Issue 62 - Remembering September 11, 2001

WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

September 11, 2001 The Journal of T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I A T I O N Number 6 2

8:46 AM HIJACKED AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 11 CRASHES INTO THE NORTH TOWER OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK CITY • 9:03 AM HIJACKED UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 175 CRASHES

September 11, 2001 Number 62

The American flag flies at half staff above the North Portico of the White House as President George W. Bush addresses the nation from the Oval Office on the evening of September 11, 2001.

INTO THE SOUTH TOWER OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER • 9:05 AM WHILE VISITING A SECOND-GRADE CLASSROOM IN SARASOTA, PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH IS ALERTED THAT “AMERICA IS UNDER ATTACK” • 9:31 AM THE PRESIDENT ASSURES THE AMERICAN PEOPLE “TERRORISM AGAINST OUR NATION WILL NOT STAND” • 9:37 AM HIJACKED AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 77 CRASHES INTO THE PENTAGON • 9:45 AM THE WHITE HOUSE IS EVACUATED • 9:54 AM PRESIDENT BUSH DEPARTS FLORIDA ON AIR FORCE ONE • 9:59 AM THE WORLD TRADE CENTER SOUTH TOWER COLLAPSES • 10:03 AM HIJACKED UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 93 CRASHES INTO FARMLAND NEAR SHANKSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA • 10:28 AM THE WORLD TRADE CENTER NORTH TOWER COLLAPSES • 1:30 PM FROM BARKSDALE AIR FORCE BASE, SHREVEPORT, LOUISIANA, PRESIDENT BUSH ASSURES THE NATION “FREEDOM WILL BE DEFENDED” • 1:36 PM PRESIDENT BUSH IS EVACUATED WEST ON AIR FORCE ONE • 6:55 PM PRESIDENT BUSH RETURNS TO THE WHITE HOUSE • 8:30 PM PRESIDENT BUSH ADDRESSES THE NATION FROM THE OVAL OFFICE IN THE WHITE HOUSE “NONE OF US WILL EVER FORGET THIS DAY, YET WE GO FORWARD TO DEFEND FREEDOM AND ALL THAT IS GOOD AND JUST IN OUR WORLD” •

Please note that the following is a digitized version of a selected article from White House History Quarterly, Issue 62, originally released in print form in 2021. Single print copies of the full issue can be purchased online at Shop.WhiteHouseHistory.org No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

September 11, 2001 The Journal of THE WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION, SUMMER 2021, Number 62

CONTRIBUTORS

the white house historical association Board of Directors

chairman Frederick J. Ryan, Jr.

vice chairman and treasurer John F. W. Rogers

secretary James I. McDaniel

president Stewart D. McLaurin John T. Behrendt, Michael Beschloss, Teresa Carlson, Jean Case, Janet A. Howard, Knight Kiplinger, Martha Joynt Kumar, Anita McBride, Robert M. McGee, Ann Stock, Ben C. Sutton Jr., Tina Tchen, Gregory W. Wendt

ex officio Lonnie G. Bunch III, Kaywin Feldman, David S. Ferriero, Carla Hayden, Katherine Malone-France

liaison Shawn Benge, Deputy Director, Operations, Exercising the Delegated Authority of the Director, National Park Service

directors emeriti John H. Dalton, Nancy M. Folger, Elise K. Kirk, Harry G. Robinson III, Gail Berry West

white house history quarterly founding editor William Seale (1939–2019)

editor

Marcia Mallet Anderson

editorial and production manager Elyse Werling

editorial and production director Lauren McGwin

senior editorial & production manager Kristen Hunter Mason

editorial and production manager Elyse Werling

ann compton served as an ABC News White House Correspondent for more than forty years, from 1974 to 2014. On September 11, 2001, Compton covered President George W. Bush as he led the nation aboard Air Force One. donna hayashi smith is the associate curator of collections and registrar with the Office of the Curator, the White House. She is a regular contributor to White House History Quarterly. anita m c bride directs the Legacies of America’s First Ladies Initiative at the American University where she serves as executive-in-residence in the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies in the School of Public Affairs.

Her White House experience spans three decades and four administrations and includes service as chief of staff to First Lady Laura Bush. matthew wendel is the author of the Recipes from the President’s Ranch: Food People Like to Eat. While serving as personal chef and personal assistant to President George W. Bush, he cooked for the first family and world leaders at Camp David and Prairie Chapel Ranch.

editorial coordinator Rebecca Durgin

consulting editor Ann Hofstra Grogg

consulting design Pentagram

editorial advisory Bill Barker Matthew Costello Mac Keith Griswold Scott Harris Joel Kemelhor Jessie Kratz Rebecca Roberts Lydia Barker Tederick Bruce M. White

the editor wishes to thank The Office of the Curator, The White House The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum

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CONTENTS

GETTY IMAGES

President and Mrs. George W. Bush lead the White House staff in a moment of silence on the South Lawn of the White House, September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed more than 3,000 people in the United States. The following pages feature memories of the events of September 11, 2001, from many of those staff members pictured here.

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FOREWORD The “American Resolve” Behind the Scenes

MARC IA M ALLET AND ERS O N

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COVERING THE PRESIDENT FROM THE LAST PLANE IN FLIGHT September 11, 2001: Ann Compton Recounts Her Experience Witnessing History Unfold Aboard Air Force One ANN C OMP TON

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THE EXECUTIVE RESIDENCE STAFF REMEMBER THE WHITE HOUSE ON A TRAGIC DAY IN HISTORY: September 11, 2001

DONNA HAYAS HI S M I T H

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PRESIDENTAL SITE FEATURE The President’s Retreat at Camp David M AT T HEW W E NDE L

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WHATEVER IT TAKES TO GET BACK TO WORK ON BEHALF OF THE PRESIDENT: The Executive Office of the President Evacuates But Carries on: Memories of September 11, 2001

REFLECTIONS History’s Perspective s t ewart d. mclaur i n

ANITA M C BRID E

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FOREWORD The “American Resolve” Behind the Scenes On the morning of September 12, 2001, hundreds of men and women showed their badges at the White House gates as they reported to work. They were following their daily routine, just as they had the previous morning under an historically intense blue sky.

Flowing through the gates were presidential aides and appointees, the first lady’s staff, White House correspondents, photographers, chefs, interns, curators, ushers, butlers, florists, engineers, housekeepers, groundskeepers, calligraphers, and others. In the intervening twenty-four hours many had watched live coverage of the terrorist attacks in New York on televisions throughout the White House complex, many had heard and even felt the impact when a hijacked passenger plane slammed into the Pentagon, and all had been ordered to run if they “wanted to live.” They had seen the smoke fill the air above Washington and felt relief when military jets arrived to protect the White House—which was not only their workplace, but likely an imminent target. They had navigated evacuating crowds of Washingtonians and tourists, worried about their loved ones when cell phones failed, and cemented bonds with colleagues, all the while keeping their obligation to support the president first and foremost in their minds.

White House History Quarterly chose the twentieth anniversary of September 11, 2001, to look back, going behind the scenes at the White House and on Air Force One, on that singular day in the history of the President’s House, when the staff was suddenly confronted with the possibility that the house, along with their lives, could be lost within minutes. The Quarterly is honored to share their many unknown stories, publishing the accounts for the first time in this issue. Beginning in 2002, Donna Hayashi Smith, associate curator of collections and registrar in the Office of the Curator, compiled the memories of her colleagues who serve on the Executive Residence staff. Anita McBride, then a special assistant to the president, shares the stories of the Executive Office of the President staff, who regrouped following the evacuation and continued to carry out their duties. We are also privileged to present the story of September 11, 2001, through the unique experience of White House correspondent Ann Compton who documented the president’s journey as he led the nation not from the ground, but from the White House in the sky, Air Force One. In his televised address to the nation delivered at 8:30 p.m. President Bush announced that government offices in Washington would reopen for all workers on September 12. He called for prayers for the families of the thousands whose “lives were suddenly ended by evil.

And he continued, “These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.” That American resolve is defined in the experiences witnessed and documented by Ann Compton, Anita McBride, Donna Hayashi Smith, and Matthew Wendel. Their accounts underscore the courage and dedication to service of those who reentered the gates and returned to service at the White House.

marcia mallet anderson editor, WHITE HOUSE HISTORY QUARTERLY

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Morning routines are underway on the grounds as White House on a sunny summer day in 2019.

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Covering the President From the Last Plane in Flight SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 Ann Compton Recounts Her Experience Witnessing History Unfold Aboard Air Force One

LEFT: ABC NEWS / ABOVE: GETTY IMAGES

an n co m pt o n

d o o msday p la n ni ng f o r t h e u. s. g o v er nm ent—the protection of the president, the civilian chain of command, the use of force by the military—leaves nothing to chance. Real crises can play havoc with those plans. One did on September 11, 2001. I was there. By that date I had covered six presidents over an arc of twenty-five years for ABC News, and by chance that sunny Tuesday was my turn as press pool correspondent to cover the president’s flight back to Washington, D.C.

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ALL IMAGES: ABC NEWS

Ann Compton covered the White House for ABC News from 1974 to 2014. Regularly reporting from the White House lawn, she also witnessed history on assignments that took her around the world. Compton is seen on the previous spread in the 1980s and (clockwise from top) covering the Democratic National Convention in July 1976; reporting from the network television camera positions on the North Lawn of the White House, January 20, 2013; and at work at ABC in New York in 1973.

ALL IMAGES: COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Reporting from Air Force One was routine for veteran journalist Ann Compton. Seen here in the early 1990s aboard the aircraft interviewing Vice President Dan Quayle (top) and President George H. W. Bush (bottom), Compton had no expectation that her assignment to travel from Sarasota back to Washington, D.C., with President George W. Bush on September 11, 2001, would be anything out of the ordinary.

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The last stop on the itinerary before returning home to Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, was a place of such innocence. At the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, President George W. Bush was promoting his education agenda, perched on a plastic classroom chair listening to second graders run through their vocabulary drills. Outside the classroom, chaos. The senior staff waiting in the next room had alerted the president of a possible small plane crash in New York City. Then came the shock.

9:07 A.M. ET AMERICA IS UNDER ATTACK America was watching in horror as live television coverage showed both World Trade Center towers in flames. White

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House Chief of Staff Andrew Card slipped into the classroom, leaned down, and whispered in the president’s right ear. I watched, stunned, at the back of the classroom.

I wrote down in my reporter’s notebook: “9:07 a.m. Andy whispers.” No one interrupts a president, not even in front of second graders. The look on the president’s face was striking, grave.

It was months later that Andy Card revealed he chose a chilling economy of words that could be delivered in one breath: “A second plane has hit the second tower. America is under attack.”

That horrifying second strike was being replayed over and over again on the screen of a TV wheeled into the staff holding room where the president grabbed a secure White House phone to reach Washington. That would not prove easy. At the other end, in the West

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above and opposite

President George W. Bush participates in a reading program at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, September 11, 2001 (above). Moments after the photograph was taken, the president’s expression turns grave as Chief of Staff Andrew Card interrupts the program to whisper “America is under attack” in the president’s ear (opposite top). With the intention of returning directly to Washington, D.C., President Bush quickly concludes his visit to Sarasota with a oneminute address from the school cafeteria (opposite bottom).

NATIONA L A RC HIVES AND RECORD S A DMINISTRATION

8:50 A.M. ET A PLACE OF INNOCENCE

T O P : A P I M A G E S / B O T T O M : N AT I O N A L A R C H I V E S A N D R E C O R D S A D M I N I S T R AT I O N

Wing, Vice President Richard Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were being rushed into the subterranean Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) that had existed for more than a half century but had never, ever been used in an emergency. Information was fragmentary and confounding.

How a president reacts to a crisis is critically important. In the predigital age, presidents had secure military communications but only one way to reach the mass American public—through us, the mainstream media. Our press travel pool of a dozen reporters and photographers flooded out of that classroom door into the school parking lot, turning on our old-style cellphones to reach our home offices. What I heard from the ABC News desk editors in New York was frantic disbelief.

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer hurried over to tell me to keep the network camera right there. The president is going to make a statement.

“No he’s not,” I blurted out. “This portable camera is not plugged in to anything. He has to speak as planned in the school cafeteria where our live cameras are already up.” The staff was reluctant, not wanting to frighten children gathered to hear an education speech, but speed was crucial. The Secret Service was already scrambling to get the president out of there to safety. He headed into the crowded room. He spoke for a little more than one minute.

9:31 A.M. ET A MOMENT OF SILENCE “This is a difficult moment for America. Unfortunately, we’ll be going back to Washington after my remarks. . . .

Terrorism against our nation will not stand. And now if you would join me for a moment of silence.”

But returning to Washington would take nine and one-half dramatic hours more.

