Seated in his office in the West Wing, Vice President Dick Cheney views President Bush’s 9:30 a.m. televised statement to the nation from the Booker Elementary School cafeteria (left). Minutes later, at 9:36 a.m., the vice president is rushed from his office through the corridors of the West Wing toward the secure bunker deep beneath the White House (below).
With President Bush on the road, the senior official in the White House on September 11 was Vice President Dick Cheney. A former White House staffer himself—ultimately as chief of staff to President Gerald Ford and the secretary of defense under President Bush 41 during the Gulf War—Cheney was distinctively qualified to manage the White House during an emergency. The vice president’s personal aide, Brian McCormack, remembers the day getting off to a gradual start. He was in the vice president’s first-floor West Wing office early that morning when President Bush 41 (who had occupied the office for his eight years as vice president under President Ronald Reagan) dropped by to see his old friend, but the vice president had not yet arrived. When Vice President Cheney arrived to begin his morning meetings, McCormack headed to the OEOB and stopped by the vice president’s advance staff office to meet with Advance Director Dan Wilmot. There, just after 8:46 a.m., he saw television coverage of a plane (American Airlines Flight 11) having just crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
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white house history quarterly
T O P : G E T T Y I M A G E S / B O T T O M : N A T I O N A L A R C H I V E S A N D R E C O R D S A D M I N I S T R AT I O N
VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY THE WEST WING