THE MOST DRAMATIC AND important events in the history of Air Force One happened on September 11, 2001.
President George W. Bush got up at 6:30 A.M., feeling great. It was a balmy morning at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort, a Gulf Coast complex on Longboat Key near Sarasota, Florida, where he had spent the night. He was in a particularly good mood since he had enjoyed a rollicking evening the night before with his brother, Jeb, the governor of Florida. They had handicapped Jeb’s reelection race in 2002 and decided no one could beat him.
Bush decided to take a run, put on shorts and a T-shirt, and jogged around the golf course in a brisk 17 minutes. As he finished, a sweating and smiling president told the small pool of reporters waiting to ask him a few questions that he was feeling especially energetic.
He would need all the vigor he could muster for the challenge that would confront him two hours later.
Bush returned to his hotel suite, had orange juice and toast, showered, and put on a dark blue suit, pale blue shirt, and iridescent orange tie. At 8:30 A.M., he stepped into his limousine, and his motorcade sped off to his first appearance of the day, a visit to a second-grade class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, to promote his ideas about education reform. During that 15-minute ride, as the president looked over the text of his remarks, his aides in other limousines got a flurry of pages and cellphone calls from the White House.
Something terrible had happened in New York.
WHEN THE MOTORCADE reached the school, Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political strategist, walked quickly up to the president in a narrow corridor. A plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City, Rove whispered. Basing his report on erroneous television reports passed along by his aides in Washington, Rove said it appeared to be a small twin-engine plane. Bush shook his head sadly and said the pilot must have had a heart attack.
He walked into a classroom and took a seat on a stool in front of a dozen second graders who took turns reading aloud. A few minutes after the program began, Chief of Staff Andrew Card, his hands folded primly across his stomach, walked gingerly up to the president, in full view of television cameras covering the event, and whispered into his right ear as Bush turned his head so the microphones couldn’t pick up what was being said. “A second plane hit the second tower,” Card whispered. “America is under attack.”
Bush’s face grew taut and pale, his lips pressed together in a grim line. His first thought, he said later, was, “They had declared war on us, and I made up my mind at that moment that we were going to war.”
Meanwhile, his traveling aides were in a small room at the school, watching the shocking TV images of two huge Boeing 767’s—American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175—crashing into the World Trade towers. A short time later, at 9:39 A.M., a third hijacked airliner, a 757 designated as American Airlines Flight 77, hit the Pentagon. It was growing tragically clear that this was the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, and there would be thousands of casualties.
Bush made a brief statement at Booker Elementary, telling the country he was aware of the events and would say more later, and boarded his limousine. His motorcade sped to Sarasota’s Bradenton International Airport.
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AFTER BUSH WALKED briskly up the long mobile staircase and entered his cabin on Air Force One, a tense Secret Service agent said, “Mr. President, we need you to get seated as soon as possible.” But first Bush talked by secure telephone to Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in Washington, and conferred briefly with Card and Rove on the plane. He was eager to get a better picture of the crisis, but there was no clarity. In fact, rumors abounded that other government sites had been hit, including the White House and Camp David.
Bush and his staff took comfort in simply being aboard the plane. It seemed a secure refuge, protected by the Secret Service and the Air Force and operated by one of the best flight crews in the world, and no one thought a hijacking was even possible. “There was this surreal, serene, quiet, peaceful feeling,” recalled White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, who accompanied Bush on that fateful day. “Everybody exhaled once we got on the plane… . When we were on the ground, at the school, and hauling ass to the airport, there was tension, but as soon as everybody got on the plane, there was a comforting feeling. Everybody felt safer.”
Adds chief White House photographer Eric Draper: “When we got airborne I was thinking, how could anyone hit a moving target?”
As the day wore on, he wasn’t so confident. Fighter escorts got closer and closer to Air Force One as a protective measure in case someone tried to shoot it down. No precaution seemed excessive, because the situation was so confused. “We didn’t know if we were going to be attacked,” Andrew Card told me later. “We didn’t know if the White House was going to be attacked. What happened in New York was horrific enough, but then when you heard about the Pentagon, and then you heard about Flight 93 [which had been hijacked by terrorists and crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers put up a fight], it was just, ‘Okay, what’s next? When will it stop?’ I’d call back and get reports on what was happening in Washington. It was, like, there was a fire in the Old Executive Office Building. Well, somebody burned a trash can, but I mean, when I first heard it, I envisioned flames coming out the windows and everything else. And then I heard, the State Department has been attacked. There was all of this stuff coming to us, and you just didn’t know. And you’d call back to the office and no one’s there to answer the phones.” It turned out that the White House had been evacuated.