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O P P O S I T E : G E T T Y I M A G E S / A B O V E : N A T I O N A L A R C H I V E S A N D R E C O R D S A D M I N I S T R AT I O N

above and opposite

As events unfolded on the morning of September 11, 2001, Air Force One was quickly readied and boarded for the return trip from Sarasota to Washington, D.C. The president was rushed onboard at the front of the plane (above), while Ann Compton and her colleagues in the press pool were hurried up the rear stairs as their bags and equipment were thoroughly searched (opposite).

9:54 A.M. ET MOVE IT, MOVE IT!

Air Force One and its military crew had been primed and ready on the tarmac, engines already roaring by the time the presidential motorcade traveling at high speed completed the 3.5 mile trip from the school. With the news of the terrorist attack, security was tighter than ever. The president was whisked onboard at the front of the plane. The rest of us were herded toward the rear stairs with agents shouting “Move it, move it!” which is clearly a Secret Service code meaning “Move it!” even as bomb squad personnel searched all our bags and equipment lest any danger had been planted in our gear. Even the CIA officer’s classified briefcase was inspected. When there is a threat anywhere, the Secret Service considers it might be diversionary action and the president might be the real target.

Once onboard, the takeoff was unusually fast. What we did not know was that the pilot Col. Mark Tillman had just been warned there might be white house history quarterly

some kind of missile lurking at the end of the runway. He abruptly turned the aircraft around and took off in the opposite direction. “The pilot stood that thing on its tail—nose up, tail down,” as presidential adviser Karl Rove remembered. The missile turned out to be one of many false alarms that day.

We flew for hours, far longer than the quick flight it ought to be to Washington. In his forward cabin the president argued forcefully for a quick return, but he faced a solid wall of opposition from his chief of staff, the pilot, his security detail, and his own officials in Washington. In the air we learned why: the carnage on the ground had now reached home. As we left Florida, a jetliner in Washington with a fuel tank full for a cross-country flight to California, took off, turned, and slammed deliberately into the outer wall of the Pentagon.

This was no longer a terrorist attack on the financial heart of New York. It was aimed squarely at the U.S. government. There was no way the president was going to be flown in a huge military jet into a capital city under attack. Even more frightening, the skies were still filled with civilian aircraft. Could other planes be hijacked threats as well?

Those first hours were a nightmare that sharpened the frustration for the president. Air Force One is a flying White House. It has awesome features: secure phone lines, a hospital cabin, wiring shielded against attack, televisions embedded into the bulkhead walls throughout the aircraft. This was, however, before the age of digital communications and satellite TV. The president was flying blind. He was only able to watch hazy images on the TV screens because the signal was so faint from local TV stations below. Adding to his frustration were the high-altitude weakness of his secure phone lines and the jammed circuits on the ground.

Poor communication might even have threatened to keep the president out of the decision-making loop.

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10:00 A.M. ET A FORMIDABLE DECISION

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Nor did Morell know that at that very hour, the agency had the hijacked planes’ manifests. He later wrote, “I had no way of knowing analysts at the CIA Headquarters had already tied AlQaida to the attacks. . . . Three passengers [on American 77] had known, and definite, links to Al-Qaida.”

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The president at work on Air Force One, September 11, 2001. Outfitted with an office, conference room, meeting space, secure phone lines, and televisions embedded into the bulkhead walls, Air Force One served its intended purpose, functioning as a flying White House as the crisis unfolded. Nevertheless, President Bush was frustrated when faint signals from TV stations below limited his ability to monitor breaking news while the highaltitude flight and jammed circuits on the ground weakened his secure phone lines.

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In the underground White House PEOC, a formidable decision was needed: permission for military fighter jets to shoot down any of the suspicious civilian aircraft still considered potential threats. The record is not clear. Did Vice President Cheney get President Bush’s concurrence before or after giving that order? At 10:20 a.m. on Air Force One the president informed his press secretary that he had authorized the unthinkable: the shoot-down of a commercial jet full of innocent civilians—if necessary. The orders reached military pilots about 10:31 a.m.

It didn’t matter. The immediate target of their concern was hijacked Flight 93, with Todd Beamer and other passengers yelling “Let’s roll!” as they stormed the cockpit. The jetliner had already nose-dived into the soil of Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m. The plane would have reached skies over Washington in as little as ten more minutes. It was not clear what the terrorists’ target was to be. The Capitol? The White House? We may never know.

The president’s second frustration was agonizing. WHO could have done this? It was the question he put twice that day on Air Force One to Michael Morell, the senior CIA official who briefed the president, in person, six days a week, on what was called the PDB. One month earlier in that classified “Presidential Daily Brief ” was a red flag, one of many that Osama bin Laden was constantly looking to attack on U.S. soil. His shadowy network Al-Qaida may not have been a household word before 2001, but U.S. intelligence had been tracking him intensively for years.

On the plane, Mike Morell at first told President Bush that, without seeing new intelligence from headquarters, this was only his personal opinion: “I told him I had no doubt that the trail would lead to the doorstep of bin Laden and Al-Qaida.”

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ALL IMAGES : NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORD S ADMINISTRATION

opposite and below

10:55 A.M. ET JET FIGHTERS ARRIVE

For its own safety, Air Force One had been circling somewhere along the Gulf Coast. Watching the weak TV reception, we were all stunned at the sight of the towers collapsing, horrified at the innocent loss of life in New York and Washington. In the skies, I never felt we and the president were in danger, but Col. Tillman at the controls took nothing for granted. We learned later there might have been a threatening call to the White House switchboard warning, “Angel is next.” Angel is the code name for Air Force One. As we flew, F-16 fighter jets appeared off each wing. At first Col. Tillman feared those jet fighters might actually be that “Angel” attack. He later told author Garrett Graff, who published the sweeping oral history The Only Plane in the Sky, that he heard on his radio, “Air Force One, this is Cowry 4-5.” It was the Texas Air National Guard. The Cavalry!

Tillman recounted, “You could hear the Texas twang in their voice. They explain to us they’re a flight of two F-16s, and they are our cover. And that was the coolest thing ever in my life.”

O P P O S I T E A N D R I G H T : N AT I O N A L A R C H I V E S A N D R E C O R D S A D M I N I S T R AT I O N

Surrounded by his aides as he looks out the windows of Air Force One (below), President Bush watches as F-16 fighters arrive to escort his flight (opposite).

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Not as cool as it was for those two young pilots. I interviewed one a year later. His code name was Romeo, and he was scrambled from the same Air National Guard unit that George W. Bush had been assigned to in his youth.

Romeo was simply told to fly to a certain point and rendezvous with the plane he was to protect. It was not until his F-16 got close enough that Romeo saw that he was riding shotgun for Air Force One. I scribbled into my reporter’s notebook at 10:55 a.m. ET that the pilot was taking Air Force One up to a much higher altitude, 45,000 feet; normal flying altitude is about 30,000 to 38,000 feet.

At 11:31 a.m. ET Press Secretary Ari Fleischer came to the press cabin.

His grave statement to the travel pool made my heart stop: “The president is being evacuated.” He said that is off-therecord, meaning it could not be shared with the public. I protested that such a profound decision is much too important to keep secret. For history! But then I looked out the windows, where jet fighters held their positions just off each wingtip. I realized I had no way to share that dramatic development with the world, even if I wanted to.

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In the rear galley of the plane, one of the familiar Air Force stewards told me that the aircraft, which is usually so well stocked, had only one chicken sandwich on board for each passenger and enough fuel to get back to Washington. Midair refueling is considered too dangerous when the president is onboard. Air Force One needed a place to land.

Press secretary Ari Fleischer informed us we would be allowed to

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file our first pool report on the ground but must turn off our own cellphones and not identify the location as Barksdale Air Force Base so the president’s precise location would remain secret.

That would not go as planned. It’s hard to hide a jumbo jet as distinctive as Air Force One. Base officers on the ground told us all of Shreveport, Louisiana, saw the plane fly in, and local camera crews were already swarming the base gates.

President Bush was driven from the aircraft over to a headquarters building in a very unpresidential-looking dark blue

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As she continues to document the day’s events in her traditional style “Reporter’s Note Book” (opposite), Ann Compton (above, standing at center) joins the reporters in the travel pool as President Bush delivers a statement from Barksdale Air Force Base. After several hours out of view, the president speaks to reassure the public, saying “Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward.

And freedom will be defended. . . . The resolve of our great nation is being tested, but make no mistake. We will show the world that we will pass this test.”

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11:55 A.M ET “FREEDOM WILL BE DEFENDED”

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Dodge Caravan. It was followed by an armored Humvee with a gun turret.

The president of the United States had now been out of public view for hours. He decided to make a statement assuring the nation, and the world, that the U.S. government had not been crippled by the attacks. The military conference room where our travel pool was waiting was so dark we asked the base personnel to bring in some desk lamps from nearby offices. The White House staff found a podium to make the scene look more official.

At 12:36 p.m. President Bush spoke for several minutes, calm, but tense: “Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward and freedom will be defended.”

He might have thought the nation heard him but, once again, the television travel crew was not hooked up to any outside lines. The videotape had to be hand carried out to the local media, where it would in turn try to be uplinked to the networks in New York. It was broadcast at 1:00 p.m.

When a president is under threat the Secret Service tries to keep the “secure package” of staff and vehicles as small as possible. I feared the 12-person press pool would be kicked off the plane since it was clear that returning to Washington was not an option. I urged the White House staff to remember how important it is for Americans to be confident they know their president is all right and in charge.

Many staff, guest passengers including two congressmen, and most of the reporters were told they would be remaining on the ground at Barksdale. Andy Card did allow me as the senior broadcaster and the senior print reporter Sonya Ross of the Associated Press to reboard Air Force One, along with the CBS camera team George Christian and Erick Washington, and New York Times veteran photographer Doug Mills. It was up to the five of us to document the important hours to come. white house history quarterly

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1:36 P.M. ET EVACUATED WEST The interior of the plane seemed cold and empty as we fastened our seatbelts. Beneath each television monitor embedded in the bulkhead wall there are three digital clocks. In green LED displays the first is labeled WASHINGTON. The second is LOCAL. The third time says DESTINATION. As Air Force One began to roll, the first two clocks read 1:36 p.m. The DESTINATION numerals changed in a snap to 12:36

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p.m. Central time. It was our only official confirmation that the president was being flown west, away from Washington. The president was being evacuated.

2:51 P.M. ET “I’M COMING HOME” Leadership in the heat of a crisis is a defining moment for a president.

George W. Bush had been in office less than eight months, but he knew it was crucial to be visible and direct with the American people. “I knew I needed to give an address to the nation that night,” he told the History Channel years later, “and I damn sure wasn’t gonna give it from a bunker in Omaha, Nebraska.”

But that’s exactly where the president was taken roughly six hours after the first attacks. I was allowed to phone in a pool report, on the record, that he would convene a National Security Council meeting but not reveal the location. Once again, local TV channels were white house history quarterly

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President Bush exits Air Force One at Offutt Air Force Base near Bellevue, Nebraska (above), the headquarters of the Strategic Command, where he will spend an hour in video conference with the Presidential Emergency Operations Center at the White House (opposite).

NATIONAL ARCHIV ES AND R EC OR DS ADMINISTRATION

I was allowed one more phone call to let the national media back home know that Air Force One was going to take to the skies again. The fastest way to share that in a pool report was to call in to ABC’s live coverage, where anchor Peter Jennings asked the obvious: “Where are you going, Annie?” My response was honest, but not reassuring. “Peter, I have no idea.”

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already there. As we touched down, we watched ourselves landing live on the plane’s TV screens tuned to an Omaha station.

Offutt Air Force Base is headquarters of the Strategic Command, and its underground bunker is bombproof.

More important, it is equipped with live secure video conferencing communications whereby the president could at last see and hear directly from the White House PEOC and the military. I called in again on my Motorola clamshell flip phone to ABC’s anchor Peter Jennings in New York. Live on the air I surprised even myself when describing the president being led not toward but away from the big buildings. He ducked into a tiny cinderblock shack followed by many others. “He’s going down the rabbit hole.” It was the backstairs fire escape and the fastest way down to the bunker.

Our small press pool remained outside.

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This was finally the moment President Bush could hear and see those back in Washington wrestling with the chaos.

CIA Director George Tenet answered the burning question: his analysts had searched the passenger manifests of the hijacked airliners. Three of the passengers on the first plane “had known, and definite, links to Al-Qaida.” Indeed, just as CIA briefer Mike Morell feared, blame could be placed at the doorstep of Osama bin Laden.

By now it now appeared that the skies over America had been cleared and the attacks were over. The president recalls he declared during the hour-long video conference: “‘I’m coming home.’ And they said, ‘We recommend you not do so.’

And I said, ‘Fine, I’m coming.’” As we scrambled back on board Air Force One for the last leg of the journey, I phoned in the pool report news of his return, on the record. The landing location was off the record.

