ON THE MORNING OF TUESDAY, September 11, 2001, as he took a predawn jog around the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort outside Sarasota, Florida, President George W. Bush almost certainly would have been content with going down in history as the “education president.” He had held out the prospect in the heated presidential campaign the previous year, touting the education “miracle” he had seen to in his six years in the Texas statehouse and denouncing the “soft bigotry of low expectations” for poor and minority children. Early in his administration Bush had cultivated a relationship with Ted Kennedy, the stalwart liberal senator from Massachusetts and aging emblem of the Kennedy dynasty. “Let’s show them Washington can still get things done,” he challenged Kennedy. At the top of the list of the things on which he sought bipartisan support was education reform. Bush’s appearance later that morning before a first-grade class at Sarasota’s Emma E. Booker Elementary School was meant to align him with the issue and serve as a backdrop for his legislative plan, No Child Left Behind. But the education president he would not be.
At 8:54 a.m., as he entered the school, Bush was told by Karl Rove that one of the World Trade Center towers in lower Manhattan, the north tower, had been struck by an aircraft at 8:46 a.m. Initially, it looked like an accident caused by pilot error, maybe a heart attack. Before Bush entered the classroom, he received a call from Condoleezza Rice indicating that the plane was a commercial aircraft. Nothing more was known. At 9:06 a.m., as Bush listened to a teacher conduct a reading exercise with the book The Pet Goat to a class of largely African American students, Andy Card quietly approached him. “A second plane hit the second tower,” he whispered in the president’s ear. “America is under attack.” Bush sat there for five minutes taking in the news, looking slightly dazed, his lips tightening. He consciously remained in place to project calm and not alarm the students—a decision that would draw controversy later as Bush was criticized for not reacting more urgently. He knew in that instant that he had become a “wartime president,” something he “never anticipated” and “never wanted.” Then and there George W. Bush’s life, like that of so many others, had changed. So, too, had his presidency.
After commending the students on their reading skills, the president and his entourage went to a holding room in the school where they watched the crashes on television, as Bush, sitting on a child’s desk chair, pulled a Sharpie from his pocket and began writing out a statement on a yellow writing pad. Minutes later, he entered the school’s gymnasium crowded with reporters, school administrators, teachers, and students. Many were unaware of what had transpired. “Today we’ve had a national tragedy,” Bush said in his first words to the nation after the attacks, as Americans gripped by horror and uncertainty stationed themselves in front of televisions. “Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.” He added, “Terrorism against our nation will not stand,” the latter three words echoing those his father had used as president after Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, but misreading the written text, which read, “Terrorism against our nation will not succeed.” “Dad’s words must have been buried in my subconscious, waiting to surface during another moment of crisis,” Bush wrote later. Bush, though, sounded less resolute than his father had seemed twelve years earlier.
Minutes later, the president and his long motorcade bounded down U.S. Route 41 at 85 miles per hour toward Air Force One, flanked on all sides by police cars. During the short ride, he called Rice, who gave him the latest development: A plane crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m.—a third commercial airline hijacked by terrorists and used as a guided missile. “Is Rumsfeld alive?” Bush asked. He was, Rice told him. The first plane could have been an accident, Bush thought. The second plane was definitely an attack. The third was a declaration of war.
By 9:54 a.m., the president and his party were airborne. The question became, Where would they go? When it was learned that Air Force One was a possible target for the terrorists, the plane, which bolted upward to forty-five thousand feet, far higher than normal cruising altitude, abruptly banked a turn and sprinted a thousand miles toward Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base at 630 miles per hour. F-16 fighter jets, not even a stone’s throw away, hugged the aircraft on either side, providing a protective flank. Bush talked to Cheney, who had been hurtled by the Secret Service to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a bunker deep under the White House’s East Wing. Bush would make decisions from Air Force One; Cheney would carry them out from the bunker. Bush gave him clear direction on the rules of engagement: An effort should be made to contact suspicious planes to get them to land peacefully. If not, the military had Bush’s authority to shoot them down. Bush gave the order somberly, knowing that innocent passengers on board those aircraft may be at risk. As subsequent reports made their way to Bush, some later proven to be false, he learned that a plane had crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, in the western part of the state. It wasn’t known whether it was shot down by the military under Bush’s orders or if it went down on its own. Am I responsible for the deaths of those passengers? Bush wondered.
Andy Card was taken with how Bush “immediately started thinking about the greater burdens.” “It wasn’t tunnel vision,” Card said. “[Bush had] terrific peripheral vision about what was happening.” Among the first calls Bush made was to Russian president Vladimir Putin. Bush wanted to make clear to Putin not to make the mistake of Russia exploiting the situation to go to war with America given its vulnerability after the attacks. Card explained that Bush wanted to “make sure [Putin] knows” not to “use [9/11] as an excuse to go to war” with the U.S. “[H]e was just saying, there is a big consequence here if people miscalculate,” said Card.
