Tasked with filtering developing news for the speechwriters, Scott Stanzel ( far right) joins other communications staff at DaimlerChrysler. He would later spend the entire night manning phones in the White House press office. Also seen here are, left to right, Ken Lisaius, Wendy Nipper, and Jimmy Orr.
50
was the same height as the president, he describes being told by Sforza to sit behind the Resolute Desk so the crew could focus the TV lights.51 Standing 6 feet from the desk when President Bush delivered the remarks to the nation, Sforza remembers, “The president so focused, and the press camera guys in the room saying, ‘we are with you, sir.’ It was galvanizing.”
“WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING OUR JOBS” The rest of Hughes’s communications staff felt that same sense of purpose to communicate the government’s response despite the difficulties in technology that day. Jeanie Mamo, southern regional media affairs spokesperson, only reluctantly evacuated from the OEOB, feeling, “We are supposed to be doing our jobs.” Eventually, Mamo’s boss, Nicolle Devenish (now Wallace) yelled for her to “Get up and go!”52 Mamo also ended up at the DaimlerChrysler office with other communications staff, researching what happened during previous crises, trying to keep up with what was going on, and fielding calls from the press. Mamo returned to the White House that night and “felt compelled to work,” like so many of her colleagues. Eventually she “walked home and sat on [her] bed watching it all over again and crying uncontrollably.” Jimmy Orr, White House digital strategy
white house history quarterly
NATIONAL ARCHIV ES AND R EC OR DS ADMINISTRATION
Hughes instructed her staff to gather the press at the nearby FBI Headquarters on Tenth and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. One of Hughes’s deputies, Scott Sforza, was close by the White House at an outside appointment that morning when he received a call from Tucker Eskew that a plane hit the World Trade Center and “you need to come back here to the WH.” Sforza sprinted to the White House, first to the Roosevelt Room to begin preparing the room for a possible presidential address. He heard the vice president being moved down the hallway. Like others in the West Wing, he went to the Mess before being ordered by the Secret Service to get out. Sforza met up with his staff— Kris Purcell, Kyle Goss, and Tracey Schmitt—and walked to the Mayflower Hotel. Sforza got paged to go to DaimlerChrysler and then was told to go to the FBI Headquarters. He navigated a labyrinth of security to meet up with Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. He prepared the first press briefing there and then went back to the White House with them. There he helped to move Congressional Picnic tables off to the side of the South Lawn and began to set up the Oval Office for the president’s address that night. He was able to get his team Goss and Purcell in to come help set up at the FBI and the White House. Purcell was barely 22 years old and working his first real job. As he