Tense, but always cool, in the familiar left seat in the cockpit of Air Force One, Colonel Mark Tillman pulled the jumbo jet into an ascent unlike anything the president or the White House staff had ever experienced. “Like a rocket,” Communications Director Dan Bartlett told me. The morning of 9/11, the president’s pilot was flying in a theater of combat. With his right hand, Tillman forced four throttles to full military thrust. The highly modified Boeing 747-200 leaped off the runway, blasting smoke and dust as it rose from Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport in Florida. President George W. Bush steadied himself against the extreme pitch and G-forces as the engines screamed for altitude. The assault on the World Trade Center had begun an hour before. The Pentagon was attacked as the presidential motorcade was en route to Air Force One. Before the missile-like ascent, Mr. Bush told his lead Secret Service agent, “Make sure my wife and girls are protected.”
Only eight months before, Mr. Bush ascended to the presidency after a disputed election. He had been narrowly defeated in the popular vote but was handed a victory in the Electoral College by the Supreme Court of the United States. Florida gave the new president his unprecedented victory. But his return to the state in early September was as ordinary as they come. In a speech the night before 9/11, he urged Americans to unplug their idle phone chargers to save energy. Early the next morning he was reading My Pet Goat to students at Emma Booker Elementary School in Sarasota. In a nearby classroom, the White House staff was watching coverage of the fire in the World Trade Center. When the second plane hit, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card stepped into the reading session and whispered in Mr. Bush’s ear, “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.” No president since Madison had faced a successful foreign assault on the homeland. No president since Lincoln had seen an act of war spill so much blood on American soil.
President Bush would be criticized for spending most of 9/11 flying across the country from Florida to Louisiana, to a secret bunker in Nebraska and then to Washington. But I believe this was his single best day as president of the United States. His deeply rooted sense of resolve guided him through a series of decisions rarely faced by a commander in chief. Frequently he overruled the instincts and advice of those around him.
The public knew little of what happened to the president on 9/11 until the White House agreed to my proposal for an hour-long prime-time documentary for 60 Minutes II. It would air on CBS the night of the 9/11 anniversary in 2002. The White House gave my team, led by producer Bill Owens, access to everyone who played a part in the first twenty-four hours after the attack. This was Air Force One’s greatest role in American history since Lyndon Johnson was sworn into office with Jackie Kennedy by his side on November 22, 1963.
Colonel Tillman’s plan was to get President Bush safely in the sky then streak to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. But as the ground fell rapidly away, Tillman was warned that Air Force One was the target of another airliner on a collision course. Air traffic control at Jacksonville Center sent a message that Tillman remembered to me this way: “Air Force One, you have traffic behind you and basically above you that is descending into you, we are not in contact with them. They have shut their transponder off.” The transponder is a radio that tells air traffic control the identity, altitude, speed and direction of an aircraft. The terrorists made the hijacked planes difficult to track by turning the transponders off. This was their signature. The suspicious plane was still far enough away for Air Force One to evade. But Tillman told me, “It was serious before that, but now it’s no longer a time to get the president home. We actually have to consider that everything we say, everything we do, could be intercepted [on the radio] and we have to make sure that no one knows what our position is.” Tillman posted an armed guard at his cockpit door. The Secret Service swept the plane, rechecking the identity of everyone. The flight crew rehearsed the evacuation plan in case Tillman was forced into a crash landing. Using the classified codename for the aircraft, President Bush told his staff: “Angel is next.”
“Women! Drop your heels and run! Women! Drop your heels and run!” Secret Service officers sprinted through the White House evacuating the 201-year-old mansion. One of the four hijacked airliners was aimed at Washington and appeared to be ten minutes out. Vice President Dick Cheney was in his West Wing office watching the burning towers on television when a Secret Service agent bolted through the door. “He said, ‘Sir, we have to leave immediately,’” Cheney told me. “He put a hand on the back of my belt, another hand on my shoulder and propelled me out the door of my office.”
“He picked you up?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” the vice president said in genuine wonder. “They must train for it. I’m not sure how they do it, but they sort of levitate you down the hallway. You move very fast. You don’t have any choice but to go.”