Card, who quickly emerged as the conduit of information to the commander in chief, didn’t tell the president every rumor, only what seemed important for him to know. Above all, Card wanted to keep Bush safe. “You can’t go back to Washington until we know,” Card told the president as Air Force One made its steep climb out of Sarasota. “You’ve got to let the dust settle.”
Bush replied, “I’ve got to go back. Andy, I’m going back to Washington.”
MOMENTS AFTER TAKEOFF, Bush removed his suit jacket, sat down at the big brown wraparound desk in his flying office, and called Cheney again. By this time, the vice president had been moved from his West Wing office, shuffled to the White House basement, and rushed through a tunnel and into a bunker under the White House designed to hold the president, the vice president, and other senior government officials under emergency conditions.
Cheney said Air Force jets had scrambled into the air around Washington in case they were needed, but the pilots were awaiting instructions. Should they shoot down any other civilian airliners that seemed to be hijacked and threatening to crash into a populated area or a historic monument? Hundreds of airplanes had been grounded around the country, but some were still flying. It was possible that the military pilots could make a horrible mistake and destroy a harmless plane. And even if another airliner had been hijacked, shooting it down could kill hundreds of innocent people.
It was the biggest decision of Bush’s presidency up to that point.
The president and vice president agreed very quickly that approval had to be given for the pilots to destroy threatening aircraft. “You have my authorization,” Bush told Cheney, and he repeated the same words for emphasis a few moments later. But the president said he wanted a bit more clarity on exactly how this dangerous process would work.
After hanging up with Cheney, he called Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, holding the phone to his left ear and waving his right hand for emphasis. Swiveling his chair to face a window behind his wraparound desk, Bush gazed at the clouds racing by beneath him as he asked Rumsfeld exactly what procedures the Air Force pilots would use in trying to force a plane to land before firing at it.
Rumsfeld, as always, was concise (just as he had been all those years ago on Air Force One when, as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, he broke the news to Betty Ford that someone had tried to assassinate her husband): The pilots would try to contact any suspicious aircraft by radio to order a landing at the closest airport. If that failed, the military pilot would use visual signals, such as hand gestures from cockpit to cockpit or flying his jet in front of the other plane to force a change of course. If the suspicious aircraft continued flying in the direction of what appeared to be a target destination with “hostile intent,” the military pilot would be authorized to destroy it. For the third time, Bush reconfirmed his authorization for a shootdown under those procedures.
But the matter still weighed heavily on him. When he was told a few minutes later that the fourth airliner, United Flight 93, had crashed in the southwestern Pennsylvania countryside, he asked, “Did we shoot it down or did it crash?” No one could be sure. Two hours later, the Pentagon confirmed that Flight 93 had not been fired upon, and Bush sighed in relief.
AT 10:32 A.M., less than an hour after leaving Sarasota, Bush got a call from Cheney with another chilling development. Air Force One, he said, appeared to be the next target. This seemed perfectly credible at the time, given all that had happened. Not only had there been four hijackings and four plane crashes that morning but, as Card said, there had been many rumors of other disasters. Now there were even more rumors—that a plane had crashed at Camp David, the presidential retreat in rural Maryland; that still another jet had gone down near the Ohio-Kentucky border, that a car bomb had exploded outside the State Department. It seemed like the terrorists might be everywhere.
Someone had called the White House, Cheney told Bush, and apparently used the military codeword “Angel” for Air Force One in warning that the plane was “next.” Cheney and others immediately concluded that terrorists had inside information that could jeopardize the president’s life aboard his plane. Card, after talking to military officials, told Bush it would take up to an hour and a half to get fighter jets alongside Air Force One.
Bush fumed at the terrorists, telling aides, “They’re not going to get away with this… . We’re going to find out who did this… . They will pay.” He repeated the same phrases frequently throughout the day.
At 10:41 A.M., Cheney called Bush again. “There’s still a threat to Washington,” he said. Condoleezza Rice agreed in a separate phone call, and Card made it unanimous. The president reluctantly accepted his advisers’ suggestion to fly to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, a secure location where he could talk further with his aides, assess the situation, and have the plane refueled. Card told the pilot.
Air Force One then banked sharply to the left, changing from a northward course toward Washington and heading southwestward toward Barksdale.