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5:07 P.M. ET THE LAST LEG During the flight we spotted President Bush coming into the Secret Service cabin in the rear of the plane, speaking quietly to the agents, and then he stopped at the door of our press cabin. He waved away our reporters’ notebooks. He would save his public words for the Oval Office address to the nation coming up in three hours, but he did have a note of resolve in his voice when he warned the United States would “get those thugs.”

We crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains as the sunlight faded on a day that had been so mild and clear all across the United States. The aircraft made a slow, full circle— probably not too far south of the spot where the fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania—before we descended to the land at Andrews Air Force Base. Marine One was on the tarmac as usual, ready to whisk the president fast to the White House South Lawn. For the only time in memory, there was a second helicopter to take our small press travel pool down along the same river route to land in a golden sunset at 7:00 p.m. on the lawn of the Washington Monument, just outside the White House gates.

We saw the same scene President Bush saw as he flew across the deserted capital. It was his first real glimpse of the shock and reality of that day—the thick black smoke rising from the ruins of the Pentagon’s gaping wound. America under attack.

One month later, the United States bombed terrorists’ training camps in Afghanistan.

One year later, Air Force One had been equipped with secure video satellite communications.

One decade later, Osama bin Laden was killed when U.S. Special Operations stormed his secret location in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Blanton, Thomas S. “The President’s Daily Brief,” updated April 12, 2004, including PDB for August 6, 2001, “Bid Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” National Security Archive, nsarchive2.gwu/edu.

Graff, Garrett M. The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (New York: First Avid Reader Press), 2019.

Morell, Michael J. “The Turn to War: 11 September 2001, With the President,” Studies in Intelligence 50, no. 3 (September 2006): 23–34, document C01407035, approved for release September 10, 2014.

Onion, Amanda. “September 11: Six Ways Uncertainty Reigned Aboard Air Force One,” posted September 10, 2019, updated September 12, 2019, History.com.

Air Force One arrives at Andrews Air Force Base, finally bringing President Bush home and concluding a long and historic flight, September 11, 2001.

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Whatever It Takes TO GET BACK TO WORK On Behalf of the President The Executive Office of the President Evacuates But Carries On: Memories of September 11, 2001

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A N I TA B . M CB R I D E

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the morning of september 11 at the White House started relatively calmly. As usual, many West Wing and senior staff were at their desks well before 7:00 a.m. The senior staff meeting, led by Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, took place as regularly scheduled at 7:30 a.m. The highlight of the meeting was a surprise visit by former President George H. W. Bush (known to all in the building as “41”), who had spent the night at the White House and was leaving with former First Lady Barbara Bush for a morning flight. On the South Lawn, 150 picnic tables were set up for that evening’s planned Congressional Picnic. White House Social Secretary Cathy Fenton and her staff and the Residence staff were busy with preparations for the event. Fenton was grateful for the “silver lining of the beautiful weather we had for nearly two straight weeks including for the first State Dinner held the week before.”

But just as the White House morning routines were beginning, the Secret Service ordered an evacuation of the entire Executive Office of the President (EOP) complex. That meant the approximately 1,800 staff working in the East and West Wings of the White House, the Old Executive Office Building (OEOB, now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building), the New Executive Office Building, and the Winder Building a block away had to leave as quickly as possible. Women were advised to kick off their heels and run for their lives. The shocking experience had little precedent in White House history. While there had been threats to the White House during the Civil War, World War II, and

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the Cold War, none had required its occupants to flee on a moment’s notice. The closest parallel was likely the British invasion of Washington in 1814, which forced Dolley Madison—along with the servants—from the White House shortly before it was set ablaze. President James Madison was already out of the city, having been on the field of battle at Bladensburg, Maryland, that afternoon, when British troops overran the American defense.1 When the editor of White House History Quarterly decided to devote an issue to the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, she knew that I had been on the EOP staff at the time and she asked that I capture the memories of the staff from across the EOP complex to add to the well-documented accounts of the president and other senior officials. Prefaced by an account of the activities of President and Mrs. George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on the morning of 9/11, the following stories were gathered through interviews and published reports and provide a record of what staff from the West Wing, East Wing, and Old Executive Office Building experienced on September 11, 2001. The memories come from a wide range of staffers, from aides assisting the vice president and the National Security Council (NSC) with the weightiest of responsibilities to the class of young fall interns from around the country who had just started their first full day at the White House. Although each story is unique, an unmistakable theme runs through them all: the people entrusted with the privilege of service at the White House were determined to fulfill their duties and to do whatever it took to get back to work on behalf of the president and the country.

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Tables await the start of the annual Congressional Picnic on the South Grounds of the White House in 2010, as they did on the morning of September 11, 2001. opposite

Aerial view of the White House and surrounding neighborhood.

On September 11, 2001, staff were ordered to evacuate the White House Residence (A), West Wing (B), East Wing (C), Old Executive Office Building (D), Winder Building (E), and New Executive Office Building (F). After crossing Lafayette Park (G) and surrounding streets, many regrouped to resume their work for the day at the DaimlerChrysler building (H).

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SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 THE WHITE HOUSE

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G F

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o n t u e s d ay, s e p t e m b e r 1 1 , 2 0 01 , President George W. Bush was in Sarasota, Florida, for an event aimed at promoting the No Child Left Behind legislation pending before Congress. He had had dinner the night before with his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, and had gotten up well before the sun for an early morning run—moments of relative calm amid the demands of the presidency. Before departing his hotel for the education event, the president received his daily intelligence briefing from Mike Morell, a Central Intelligence Agency analyst.2 The staff traveling with the president were in the motorcade awaiting the departure to the nearby Emma E. Booker Elementary School.

They left the hotel at 8:39 a.m.3 During the short drive to the school, at 8:46 a.m., a plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.4 Karl Rove, senior adviser to the president who was in one of the motorcade cars, received a call within minutes from his assistant, Susan Ralston. She reported the incident and that “it wasn’t clear whether it was a commercial or private plane.” At 8:54 a.m., when the motorcade arrived at the school, Rove walked over to the president and “passed on the information” as the president and Secretary of Education Rod Paige

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were beginning to shake hands with the staff and teachers outside the school.5 The president went to a holding room to take a call from National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who was at the White House. In his book Decision Points, Bush recounts that when he first heard about the plane he “envisioned a little propeller plane horribly lost.” But then Rice told him that “the plane that had just struck the Trade Center tower was not a light aircraft. It was a commercial jetliner.”6 Still thinking the crash was a tragic accident, the president entered Classroom 301 at 9:00 a.m. for the reading demonstration. At 9:03 a.m. a second plane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center.7 Deborah Loewer, the National Security Council’s director of the White House Situation Room, who was traveling with the president, was outside the classroom and “entered stage left, went to Chief of Staff Andy Card and whispered” the news in his ear.8 Card recounts that he “stood at the classroom door and performed a test chiefs of staff have to perform all the time, and it’s a usually tough test: Does the president need to know? This was an easy one to pass: Yes.”9 Card walked into the classroom, leaned over, and delivered a message that no president would want to hear: “A second plane has hit the second

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The morning of September 11, 2001, begins peacefully for President George W. Bush (above left) as he turns to answer a reporter’s question following a morning run in Sarasota.

At 9:00 a.m., the president enters Classroom 301 at Emma E. Booker Elementary School (above right) moments before he learns from his chief of staff Andrew Card (opposite top) that America is under attack.

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PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH SARASOTA, FLORIDA

tower. America is under attack.”10 The message set in motion a harrowing day for President Bush and the staff traveling with him. The president returned to the holding room to speak with Vice President Dick Cheney, New York Governor George Pataki, and Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Robert Mueller, before going to the media center set up in the school cafeteria to make a press statement. At 9:32 a.m. the president’s motorcade left Booker Elementary School.11 During the short ride to Air Force One, a third passenger jet crashed into the Pentagon. Although the president wanted to return immediately to the White House, the Secret Service strongly objected in light of the potential threats. The president spent the next nine and a half hours managing the emergency response from Air Force One (which was ultimately protected by an escort of fighter jets) and secure locations at Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, Louisiana, and the U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base near Bellevue, Nebraska. He returned to the White House at approximately 6:55 p.m., where he addressed a shocked and grieving nation on national television at 8:30 p.m.12

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Surrounded by his senior staff in the Booker Elementary School holding room, President George W. Bush begins a round of telephone calls to Vice President Dick Cheney, New York Governor George Pataki, and FBI Director Robert Mueller. Seen here, left to right, are Karl Rove, Andrew Card, Ari Fleischer, the president, and Dan Bartlett.

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Visiting Capitol Hill on the morning of September 11, 2001, to brief the Senate Committee on Education, First Lady Laura Bush, seen between Senator Judd Gregg and her host Senator Edward Kennedy (right top) offers words of support and comfort to victims of the terrorist attacks in New York City and to their families and the first responders.

After hearing of the attack on the Pentagon and watching news of the unfolding events on a television in Senator Kennedy’s Office ( beside Andi Ball, bottom), Mrs. Bush is escorted out of the Russell Senate Office Building by the Secret Service and evacuated to an undisclosed location (opposite).

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FIRST LADY LAURA BUSH THE U.S. CAPITOL As the workday began for First Lady Laura Bush, Melanie Jackson, the first lady’s deputy director of scheduling and advance, was waiting in the Diplomatic Reception Room on the Ground Floor of the White House to see Mrs. Bush off for her short ride to the U.S. Capitol. The first lady was going to brief the Senate Committee on Education about the Early Childhood Cognitive Development Summit she had held earlier in the summer. Going with her were, among others, her chief of staff, Andi Ball, White House Domestic Policy Adviser Margaret Spellings, Press Secretary Noelia Rodriguez, and Personal Aide Sarah Moss (now Garrison).

At approximately 8:55 a.m. White House Chief Usher Gary Walters was ready to escort the first lady to her limousine at the South Portico.13 Before getting in her car, Mrs. Bush was informed by her Secret Service agent, Ron Sprinkle, that a plane had just crashed into a tower at the World Trade Center.14 By the time she arrived at the Capitol, the second plane had hit. Mrs. Bush was met at the Capitol

by her Senate host, Committee Chair Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Mass.), and they went to a private room in his office.15 The hearing was postponed, but Mrs. Bush prepared and delivered a statement for the press, accompanied by Kennedy and Ranking Chair Judd Gregg (R.-N.H.). Waiting to speak publicly until the president spoke first at 9:30 a.m., she directed her comments to the people of New York.

On the walk back to Senator Kennedy’s office she learned of the attack on the Pentagon from her lead advance staff, John Meyers,16 and she watched the horrific images from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with Andi Ball on a small television in Kennedy’s office. After United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Mrs. Bush was evacuated to an undisclosed location, and she insisted her staff must come with her.

Referring to the press pool reporters who had traveled with Mrs. Bush to the Capitol, Noelia Rodriguez told Deputy Press Secretary Ashleigh Adams, “You’re going to have to tell the reporters that they are on their own.”17

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Seated in his office in the West Wing, Vice President Dick Cheney views President Bush’s 9:30 a.m. televised statement to the nation from the Booker Elementary School cafeteria (left). Minutes later, at 9:36 a.m., the vice president is rushed from his office through the corridors of the West Wing toward the secure bunker deep beneath the White House (below).

With President Bush on the road, the senior official in the White House on September 11 was Vice President Dick Cheney. A former White House staffer himself—ultimately as chief of staff to President Gerald Ford and the secretary of defense under President Bush 41 during the Gulf War—Cheney was distinctively qualified to manage the White House during an emergency.

The vice president’s personal aide, Brian McCormack, remembers the day getting off to a gradual start. He was in the vice president’s first-floor West Wing office early that morning when President Bush 41 (who had occupied the office for his eight years as vice president under President Ronald Reagan) dropped by to see his old friend, but the vice president had not yet arrived.

When Vice President Cheney arrived to begin his morning meetings, McCormack headed to the OEOB and stopped by the vice president’s advance staff office to meet with Advance Director Dan Wilmot. There, just after 8:46 a.m., he saw television coverage of a plane (American Airlines Flight 11) having just crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

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VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY THE WEST WING

“An aircraft coming at you”

The vice president was meeting with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Deputy Director Sean O’Keefe. On the vice president’s schedule was a meeting with John McConnell, who served as senior speechwriter for both him and President Bush. McConnell had just finished writing remarks for President Bush to deliver on Friday, September 14, at a ceremony to rename the Old Executive Office Building as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. He turned to writing the remarks for the vice president to deliver at a separate event that coming Friday and had requested time with him on September 11, to discuss the speech. Walking over from his office in the OEOB to the vice president’s office, he remembers looking up at the Palladian window in the West Sitting Hall of the White House and thinking what a beautiful day it was. He was greeted in the small outer office by the vice president’s personal secretary, Debbie Heiden.

As O’Keefe left the office, he told McConnell that the vice president had seen the TV report about a plane that just crashed into the World Trade Center.