“There wasn’t a lot of time for chit-chat with the vice president,” Brian Stafford told me. The director of the US Secret Service spoke in a baritone drawl you’d expect from a lawman in a Western. As the attack unfolded, Stafford was in his command center near Capitol Hill executing, for the first time, the emergency continuity of government plan under the authority of The Presidential Succession Act of 1947. His officers were rounding up fifteen key officials including the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert of Illinois; the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, Robert Byrd of West Virginia; and nearly every member of the cabinet, in case one of them had to become president of the United States.
“You felt like you had minutes to work with?” I asked Stafford.
“Correct,” he said. “We knew that there were unidentified planes tracking in our direction.” The Secret Service agent who “levitated” the vice president took Cheney down a tunnel that burrows below the White House and leads to a bunker called the PEOC, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. The PEOC offers a higher level of security than the more familiar White House Situation Room. The bunker was dug during the FDR administration. Its specifications are classified but it is said the PEOC can withstand a nuclear blast.
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was being urged to get down to the PEOC, but she wouldn’t get off the phone. She told me, “They were hurrying me off the phone with the president. He said, ‘I’m coming back,’ and we said, ‘Mr. President, that may not be wise.’ I remember stopping briefly to call my family, my aunt and uncle in Alabama and say, ‘I’m fine. You have to tell everybody that I’m fine,’ but then, settling into trying to deal with the enormity of that moment. In the first few hours, I think the thing that was on everybody’s mind was, how many more planes are coming?”
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta rushed through the PEOC door and settled at the conference table beside Cheney and the vice president’s wife. Mineta told me he remembers someone counting down the progress of suspect airliners headed to the capital. “Mr. Vice President, there’s a plane fifty miles out,” Mineta recalled hearing. “Then,” Mineta told me, “the man came in and said, ‘It’s now ten miles out. We don’t know where it is exactly, but it’s coming in low and fast.’” This was probably American Flight 77. Inside the PEOC, they could only guess at its target. At 9:32 a.m. air traffic controllers at Dulles International Airport in Virginia spotted an aircraft flying too fast, too low, with its transponder off. Dulles alerted the Air Force Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) to an “aircraft six miles southeast of the White House.” Two fighter jets from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia were already in the air. But they had taken off with no specific orders, so the fighters followed standard procedure and flew east over the Atlantic. They were more than 150 miles at sea when the order came to turn them toward Washington. The NEADS commander took over the communications network. “Okay, we’re going to crank it up...run them [the fighters] to the White House. I don’t care how many windows you break...damn it!” he said, authorizing the fighters to push to supersonic speed which would leave a chain of sonic booms in their wake.1 Before the fighters arrived, at 9:37 a.m., American Flight 77 exploded into the Pentagon at more than five hundred miles an hour. It was the first successful attack on Washington since 1814 when the British burned the Capitol and White House.
Over the Gulf of Mexico, Colonel Tillman ordered fighter support. Two F-16s from the Texas Air National Guard, President Bush’s old outfit, scrambled into the air. Their mission was so secret, the pilots were told where they were going but not why. The Texas Air National Guard commander told pilot Shane Brotherton, “You’ll know it when you see it.” Brotherton told me, “I didn’t have any idea what we were doing.”
“You knew it when you saw it?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” Brotherton replied.
Brotherton’s agile F-16 Fighting Falcon was not much more than a seat bolted onto a galloping engine. I once flew in a two-seat version. The cockpit is so tight you have the sense of wearing the fighter. I found the slightest hint of a twitch on the control stick got an instant, muscular response. Brotherton and a second F-16 piloted by his wingman, Randy Roberts, soared over the Gulf. Looming into their acrylic canopies was the sleek symmetry known in the Air Force as a VC-25. There are only two in the world—identical except their tail numbers—28000 and 29000. Their call sign is SAM, for Special Air Mission, unless the president is onboard. Then the VC-25 is addressed as Air Force One. The Gulf Coast sun glinted off the 747’s chrome belly. Above its wings ran a thin gold line and dark blue stripe that underscored UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. The typeface, called Caslon, was chosen because of its resemblance to the font in the title of The Declaration of Independence. The Seal of the President circled the space below the forward boarding door. The vertical stabilizer lofted the Stars and Stripes. The aircraft livery has remained the same since 1962, when President Kennedy commissioned the work from industrial designer Raymond Loewy—the man who sculpted the modern Coke bottle.2 The plush leather and thickly carpeted interior of the 747 was fitted in beige, brown and tan—the palette of Nancy Reagan.3 But the planes never served the Reagan White House. In 1989, I broke the story on the CBS Evening News that the new Air Force One was, in effect, too heavy to fly. The aircraft wiring had been shielded to protect against the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear blast. But the miles of cables weighed too much. A solution delayed delivery until 1990—in the term of President George H. W. Bush.
