NATIONAL ARCHIV ES AND R EC OR DS ADMINISTRATION
After evacuating the OEOB in the morning, OMB Director Mitch Daniels returned to work out of the Roosevelt Room during the afternoon of September 11, 2001.
recalls Quincy Hicks Crawford. Cathy Fenton recounts that Russ Appleyard, the UD officer stationed in the East Wing, came into her office and told her, “We are evacuating, a plane has hit the Pentagon.” Her staff left with others from the First Lady’s Office. Fenton and her deputy, Jeanie Figg, put on their tennis shoes, grabbed their purses, and ran down the stairs past the startling sight of Secret Service agents drawing weapons from behind hidden closets in the East Wing Lobby.
MITCH DANIELS: “I’M STAYING” While most of the White House staff evacuated quickly, a few did not. When Karen Keller told her boss, OMB Director Mitch Daniels, “We have to evacuate,” Daniels responded simply, “I’m staying.” Daniels, who previously served in the Reagan White House as assistant to the president for political and intergovernmental affairs and later went on to become governor in his home state of Indiana, told me he was struck by how “there was no system other than people running through the halls” and that “my first instinct was to stay.” Daniels recounts how he believed he was one of the last people to leave the building until he arrived a couple of blocks
away at an OMB annex office, where he could get a landline to call his military driver who, he discovered, was still sitting in his fifth floor OEOB office, unaware of the evacuation. Daniels asked him to go to his office, and grab his in-box and briefcase, and meet him at a location near the annex. From there Daniels was able to get to his apartment in Northwest Washington. In mid-afternoon he returned to the White House, with his military driver able to navigate the fortified perimeter that surrounded the White House by several blocks. Daniels worked out of the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing, having asked White House Communications Agency staff, who were setting up equipment in the Oval Office for the president’s address that night, to install a phone on the table for him to work from.
THE SITUATION ROOM: THE DEAD LIST For other staff, evacuation was not an option, at least not at first. Ruth Elliott was only 25 years old when she came to the White House from California in April 2001. She had worked for Condi Rice at the Hoover Institution and was hired by the National Security Council’s Executive Secretariat
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