McConnell and the vice president sat down to discuss the upcoming speech. Then both saw the live TV coverage of the second plane (United Flight 175) crashing into the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.

McConnell reports that the vice president immediately got up and went to Chief of Staff Andy Card’s office to tell Card’s executive assistant, Melissa Bennett, to “get Andy on the phone.” It was not long before National Security Adviser Condi Rice, Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, Chief of Staff to the Vice President Scooter Libby, and Counselor to the Vice President Mary Matalin were all in the vice president’s office. The vice president had a brief but intense conversation with the president around 9:15 a.m.18—shortly after the president left the classroom in Florida—and, according to McConnell, was momentarily furious when the call dropped. With all these people in the vice president’s office, McConnell knew “I was not needed here and I went back to my office in the OEOB.” The meeting of these principals in Cheney’s office continued until the vice president’s lead Secret Service agent, Jimmy Scott, burst through the door at 9:36 a.m.19 Minutes earlier, the Secret Service operations center had received a call from air traffic control tower supervisor Victor Padgett at Ronald Reagan National Airport reporting “an aircraft coming at you and not talking with us.”20 Making sure the message was clear, the supervisor

added, “What I’m telling you, buddy, if you’ve got people, you’d better get them out of there. And I mean right goddamned now!”21 The Secret Service flew into action, with agents sprinting through the West Wing to reach the vice president and positioning themselves on the stairways to protect him as he moved to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC)—the secure bunker deep under the White House. Joel Kaplan, a top aide in the chief of staff ’s office, remembers seeing “about four Secret Service agents sprint down the hall from the Oval [Office] area to the vice president’s office.” He saw them again seconds later with the vice president, looking “like they were carrying him by his arms.” Bennett remembers looking up from her desk in the chief of staff ’s office and seeing “the agents move the VP so fast; we could barely see him they were so close to him.” A young staffer in the chief of staff ’s office who also supported the vice president’s West Wing office, 20-year-old Josh Deckard, remembers that he was “almost knocked over” by the Secret Service agents racing the vice president down the hallway, “holding him by the back of his belt.” McCormack, who had rushed back to the West Wing, arrived just as the vice president was “hustled out from behind his desk and encircled by Secret Service agents to move him to the secure bunker.” Agent Jim Scott later told McCormack, “We had 56 seconds to move him.”

On the way down to the PEOC, the vice president and his agents received another report.22 The plane reportedly bound for the White House—later identified as American Airlines Flight 77—had instead hit the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m.23 It was now unmistakable that the United States was facing a coordinated attack aimed not only at New York but at the seat of government in Washington. The vice president called the president from a phone in the tunnel on the way to the PEOC,24 describing the nature of the attack and urging him to stay away from Washington.25 Cheney then made his way to the PEOC, where he was joined by National Security Adviser Condi Rice and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, along with other national security principals. In keeping with standard emergency procedures, Lynne Cheney, the vice president’s wife, had also been brought to the PEOC. His photographer, David Bohrer, was there as well.

Bohrer had been caught up in the scrum around the vice president’s office when McCormack quickly told him to “go with him.” As a result, Bohrer

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After evacuating from his office, Vice President Cheney is joined by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Deputy National Security Adviser Steven Hadley, and senior national security officials in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC)—a secure facility under the White House entered through a basement corridor (below).

Throughout the day Cheney remained in contact with the president from this location.

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Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m.30 Everyone onboard was killed; no one on the ground was harmed. Countless lives—and potentially the White House or the Capitol, the likely targets of the hijackers—were saved. As President Bush later put it, the act of heroism aboard the plane was the first counteroffensive of the war on terror.31

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West Wing staffers, told to gather in the White House Mess, watch televised coverage of the unfolding crisis (top) before exiting as the Secret Service orders an immediate evacuation from the White House complex (bottom).

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photographed scenes from the PEOC throughout the day. Presidential photographer Eric Draper similarly took photographs while traveling with the president. Together they documented some of the most significant moments in White House history.

Soon after the vice president and senior staff arrived at the PEOC, a military aide informed them that another plane, believed hijacked, was headed for Washington. Having conferred with the president and confirming Bush’s authorization, the vice president gave the weighty order for the Air National Guard to shoot down the airliner—almost certainly filled with American passengers—if it did not respond.26 President Bush, a former National Guard pilot, understood the enormity of the decision27 and later explained he had “concern for any young pilot who was ordered to shoot down a jetliner.”28 Military fighter planes scrambled into the sky, in some cases so quickly that there was no time to load missiles. Years later, one of the pilots of those unarmed jets revealed that she had planned to fly her F-16 into the hijacked plane—identified as United Flight 93—sacrificing herself to save others on the ground.29 As it turned out, the passengers did that themselves. In one of the most powerful illustrations ever of American democracy, the passengers took a vote, stormed the cockpit, and brought down the plane in an empty field near

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“GET OUT NOW” With the vice president and senior national security team in the bunker and the president and senior staff in the air, the rest of the White House staff was ordered to evacuate. The directions started gradually, with West Wing staff told to gather in the White House Mess, a windowless ground floor staff dining room across the hall from the Situation Room that was the shelter-in-place location for inclement-weather drills and the like.

Brian McCormack and Josh Deckard were among those who gathered in the Mess. As the threat to the White House became clear, the orders quickly turned urgent. McCormack remembers one Secret Service agent telling him, “If you want to live, run.” The young Deckard, who had been in Washington for only six months, was standing next to McCormack and thought, “This is the last face I’ll ever see.” White House photographer Tina Hager, whose desk was located in the Photo Office on the ground floor of the West Wing, also gathered in the Mess and took photographs of the staff gathered there.

I was among them. At that time I was serving as special assistant to the president for White House management and administration and my

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remember agents telling them to kick off their heels so that they could sprint. At the time, we believed that a few extra seconds could mean the difference between life and death.

OEOB STAFF Across the street at the OEOB, there are varying accounts of how people were told to evacuate. Some were told by Secret Service agents, but the evacuation order traveled mostly by word of mouth. John McConnell, the speechwriter who had been meeting with the vice president when they saw the second plane hit, had returned to his office and called his mother in Wisconsin to say he was all right. His mother told him, “The TV says the White House is being evacuated.” McConnell went into the hallway and saw people walking out the building, and he left his office without his keys, pager, or phone. On West Executive Avenue he saw Mrs. Cheney arrive with her agent Mike Coleman. “John, everyone has to get out of here,” Coleman said. McConnell joined those running out the gates.

Just one floor up from McConnell in the OEOB sat Karen Keller, special assistant to OMB Director Mitch Daniels, a member of the president’s cabinet

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“If you want to live, run.”

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office was located on the first floor of the OEOB, facing Pennsylvania Avenue. That morning, I was in the White House Mess having breakfast with my colleague Linda Gambatesa, director of Oval Office operations. Bob Marsh, special assistant to the president for legislative affairs, came into the dining room to tell us that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. Linda remembers being “calm about it.” Like most others, we both thought it was a terrible accident. We left the Mess shortly thereafter, not knowing that the second plane had hit the second tower. We both have vivid memories of the rush of activity and being told by the Secret Service Uniformed Division (UD) officers to get West Wing staff out of their offices and move them to the Mess.

Linda went up the back stairs to alert staff on the first floor, never stopping in her own office to get her phone or purse. I went up to the second floor.

The agents also were commanding people to leave their offices. We all gathered in the Mess as ordered, but our time there was brief. The agents, with their weapons drawn, soon ordered everyone to “get out now,” and staffers raced through the large iron gates that had been opened at both ends of West Executive Avenue. Many women staff members

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Heeding the warning issued by the Secret Service, “If you want to live, run,” White House staffers race through the iron security gates opened for their escape at both ends of West Executive Avenue.

and the highest-ranking official in the OEOB. Daniels was conducting his daily senior staff meeting when Keller interrupted, having seen the second plane hit the World Trade Center on the TV on her desk. Daniels had seen it, too. With the outer office doors open to the corridor, Keller could hear people running down the hallways and “people yelling to evacuate.” Keller assisted a thirty-year career OMB veteran who served as the receptionist in the director’s office and “had recently returned to work after being on leave for a back injury.” “She was very upset and shaking,” remembers Keller, “and I walked with her down the two flights of stairs out through the Seventeenth and G Street exit and ran down G Street to get her in a cab before walking to my brother-in-law’s store on K Street NW to call my family.”

Also in the OEOB that day was Eric Motley from the Presidential Personnel Office. The TV in the outer office was on, and he recalls a colleague telling him a plane struck the World Trade Center.

Motley was on the phone conducting a personnel interview, but, when told that a second plane struck, he ended the conversation and joined his colleagues to watch what was unfolding on TV. “We

began to take this all in,” he recalls, “when we saw the chyron read: ‘White House being evacuated.’”

At that moment, a Secret Service UD officer entered the office telling everyone, “We need you to clear these offices and get out of here and go as far as you can.” Not knowing when they would return, Motley stopped briefly to turn off the front office coffeepot and then suddenly remembered the floppy disks of his PhD thesis, the only copy of his dissertation, that were sitting in his desk drawer. He retrieved the disks to the shouts of an agent ordering him, “You need to get out of here.”

FIRST DAY DRAMA FOR 112 INTERNS That morning Mike Sanders, director of the White House Internship Program, had arrived at his first floor OEOB office before 8:00 a.m. The previous day he had welcomed the first full class of interns under the new program he established for the fall 2001 class. The 112 interns “were from many parts of the country and for 95 percent of them it was their first time in Washington,” he recalls. They had attended a half-day security briefing, toured the building and went briefly to their new offices.

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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.

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“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.

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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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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

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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,

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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.

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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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agents gave no real instructions other than to “go as fast as you can” and for women to “take off their shoes and run.”

To the senior staff gathered in Lafayette Park outside, I suggested we head to the DaimlerChrysler office at 1401 H Street NW, two blocks from the White House. My husband, a former aide to President George H. W. Bush who held several White House positions including responsibility for many emergency procedures, now served as director of government affairs for DaimlerChrysler in its Washington office. In the only call I was able to get through on my cell phone, I asked if I could bring White House staff there. My husband sent his staff home, asking them to leave computers on with their passwords written down.

“Once the White House staff arrived, it was impressive how quickly they set up their operations,” Tim McBride recounted in an interview with the National Journal. “They represented many different areas of the White House, Communications, National Economic Council, speechwriters, Cabinet Affairs, Legislative Affairs, photographers. As the President’s staff learned their colleagues had assembled at DaimlerChrysler, others collected here. Ultimately about 72 members of the White House staff worked from these offices.”35 I asked Helen Mobley (now Sauvage), deputy director of presidential scheduling for correspondence and invitations and one of the first to arrive

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at DaimlerChrysler, to sit at the front desk and make sure everyone who came in recorded their name and a contact number so we could fax that list to the Situation Room, to notify staff there who was at this location.

Mobley had been in the West Wing for the daily Scheduling Office staff meeting with her boss Brad Blakeman, and Kara Figg (now LiCalsi), deputy scheduler to the president, when they saw the live coverage of the second plane hitting the second tower. Like other West Wing staff told to go there, they went to the Mess. Mobley worried about her interns and volunteers in her first floor OEOB office.

One of those volunteers, Marcy Anderson Saliba, recounted that she was returning to her desk from getting coffee in the ground floor cafeteria and “saw the vice president’s agents tearing down the stairs from his office one floor above.” She was a mother with a young child at home and thought, “I better get out of here.” Saliba made it home to Virginia

by Metro and never returned to volunteer at the White House.

Kara Figg remembers worrying about her mother, Jeanie Figg, deputy social secretary, who worked on the other side of the White House in the East Wing: had the staff there got word to evacuate? She ran with colleagues up Pennsylvania Avenue to K Street and then found herself strangely alone as everyone scattered. Her cell phone was not working so she walked to her father’s law office on

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C H L O E O V E R S T R E E T F O R T H E W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N

The DaimlerChrysler building at 1401 H Street, Northwest (second building left of corner), served as a refuge and workspace for more than seventy White House evacuees on September 11, 2001.

T O P A N D B O T T O M : N A T I O N A L A R C H I V E S A N D R E C O R D S A D M I N I S T R AT I O N

White House staff entering the DaimlerChrysler offices signed in at the front desk staffed by Helen Mobley (right seated beside Anita McBride). Josh Deckard and Ashley Davis are also seen standing at the counter.

DaimlerChrysler staff relinquished their work and meeting spaces (below) to accommodate White House staff, who quickly set up their operations.

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Thirteenth Street NW, where she was relieved to find her mother, along with Social Secretary Cathy Fenton. Figg reconnected by phone with Blakeman, who was at the DaimlerChrysler office directing the staff on the changes that needed to be made to the president’s schedule. According to Figg, Blakeman told her that the president “wanted us to plan a trip to New York for him.”

