NATIONAL ARCHIV ES AND R EC OR DS ADMINISTRATION
above and opposite
Heeding the warning issued by the Secret Service, “If you want to live, run,” White House staffers race through the iron security gates opened for their escape at both ends of West Executive Avenue.
and the highest-ranking official in the OEOB. Daniels was conducting his daily senior staff meeting when Keller interrupted, having seen the second plane hit the World Trade Center on the TV on her desk. Daniels had seen it, too. With the outer office doors open to the corridor, Keller could hear people running down the hallways and “people yelling to evacuate.” Keller assisted a thirty-year career OMB veteran who served as the receptionist in the director’s office and “had recently returned to work after being on leave for a back injury.” “She was very upset and shaking,” remembers Keller, “and I walked with her down the two flights of stairs out through the Seventeenth and G Street exit and ran down G Street to get her in a cab before walking to my brother-in-law’s store on K Street NW to call my family.” Also in the OEOB that day was Eric Motley from the Presidential Personnel Office. The TV in the outer office was on, and he recalls a colleague telling him a plane struck the World Trade Center. Motley was on the phone conducting a personnel interview, but, when told that a second plane struck, he ended the conversation and joined his colleagues to watch what was unfolding on TV. “We
began to take this all in,” he recalls, “when we saw the chyron read: ‘White House being evacuated.’” At that moment, a Secret Service UD officer entered the office telling everyone, “We need you to clear these offices and get out of here and go as far as you can.” Not knowing when they would return, Motley stopped briefly to turn off the front office coffeepot and then suddenly remembered the floppy disks of his PhD thesis, the only copy of his dissertation, that were sitting in his desk drawer. He retrieved the disks to the shouts of an agent ordering him, “You need to get out of here.”
FIRST DAY DRAMA FOR 112 INTERNS That morning Mike Sanders, director of the White House Internship Program, had arrived at his first floor OEOB office before 8:00 a.m. The previous day he had welcomed the first full class of interns under the new program he established for the fall 2001 class. The 112 interns “were from many parts of the country and for 95 percent of them it was their first time in Washington,” he recalls. They had attended a half-day security briefing, toured the building and went briefly to their new offices.
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