My first flight on Air Force One was aboard the old Boeing 707 during the first half of George H. W. Bush’s term. The late president held court with staff and reporters in the middle of the cabin. I admired the man enormously for his heroism in war, his life of service to the country and his unfailing good humor. In my view, he was a model president of the United States. As I left the plane, I swiped a powder blue book of matches emblazoned with the Seal of the President. I still have the matches in the top drawer of my desk. I suspect smoking onboard Air Force One retired with the 707s.
Boeing built the latter Bush’s 747-200 jumbo jet to serve as a nuclear war “lifeboat” for the president. The plane was subtly studded with electronic countermeasures in case of attack. A missile approach warning sensor stood guard on the tail. Behind and above each engine, glass-covered pods projected infrared signatures to confuse heat-seeking missiles. Just in front of Colonel Tillman’s windscreen, a hump above the nose of the 747 was a connection for midair refueling. The four GE turbofan engines were fitted with extra-large oil tanks to keep them running indefinitely. Air Force One could remain aloft for days. Its principal limitation was food.
Tillman’s headset sparked to life. “Air Force One, got two F-16s at about your, say, your ten o’clock position,” radioed an air controller. Riding shotgun to Tillman’s left, the F-16s looked like small asphalt-gray darts. Each was armed with long-range radar and air-to-air missiles. F-16 pilot Randy Roberts told me, “We were trying to keep an eighty-mile bubble around Air Force One and we’d investigate anything that was within eighty miles.”
The single aisle of Air Force One runs nearly the length of the plane along the left-side windows. This leaves maximum space to the right for the president’s office, conference rooms and seating. When the F-16s arrived, Mr. Bush crouched in the aisle to peer out the left side. Above the pale blue cowlings of the 747’s engines, he could see one of the fighters locked in formation. In an interview in his flying office a year later, I asked the president, “Were you worried about the safety of the people on this aircraft? Your own safety?” Mr. Bush wore a powder blue shirt and solid scarlet tie under his dark blue waist-length cotton flying jacket. The Seal of the President was embroidered over his right breast. “Noooo,” Mr. Bush said, drawing out the word to match the rhythm of his shaking head, “I wasn’t worried about it. I looked out the airplane and saw an F-16 on each wing. It was going to have to be a pretty good pilot to get us.”
In the White House bunker, the confusion was maddening. How many hijacked planes were in the air? The estimate was eleven. “I discussed it with the president,” Vice President Cheney recalled. “Are we prepared to order our aircraft to shoot down these airliners that have been hijacked?”
“That was your advice to the president?” I asked.
“It was my advice. It was his decision.”
Mr. Bush told me giving that order was such a difficult moment for him, he left his staff in his office and stepped into his stateroom to make the phone call in private. “That’s a sobering moment, to order your own combat aircraft to shoot down your own civilian aircraft,” he told me. “But it was an easy decision to make, given the fact that we had learned commercial aircraft were being used as a weapon. Now, I say ‘easy’ decision.” Mr. Bush raised his voice slightly to underscore his self-correction. “I didn’t hesitate, let me put it to you that way. I knew what had to be done.”
Twenty-six minutes after the Pentagon attack, a passenger revolt brought down United Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The vice president and National Security Advisor Rice told me that those in the PEOC believed the airliner had been shot down by an American pilot executing the orders of the commander in chief.
In the president’s flying office, horrifying pictures of New York City and the Pentagon flickered in and out on the four by three glass tube television mounted in a maple cabinet. The signal was breaking up. The bubble top on the 747 is packed tight with classified communications gear and three Air Force operators manning consoles. And yet, Mr. Bush’s calls to the vice president were being dropped. “This is inexcusable!” the president shouted. “Get me the vice president!” Mr. Bush told me, “I was trying to clear the fog of war and there is a fog of war. Information was just flying from all directions.”
