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After evacuating from his office, Vice President Cheney is joined by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Deputy National Security Adviser Steven Hadley, and senior national security officials in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC)—a secure facility under the White House entered through a basement corridor (below). Throughout the day Cheney remained in contact with the president from this location.
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Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m.30 Everyone onboard was killed; no one on the ground was harmed. Countless lives—and potentially the White House or the Capitol, the likely targets of the hijackers—were saved. As President Bush later put it, the act of heroism aboard the plane was the first counteroffensive of the war on terror.31
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West Wing staffers, told to gather in the White House Mess, watch televised coverage of the unfolding crisis (top) before exiting as the Secret Service orders an immediate evacuation from the White House complex (bottom).
T O P A N D 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
photographed scenes from the PEOC throughout the day. Presidential photographer Eric Draper similarly took photographs while traveling with the president. Together they documented some of the most significant moments in White House history. Soon after the vice president and senior staff arrived at the PEOC, a military aide informed them that another plane, believed hijacked, was headed for Washington. Having conferred with the president and confirming Bush’s authorization, the vice president gave the weighty order for the Air National Guard to shoot down the airliner—almost certainly filled with American passengers—if it did not respond.26 President Bush, a former National Guard pilot, understood the enormity of the decision27 and later explained he had “concern for any young pilot who was ordered to shoot down a jetliner.”28 Military fighter planes scrambled into the sky, in some cases so quickly that there was no time to load missiles. Years later, one of the pilots of those unarmed jets revealed that she had planned to fly her F-16 into the hijacked plane—identified as United Flight 93—sacrificing herself to save others on the ground.29 As it turned out, the passengers did that themselves. In one of the most powerful illustrations ever of American democracy, the passengers took a vote, stormed the cockpit, and brought down the plane in an empty field near