Most of those aboard weren’t sure what was happening. “I overheard someone saying, ‘Angel is the next target and that means us,’” recalls Eric Draper, who was sitting in his assigned seat, No. 37, in a staff cabin. By this time, every person seemed to have a telephone to his or her ear, trying to get information or to let loved ones know they were all right. All the TV monitors were tuned to the news, but the reception kept cutting off. The onboard television system at the time could only pick up local stations as the plane flew over large cities and towns, which frustrated the worried fliers. (That system has since been improved.)
At one point, Colonel Mark Tillman, the pilot, mistakenly thought an airliner was heading for Air Force One and diverted his course. He worried that terrorists might be listening in on his radio communications, so he refused to tell air traffic controllers his precise position, assuming rightly that they would track it on radar. He was so concerned about what might happen next that he asked for, and received, an armed guard outside the cockpit door.
Occasionally, Bush would emerge from his office and see how the staff was holding up, sometimes giving a frazzled aide a hug, at other times seeking a bit more information to coordinate the federal response. “What stood out to me was how cool, calm, and collected he was under the circumstances,” Draper says.
In the end, the threat to Air Force One turned out to be exaggerated. An anonymous caller had indeed threatened the plane, U.S. officials later said, but the caller had never referred to the aircraft as “Angel.” Somehow a White House operator or someone in the chain of command had inserted the codeword in passing along the threat, and by the time it reached senior officials, including Cheney, it was garbled. Everyone thought the caller had used the internal call sign of “Angel.” But on September 11, no one was taking any chances.
The president and his flying team soon got another shock. They had seen TV footage of the hijacked planes crashing into the twin towers, which was bad enough. But no one was prepared for the collapse of the buildings, in huge, gray plumes of smoke and dust. Everyone on board seemed to have the same thought: How many people had died?
AS BUSH’S PLANE approached Barksdale, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, who was on board, drafted another statement for Bush to read on his arrival at the base. The nation was waiting to hear the president, and it would be an important moment. (Bush had briefly considered making a statement by phone from the plane directly to the radio and TV networks, but rejected the idea because it might look like he was afraid to land.)
Fleischer called Karen Hughes, Bush’s longtime counselor, in Washington, for some ideas. At one point, he started to read her a phrase he was considering: “This morning we were the victims of—” But Hughes cut him off. “Wait a minute,” she snapped. “We aren’t the victims of anything. We may have been the targets, we may have been attacked, but we are not victims.” The phrase was deleted, which reflected Bush’s thinking perfectly.
At another point in the confusion, Hughes tried to reach Bush directly through the White House operator but the call didn’t go through. “We can’t reach Air Force One,” the operator reported to a distressed Hughes. What if the plane has been blown up? she thought. Actually, Hughes had gone through the White House civilian communications system, not the military network that was the proper procedural way to reach the plane in a crisis. Hughes quickly got an update from an aide: Nothing was wrong with Air Force One.
In fact, as the plane began its descent into Barksdale, Bush and his staff stood at the windows lining the right side of the plane and watched as fighter jets fanned off into the distance. It was a comforting sight.
At Barksdale, Bush called his wife, Laura, at a secure location in Washington and was told that she and their twin daughters were fine. He also talked again with Cheney. At 12:36 P.M., Bush walked quickly into a conference room near the base commander’s office and, as hastily assembled TV cameras rolled, read the five-minute statement prepared by Hughes and Fleischer. He seemed grim and hesitant, but he ended on a forceful note. “The resolve of our great nation is being tested,” the commander in chief declared. “But make no mistake: We will show the world that we will pass this test.”
THROUGHOUT THE DAY, there was little time to ruminate or reflect, but this was the perfect environment for Bush. It required quick, instinctive judgments, and Bush prided himself on his decisiveness. As always, Air Force One reinforced the solitary nature of the presidency in a time of crisis.
Bush took off his suit coat but didn’t roll up his sleeves or loosen his tie. He allowed a few trusted aides, including Card, Rove, and Bartlett, to flow in and out of his office, and he had near-instant access to hundreds of policy makers in Washington. But as the day wore on, Bush felt the full weight of the crisis was on his own shoulders. As he looked out the small porthole windows in his cabin at the endless expanse of cities, suburbs, and farmland 40,000 feet below (a mile higher than usual, at an altitude where most missiles supposedly could not reach the plane), Bush felt especially alone. In nervous agitation, he drank bottled water and munched unsalted popcorn, sometimes filling his mouth with handfuls of it as kernels scattered on the floor.