Word spread, and more staff were coming in to the DaimlerChrysler office. Among them were Photo Office Editors Michael Davis and Lynden Steele, who took photographs throughout the day, as well as senior staff members Clay Johnson; Larry Lindsey, assistant to the president for economic policy and director of the National Economic Council; Albert Hawkins, assistant to the president for cabinet affairs; and Nick Calio, assistant to the president for legislative affairs.

Calio had been in his second floor West Wing office at 6:30 a.m. before going to a postoperative check-up, having had knee surgery ten days earlier. Before leaving the medical building, he made a detour to his allergist’s office on another floor, where the receptionist had a small TV on her desk and told him, “Mr. Calio, you’ll be interested in this, a plane flew into the World Trade Center.” Calio turned right around and walked out and drove back to the White House. He took a call from Andy Card about making a decision on the Congressional Picnic. Calio had earlier thought about the gorgeous weather for a large outdoor event. Pulling into the gate before evacuation began, he saw agents with weapons swarming the grounds and chasing tourists away. He said, “Andy, I don’t think there’s any decision at all. We cancel.”36 Calio went into the West Wing and briefly up to his office to check on his staff before going back down to the ground floor. There, outside the Mess, he encountered Carl Truscott, head of the President’s Protective Detail, and Hector Irastorza, deputy assistant to the president for management and administration, who both told Calio, “We are getting everybody down here.”37 Just a week before, Calio had been given a classified briefing by Truscott on the reopening of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. Calio was “a vocal advocate, too vocal for the Secret Service, about reopening it.” The Secret Service gave Calio the briefing and explained what would happen to his office right above the front door of the West Wing facing Pennsylvania Avenue if a truck

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with a bomb went off. Calio reports, “I changed my mind pretty darn quick.”38 When the order was given to evacuate the Mess and run from the building, Calio left but was “limping terribly” and was ultimately separated from his staff. He walked as far as Connecticut Avenue and H Street NW. With no cell service he asked to use the phone in the nearby Equinox restaurant, where he knew the owner. He went first to his old office at 1350 I Street NW to make some calls, reach his staff, and try to get through to the Hill. Members of his staff—Kirsten Chadwick, Bob Marsh, and Jack Howard—met up with him and walked across the street to the DaimlerChrysler office, where the “communications were better.” Calio and his team “started to do a checklist of everything we needed to think about.”

Some of Calio’s House and Senate liaison staff, including Legislative Assistant Christal West (now Atkinson), had offices on the ground floor of the White House East Wing. They evacuated through the North Gates from East Executive Avenue, making their way to the Hilton Hotel on Sixteenth and K Streets NW. There they watched the first tower fall on the TV in the lobby. “Kirsten went to meet up with Nick,” West recalls. “The rest of us walked north to my apartment at Nineteenth and S Street NW to get a landline, take turns using the phone, and watch the news” before going back to the White House that night to get their vehicles.

“WE’VE GOT A SITUATION” Cabinet Secretary Albert Hawkins had been in the OEOB that morning for the 8:30 a.m. daily staff

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Evacuated staffers look to the sky for incoming aircraft as officer C. K. Djossou directs people away from the White House.

T O P A N D B O T T O M : N A T I O N A L A R C H I V E S A N D R E C O R D S A D M I N I S T R AT I O N

“If a plane hits the White House– it’s over–it’s not safe here.”

meeting he held with his team. His assistant Cindy Mendel called over to the meeting to inform him that the Situation Room had reported a plane hitting the World Trade Center. Albert continued the meeting and had Ali Tulbah, a member of his staff whose portfolio included the Department of Transportation, call Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta’s chief of staff, John Flaherty. “We’ve got a situation,” Flaherty said, and told Tulbah to get Hawkins “on a secure phone” to give more information. Hawkins and his team saw the second plane hit on the TV in the office where they were meeting.

Hawkins and Tulbah went immediately from the OEOB to the Situation Room to ask the duty officer to connect with Secretary Mineta’s office on secure line to get more information on the situation that was unfolding. While at the Situation Room door that faces the Mess, they were interrupted by the shouts of Secret Service agents directing staff to go into the Mess. Tulbah followed others to the Mess, while Hawkins went in a different direction up to the first floor West Wing “to Josh Bolten’s office who was Acting Chief of Staff that day since Andy was in Florida and was sharing what I had learned from DOT with Josh and Condi until the USSS escorted them away and left me standing there.”

Hawkins evacuated from the White House complex and found himself in the group in Lafayette Park.

He remembers “gratefully follow[ing] [McBride] and others to the office building. I had no idea what office it was we were going to, but remember being told your husband [Timothy McBride] officed there.” Hawkins later explained, “After the

9/11 experience, there was a secure line installed in my office.”

Ali Tulbah, who had held onto his list of cabinet officials and the principal points of contact, also evacuated to the DaimlerChrysler office. “We remained there for a while and begin planning for what would be needed when POTUS returned.

Tucker [Eskew, deputy assistant to the president for media affairs] and other communications folks there began framing the president’s remarks and Clay [Johnson] began thinking through the continuity of government and Larry [Lindsey] the economic ramifications, especially the market impact.”

After the list of staff at the DaimlerChrysler office was received at the Situation Room, I got an anxious call from Hector Irastorza saying that an escort was coming to bring the most senior staff—the assistants to the president, Calio, Hawkins, Johnson, and Lindsey—back to the White House. With the largest number of staff assembled in an outside location at the DaimlerChrysler office, an agent was also sent to stand post outside the building, allowing only staff members with White House passes to enter.

Special Agent Myles (“Colin”) Johnson came to the DaimlerChrysler conference room to brief us all before he and other heavily armed Secret Service agents escorted the senior staff back to the White House and down to the PEOC. Clay Johnson recalls Colin Johnson as “the biggest man I ever saw” and says they felt safe as they “walked the streets with him, empty at every intersection.”39

A COMMAND POST Early that morning, Ken Mehlman, who served as deputy assistant to the president for political affairs, one of Karl Rove’s deputies, had been in the White House Mess hosting several members of Congress, including Rob Portman (R.-Ohio), Bob Ehrlich (R.-Md.,), and Paul Ryan (R.-Wisc.), to “continue the budget surplus debate.”40 When they left the West Wing, the congressmen went back to the Hill.

Mehlman saw two people running into the Situation Room and heard a young West Wing staffer say a plane hit the World Trade Center. Mehlman returned to his first floor OEOB office. He recalls: “We had a big meeting scheduled that day with Teamsters President James Hoffa. We wanted to talk to him about a big initiative the Vice President was leading to expand domestic energy activity; this would mean a lot of teamsters jobs. It was part

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of my mission to build coalitions and relationships and find ways we can work together.”

Kate Marinis (now Walters), Mehlman’s executive assistant, was in early that day to watch Secretary of Commerce Don Evans on NBC’s Today show. She saw the coverage of the first plane that struck the first tower and then the live coverage of the second plane. “A lot of progress was made with [the Teamsters] to get to the point of this meeting,” but after seeing second plane she had to call Hoffa’s assistant to cancel it. Marinis could hear commotion in the hall and looked out to see people leaving. “I knew we needed to leave,” she recalls, “but don’t remember any officers coming in the office to tell us.” Sara Taylor (now Fagen), one of the regional political directors on Mehlman’s team, recalls Mehlman “telling us we need to go.” She and Marinis and a few others followed Mehlman down the stairs to the Seventeenth and G Street NW exit.

Taylor saw the UD officers yelling to “get the [expletive] out.” Taylor tripped and lost her shoe and then her colleagues in the pandemonium. She made it to the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue NW and watched the horror on TV with other White House staff gathered in the hotel lobby.

Marinis was also temporarily separated from Mehlman and tried to call her fiancé Logan Walters, President Bush’s personal aide who was not traveling with the president that day, but her phone was not working. She walked with some other colleagues to the Madison Hotel on Sixteenth Street NW and saw the towers fall on the TV in the lobby. She later received word to meet Mehlman and others from her office at the DaimlerChrysler office, and she worked there until late afternoon. When some staff members were cleared to go back to the White House, she went home to her apartment. Marinis also recounts how her parents were flying from Houston to Washington that day, and, thirty minutes into the flight, the pilot announced, “There’s been an incident in Washington and we have to turn around.” Marinis’s parents were not seated next to each other on the flight, and “the woman sitting next to my mother told her a plane crashed into the White House.” It was a frantic thirty minutes until her parents landed and reached Marinis on her cell phone. She assured them she was fine, but, “There was just so much misinformation,” she recalls.

In the evacuation, Ken Mehlman had walked briskly from the OEOB to Lafayette Park and

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“collected as many of [his] staff as [he] saw” because he knew they “shouldn’t be standing there.”

They walked to Georgetown, where the group went to staffer Josh Deckard’s apartment. Mehlman stopped only briefly, because “I got word that staff was assembling at the DaimlerChrysler office.”

Deckard remembers that before Mehlman left he bought lunch for the group so they could alternate watching events unfolding on TV and using the landline to call family.

Once at DaimlerChrysler, Mehlman quickly established “a command post”41 with Brad Blakeman and other West Wing staff members who also began arriving, including Israel (“Izzy”) Hernandez, Rove’s special assistant; Ashley Estes (now Kavanaugh), personal secretary to the president; and later Logan Walters, the president’s personal aide.

OVAL OFFICE STAFF Ashley Estes and Logan Walters had been at their desks in the office outside the Oval Office when the first plane struck the first World Trade Center. When they saw the live coverage of the second plane, Walters headed to the chief of staff ’s office and “heard the door burst open to watch the VP being hustled to the PEOC.” Returning to the outer Oval Office, he and Estes were trying to figure out what they could do to help as the nerve center was in Florida and the vice president and others were in the PEOC. They thought one of them should stay there. Estes moved to the Mess and evacuated when ordered to leave by the agents. She connected with Linda Gambatesa in Lafayette Park and went briefly to Gambatesa’s former office at General Motors before they joined the group at DaimlerChrysler.

Walters remembers an agent coming to take him to the Situation Room and being asked by a duty officer, “Is anyone at the ranch [the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas]? There is a plane flying there.” Walters reached the ranch manager and told him, “You need to leave the ranch. Get away as far as possible.” In a brief moment of respite from the dramatic tension, Walters hears the ranch caretaker calmly say, “Okay then,” and turn to his wife: “Mama, let’s get in the truck, we’ve got to go.”

Walters explained that the military aides started connecting all calls through the PEOC so none were coming to the Oval by that point. Walking back to his office, Walters saw “the Secret Service Uniformed Division officer standing at his post alone

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Ken Mehlman, deputy assistant to the president for political affairs, and Brad Blakeman, deputy assistant to the president for appointments and scheduling, quickly established “a command post” with other West Wing and EOP staff members in the DaimlerChrysler offices.

Top left, left to right, Ken Mehlman, Israel Hernandez, Brad Blakeman, and Joel Kaplan.

Top right, standing, Taylor Griffin, Ken Lisaius, Jeanie Mamo, Wendy Nipper, Jimmy Orr Center right, Logan Walters stands at desk where Israel Hernandez, and Ashley Estes are at work. Kristen Silverberg is seen with Associate Counsel Courtney Elwood in background.

Bottom: Evacuated EOP staff gather in the DaimlerChrysler conference room for updates from the White House including plans for the president’s schedule from Brad Blakeman.

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for most of the day.” He reports that they started making lists of what would need to happen for when the president returns. Silverberg “walked around the offices to stay informed on what was going on,” and Kaplan remembers “weighing in” with the speechwriters on the president’s remarks.

THE SPEECHWRITERS John McConnell and his fellow speechwriters, David Frum and Matthew Scully, had also arrived at DaimlerChrysler, and McConnell remembers being directed to an office where they could work together and get on the phone with the president’s chief speechwriter, Mike Gerson. Gerson had been driving to the White House on Interstate 395 and “saw a plane flying very low over the highway ahead, so low [he] could see the windows clearly.” What Gerson saw next was shocking: “The impact [at the Pentagon] was hidden by a bend in the highway, but I saw smoke begin to rise.”43 Gerson was stopped in traffic for more than hour and says he “began to sketch out some thoughts on a yellow pad for the inevitable speech.”44

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Speechwriters, including John McConnell (below), regrouped at the DaimlerChrysler offices and began work on the speech that the president would deliver from the Oval Office at 8:30 p.m.

NATIONAL ARCHIV ES AND R EC OR DS ADMINISTRATION

outside the Oval Office and I remember thinking he looked nervous to be there. If the White House goes down, he goes with it.” “There was confusion about whether a plane was coming toward the White House and I imagined what happened if a plane hits the White House—it’s over—it’s not safe here—but the sense of service was palpable.” Walters had reached his fiancé, Kate Marinis, who told him where Mehlman and the other staff were gathered. “I didn’t wander around but headed straight there to DaimlerChrysler,” he said. “The building was already locked down by the Secret Service when I got there.”