“I remember hearing that the state department might have been hit,” Chief of Staff Andy Card told me. “Or that the White House had a fire in it.”
“You feared all of that was true?” I asked.
“At the time, I did,” Card nodded, eyes widening, still in disbelief nearly a year later. In a photograph of the president’s airborne office the morning of 9/11, Mr. Bush is behind his desk, facing aft, with his Air Force One jacket draped over the back of his beige leather chair. Card is standing before the president, palms flat on the desk, leaning into Mr. Bush’s full attention. Floor-length drapes are pulled fully back admitting a stratospheric glare. Mr. Bush strokes his thoughts in black felt-tip Sharpie on a yellow legal pad. Along with Card, other senior staff members—Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and Counselor to the President Dan Bartlett among them—crowd a couch across from the president, some spilling off its edge to take a knee on the beige carpet.
A few steps forward from the president’s office, up a flight of stairs and past the communications operators, Colonel Tillman was in his cockpit trying to turn the most visible plane in the world into a stealth aircraft. The 747 is longer than the White House mansion.4 There wasn’t much Tillman could do about that. To conceal his intentions from eavesdroppers, Tillman abandoned Air Force One’s sophisticated communications system and picked up his personal cell phone. He dialed the numbers of air traffic control centers along his route. “We actually didn’t tell them our destination or what direction we were heading,” Tillman told me. “We basically just talked to them and said, ‘We have no clearance at this time; we are just going to fly across the United States.’” Air traffic controllers warned each other to keep the plane’s route secret as they passed Air Force One from one sector to another. One receiving controller asked, “Okay, where’s he going?”
“Just watch him,” came the reply from another controller. “Don’t question him, where he’s going. Just work him and watch him. There’s no flight plan in and, right now, we’re not going to put anything in. Okay, sir?”
“Copy that.”5
In his airborne office, Mr. Bush told me, “I can remember sitting right here thinking about the consequences of what had taken place and realizing it was a defining moment in the history of the United States. I didn’t need any legal briefs; I didn’t need any consultations. I knew we were at war.”
We now know the reported threat to Air Force One was part of the “fog of war,” another phantom threat in the aerial chaos. But it had a powerful effect at the time. Mr. Bush hadn’t been seen by the public since he made brief remarks before leaving Florida when very little was known. Mr. Bush improvised then, calling the fires at the World Trade Center “a difficult moment for America.” After this statement, the Pentagon was attacked. But the American people would not hear from the commander in chief again for more than three hours. “The American people want to know where their dang president is!” Mr. Bush grumbled to his staff.6 A telephone address to the nation from Air Force One was debated. Mr. Bush hated the idea. Instead, he ordered Tillman to land somewhere, anywhere, within thirty minutes. At 11:45 a.m., Air Force One settled heavily onto a runway at Barksdale Air Force Base southeast of Shreveport, Louisiana. Mr. Bush hurried off his plane to a gaggle of news cameras summoned for his statement. “The resolve of our great nation is being tested,” Mr. Bush said. “But make no mistake, we will show the world that we will pass this test. God bless.” There was that word, resolve. On this morning of horror, with fractured communications and wild rumors, Mr. Bush fell back on an inner compass. He might not have known the plans of the enemy but he knew his own mind. His senior staff would be reminded of that fact at the next stop.
After the Barksdale statement, the president was on a heading almost due north to a secret national command center at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. The underground bunker there had been built with all the communications gear necessary for the president to fight a nuclear war.
Mr. Bush had asked his press secretary, Ari Fleischer, to take careful notes of what he said through the day. No one else was keeping a record for history. Fleischer shared his notes with me. They capture Mr. Bush’s language, plain and unguarded. To the vice president, Mr. Bush said, “We’re at war, Dick. We’re going to find out who did this and kick their ass.” Later, Mr. Bush said, “We’re not going to have any slap-on-the-wrist crap this time.” In our interview, Mr. Bush told me, “I can remember telling the secretary of defense ‘We’re going to find out who did this and then, Mr. Secretary, you and Dick Myers—who we had just named as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs—are going to go get them.’”
