In My Time (3 page)

With all air traffic to and from the continental United States being grounded, requests began to come in for planes to fly senior officials who had been stranded. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, was stuck in Zurich, Switzerland. The magnitude of the economic impact of the attack would be significant, and we needed Alan back in the United States to help us manage it. We asked the Pentagon to get him a plane.

While we were managing things from the PEOC, another meeting was under way in the White House Situation Room. The PEOC staff attempted to set up a videoconference to connect the two rooms, and we
managed to get images of the Situation Room meeting up on one of our screens, but we couldn’t get any audio of the meeting. We were getting better real-time information from the news reports on TV, but because of a technical glitch, I couldn’t hear those reports when the video of the Sit Room meeting was on display. Finally I asked that the videoconference to the Sit Room be turned off so we could follow the reporting on TV. I told Eric to get on the phone and try to listen in on the Sit Room meeting, but after a few minutes he described the audio quality as “worse than listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks at the bottom of a swimming pool.” I told him to hang up. If something important was happening upstairs, they could send someone down or call us direct.

In the meantime, Secretary Rumsfeld had made the decision to take our nation’s military alert level from the peacetime Defense Condition 4 to DefCon 3, higher than we’d been since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Scooter Libby, my chief of staff, and Eric Edelman pointed out that someone needed to tell the Russians that we were going to a higher alert level. They were at that moment conducting major military exercises, and we didn’t want them to be surprised or think our alert level had been raised because of them. We had all lived through the Cold War and knew the possibility of a mistaken nuclear launch had to be kept in mind. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice made the call, got through to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and reported back his expressions of support. The Russians agreed to halt their military exercises in light of the attacks on the United States.

A decision had been made to set Air Force One down at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where the president would tape a brief message to the American people. Shortly before he landed, we began to get word in the PEOC of international flights in trouble. The Coast Guard was receiving distress calls from United, Air Canada, and Continental planes, all over the Atlantic. Within a half hour, we were told that those flights were no longer cause for concern, but there was a Korean Air flight over the Pacific inbound for Anchorage with its hijack code squawking. Fighter jets had been scrambled from Alaska’s Elmendorf Air Force Base to shadow it.

Condi Rice asked me where I thought the president should go from Barksdale. “Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha,” I told her. From my time as secretary of defense, I knew that the U.S. military has facilities throughout the country that offer a combination of high security and state-of-the-art communications. STRATCOM was one. The president would be safe there, and on a day when the weaknesses of our communications capability had become painfully obvious, he could be in close touch with the key members of his government in Washington, D.C.

BY EARLY IN THE afternoon, we had gotten most of the planes out of the sky. We had learned that many of the reports of attacks and hijacked airliners were false. The situation and the flow of information about it were stabilizing. I knew that the president was anxious to get back to Washington, and during a call with him as he was on his way to Offutt, I recommended he begin thinking about a time to return. He had scheduled a secure videoconference at Offutt so he could talk to his National Security Council, but I had no doubt that after that he’d be on his way to D.C.

As the day progressed, it became clear that someone from the executive branch who was fully briefed on our early responses to the attack needed to go on the air to reassure the American people and the world that the president was safe and that the U.S. government was functioning. The attack had not succeeded in shutting us down. As we watched television reports in the PEOC, it seemed that none of the reporters had been in contact with anyone in the executive branch who could talk authoritatively about what we were doing. Several members of Congress had been on the air, but they were all removed from the business of actually running the country.

Someone needed to make a formal statement to the nation—and I knew it couldn’t be me. My past government experience, including my participation in Cold War–era continuity-of-government exercises, had prepared me to manage the crisis during those first few hours on 9/11, but I knew that if I went out and spoke to the press, it would
undermine the president, and that would be bad for him and for the country. We were at war. Our commander in chief needed to be seen as in charge, strong, and resolute—as George W. Bush was. My speaking publicly would not serve that cause.

Presidential Counselor Karen Hughes seemed to me to be the right one to talk to the press. She’d taken a rare day off, but had made her way to the White House and soon started working with Vice Presidential Counselor Mary Matalin to draft a statement. For a range of security reasons, the Secret Service did not want Karen to use the White House press briefing room, so they arranged for her to be driven to FBI headquarters, where she briefed reporters.