Throughout the day Mehlman directed staff on several tasks and the questions that needed to be asked: “What was significance of this day? Why pick that day to attack?” “How did presidents who faced national tragedies respond?” Brad Blakeman directed the staff to create a schedule of events and frame up what the next few days would be for the president. His nephew, Thomas Jurgens, was a first responder at the World Trade Center, and Blakeman later learned of his nephew’s tragic death in the attacks.42 Among the West Wing staff at the DaimlerChrysler office were Kristen Silverberg and Joel Kaplan, both of whom were serving as special assistants to the deputy chief of staff for policy, Josh Bolten.

They had been sitting in their first floor West Wing office across the hall from the chief of staff ’s suite.

Kaplan reports that the TV was off when he got a call from his contact at the Department of Transportation, which was in his policy portfolio, telling him they had “the flight number and the manifest.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked. The answer: “Turn on the TV.” They did, and they saw the second plane hit the second tower.

Silverberg thought, “This is terrible, but I kept working and stayed focused” as the impact of what she had seen had not yet registered with her. Josh Bolten poked his head in and said very calmly, “I think they want us to go downstairs now.” Kaplan “later realized that the ‘we’ did not include Josh, as he went to the PEOC.” Silverberg and Kaplan went to the Mess and were not there very long before the Secret Service instructed, “Everybody get out, get out of the building.” They went out to West Executive Avenue and walked in a group to the DaimlerChrysler office.

“There was no way to reach the PEOC,” said Kaplan, and the staff there were “incommunicado

NATIONAL ARCHIV ES AND R EC OR DS ADMINISTRATION

Counselor to the President Karen Hughes delivers a press briefing at the J. Edgar Hoover Federal Bureau of Investigation Building.

KAREN HUGHES: “I HAD TO GET TO WORK” Presidential Counselor Karen Hughes was scheduled to represent the White House at a Habitat for Humanity home-building event on the morning of September 11. As the event was near her neighborhood in Washington, she did not attend the White House senior staff meeting that morning. In her book Ten Minutes from Normal, Hughes describes the phone call she received from her assistant, Jill Angelo, from her second floor West Wing office.

“Karen, a plane has hit the World Trade Center and I think it’s pretty bad.”45 Hughes called her deputy, Dan Bartlett, who was traveling with the president, to verify that the president knew what happened.

As she finished getting ready for the Habitat event, she turned to the television to see “the large dark shape of an airplane heading right toward, then crashing into, the second tower.” Hughes was “horrified” and “dropped to her knees.”46 She reached Bartlett’s phone again and talked to Karl Rove and Press Secretary Ari Fleischer through him. They all agreed the president needed to make a statement and get back to Washington. She did not know that the vice president, Andy Card, and Condi Rice had recommended he stay away, recognizing that “this crisis would be even worse if something happened

to the president.” Hughes was on the phone with Angelo when, “her voice shaky but composed,” Angelo said, “Karen, the Secret Service is yelling at us to get out of here.” “Suddenly I was oddly disconnected,” recalls Hughes, but she knew “I had to get to work.”47 Hughes received a message on her pager at 10:07 a.m.: “You are needed in the shelter ASAP.”48 She did not know where the shelter was.

On her way to her son’s school to get him, she was reached on her phone by Deputy Chief of Staff Bolten. “The Vice President is looking for you to make a statement,” he said, and would send a military driver to get her.49 She headed back home to await her escort.

When Hughes reached the bunker, the vice president was on the phone, as was Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta, who was overseeing the grounding of all the planes across the country.

Cabinet Secretary Albert Hawkins was collecting information about airports, banks, search-and-rescue teams, and emergency operations, information important to get out to the public to show that the government was functioning.50 Hughes talked to the president after Air Force One landed in Louisiana and got his approval to go out and do a press briefing on his behalf. The Secret Service did not think it was safe to brief from the White House.

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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.

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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

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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

In New York City for a scheduled site survey on the morning of September 11, 2001, Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Joe Hagin takes a call while watching news coverage of the Twin Towers ablaze.

director, who went to the DaimlerChrysler building, wrote, “My only goal was to get the White House website online again.” Among the issues that day, the White House website was not working. “It was bad enough from a communications perspective that we couldn’t get the president’s statements up on the website. But it paled in comparison to the enormity of the message we sent the country and the world that the White House site was down.”53

SCOTT STANZEL: TWENTY FOUR HOURS ON THE JOB

JOE HAGIN: NEW YORK CITY Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Joe Hagin was in New York on

NATIONAL ARCHIV ES AND R EC OR DS ADMINISTRATION

Scott Stanzel, Midwest regional spokesman for media affairs, was in his first floor OEOB office at 6:30 a.m. that day, poring through the news for his region. He had the TV on in his office and saw the news about the first plane. When his colleague Ken Lisaius called out from an adjoining office that another plane has hit, the media affairs team was called down to Eskew’s office and asked to research past presidential responses in time of a disaster. When they saw the Pentagon was hit, Stanzel remembers the Secret Service agents “barging in to tell us to get out.” Stanzel joined other members of the communications staff at the DaimlerChrysler office. They were tasked by Tucker to “track what was going on in the news—all developments—filter

info to the speechwriters, comparing notes on ‘what we were hearing’ and filter information to Karen [Hughes] for her to understand the tone in the country.”

Stanzel also happened to be the scheduled communications duty officer that day, tasked with covering for the press office and fielding reporters’ questions. When West Wing staff went back to the White House around 4:30 p.m., Stanzel made his way home. Then he received a call from Press Secretary Ari Fleischer asking him to go back to the White House to “man the phones” as “people will expect we are there working.” Stanzel’s roommate and press office staffer Allen Abney offered to drive Stanzel, and they made their way through the extended security perimeter, reaching the White House around 6:00 p.m. Stanzel fielded calls outside of Fleischer’s office until 6:30 a.m. the next morning, when the next duty officer came on—a full twenty-four hours on the job. Stanzel emphasizes how he never wavered on his commitment to the role: “our jobs as we predicted what they would be like changed immediately and dramatically.”

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September 11, leading the White House advance team on a site survey trip for the president’s appearance at the upcoming United Nations General Assembly. After the second plane hit the second tower, the Secret Service took Hagin and the team from their meeting at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations to a police station in Midtown Manhattan, where it was thought they would be safer. Then the Pentagon was hit, and the New York City police and Secret Service put together a route to get them out of the city. By then both towers had collapsed. “We ended up taking the tunnel that empties out right across from the [Hudson] River from the World Trade Center, so we had a long, painful look at that scene,” said Hagin. The group arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where they split up. Hagin and seven others took a military plane back to Washington. “On final approach, we flew right past the Pentagon,” Hagin recalled. “So my guess is, the eight of us were probably the only people in the world to see both those buildings burning on September 11.”54

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her the Counsel’s Office staff was gathering at the downtown law firm, adding, “We have to research the laws of war.” “It was just so mind-blowing,” she says. Riepenhoff had evacuated the White House from the Mess with Britt Grant, assistant to Deputy Domestic Policy Director John Bridgeland. The two young women were hometown friends, and they ran together to Grant’s apartment in Dupont Circle. Riepenhoff had started her day feeling that “today is my lucky day.” It was a “perfectly blue, clear and beautiful day,” and she got a rare prime parking spot on the Ellipse. Then, when sitting at her desk that morning, “President George Bush 41 walked in to say hello to [White House Counsel] Al Gonzales.” She and office mate Libby Camp (now Elliott), executive assistant to Gonzales, asked to take a picture with the former president. Riepenhoff “sat down at my computer and wrote my parents an e-mail saying how much I love my job and how President Bush 41 came by; I was the luckiest person in the world.” Hours later, as Riepenhoff walked to the law firm, she “was terrified the entire

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“A ghost town.”

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Associate Counsel to the President Noel Francisco had returned to his OEOB office after the regularly scheduled Counsel’s Office staff meeting in the West Wing, and he evacuated with his colleague, Associate Counsel Rachel Brand. They ended up on the Ellipse after exiting the Southwest Gate. There they ran into David Kuo from the Office of FaithBased and Community Initiatives, who was the only one whose cell phone was working, and they took turns calling family members. Francisco and Brand walked to their former law firm at Fifteenth and K Streets NW, then known as Cooper, Carvin, and Rosenthal. According to Francisco, law firm partner Chuck Cooper turned over the keys and told them to stay as long as was needed. Francisco contacted other Counsel’s Office staff, and about half of them arrived at the law firm to work and do legal research. Francisco went back to the White House around 11:00 p.m. that night after receiving a call from Deputy White House Counsel Tim Flanigan, asking him to return. He remembers the heavy military presence on the streets and around the complex and working through the night. For a while after 9/11, the Counsel’s Office was always staffed overnight.

Allison Riepenhoff, Tim Flanigan’s assistant, was one of the staff members who received a call telling

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Normally heavily traveled, H Street outside of the DaimlerChryster office is totally deserted after the evacuation of the city. Staff returning to the White House on the evening of September 11, 2001, would navigate newly erected barricades and police lines throughout a tightly lockeddown President’s Neighborhood.

time, [and] kept staring at the sky because [she] was so afraid a plane was coming and was going to take down a building near [her].” “We were there for many hours,” she remembers. “Watching President Bush’s address to the nation that night, his eyes were so sad but also so determined.” “After that we started having to get to work at 6:30 a.m.,” she recalls. Riepenhoff ’s mom and sister were scared and wanted her to come home, but Riepenhoff was steadfast. “I remember when Tim [Flanigan] interviewed me for the job. While he didn’t ever say ‘terrorist attack’ or ‘war,’ he had said ‘you’re going to face things in this job that you will never face in any other position and you need to do your job.’ I felt like I could at least do my job supporting the people I was supposed to support and it would have been a betrayal to his trust if I left.”

To this day Riepenhoff tunes that day out. “I don’t watch TV [on] that day. I definitely don’t do social media. I think I just have walls up because it was such a terrifying time.”

HEADING BACK Back at the DaimlerChrysler office, word had been received around 5:00 p.m. that the staff from the chief of staff ’s office and other West Wing staff should head back to the White House so they would be there for the president’s return. Kaplan and Silverberg made their way back across Lafayette Park. Kaplan remembers the city feeling like a “total occupied military zone” and a “ghost town” with a heavy military presence. While it was surreal to be back in the building they had only recently run from, Kaplan and Silverberg got right to work on the domestic challenges that arose from 9/11, working very late into the night. They “didn’t have a minute to think” because “there was a lot to be done . . . we all had to be contributing,” Kaplan says. “After spending the day confused, we were walking back and felt a sense of determination and focus,” says Silverberg, adding, “The culture of the White House stuck with people in the face of an emergency.” Mehlman also went back to the

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T O P A N D B O T T O M : N A T I O N A L A R C H I V E S A N D R E C O R D S A D M I N I S T R AT I O N

When President Bush returned to the White House at 6:55 p.m., preparations were well under way in the West Wing for his 8:30 p.m. address to the nation. The lighting and cameras are positioned in the Oval Office (left) as the president reviews a draft of the speech (below) surrounded by aides including Mary Matalin, Karen Hughes, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove, Nick Calio, Ari Fleischer, Alberto Gonzales, and Andrew Card.

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During the televised speech, cabinet members and senior staff gather in the Roosevelt Room to meet and watch the president address the nation. right

President Bush delivers a televised address, reassuring the nation that “ Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America.

These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve. . . . The functions of our government continue without interruption.

Federal agencies in Washington which had to be evacuated today are reopening for essential personnel tonight and will be open for business tomorrow.”

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White House around 5:00 p.m. that afternoon and summed up the day’s emotions: “The day was very meaningful in ways I never anticipated. . . . I will always remember who I was with, what I did, how we all thought about we needed to do to help. We wanted to work.”

John McConnell walked back to the White House and convened with his speechwriter colleagues in Mike Gerson’s ground floor West Wing office. The OEOB was locked down, but he convinced the UD officer to allow him to quickly go and retrieve his phone and apartment keys. The building was completely silent and dark, and he felt his way up the stairs to his office by holding onto the railings. He heard the president’s helicopter arrive and “felt a big lump in my throat thinking he was supposed to be dead and this building was not supposed to be here.”

About this time, back at the DaimlerChrysler office, I went room by room. Everyone had left, and I collected any papers or documents left behind. On top of the stack of papers was the original copy of the list of names that had been sent to the Situation Room, of the people who evacuated and worked there that day. These papers were, after all, presidential records, and I brought all of them to the Office of Records Management to be included in the materials and files that go to the National Archives. It was not until I walked back the few blocks to the White House to get my car and drove home that I thought about how my husband and I had been in the same place all day and if something had happened to us, what would have happened to our two children, ages one and four, who were at home with a babysitter?