Finding out “who did this” didn’t take long. Amy Sweeney, a flight attendant on the first plane to crash, American Flight 11, used an onboard phone to report the seat numbers of the hijackers. FBI Director Robert Mueller told me, “That was the first piece of hard evidence. We could then go to the manifest, find out who was sitting in those seats and immediately conduct an investigation of those individuals, as opposed to taking all of the passengers on the plane and going through a process of elimination.” Some of the seats Sweeney identified had been occupied by known al-Qaida operatives traveling under their real names.
By 3:00 p.m. Eastern time, Air Force One rolled to a stop at Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base. Mr. Bush and his team were herded across the tarmac to a small unmarked cinderblock hut that resembled an outhouse. It was the entrance to a stairwell leading to the US Strategic Command’s Underground Command Center, built to provide the president with a military headquarters for months if necessary. As the president crossed the bottom step, the battle staff snapped to attention. Mr. Bush was escorted to a small conference room with a video camera. His encrypted image appeared simultaneously at the White House Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the Pentagon, FBI headquarters and the CIA. The intelligence agency was just settling back into its Langley, Virginia, headquarters after an evacuation. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told me the president started with a question to his director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet. “Who do you think did this to us?”
Rice remembers Tenet’s reply this way: “Sir, I believe it’s al-Qaida. We’re doing the assessment, but it looks like, it feels like, it smells like, al-Qaida.”
Tenet’s appraisal did not come as a surprise to the president or his national security team. Two months before, Tenet was sweating a summer of intelligence reports warning of an al-Qaida attack on American interests somewhere in the world. Often the reports lacked specifics. Some came from dubious sources. But the sheer number—another nearly every day—led Tenet to say at the time, “The system is blinking red.” More than a year before 9/11, near the end of the Clinton administration, Tenet’s team put together a CIA paramilitary plan to attack al-Qaida with air and ground forces in Afghanistan. President Clinton, who had once tried to kill Osama bin Laden with cruise missiles, declined Tenet’s more ambitious plan. With the beginning of the Bush administration, Tenet saw another chance. In July 2001, about two months before 9/11, he asked for a meeting to brief National Security Advisor Rice. In an interview, Tenet told me, “Essentially, the briefing says, there are gonna be multiple spectacular attacks against the United States. We believe these attacks are imminent. Mass casualties are a likelihood.”
I asked Tenet, “You’re telling Condoleezza Rice, in that meeting in the White House in July, that we should take offensive action in Afghanistan, now?”
“We need to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan now. We need to move to the offensive,” Tenet told me.
Rice put Tenet’s warning on her agenda. But I wondered why Tenet didn’t press for faster action. I asked, “You’re meeting with the president every morning? Why aren’t you telling the president, ‘Mr. President, this is terrifying. We have to do this now. Forget about the bureaucracy. I need this authority this afternoon.’”
“Right,” Tenet replied. “Because the United States government doesn’t work that way. The president is not the action officer. You bring the action to the national security advisor and people who set the table for the president to decide on policies they’re going to implement.”
“You thought you had some time?”
“Well, you didn’t know but yeah, you thought you might have time. You can second-guess me till the cows come home. That’s the way I did my job.”
On September 4, 2001, one week before 9/11, Rice chaired a “Principals Committee” meeting on al-Qaida. The “principals” were the top members of the president’s national security team. One of them, National Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke, sent Rice a personal note before the meeting. Clarke, like Tenet, was a holdover from the Clinton administration. He was beyond frustrated that he could not convince President Clinton to destroy al-Qaida in Afghanistan. His note to Rice painted a dire picture. He warned: “Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the Counterterrorism Security Group has not succeeded in stopping al Qida [sic] attacks, and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US. What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time.”7 That future day would be the next Tuesday.
