THE EAST WING Evacuation was also under way over in the East Wing, where the First Lady’s Office, the Visitors Office, and several members of the Legislative
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Affairs team are located. Mrs. Bush’s staff fled their second floor East Wing office and ran out the Ground Floor entrance by the Visitors Office and through the East Wing gate toward Lafayette Park. Quincy Hicks Crawford, director of scheduling and advance for the first lady, remembers tourists looking at them. In her memoir Spoken from the Heart, Laura Bush describes how her staff “passed piles of strollers scattered across the lawn, left behind by tourists who had grabbed their children and fled the White House grounds.”32 Visitors Office Director Clare Pritchett and staff members Matthew Wendel and Listi Arnold (now Sobba) gathered the volunteers in their office, many of them elderly and needing assistance, to help guide them out of the building. When a Secret Service UD officer came in and ordered them to “get out as fast as you can,” Wendel asked, “Where do we go?” The agent’s response was, “As far as away from the White House as possible.” They walked as far as McPherson Square, asking motorists driving by to tell them what they were hearing on their car radios. Many of the first lady’s staff stayed together in groups, some walking to Georgetown and others meeting up with colleagues at the Madison Hotel,
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The OEOB is seen in the background as the crowd of evacuating White House staffers mix with tourists in navigating stalled traffic at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventeenth Street. NATIONAL ARCHIV ES AND R EC OR DS ADMINISTRATION
“September 11 was their first full day in their new assignment,” he says. Sanders watched the second plane hit the second tower with his office mate Merrill Hughes, an assistant in the Office of Management and Administration. Their calls to their West Wing supervisors went unanswered, and they “started hearing noise in the hall and saw people running down the stairs and down the hallways.” Sanders gathered the interns in the offices closest to him as the Secret Service ordered them to “get out.” On the corner of Seventeenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, he hailed two cabs and took six interns with him to a friend’s apartment in Northwest Washington near the National Cathedral. There he had them call their families and try to reach other interns and spread the word about where everyone had gone. Several interns were “crying, shaken and stunned, never thinking they would be spending their first full day in the office running for their lives,” Sanders recalls.