Air Force One proved to be an effective mobile command center as, for the first time, a president actually directed the government and sought to guide the nation in a crisis from his flying White House. “Almost every nook and cranny on the plane was being used for some kind of meeting, which is unusual,” said Card. At one point, the chief of staff even used Bush’s bedroom to meet with Secret Service agents and Bush’s military aide about where the plane should fly next, and to assess the latest intelligence reports.
JUST AFTER 1:30 P.M., Air Force One took off from Barksdale heading for Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. The president and his advisers decided it still wasn’t safe for him to return to Washington, and he could preside over a meeting of his National Security Council via a secure videoconference from Offutt.
But Bush was getting impatient. “I want to go back home ASAP,” he told Card aboard the plane. “I don’t want whoever did this holding me outside of Washington.” Bush emphasized that he would return to the White House after his stop at Offutt unless some new and extraordinary threat was discovered that would change his mind.
Bush itched to take action. He called his advisers in Washington for more updates and grew even more angry as he and his staff watched TV coverage of the attacks, which by this time included the horrific images of the collapsing buildings, repeated again and again.
At one point, speaking again to Rumsfeld by phone, he said he had been preoccupied with the attacks in New York and was stunned to see all the damage to the Pentagon and to learn more details of what had happened there. “Wow,” he told the defense secretary, “it was an American airliner that hit the Pentagon. It’s a day of national tragedy, and we’ll clean up the mess, and then the ball will be in your court and Dick Myers’s court to respond.” Air Force General Richard B. Myers was scheduled to become the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in three weeks.
At 2:30 P.M., Bush reached his father on the phone. “Where are you?” the president asked. The former commander in chief said he and his wife, Barbara, had been on the way to Minneapolis but were at that moment in Milwaukee.
“What are you doing in Milwaukee?” President Bush asked.
“You grounded my plane,” his father replied.
President Bush went on to say his crisis team was “functioning well” and he knew just what the nation needed to do. “We’re going to be fine,” he summed up.
Both father and son found the call comforting.
Just before Air Force One landed at Offutt at 2:50 P.M., Bush told his lead Secret Service agent on the plane, “We need to get back to Washington. We don’t need some tinhorn terrorist to scare us off. The American people want to know where their president is.”
His cowboy swagger had returned.
EN ROUTE BACK to Washington, Card cleared Bush’s suite so the president could put the finishing touches on his address to the nation that night. But when the plane began its descent into Andrews Air Force Base, Bush opened the door to his office and aides filtered in. For several long minutes, the president and his staff again lined the sides in the presidential cabin and the senior-staff compartment, looking out the windows.
The wingtips of the fighter jets this time were amazingly close to the wingtips of Air Force One, one escort on each side—so close, in fact, that one of the pilots’ late-afternoon stubble could be clearly seen on his face as he slightly tipped his wings as a salute to his commander in chief. Bush saluted silently. “It’s great,” Bush said, in recognition of the awesome military power at his disposal.
In an interview for this book a year later, Bush said, “I never felt like my life was in danger… . I’m the kind of guy, my attitude is, if your number is up, it’s up, you know? And you just be prepared for it. I don’t walk around saying there’s a guy with a gun around every corner. I just don’t think that way. But I’ve never worried about my safety. The pilots on Air Force One are the best.”
THE EVENTS OF September 11 proved several things—among them that Air Force One could function well as a flying command post, that the aircraft’s emergency procedures were workable, and that Bush himself was an effective commander in chief. There had been doubts about this last point since Bush was declared the winner of the disputed campaign of 2000. For weeks after Election Day, Bush and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Al Gore, had waged a furious legal and political battle to determine who had carried the state of Florida. In a controversial 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in Bush’s favor, giving him the slimmest of majorities in the Electoral College, and the White House.
Yet until September 11, Bush had been unable to completely erase the hard feelings and establish his legitimacy. Gore had, after all, won the popular vote nationwide by 500,000 ballots, and many Democrats argued that he was the real winner, the “people’s president.”
As he struggled to govern, Bush implemented several theories about presidential leadership that broke with the immediate past. One was that, after the turbulent Clinton years, Americans didn’t want the president to be constantly hogging the headlines and calling attention to himself. As a result, the Bush White House would go for long stretches without the president making the front pages or leading the evening news. This was just fine with Bush.