While reviewing the records of the White House and the FBI, I discovered an astounding coincidence. On September 4th, at the same time the principals were debating whether to attack al-Qaida, the hijackers were buying their plane tickets. An FBI timeline shows Ahmed al-Haznawi was paying $1,721.50 for a ticket on United Flight 93, which would crash in Pennsylvania. Also, on September 4th, five other hijackers were buying tickets to travel from their base in Fort Lauderdale to Boston to prepare for the hijacking of United Flight 175, bound for the World Trade Center. That same day, terrorist pilot Marwan al-Shehhi purchased his first-class ticket on Flight 175. Three others, who would crash American Flight 77 into the Pentagon, found time on September 4th to use a temporary pass to Gold’s Gym in Laurel, Maryland. The FBI discovered the pass in the wallet of al-Qaida’s Nawaf al-Hazmi. Al-Hazmi’s wallet was found in the wreckage of the Pentagon.8
As the hijackers made their final preparations on September 4th, the national security principals approved a draft presidential directive authorizing the CIA paramilitary campaign in Afghanistan.9 But first, lawyers would have to write the legal justifications and money would have to be appropriated. Rice told President Bush it would take probably three years for al-Qaida to be crushed in its homeland. On Monday, September 10, the day before 9/11, Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley assembled the deputies of the principals to put the final touches on a multiyear strategy to disrupt al-Qaida and overthrow the Taliban government of Afghanistan.10
The next evening, the president of the United States was in his Nebraska bunker questioning decision makers who, in the prophecy of Richard Clarke, were now imagining those things “they wished they had done earlier.”
Plans were made for a presidential address to be broadcast from the Omaha command center. No one believed it was safe for the president to return to Washington. But the thought of that image on television, the president confined to a bunker, pushed President Bush to his limit. He had more than enough of broken communications and flights that took him farther from the capital. Against advice, he ordered Colonel Tillman to take him home. The American people, he insisted, needed to see their president in the White House, not a jailhouse. Press Secretary Ari Fleischer’s notes record the president saying, “I don’t want any tinhorn terrorist keeping me out of Washington.”
“Bullshit,” I said, prosecuting Fleischer. “He didn’t say ‘tinhorn’ terrorist.”
“That’s verbatim.” Fleischer shrugged.
Mr. Bush put it more starkly to me in our interview. “Anybody who would attack America the way they did, anybody who would take innocent life the way they did, anybody who is so devious, is evil.”
I asked, “In those early hours on Air Force One, you were looking out on a world that was suddenly pretty black-and-white to you?”
“That’s right. I felt that way.”
Air Force One departed Offutt and flew toward the darkening east. Before Mr. Bush arrived at Andrews Air Force Base, 7 World Trade Center collapsed—the last casualty of 9/11. Mr. Bush arrived at Andrews nine hours after the attacks. The shadows were long and the evening was warm, eighty-two degrees, thick with humidity. The president stepped, grimly, down the red-carpet stairs that had been wheeled to the plane. At the bottom step, he returned the salute of an air force officer who, instead of the customary dress uniform, was already clothed in battle fatigues.
Marine One, a deep green Sikorsky VH-3D Sea King helicopter, received Mr. Bush for the ten-minute flight to the South Lawn of the White House. In the sky, the president’s aircraft was joined by two identical helicopters, which traded places in a shell game meant to disguise which one carried the president. Mr. Bush’s helicopter flew north, along the Potomac River. A tower of smoke from the Pentagon rose into Mr. Bush’s left-side window. The marine pilots slipped the helicopter just to the left of the Washington Monument—a close approach the president normally found exhilarating. Over the lawn, the helicopter settled with the sun. The pilot pressed the foot pedals to swing the Sea King’s tail clockwise ninety degrees. The president’s view panned past the Oval Office before settling on the mansion. In a show of precision, the pilot lowered the machine inch by inch until it pressed its wheels stiffly onto three small metal pads sunk into the tall fescue grass. Mr. Bush stepped off, reflexively returning the salute of the Marine who had lowered the helicopter’s door. He walked alone in gathering darkness toward the Oval. His communications strategist, Karen Hughes, stepped out to meet him. The sight of Karen was a relief to the president. He valued her judgment above all his advisors. Hughes was affable but unshakable. She always seemed to know what to do—and what to say—in a crisis. Her considerable talents may have been rooted in her “military brat” upbringing. Her father was a general in the US Army Corps of Engineers and was the last American governor of the Panama Canal Zone. I had known Karen even longer than the Bush family had. She was a friend from the late 1970s when she; my wife, Jane; and I were reporters in the same Texas newsroom. Karen covered the presidential campaigns of George H. W. Bush, the president’s father. Later, she turned in her press credentials to become chair of the Republican Party of Texas. Two years before the attacks, Karen came to dinner in our home and told Jane and me that Governor Bush would soon announce he was running for president. Throughout the campaign she was in charge of communications and messaging. Now, on 9/11, she was drafting the most important speech of Mr. Bush’s life. His address from the Oval was scheduled for 8:30 p.m. The president consulted with Hughes about edits to the draft speech, then he changed clothes and returned to the Oval and settled behind what is known as the “Resolute Desk.”
