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
“GET OUT NOW” With the vice president and senior national security team in the bunker and the president and senior staff in the air, the rest of the White House staff was ordered to evacuate. The directions started gradually, with West Wing staff told to gather in the White House Mess, a windowless ground floor staff dining room across the hall from the Situation Room that was the shelter-in-place location for inclement-weather drills and the like. Brian McCormack and Josh Deckard were among those who gathered in the Mess. As the threat to the White House became clear, the orders quickly turned urgent. McCormack remembers one Secret Service agent telling him, “If you want to live, run.” The young Deckard, who had been in Washington for only six months, was standing next to McCormack and thought, “This is the last face I’ll ever see.” White House photographer Tina Hager, whose desk was located in the Photo Office on the ground floor of the West Wing, also gathered in the Mess and took photographs of the staff gathered there. I was among them. At that time I was serving as special assistant to the president for White House management and administration and my
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