“He has a very basic belief that if he does his part—gets the information, makes the choices—the results are somehow with God,” says chief White House speech writer Michael Gerson. “He believes there’s something broader going on. He does his best and the outcome is out of his control.” This gives him a sense of peace and enables him to make decisions crisply and without anguish.
In his personal habits and predilections, Bush seems to be the picture of humdrum, everyday normalcy, as does his inner circle. “We’re a pretty dull crew,” says White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. Bush, trying to move beyond the party-boy reputation he gained as a hard-drinking youth, reinforces this image of sobriety in just about everything he does. A teetotaler for many years, he goes to bed by 10 P.M. every day and gets up at 6 or 6:30. He doesn’t throw fancy parties and rarely holds state dinners, and he disdains the Georgetown social circuit. In pointed contrast to his predecessor, he shuns the Hollywood types that Bill Clinton couldn’t get enough of.
Bush sees Air Force One as his private place, as all presidents tend to do. “It’s their sanctuary,” says White House Communications Director Bartlett. “You can almost see both the president and the staff let their guard down once they get on the plane.”
In his private moments, Bush appears to be more of an average Joe than most presidents like to admit. He is not a voracious reader of books, managing to plow through one biography or historical volume every two or three weeks. In early 2002, for example, he read Edmund Morris’s Theodore Rex, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and Bernard Goldberg’s Bias, an insider’s account of an alleged liberal slant in network television news.
He has little interest in following the news day-to-day on TV. When he wanders into an Air Force One staff cabin and notices the news on a monitor, he will often frown and snap, “Turn that off.” Like most presidents, he doesn’t think he gets a fair shake from the media and tries to ignore the coverage as much as possible. He scans a few newspapers every morning but prefers to have his press staff summarize, orally or in writing, whatever he needs to know beyond his daily security and intelligence briefings. His favorite TV fare is major-league baseball, and before trips his staff occasionally videotapes one or two games, especially those involving his former team, the Texas Rangers, so he can watch the replay on Air Force One. He is an enthusiastic reader of the box scores, especially for the Rangers. (He was once part owner of the team.)
Bush hates sitting still. Before landing, he has a habit of pacing impatiently in his airborne office or waiting just outside the door as the plane completes its taxiing (even though this violates air-safety rules that require passengers to remain seated and strapped in until the aircraft comes to a stop). If the mobile staircase takes longer than he anticipates to roll up to the doorway, he will start complaining. “Let’s go,” he will say. “What’s going on?”
Several months into his administration, Bush added a special feature to Air Force One: a treadmill. Bush uses the machine often in his airborne conference room or in his bedroom, especially on long flights, when he will work up a sweat that soaks through his T-shirt. “He likes a serious workout,” Fleischer says.
Bush admits that he gets restless easily, and finds that using the treadmill calms him down. “Being a ‘Type A’ personality,” he told me, “I can get kind of caged in.”
Another innovation is Bush’s interest in the board game Risk, in which players amass armies and try to conquer the world. En route home from Europe in July 2001, Bush supervised a particularly competitive game. The president encouraged each participant to take the biggest risks possible and to attack each other mercilessly. At one point, he goaded his military aide, supposedly an expert on military maneuvers and strategy, to take some chances. When he did so and found his armies annihilated, Bush teased the aide for being the first to lose. Supervising another game, the commander in chief yelled, “You’re a wimp. Go get ’em.”
Bush also likes to play bridge, but most of the time he can only persuade Condoleezza Rice and First Lady Laura Bush to participate, and that isn’t enough. Few others on the White House staff know how to play, so they almost always lack a foursome. Some goals are beyond even the president of the United States.
“Air Force One is a comfortable environment for the president,” said White House Chief of Staff Card in an interview. “It’s less formal than the West Wing of the White House. And for example you can walk into the president’s office on Air Force One and he will be dressed in casual attire. It’s very, very rare to walk into the Oval Office and find the president dressed in casual attire. I mean, it’s not the Oval Office, but it is the president’s working office. It’s also his living room on the plane, and just like you can relax and have a conversation in your living room with friends, he invites people to his living room on Air Force One as friends. The living room also has some formality to it, and that’s when he might convene a meeting of some of his senior advisers or some of the folks on the plane to talk policy and it’s a little more structured. But I tend to find the more structured meetings tend to be in the conference room rather than in the office up in the front.”