Kara Figg walked back to the White House from her father’s office that evening to join her boss Brad Blakeman, who had returned from the DaimlerChrysler office. Despite the unnerving sight of National Guard, tanks, and armored vehicles on the streets and surrounding the White House, Figg says, “I strangely felt safe in the White House.” For Melissa Bennett, “It was very emotional to see Andy again. . . . He gave us the comfort we needed.” She reflects, “All day [at the DaimlerChrysler office], I just wanted to do whatever I was asked to do.” Back at the White House, “Everything was different but anything we have to do to support this mission, we will do it.”

Nick Calio, who was in the PEOC and remained at the White House throughout the day and late

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into the night, recounts how he was able to bring several of his senior team back to the White House on 9/11, including Bob Marsh, Jack Howard, and Kirsten Chadwick. They worked out of Calio’s second floor West Wing Office to reach out to members of Congress and governors. Calio remembers the senior staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room that evening and seeing the president sitting in the Oval Office before his speech. “I asked the president, ‘How are you doing?’ His response: ‘I’m ready. You be ready, too.’”

“There was a laundry list of legislation ahead,” recalls Calio, “including aid for New York and Pennsylvania.” “I went to the Hill that night with [Attorney General John] Ashcroft and [FBI Director Bob] Mueller to brief the members of Congress after the president’s speech. I went home about 3:00 a.m., and was back at 5:30 a.m. A couple of the Leg Affairs admins were nervous to come back the next day, but everyone wanted to return.”

On the night on 9/11, Clay Johnson was in the PEOC and remained at White House until late.

Reflecting on the gravity of the day, he says, “What I saw at every turn was incredible professionalism.”

For his own part, “Whatever was going on had nothing to do with Presidential Personnel but we just did whatever we were instructed to do with no questions asked.”

SEPTEMBER 12, 2001: “WE HAVE A LOT OF WORK TO DO” Johnson directed his staff to come back to work on September 12. “I went to the OEOB the next day to connect with my team. They were quiet and concerned but showed confidence to stay focused on business.” Eric Motley on Johnson’s staff recounted, “Clay came over, and in a very calming way talked about what we had experienced, how sad and devastating it was.” “He also talked about the president’s speech,” and said, “We are here to support the president, and we have a lot of work to do.” “We felt ennobled and emboldened,” remembers Motley.

“It was patriotically riveting.”

Karen Keller returned to the White House on September 12 after OMB Director Daniels had called her the night before at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. and said he needed her back. “It was surreal getting to work and seeing big, huge military vehicles all around the White House. I was scared but I knew I had to go back and I wanted to be there,” she recalled. The thirty-year veteran staff member

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“I’m ready.

You be ready too.”

she helped to evacuate never returned to the office, however, and retired soon after the attacks.

Ali Tulbah from Cabinet Affairs returned the next day and remembers the military presence and the sense of “total resolve that what we all would need to be doing was to support the president now.”

“We had a big meeting about what all the agencies needed to do,” he recalls. “One of the presentations included a readout of the impact on the foreign exchange of the U.S. dollar and the value of the U.S. currency today. . . . It was the first time this hit us about how this was an attack on the American way of life, not just a physical attack.”

Helen Mobley of the Scheduling Office returned to her office the next day and remembers “all the invitations that started coming into the White House for the president to attend the funerals of people who died on 9/11.” In addition to the written regrets that went out in a letter signed by Blakeman, Mobley “called every single family to convey the president’s regrets and express condolences.”

Ruth Elliott and Mary Haines returned the

next day at the NSC. Elliott recounts, “I remember watching the president give his address that night and that brought me a lot of comfort and reassurance. If he can be there, I can be there. I’m going back and I’m helping to do whatever I can.” When she called the NSC Executive Secretariat late that night, the deputy who answered the phone said, “Come in early tomorrow morning and just be ready.

Ready for anything.” Haines remembered, “I went back [to the NSC] the next day. We were so busy.”

Among her many duties, Haines was responsible for scheduling proposals for world leader phone calls. “The whole world wanted to talk to President Bush,” she recalls, “and they were calling in and asking for an appointment.” It was a challenge to organize but, knowing the president was up very early every day, Haines thought there would be a better way to manage it. She met with Brad Blakeman, deputy assistant to the president for appointments and scheduling, and suggested that they block the schedule from 7:00 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. for world leader calls because it is a “humane time anywhere

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Back at work on September 12, 2001, Karen Hughes and Andrew Card confer near the door to the Oval Office as Vice President Cheney takes a call at Ashley Estes’s desk.

Newspapers neatly stacked nearby document the tragedy of the previous day.

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in the world.” Haines said, “Brad really liked that idea. That morning time slot stayed for eight years because of 9/11.” Additionally, “The world leaders started coming to show support and strategize. The NSC was super busy. We didn’t have time to feel, we just had to implement.”

Josh Deckard was back in his West Wing office on September 12. “I remember 9/11 but also 9/14 being the most challenging days at the White House,” says Deckard. “On 9/14 Brian McCormack comes to get me and says, ‘There is a major threat and we [the vice president] are leaving for an undisclosed location and you need to sit in the VP’s outer office and man the phones. If you get a call and are told to leave, just go.’” Deckard remembers, “It was the second time I saw the CAT teams [Counter Assault Teams] and the first time I got emotional. . . . Melissa Bennett came by to see me, and I just felt better seeing her. I remember her saying to me, ‘It’s going to be okay.’”

OMB Director Daniels recalls how “the days that followed were intensely busy with a long list of assignments that impacted every agency including supplemental appropriations for rebuilding New York City and indemnifying the airlines so that they can fly again. . . . The long sessions in Speaker [of the House Denny] Hastert’s office with House and Senate leadership was a period of bipartisanship we have not seen since.”

The commitment to returning to work extended throughout the ranks. Mike Sanders, the director of the intern program, remembered many interns asking him, “Do we go back to the White House tomorrow?” When told they were cleared to return, “Every one of the interns came back.” Page Austin, a 22-year-old from New Orleans, returned the next day to the Political Affairs Office. She had evacuated with other interns and remembers: “We were scared and didn’t know what to do. Our phones didn’t work so we couldn’t get in touch with our families back home.” Her father wanted to bring her home to Louisiana, but she “insisted on staying.” She remembers “the first time I got to meet the president,” when he came to the OEOB cafeteria and was “standing at the door shaking hands and thanking his staff ” for coming back to work.55 Sara Taylor also remembers the sight of the president “coming into the cafeteria and thanking the staff and the custodians and cafeteria staff for coming back to work. He was trying to reassure

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everyone and be strong for us.” “It was a human moment as a leader. It made a big impression on me to see that,” said Scott Stanzel.

The president was concerned about the lack of evacuation plans for the White House staff. Ashley Estes remembers him asking her the next day, “Where did you go?” “What did you do?” “What was the warning?” He was “incredulous there was no preparation or plan,” says Linda Gambatesa. “He wanted that changed.” Estes and Walters had come from Texas with President Bush and were not surprised by his concern for the staff, but Estes remembers feeling “he had such weighty matters on him now and we didn’t want to be something he had to worry about in the face of all this.”

That concern for the staff was also demonstrated

by First Lady Laura Bush. Her scheduler Quincy Hicks Crawford remembers the first lady’s chief of staff, Andi Ball, calling the staff the night of September 11 “to check on us and to tell us to come to work the next day and that Mrs. Bush wanted to meet with us.” And on the morning of September 12, the first lady “put on a simple black shirt and gray slacks and went down to meet [her] staff.” “Nearly all had been told yesterday to run for their lives,” she wrote in her memoir. “Now they were being asked to come back to work in a building that everyone considered a target and for a presidency and a country that would be at war.” In meeting with her young staff, Mrs. Bush wrote, “I wanted to start by reassuring my staff. The night before, I asked Kathleene Card, a Methodist minister who is married to Andy Card, George’s Chief of Staff, to come in to speak. She tried to quiet their fears. But it was difficult. It was difficult to awaken in this new world.

We were all still moving on adrenaline, but with an overlay of anxiety. Would today bring something worse?”56 Crawford recounts, “Mrs. Bush was super calm and comforting.” “What she did for us she did for the whole country. It was needed. We were looking to the president for one thing, and looking to her for another, and she provided it.”

A few days after 9/11, Dr. Richard Tubb, the president’s physician, held a mental health information session for people who were struggling.

According to Tubb, Joe Hagin, as deputy chief of staff for operations, was very involved in the continuity of government plans and operational changes for the White House. He had been a volunteer firefighter and “suggested setting up sessions for the

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The well-being of her staff is a priority for First Lady Laura Bush as she listens while East Wing staff share their evacuation experiences, September 12, 2001.

“It was difficult to awaken in this new world.”

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After visiting victims wounded in the attack on the Pentagon, First Lady Laura Bush, with President of the American Red Cross Dr. Bernadine Healey, thanks White House staff for participating in a blood drive at the OEOB, September 12, 2001.

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staff called CISM—Critical Incident Stress Management.” On September 14, while the president was at the National Prayer Service at the National Cathedral, the White House Medical Unit set up the first CISM session in the OEOB’s Indian Treaty Room for staff who could not go to the service. Over the next few weeks, the CISM “brought in secular counselors, psychologists, faith-based counselors and the Med Unit themselves to counsel staff.” Tubb believes they saw up to one thousand staff members, either individually or entire offices together.

“It was really a tough three months for everyone, especially the younger people, the people who were told to run for their lives,” says Cindy Wright, a nurse in the White House Medical Unit who was traveling with the president on 9/11. “Some people were getting settled from that and then anthrax struck. Then everyone’s anxieties were heightened again.” Wright remembers how on 9/11 she was amazed that “the president was walking through the plane checking on us.” “It has always left an impression on me that in the midst of this crisis that he was taking time to get a feel of where his people were and to reassure everybody.” Dr. Tubb adds, “People struggled with the knowledge they were collateral damage with targets on their back based upon where they worked and who they worked for.” He viewed his job as “care by proxy”: by taking care of the people who take care of the president, he’s taking care of the president.

“NOTHING WAS EVER THE SAME” These first-person accounts and stories of this tumultuous day in history, and the emotional days that followed, reveal the understandable anxiety and disbelief felt by the White House staff and also the strength and determination, with a profound sense of purpose. Staff members drew that resolve directly from the president and the duty to the country they were proud to serve.

The country was now at war, and the physical signs of how life changed after 9/11 were evident not only in the heavily armed streets surrounding the White House but in the horror at the Pentagon, at Ground Zero in New York City, and in a field in rural Pennsylvania. “Everyone knew it was the start of a new chapter,” says Joel Kaplan, and “nothing was ever the same after 9/11.” Policy decisions and legislative priorities were impacted by the domestic consequences and issues that arose from the terrorist attacks. The staff ’s work in organizing the

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president’s schedule now also shifted in ways they could have not imagined on the beautiful sunny morning of September 11. On September 12 he visited the Pentagon to survey the damage and boost the morale of the rescue workers and those charged with the morgue detail, uncovering the bodies of their friends and colleagues. And on September 14, after leading the nation in the prayer service, President Bush traveled to New York City and stood atop the rubble of the collapsed towers and then spent hours consoling the grieving families. Not long after, he and Mrs. Bush hosted the Flight 93 families at the White House. White House staff were tasked with “the excruciating experience,” in the words of Kate Marinis and Sara Taylor, of calling those families and arranging their transportation to Washington and escorting them to the emotional meeting on the State Floor. When those families arrived, they were greeted by many White House staff who lined the halls in the East Wing ground floor to thank them and tell them they were praying for them. Kara Figg says that image of lining up to meet those families “is burned in my brain.” Taylor told me, “These families, who had not met before, were now forever connected in a very unique and shared tragic experience.”

That tragic experience connected the White House staff, too, as reflected in what Eric Motley shared with me: “Working at the White House is a binding experience in itself, but the strengthening of that bond deepened after an experience like this.”

NOTES The interviews on which this article is based were conducted by the author in January, February, and March 2021. Interviews of Christal West Atkinson, Ruth Elliott, Mary Haines, Joel Kaplan, Allison Riepenhoff Ratajczak, Richard Tubb, and Cindy Wright were conducted by Emily Michel. The interview of Noel Francisco was conducted by Chris Michel. Notes from these interviews are in the possession of the author. All quotations, unless otherwise cited, come from these interviews.

1.

“Flight of the Madisons,” White House Historical Association, online at www.whitehousehistory.org.

2. George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), 126.

3. George W. Bush, Presidential Daily Diary, September 11, 2001, online through George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum website, www.catalog.archives.gov.

4. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, 2004, 7, available online at https://govinfo.library.unt.edu.

5. Karl Rove, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight (New York: Threshold Editions, 2010), 249–50.

6. George W. Bush, Decision Points, 126.

7.

9/11 Commission Report, 8.

8.

Scott Thuman, “Inside the Situation Room and with the President on Sept. 11,” WJLA with McClatchey Newspapers and Reporter Mike Bohn, September 8, 2011, online at https://wjla. com.

