to assist with planning presidential meetings and visits with foreign leaders. She was at her desk in the Situation Room, the nerve center of presidential crisis management, when the second plane hit, and she remembers the somber mood in the room along with the flurry of activity when Rice was later evacuated to the bunker. According to Mary Haines, deputy executive secretary of the NSC, Rice told the Sit Room staff that the president wanted an NSC meeting, thinking at the time that he was returning directly to Washington. It was Elliott’s job to set up the meeting, and she had already started making the calls to her agency counterparts when the Secret Service entered the room and ordered everyone to the Mess. Elliott grabbed her purse and her notebook with the list of all NSC members and their office contacts and phone numbers. In a dramatic moment that Elliott tearfully remembers, Haines, “treating me like a mother,” said, “Ruth, give me your book. You run. Get out of here. I have lived twice as long as you have. I will organize the meeting.” Elliott exited through the Southwest Gate. She did not know her way around Washington and did not know many people outside her immediate
40
office. She was alone when she evacuated. Then she saw some familiar faces from the NSC lined up on F Street NW, across from the OEOB, and joined them. She kept thinking about how much work there would be to do. She tried to reach her parents in California but could not get through. It took her two hours to get home to her Crystal City, Virginia, apartment. She could smell the fire at the Pentagon and see the embers burning. The navy pantsuit and lavender top she wore that day had been one of her favorite outfits, “but after that day I never wore it again.” Recognizing the president was not coming back right away and the principals were in the bunker and the Sit Room staff were keeping the information flow going, Mary Haines eventually evacuated the White House through the Northwest Gate. She was struck by the sight of Secret Service agents on the North Lawn with weapons drawn protecting the White House. “They were ready for anything,” she recalls. Back in the Situation Room, Elliott’s and Haines’s colleague, senior duty officer Rob Hargis, told the men and women still at their duty stations,
white house history quarterly
White House staffers who evacuated to the north through Lafayette Park gather at the corner of H Street and Jackson Place. They are joined by CNN’s White House correspondent John King ( facing camera) and other members of the press as well workers evacuating neighborhood offices and tourists. While some look to the sky, others struggle to get a signal on their cell phones.