“Having traveled with the president all across the country in the campaign in a much smaller, much less user-friendly airplane, I remember thinking ‘Wow!’” says Karen Hughes, Bush’s longtime adviser, recalling her first time on board. “It’s an airplane, but you can actually work and get a lot of things done. There are workstations and computers and office space and a conference room and a conference table. And that’s an enormous advantage in helping you work, as opposed to sitting balancing a laptop in your seat, which is the way I spent most of the year and a half before.”
Hughes says another big advantage to traveling on Air Force One is that the staff gets to know each other very well amid the informal atmosphere of long flights. This is where the staff first got a taste of Rice’s sense of humor. Leaving El Salvador on one trip, the president was running early, as usual—in this case, an hour ahead of schedule. “We run so early,” Rice quipped, “that our first term is going to be over in three years and six months.”
It was on the long flights that White House colleagues learned that Rice is, in Hughes’s words, “a good catnapper—Condi can fall asleep anywhere,” but she usually prefers to stay in her first-class seat, as does Card. Secretary of State Colin Powell prefers to stretch out, so he usually lies on the floor.
As for Bush, he has little trouble dozing wherever he is, and he arranges his sleep schedule according to the advice of his doctors and his staff. After boarding an early-morning flight to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska on February 16, 2002, en route to Asia, Bush’s military aide advised the president and his traveling party to sleep for about two hours, then stay awake for the rest of the long flight. That way, they could go to bed again when they arrived in Tokyo on Sunday night and sleep through. Bush followed the directions and felt fine when he started his official visit on Monday morning. He generally follows this pattern on long trips—start early and doze briefly on the plane, stay awake until landing, and then get a good night’s sleep at his destination.
WHEN HE RECEIVES a briefing on the plane, he follows the same pattern that he does at the White House. “I think people would be surprised by the questions he asks at a briefing,” says Nick Calio, Bush’s first congressional liaison, “because they come oftentimes at a torrent. He can also cut you off fairly quickly if you’re going on too long or if he’s already got where you’re going and he wants you to move on. He’s also funnier than hell,” making jokes and self-deprecating remarks.
He will usually make a variety of phone calls to advisers back home, to members of Congress, or to foreign leaders. On very lengthy flights, he might watch a movie, and during the months after September 11, he seemed drawn to films with military themes, such as Behind Enemy Lines and Hart’s War. At other times, he thumbs through the Air Force One movie guide and gives spot reviews of movies he has seen or read about, making pronouncements such as “terrible” and “chick flick.” One non–action-adventure film he did like was Analyze This, a comedy starring Billy Crystal that parodies organized-crime movies.
AS HE SHOWED on September 11, Bush apparently has no qualms about moving decisively, even if it means reversing himself. This flexibility came across en route to Berlin on May 22, 2002, during a trip to solidify European support for his war on terrorism. During the flight, Bush approved the reorganization of the federal government that was to become a hallmark of his second year in office.
Meeting in the president’s airborne suite, Card briefed the president and presented him with an inch-and-a-half-thick binder containing eight policy options for the reshuffling, designed to enhance the anti-terror campaign at home. Bush accepted nearly all the recommendations, including one for a Department of Homeland Security, a Cabinet-level department that he had initially opposed. In the end, his concern about bigger government was outweighed by the bureaucratic impediments that he felt were hampering his campaign, and he opted for the new department.
Typically, in making the choices, he followed the advice of Card and other key aides, and felt no need for exhaustive briefings and explanations of each proposal.
MOST AMERICANS PROBABLY realize that Bush has a spiritual side. He makes frequent references to his “born-again” Christianity and once said the philosopher he admired most was Jesus Christ. But the depth of his Christian commitment may take many by surprise. Knowing that he hates to miss church on important occasions, Condoleezza Rice, Card, and Karen Hughes suggested to Bush that they conduct an informal religious service on the flight from San Salvador to Washington on Palm Sunday, 2002. Bush enthusiastically agreed.
What followed aboard Air Force One was possibly unprecedented in the travel history of the presidents. Rice and other senior aides spread the word on the plane shortly after takeoff that there would be a service for anyone who wanted to attend. White House Staff Secretary Harriet Miers and a young press aide named Reed Dickens helped draw up a program, which was reproduced and distributed to the three dozen officials who huddled in the conference room. As President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and six aides sat around a rectangular table, senior staffers made remarks.