The public does not know what happened in the Oval Office in the moments before the address. But I have seen an unreleased videotape. About three minutes before air, the president is resting his forearms against the desk, appraising the speech. But his attention is being pulled away by an argument he’s having with a male aide standing off camera. Mr. Bush is angry, absolutely determined not to budge on a decision he made at the last minute against the advice of his senior staff. On the tape, Mr. Bush’s voice rises like that of a man who refuses to be cornered. “You’re trying to get me to make a promise we might not be able to keep!” he shouted at the aide. The president’s palm crashes down on the desktop with a sharp slap.
This was not the first time the old desk had suffered a blow from a president in crisis. It was a gift from Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880—hewn from the timbers of the British Arctic exploration ship, HMS Resolute. In 1854, the barque-rigged sailing ship was entrapped in ice and abandoned. An American whaler found Resolute and returned her to Britain. In gratitude, Victoria ordered a desk built from the ship’s oak timbers. The original specifications, written in longhand on yellowed drafting paper, envisioned “a library table with two fronts, one for the president’s use the other for his secretary.”11 Today we would call that a partners desk. But, in practice, there is no lonelier helm in the world. Not all presidents choose to work behind the antique, but FDR was at the Resolute Desk in his private study when he heard about Pearl Harbor and it supported the weight of the world when JFK confronted the Cuban Missile Crisis.12
Now the desk was at the center of history again, less than a minute from President Bush’s 9/11 address. Mr. Bush listened impatiently as his senior advisor pressed the argument to include the only line in Karen Hughes’s speech that the president had specifically taken out. Mr. Bush dug in his heels. He argued and shouted nearly up to the second that the TV crew’s cue would lift the curtain on a nation in anguish. Mr. Bush had made his edits with his preferred Sharpie felt-tip pen. The document was labeled Presidential Statement—Draft 2. Next to the title, a rubber stamp certified “President has seen” in red ink. A handwritten notation near the top reads “9/11/01.” The president’s edits were minor until he reached the line: “We will not relent until they are brought to justice.” Mr. Bush swiped a swift single black streak through the sentence, then he went back over it, making a point of nearly obliterating the words. It is the only line the public never heard.13
As the seconds ticked toward 8:30 p.m. Eastern time, the senior advisor tried to convince the commander in chief to put the line back in. The TV crew counted: ten seconds, nine, eight, seven... The anger in the president’s face was reflected on the shining leather desktop. Mr. Bush ended the argument. “I won’t do it!” Five seconds, four, three, two, one. Turning to the camera, Mr. Bush passed instantly from anger to carefully calculated serenity. He read the words in the teleprompter which glowed on a one-way mirror in front of the camera lens. A year earlier, as the Republican nominee, Mr. Bush had scorned foreign entanglements and warned against nation building. But in all the years I’ve covered the White House, this much I’ve learned: presidents come into office to change history, but it’s history that always changes them.
“Good evening,” the president began. “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist attacks.”
The days that followed 9/11 marked the zenith of the Bush presidency. His resolve rallied a nation in grief. Bravely and without compromise he guided American fury away from religious bigotry and hate. His refusal to “make a promise we can’t keep” was a moment of prescience as Osama bin Laden would outlast his presidency. As the speech scrolled up the screen, matching his pace, the president looked past the words into a dark, unpredictable future. Mr. Bush was about to begin two wars: one in Afghanistan and the Global War on Terror. In short order, the stubborn resolve that had served him well, would betray him in the invasion of Iraq. The conclusion of his address rose on the glass of the prompter: “We go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world.”
On the paper draft, in the course of the entire speech, Mr. Bush had underlined only two words: good and just.