As Air Force One sped westward, news reports spotlighted the rapidly evolving developments on the East Coast. None of them was good. At 9:59 a.m. the south tower collapsed, rolling downward with colossal might and disintegrating into a mushroom cloud of gray ash, which rose up in its place. Eleven minutes later, at 10:10 a.m., a western wing of the Pentagon fell. At 10:28 a.m., the north tower descended with the same apocalyptic force as the south tower. In less than two hours, the 110-story Twin Towers, symbols of American possibility and prosperity, exclamation points at the end of Manhattan’s glittering skyline, were both down in heaping ruins, as the Pentagon, a fortress housing defenders of American security, was in flames. Untold thousands were dead. As images of the crippled towers falling played over and over, Bush felt like almost every other American on that morning: shocked, angry, and overcome with feelings of helplessness, a fierce will for justice, and a desire to hear the voices of those he loved.
Air Force One touched down at Barksdale a little before noon eastern time. Bush made another statement to the American people. He was firmer than he had been in Florida. “Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts,” he said, but as David Frum, who had written the statement, observed, he “looked and sounded like the hunted, not the hunter.” Aides who were with Bush on 9/11 saw the president’s steely resolve, his calm, and his ease with making big decisions. It was less evident over the airwaves.
After his remarks, upon conferring with Cheney, Bush was soon airborne again. The communications system at Barksdale was deemed insufficient, and Cheney recommended that Bush go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, which housed the U.S. Strategic Command. Bush resisted. As in Florida, his instincts told him he needed to return to Washington. “We don’t need some tinhorn terrorist to scare us off,” he said. “The American people want to know where their dang president is.” But the situation was too unstable. At 9:45 a.m., when the White House was thought to be a target, staffers were ordered to evacuate the complex, as agents shouted instructions to women to take off their heels and run. Chaos reigned in Washington, with little reliable information filtering through the fog of war. Better that the commander in chief stay in a secure environment until things stabilized.
At Offutt, where he arrived just before 3:00 p.m. eastern time, Bush was rushed to the base’s command center. There he held a videoconference with Cheney, Rumsfeld, CIA director George Tenet, and FBI director Robert Mueller. Tenet told the president what they all had suspected: al Qaeda, the militant Islamist terrorist group founded by Osama bin Laden during the presidency of Bush’s father, was the likely perpetrator. “We’re at war against terror,” Bush told the group. “From this day forward this is the new priority of our administration.”
Afterward, Bush issued an order: He was going back to Washington. Air Force One rode tailwinds over twelve hundred miles of a changed America. By 6:55 p.m., Marine One, hovering as low to the ground as possible for security reasons, far lower than the Washington Monument as it approached the White House, deposited him on South Lawn. A few minutes later, he was reunited with Laura underground in the White House bunker.
Like her husband, Laura Bush had begun her day campaigning for No Child Left Behind. She learned from a Secret Service agent on a limousine ride to Capitol Hill, where she would meet with the Senate committee on education to discuss early childhood development, that the first tower had been hit, then the second. By the time she met with Ted Kennedy after 9:00 a.m. in his office on the third floor of the Russell Senate Office Building, the world knew that the U.S. was under attack. A small television in the corner of Kennedy’s office broadcast the developments, but the senator disregarded them. Instead, Kennedy, whose life had been embossed by tragedy including the assassinations of two of his brothers, offered the first lady a tour of his office, the walls of which were a collage of Camelot glory. “We never talked about the terrorist attacks,” Laura recalled. “He just kept up small talk. I don’t know if he thought I would fall apart if we started talking about it, or if it was just a . . . psychological mechanism because he had had so many terrible shocks in his own life—if it was just the way he could deal with it.”
Bush’s parents had been with Laura at the White House on the evening of September 10, while their son was in Florida. The following morning, as Laura was on Capitol Hill, they made their way back to Maine by way of Saint Paul, Minnesota, where they both were slated to give speeches. When their private plane, along with all commercial aircraft, was ordered to land at the nearest airport, they found themselves in Milwaukee where they checked into a suburban motel in which the bed was made up with brown sheets. There they glued themselves to the television. When asked later what his reaction to the attacks was that day, George H. W. Bush replied, “Shock and awe,” the phrase that was used during his presidency when he ordered the raining of bombs on Baghdad in an overwhelming show of force after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. “It was traumatic for me and Barbara,” he said, “but no more so than for anyone else, except the president was our son.” The Bushes were relieved when George W. reached them from Air Force One several hours after the towers were struck. They spoke briefly. When he asked what they were doing in Wisconsin, Barbara replied, “Son, you grounded our plane.” His father suggested, “the sooner [you] get back to Washington, the better,” counsel with which the president agreed.
The Bushes would discover in the days ahead how close the attacks had come to their family. The elder Bushes’ youngest son, Marvin, had been in a Manhattan subway car under Wall Street on his way to a meeting when the attacks occurred. After the train was evacuated and orders were given to passengers to walk uptown or across the Brooklyn Bridge as soon as possible, he trekked seventy blocks to his midtown hotel with hordes of others, like war refugees, through smoke, debris, and blind confusion. Nine-eleven did not discriminate.
A little over ninety minutes after arriving back at the White House on the evening of 9/11, Bush was behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, where he briefly addressed the nation at 8:30 p.m. “The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts,” he assured Americans. “I’ve directed the full resources for our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and bring them to justice.” Then he added, “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them.” He hadn’t discussed the declaration or its implications with any of his core foreign-policy team—Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, or Powell—but on September 11, 2001, after the bloodiest attack ever perpetrated on American soil, the forty-third president had just sowed the seeds of the Bush Doctrine.