Card, whose wife is a Protestant minister and who reads verses from the Bible each day, as does Bush, started the proceedings. “I opened it up with greetings and a prayer and call to worship,” Card told me. The group—which included Secretary of State Powell, members of the flight crew, and lower-level aides—then sang hymns and religious songs led by Rice, an accomplished musician and singer. There were readings and prayers by different officials from the Old and New Testaments, and Hughes gave what one attendee called a “wonderful little sermonette.”
Speaking from notes she had hastily prepared just before the service, Hughes talked about how Christ had been warmly welcomed by the people of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, yet only a week later he was rejected by those same people. Her point was indirect but clear: Bush was riding high in the polls, but public opinion can be very fickle.
Two other recurring themes in the spoken remarks were thanksgiving both that the trip had gone well and that they were united in the service of their country, and recognition of the family and friends who were not able to join them. At the end of the spoken presentations, everyone sang the Christian hymn “Amazing Grace,” and members of the group, including the president and the First Lady, exchanged hugs and kisses in a gesture of solidarity and fellowship.
Some staffers said later they felt a bit uncomfortable about the unusual service, which they considered Christian in tone, although no one who practiced a different faith was excluded. They were concerned that Bush critics might portray the service as an inappropriate blending of church and state.
“I feel guilty talking about it—I don’t know why,” Card said during our interview, “because the president made sure that all the staff on the plane was invited to attend, the Air Force staff as well as his staff. I reminded people of the celebration of Jesus coming into Jerusalem [on Palm Sunday] and that wherever people are gathered in his name there is a church, and so you didn’t have to be in a church to have a church on the plane.”
Others were even more effusive. “It showed the humanity of the president,” recalled Noelia Rodriguez, First Lady Laura Bush’s press secretary, who attended the ceremony. “None of us could be in church that day, and this was the president’s way of honoring our spirituality. You could feel this connection with everybody, and we were so close to heaven that it was very special and moving.” Dickens said everyone seemed to experience “a heavenly feeling.”
For his part, Bush remembers the experience warmly. “There were a lot of religious people on the plane,” he told me. “… It was just a packed house… . And to be able to worship with people with whom you work in a unique spot is a special moment.” He added: “You know, I did feel the presence of God amongst my friends on Air Force One… . and it was a lovely ceremony. It was a very touching moment.”
Yet Bush mostly keeps his innermost feelings to himself—a family trait he shares with his father. Unlike Bill Clinton, who would emote late at night on long flights, Bush resists unburdening himself as much as he can. “He is not the emotive type,” says Fleischer. “He’s emotional. He’ll tear up or cry, but no, he doesn’t exactly start spilling his guts to the staff or anybody else just because he is on Air Force One.”
BUSH’S RELIGIOUS FEELINGS notwithstanding, he can’t escape the R-rated side of popular culture. Sometimes the films available on Air Force One have a distinctly raunchy side that might surprise his culturally conservative allies.
This caused a flap during a flight from Michigan to Washington in May 2002. A pool report written by Joseph Curl of The Washington Times noted that a film shown in the press cabin and a Secret Service compartment, called Not Another Teen Movie, revealed “a fully naked female displaying her full nudity (in a frontal manner).”
After The Washington Post picked up the item in a gossip column, the film was pulled from the plane’s inventory; but reporters and, apparently, Secret Service agents (mostly male in both categories) raised a fuss, and a few weeks later, bare breasts returned in another movie.
A White House official told me the films chosen for the plane are generally available in theaters across the country, even if some are R-rated. “We’re not prudes,” he said.
CONTRARY TO HIS carefully cultivated populist image, Bush loves the perks of office, as most presidents do, and this trait is especially clear on Air Force One. After taking off his suit jacket upon boarding, he customarily puts on a lightweight blue windbreaker-style jacket with AIR FORCE ONE over the right breast and “President George W. Bush” embroidered on the left. His father loved to wear the same distinctive jacket on the plane, as did Bill Clinton. It has become an airborne presidential uniform—prized by the owners because only one man in the world gets to wear it. On lengthy flights, he changes into a sweat suit or slacks and a golf shirt.
“He’s always an affable person and that continues aboard the plane,” says Fleischer. Bush starts off most trips in his cabin and sometimes invites friends, members of Congress, or special guests there for a while. On day trips, he prefers leaving Washington early in the morning so he can get home early enough for dinner with his wife, Laura; he generally spends his evenings quietly in the East Wing residence.
