumbfounded by the
words he was hearing that he repeated them aloud, for the benefit
of everyone else: "A plane has just crashed into the World Trade
Center."
The room froze.
"What kind of plane?" Mr. Shrum asked.
"A 737!"
Other cell phones rang around the
table. A reporter headed for the exit, followed by another. But
most remained.
Mr. Greenberg's phone rang, then Mr.
Shrum's again, with the news that a second plane had hit the other
tower. It looked like a coordinated attack by terrorists.
Before anyone else could leave, Mr.
Carville was on his feet.
The cynical strategist, who had just
described Washington as "a city that operates on fear," suddenly
felt a stab of worry about his wife in the White House this
very moment and their two young daughters across town.
"Disregard everything we just said,"
Corporal Cueball commanded. "This changes everything."
The immediate job
"A second plane hit the second tower.
America is under attack."
"At the count of three," Mrs. Daniels
was instructing her second-graders, blissfully unaware of what Mr.
Card had whispered in the president's ear. "Everyone should be on
page 163."
"The Pet Goat," the
children recited as their teacher thumped her pen on her book to
keep time with each syllable.
Mr. Bush absently picked up his copy
of the reader from a pink easel. He glanced at the cover: a cuddly
dragon surrounded by butterflies. Turning to the bookmarked page,
he tried to follow along.
"A girl got a
pet goat," the children recited.
"Go on," instructed Mrs. Daniels,
thumping away.
As the children plowed through the
story, the president kept gazing up, lost in a tumult of urgent
thoughts. So the first plane crash had not been an accident after
all. The second crash had proven that much.
A second plane hit the second tower.
But what kind of plane? Another small, twin-engine job? Who were
the pilots? Why had they done it? How many Americans had they killed?
"But the goat
did some things that made the
girl's dad mad."
"Let's clean that up," Mrs. Daniels
said.
The president noticed someone moving
at the back of the room. It was White House Press Secretary Ari
Fleischer, maneuvering to catch his attention without alerting the
press. Mr. Fleischer was holding up a legal pad.
Big block letters were scrawled on
the cardboard backing: DON'T SAY ANYTHING YET. The remarks drafted
earlier would be woefully inadequate.
"The goat ate
things."
"Go on."
The president managed a wan smile
at the teacher. He redoubled his efforts to appear as though he
were concentrating. But it was no use.
Who could have perpetrated such a
diabolical crime? No, this was more than a crime. Someone had suddenly
declared war against the United States of America.
"Victory clicked into my mind," Mr.
Bush told The Times. "The one thing that became certain is that
we wouldn't let this stand. I mean, there was no question in my
mind that we'd respond.
"I wasn't sure who the attacker was.
But if somebody is going to attack America, I knew that my most
immediate job was to protect America by finding him and getting
them."
A new convert
The children reached the last
line: "More to come."
"What does that mean?" the president
asked. "'More to come?'"
Nearly all the children raised their
hands. Mr. Bush pointed to a girl with braided hair tied in a ribbon.
Something else was going to happen, she answered.
"That's exactly right," the president
said, hoping this was not some ominous prophecy.
Mr. Bush lingered until an aide ushered
the press out. He turned to the principal, Mrs. Tose-Rigell, and
pulled her aside for the first private conversation in this new
phase of his presidency.
"I'm so sorry," he said. "But a tragedy
has occurred."
Mr. Bush told her of the second plane
crash and explained that there would be no speech on education.
"I'm going to have to address some
things," he said. "I really wish it would have been a different
set of circumstances."
"I fully understand," Mrs. Tose-Rigell
said.
The principal told the president how
frantic she gets when one of her students doesn't arrive home right
after school. She likened those in the World Trade Center to students
for whom the president was responsible.
Mrs. Tose-Rigell sensed a transformation.
The man she had viewed as a "phony" only minutes earlier was calmly
apologizing for having to scrap his planned speech. She was astonished
by Mr. Bush's sincerity, especially since he hadn't had time to
gather his wits in private.
"That's not something that you can
fake," the principal said later. "I'm telling you, I was very impressed.
I don't know what spurred him on. I don't know if he tapped into
his faith. I don't know if there were people around the country
praying for him.
"But at that moment in time, he was
very, very composed. All I can say is he looked very presidential."
Gwendolyn Tose-Rigell, inner-city
principal and Gore Democrat, became the first of many observers
across America and around the world to conclude that George W. Bush
somehow was changed profoundly by the terrible events of September
11.
"From that point on," she said, "I
was a convert."
Finding the words
Returning to the holding room,
where he first saw television images from New York, the president
talked by phone with the vice president, who was in his White House
office with Miss Rice and Miss Matalin, wife of Mr. Carville.
"One thing for certain," Mr. Bush
said later, "I needed to get out of where I was."
But the president also realized he
would have to make a statement. Mr. Fleischer and Communications
Director Dan Bartlett hastily drafted one. Mr. Bush, taking a Sharpie
fine-point marker from the inside pocket of his jacket, put it in
his own words by scribbling on three sheets of crinkly white paper.
In the school library, the press
corps and his scheduled audience waited. Some close to the podium
were unaware of what had happened.
The president emerged from behind
a blue curtain just before 9:30 a.m. He gestured for the applauding
audience to sit down. His expression was grave, tense, almost pained.
"Thank you," Mr. Bush said, before
the applause subsided. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult
moment for America."
|