NATIONAL ARCHIV ES AND R EC OR DS ADMINISTRATION
After swiftly evacuating the White House, Anita McBride (center) and Mary Matalin confer at the corner of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Matalin, counselor to the vice president, is soon summoned back into the White House to join the vice president and other advisers in the PEOC. After proceeding to Lafayette Square, McBride quickly arranges for other White House staff to regroup at the nearby DaimlerChrysler building, where they would spend the day at work.
“We have been ordered to evacuate. If you want to go, go now.” No one moved, and for the rest of the day the on-duty staff remained at their stations and worked to keep information flowing to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and key White House personnel. NSC’s senior director for defense, Frank Miller, collected everyone’s names and next of kin and gave them to the watch team’s communications technician, Scott Heyer, for transmission to the CIA Operations Center. The duty officers called it the “Dead List.”33
“EVERYTHING WE NEEDED TO THINK ABOUT” As is evident in these accounts, White House staff poured out the various exits of the complex and scattered in different directions. Some stayed together in groups, while others found themselves separated and alone. Many who evacuated the West Wing through the Northwest Gate congregated in Lafayette Park, north of the White House. At first, I headed west toward Seventeenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue with Mary Matalin, counselor to the vice president, who had been with Vice
President Cheney when he was taken to the bunker. She evacuated with the rest of us to the Mess and then out of the West Wing. Matalin’s cell phone soon rang with a call from the PEOC: the vice president wanted her to come back.34 I headed east to Lafayette Park and joined the staff standing there. My instinct was to find a safer place to congregate, particularly when I saw one of the members of the White House senior staff, Clay Johnson, standing next to me. Johnson was a close friend of the president, had served in the Texas Governor’s Office, and was now assistant to the president for presidential personnel. He had seen coverage of the first plane on the TV in the second floor West Wing outer office space that Presidential Personnel shared with the Legislative Affairs Office. He had been down the hall in a regularly scheduled 9:00 a.m. meeting with Deputy Counsel Tim Flanigan when Flanigan’s assistant Allison Riepenhoff (now Ratajczak) walked in and handed him a note. Johnson remembers Flanigan’s out-loud response, “Another one?” and moments later Riepenhoff interrupted again to announce, “They told us to go to the Mess.” Johnson recalls how
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