On what some of his aides call a flying day, Bush generally gets his daily military or intelligence briefing as his first order of business on the plane, conducted in the conference room, as he would do in the Oval Office. Aides say Bush looks forward to these sessions because he has more time to ask questions on the plane, when the schedule is more relaxed than in the White House.
Afterward, he usually comes back to chat with advisers in the senior-staff cabin and visits with members of Congress when they are aboard, then he returns to his private cabin or his bedroom to read or take a nap. But sometimes he gets so involved in chatting up his guests that he will refuse to sit down and fasten his seat belt, so he will sometimes be standing and swaying in the aisle as the plane takes off or lands. He generally waits until the last minute to change back into his business suit, but he is almost never late under any circumstances.
Early on, Bush ordered aides to keep his traveling entourage to a minimum in a clear contrast with Clinton, who often would fly with a huge crowd of officials, guests, and hangers-on. “We don’t fill the aircraft all that much,” says Mark Rosenker, former director of the White House Military Office. “… This president likes a small ‘footprint’ when he travels. That’s his style and that’s how he’s able to function best.”
For those who do accompany him, Bush enjoys giving impromptu tours of his quarters, as do most presidents, pointing out his shower, his desk, the medical clinic, and his exercise equipment. Knowing the limits of his self-control, Bush banished the Heath bars, Reese’s peanut butter cups, and other candies—treats that the Clintonites enjoyed—from his cabin and the senior-staff area. He realized he couldn’t resist the temptation after catching himself munching the sweets when he passed by. Still, he snitches a snack or two when he finds them farther back in the plane among the junior aides.
Says Nick Calio: “We see a very different person than the public sees on a day-to-day basis… . It’s a more informal setting and he can relax more. And he’s not so guided. In the West Wing, he can’t get up and walk out of a room without somebody following him, and on the plane he has the luxury of having more freedom… . It’s clearly quite different than anything at the White House. If he really doesn’t want to do something, he doesn’t have to. There’s usually not much scheduled on the plane. So if he wants to go back and spend the whole trip with members of Congress or if he wants to call them up to the front for a while, he can.”
Adds Bartlett: “He understands the symbolism of the plane and its usefulness as far as being part of the presidency, the effectiveness it can have, whether it be lobbying or whatever.”
A trip to Billings, Montana, in early 2001 was pivotal. Bush looked out a window and saw cars lined up for miles around the airport so local folks could catch a glimpse of his plane. Since then, he has made a habit of adding a riff in his arrival remarks about how he has just flown in on Air Force One. He knows the connection is powerful.
So do the politicians who clamor to ride with him—and be seen on TV as they disembark. “I would have crawled on broken glass,” said Matt Salmon, the GOP candidate for Arizona governor who traveled with Bush on Air Force One during the 2002 mid-term campaign.
Bush’s staff also has installed a presidential seal and more sophisticated lighting in the conference room so the president can record a statement and drive home that it is from Air Force One, at a time of crisis or political necessity. On touchdown, the videocassette containing the statement can be sent immediately to the TV networks.
AS A MATTER of routine, Bush rarely ventures into the press compartment. He told Press Secretary Fleischer that he would gladly talk with the media folks there if he could do it off the record, or at least off camera. That way, he would not have to mind every word and gesture, and neither would the reporters. They could get to know each other in a more informal setting. But journalists for the wire services and some TV correspondents object to such arrangements. They always want the president on the record and on camera, which can stifle conversation. So Bush’s contact with the airborne press corps is minimal.
This is a shame, because from Roosevelt to Bush, no accounting of the presidency is complete without an examination of what happens on Air Force One and the plane’s hold on our presidents.
“It was like you had your own little community there,” recalled Bill Clinton. “The experience took on a life of its own because we worked there, we played there, we slept there… . It became like a floating family.”
“When you’re abroad and in strange lands,” Ronald Reagan said, “… you’re very busy and then you arrive back at the airport—and your first glimpse of this plane and that flag up there—yes! It’s a little bit like hearing the national anthem and you swell a little with pride.”
Added George Herbert Walker Bush: “When you taxi up in our country or in some other country, there is a great emotion… . I love when I [went] up and [shook] hands, you know, at the rope lines with some kids … and you can really tell that they were moved… . It is the mobile symbol of the presidency and thus the country.”
Jimmy Carter summed it all up: “Everywhere we’ve been in the world on Air Force One, and we’ve been many places, I can see within the eyes and the demeanor of those who welcomed us that they sensed that Air Force One at that moment was the United States of America.”