In the meantime I was starting to think about our response to this act of war. I had managed to get my general counsel, David Adding-ton, back into the White House after he had been forced to evacuate. Almost as soon as he arrived in the PEOC, he began coordinating by phone with a team of the president’s staff who were in the Roosevelt Room thinking through what kind of legislative authorities we would need in the days and months ahead.

We suspected early on that this was an al Qaeda attack. There were few other terrorist organizations capable of organizing and carrying out an attack of this scale. We’d certainly go after those responsible, but that wasn’t enough. There were organizations that financed terrorist activity and provided weapons and arms. There were states that provided the terrorists with safe harbor. Those who supported terrorism also needed to be held accountable.

During the National Security Council meeting that the president convened by means of secure teleconferencing from Offutt, the contours of the Bush Doctrine began to emerge. We would go after the terrorists who had done us harm—and we would also go after those who made their murderous attacks possible.

The president returned to the White House and at 8:30 p.m. addressed the nation from the Oval Office. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them,” he said. Afterward he chaired a National Security Council meeting
inside the PEOC. When it was over, Lynne and I left the bunker and walked out the diplomatic entrance of the White House onto the South Lawn, where a white-top helicopter was waiting to take us to an undisclosed location. It was the first of many times that I would leave for a location different from the president’s that we did not reveal publicly. If the terrorists tried an attack to decapitate our government, we wanted to make sure they didn’t get both of us.

As Marine Two gained altitude, we could see the Pentagon. The building was lit up for the rescue teams still at work, and smoke was rising from it. All day I had seen images of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on TV. Seeing the site of an attack firsthand brought home the vulnerability of the United States and the dangers that America faced. I thought about the fact that the city of Washington had come under attack in 1814 at the hands of the British. Now, 187 years later, al Qaeda had demonstrated they could deliver a devastating blow to the heart of America’s economic and military power. On this day all our assumptions about our own security had changed. It was a fundamental shift.

We flew toward the Catoctin Mountains and Camp David, the presidential retreat that would be our undisclosed location on the night of September 11. When we arrived we were taken to Aspen Lodge, where I stayed up into the morning hours thinking about what the attack meant and how we should respond. We were in a new era and needed an entirely new strategy to keep America secure. The first war of the twenty-first century wouldn’t simply be a conflict of nation against nation, army against army. It would be first and foremost a war against terrorists who operated in the shadows, feared no deterrent, and would use any weapon they could get their hands on to destroy us.

W
hen I was born my granddad wanted to send a telegram to the president. Both sides of my family were staunch New Deal Democrats, and Granddad was sure that FDR would want to know about the “little stranger” with whom he now had a birthday in common. My parents had been married in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I was born there, at Bryan Memorial Hospital, on January 30, 1941—the same day that Franklin D. Roosevelt turned fifty-nine. My mother, who had a penchant for keeping scrapbooks, saved the bill for my delivery—exactly $37.50.

On the front lawn in Lincoln, Nebraska, age six months in 1941

My first memory is of riding on a crowded bus with my mother. I’m seated beside her, and my younger brother, Bob, about two, is on her lap. It’s wartime, and even the aisles are packed with servicemen. One of them leans over and offers my mother a cigarette. She takes it and he gives her a light, which is the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed. I’m not quite four years old, and I have never seen her smoke before.

Mother and Bob and I have just left our home in Lincoln and are
heading halfway across Nebraska to live with my father’s parents in Sumner. Dad had received his draft notice in 1944, and after training at Great Lakes Naval Station, he was sent to San Diego with the expectation of being shipped out to the Pacific. Instead he was stationed there and assigned to a shakedown unit, which made sure that ships headed out were seaworthy and ready for combat. We’d have gone to be with him, but San Diego was a nearly impossible place to find wartime housing. My mother had tried to stay on in Lincoln, but after an attack of appendicitis, she decided she couldn’t manage with two small boys on her own.

We couldn’t move in with her folks, David and Clarice Dickey, because when the war began, David had closed the small restaurant he owned and signed on as a cook for the Union Pacific Railroad.

My mom’s parents, Dave and Clarice Dickey, who were cooks on the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1940s.

Now his and Grandma’s home was the railroad car next to the one in which they cooked for repair crews up and down the UP line in Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming. After the war Bob and I loved visiting them. Grandpa Dickey knew how to turn the most ordinary day into an adventure. He would take us fishing for catfish, using a special combination of blood and chicken guts for bait.