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9. “The Frontline Interviews: Andrew Card,” interview by Jim Gilmore, PBS, January 5, 2014, online at https://www.pbs.org.

10. Ibid.

11. George W. Bush, Presidential Daily Diary, September 11, 2001.

12. Ibid.

13. Timothy McBride, quoted in “Voices of 9-11: ‘A Cacophony of Information,’” National Journal, no. 35 (August 31, 2002): 2478.

14. Laura Bush, Spoken from the Heart (New York: Scribner, 2010), 197.

15. Ibid., 198.

16. Ibid., 200.

17. “Voices of 9-11,” 2477–78.

medium.com.

52. “What Was It Like in the White House on September 11, 2001?” interview with Nicolle Wallace, Today, September 11, 2016, online at www.today.com/video.

53. Jimmy Orr, “ ‘A Plane Just Hit the Pentagon!’: A Wyomingite’s Memories from the White House on 9/11,” Cowboy State Daily, September 11, 2020, online at https://cowboystatedaily.com.

54. “Voices of 9-11,” 2490–91.

55. Page Austin, “9/11: A White House Story,” Harvest, September 10, 2015, online at Harvest Homeowners Association website, www. harvesthoa.com.

56. Laura Bush, Spoken from the Heart, 206–07.

18. George W. Bush, Presidential Daily Diary, September 11, 2001.

19. 9/11 Commission Report, 39–40.

20. Ibid., 39.

21. Quoted in Michael Bohn, “Inside the Situation Room: Tension,” Anchorage Daily News, May 31, 2016, online at www.adn.com.

22. 9/11 Commission Report, 40.

23. Ibid., 10.

24. Richard B. Cheney, with Liz Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 2.

25. 9/11 Commission Report, 40.

26. Ibid., 40–41.

27. George W. Bush, Decision Points, 129.

28. Quoted in Rove, Courage and Consequence, 254.

29. Steve Hendrix, “F-16 Pilot Was Ready to Give Her Life on Sept.

11,” Washington Post, September 8, 2011.

30. 9/11 Commission Report, 30.

31. Shyamantha Asokan, “9/11 Memorial for Victims of Flight 93 Is Dedicated near Shanksville, Pa.,” Washington Post, September 10, 2011.

32. Laura Bush, Spoken from the Heart, 206.

33. Bohn, “Inside the Situation Room: Tension.”

34. “Voices of 9-11,” 2474–75.

35. Ibid., 2483.

36. Nicholas E. Calio, oral history, March 14, 2013, George W. Bush Oral History Project, University of Virginia, Miller Center for Presidential History, Charlottesville, Va., online at https:// millercenter.org.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Special Agent Colin Johnson, who made all of us at that office feel safer on September 11, 2001, passed away from pancreatic cancer on September 5, 2018, at the age of 50. His funeral was held at the historic St. John’s Church, one block from the White House he helped to protect.

40. Paul Ryan, The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea (New York: Twelve, 2014), 86.

41. Rove, Courage and Consequence, 270.

42. Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (New York: Anchor Books, 2013), 137.

43. Michael J. Gerson, Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America’s Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don’t) (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 68.

44. Ibid.

45. Karen Hughes, Ten Minutes from Normal (New York: Viking, 2004), 234.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., 236.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., 237.

50. Ibid., 240–41.

51. Kristopher Purcell, “I Was a White House Staffer on 9/11 . . . I Will Never Forget the Look on President Bush’s Face,” posted September 10, 2020, Medium open platform, online at https://

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We’re here to take care of the president and first lady.

That’s our job. That’s our obligation.—Buddy Carter I don’t know if I was ever really afraid of dying . . . I was more afraid of actually losing the White House.—Claire Faulkner I was shaken like everyone else, but we still had a job to do here. . . . We had to press on.—Willie Murchison

The Executive Residence Staff Remember the White House on A TRAGIC DAY IN HISTORY September 11, 2001 d o n na h ayas h i s m i t h

“ w h e r e w e r e y o u ? ” That is what people ask each other about September 11, 2001. “Did you know anyone in New York, Pennsylvania, or at the Pentagon?” For the Executive Residence staff at the White House, the conversation then continues: “Were you at the White House that day? Do you think a plane was really aiming for it?”

The Executive Residence staff consists of approximately eighty-five people who serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States and, by extension, the first family. They include butlers, carpenters, chefs, curators, electricians, engineers, florists, housekeepers, operations aides, painters, plumbers, and ushers. It is not unusual for Residence staff to hold their positions for their entire careers, and many serve for thirty, forty, or even fifty or more years. Throughout the history of the White House, this tight-knit, diverse group of behind-the-scenes individuals have kept the White House running through many challenges,

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Carpenter Shop Foreman Ed Watson hangs the Presidential Seal on the Truman Balcony. above and left

Donna Hayashi Smith (left), associate curator of collections/ registrar in the Office of the Curator, documented the 9/11 experiences of the Executive Residence staff, many of whom gathered for a group photograph (above) in 2002.

L E F T : P H O T O B Y T I N A H A G E R F O R T H E G E O R G E W. B U S H L I B R A R Y / TOP: WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

WERE YOU AT THE WHITE HOUSE THAT DAY?

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As in 2007 (above), the South Lawn was to be set to welcome guests to the 2001 Congressional Picnic. On the morning of September 11, 2001, most of the Residence staff were fully occupied with the preparations when the terrorist attacks began. By 9:35 a.m. the staff reversed course and rushed to clear the tables from the lawn. Moments later they felt the ground shake as terrorists crashed a third plane, hitting the Pentagon.

even tragedies. They experience national events firsthand. Through it all, they remain committed to the first family, every first family, regardless of political party.

But in two centuries of White House history, there has never been an event like 9/11. About a year later, some members of the Executive Residence staff shared their memories with me. The following are some excerpts—their recollections, thoughts, and feelings about working at the White House through this traumatic day in the nation’s history. Twenty years later, as these memories are shared, many from the Executive Residence staff who were there that day have moved on, retired, or passed away.

WE FELT THE GROUND SHAKE Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was already a busy day at the White House, early in the morning. Most of the staff and contractors throughout the building and grounds were preparing for the Congressional Picnic, a festive annual event for members of

Congress and their families, with food and musical entertainment on the White House South Lawn.

At 9:35 a.m., approximately fifty minutes after the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Chief Usher Gary Walters decided to clear the 150 picnic tables that had been set up for the afternoon event. He predicted the White House social secretary would cancel the picnic, and he needed to prepare for what he expected would be President George W. Bush’s early return from Florida, where he was visiting an elementary school. Marine One would need to land on the South Grounds that day.

Houseman Bernard Ward was busy with his usual task of cleaning the Truman Balcony, off the Second Floor of the White House. This outdoor area, enjoyed by first families since its completion in 1948, affords a spectacular view of the South Grounds, with the Jefferson Memorial in the distance. Ward remembered seeing a plane coming toward the White House but pulling away minutes before the Pentagon was hit.

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evacuation was ordered. “We just threw the tools down and took off out the Southwest Gate as far as we could run. All I kept doing was looking up in the sky for another plane to come down,” said Watson.

After learning about the World Trade Center, Assistant Usher Daniel Shanks instructed the catering trucks to leave the South Grounds. He asked a Secret Service Uniformed Division (UD) officer if he could share his post on the South Grounds.

He recalled, “Watching the hour unfold from the gatehouse was surreal. The officer called his family to tell them how much he loved them and that he would be careful, then proceeded to unlock the gun cabinet and take out a shotgun, asking whether I knew how to use one.” After 9:30 a.m., Shanks recalled, “I walked outside the booth, moving to the center of the South Grounds to look up at the South Portico for signs of Residence activity, when we all felt the almost implosive concussion of the airplane crashing into the Pentagon. Turning south you could begin to see the heavy dark smoke rising.”

Operations Foreman Rickey McKinney was constructing a candy-striped tent for the picnic when Gary Walters told him to stop. McKinney remained on the South Grounds, standing on the southeast

WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

At the same time, Executive Chef Walter Scheib was standing at the Southeast Gate, receiving mobile kitchen equipment from the U.S. Army. He recounted, “I could hear what sounded like a plane accelerating. I said, ‘That’s strange. I never heard a plane that loud before.’ And I heard the really, really hard acceleration and then a thump, and it was like a concussion. You could feel a concussion in your chest. I remember looking back over my left shoulder, and there was this column of khaki-colored smoke, from the Pentagon.”

After watching the second plane hit the World Trade Center South Tower on the Usher’s Office television, Carpenter Shop Foreman Ed Watson returned to the South Grounds to alert his staff, who were building a stage. At that moment they heard the large explosion of the Pentagon crash. He said, “We felt it. I felt the ground shake. I mean, it was an explosion sound, a very loud explosion sound. The ground shook.” Watson watched Scheib run up the driveway then Watson told his staff to get into the White House. Gary asked Watson and his carpenters to remove the stage and help clear the South Grounds. They reluctantly agreed, but when a military jet appeared, an immediate

Smoke fills the air over the White House as the Pentagon burns barely two miles away on the morning of September 11, 2001 (opposite top). Executive Residence staff working on the South Lawn at 9:37 a.m. heard and felt the impact and soon saw the smoke rise when terrorists crashed American Airlines flight 77 into the western wall of the Pentagon. White House carpenters had been at work on the South Grounds building a stage at the time of the impact, “It was an explosion sound. . . . The ground shook,” recalled Ed Watson seen here with his colleagues in the White House Carpenter Shop (left to right, Robbie Thompson, Ed Watson, Charlie Brandts, and Tom Craven). Assistant Usher Daniel Shanks (opposite bottom) described the impact as an “implosive concussion.”

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knoll with Walters and with colleagues Mike Tederick and Mike Lawn. “And you could see the smoke from the Pentagon,” said McKinney, “where the plane had hit. It seemed like hours, but was only minutes when we saw the first fighter jet go by. And then we saw what they call a military observation plane, which has radar and different things on it, but it’s an unmarked plane, and it flew over the White House and made a steep climb just above the White House. I kind of had a feeling, I think all of us did out there, not knowing if that was indeed going to be it. We kind of looked at each other in what I would call a dead stare, because at that particular moment, you think of a million things—family, loved ones—but you never stop to think about the person that’s immediately with you. When something like this happens and you’re unsure, and you can look at someone you’ve worked with—and I’ve worked here twenty-one years—you can look at someone and see in their eyes the same thing that you feel and you know the severity of the situation.”

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At 9:55 a.m. Gary Walters ordered the evacuation of the White House. Administrative Assistant Claire Faulkner remembered the moment when Walters telephoned her from the South Grounds: “So as I was watching the Pentagon on TV, Gary called me, probably about three or four minutes after that, and said, ‘Claire, get out of the House. Get everyone out of the House that you can find, and run towards the south.’ And that was probably the most frightening thing of the whole morning, because Gary Walters would never leave the House. I mean, he’s so dedicated that he would never ask anyone to leave their office or their post for any reason, unless there was an emergency.”

Twenty years ago only Executive Residence supervisors carried government-issued cell phones; many staff carried pagers, but not all. Two-way radios were used mainly by electricians and the engineers. There were no complex-wide emergency radios. Because staff members were working in different areas of the White House and Grounds and

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not everyone had communication devices, widespread emergency evacuation notification was difficult. Most staff received notice by word-of-mouth, and some by landline and mobile phone.

Executive Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier repeatedly tried calling his staff working in the Pastry Shop on the First Floor Mezzanine from a landline telephone in his Chocolate Shop off the Ground Floor hallway but received a busy signal because someone was on the phone. A Secret Service UD officer finally reached the Pastry Shop after Chef Mesnier was forced to evacuate. His tall chef ’s toque helped his staff identify and reunite with him and the rest of the Pastry Shop staff at Lafayette Park.

There was a lot of confusion among the staff, and even a kind of paralysis when they were told to evacuate. Many left without their wallets or car keys. The Secret Service officers were also unnerved, not knowing what was going to happen next.

Nancy Clarke, the chief floral designer, went to the Usher’s Office and found Claire Faulkner sitting

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Heeding warnings that the White House was likely an imminent target, Chief Usher Gary Walters ordered the evacuation of the White House at 9:55 a.m. In the hopes that his staff would see him, Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier wore his tall chef ’s toque as he made his way through the evacuating crowds in Lafayette Park.

His plan worked, and he reunited with the kitchen staff at the corner of H Street NW and Connecticut Avenue.

NATIONAL ARCHIV ES AND R EC OR DS ADMINISTRATION

THE EVACUATION

WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

News of the evacuation order spread to the Residence staff primarily by word of mouth. Following Gary Walters’s instructions, Claire Faulkner (opposite, in gray) is remembered for spreading the order to leave as she sprinted through occupied offices without stopping. Unaware of the evacuation, florist Nancy Clarke (seen above making wreaths for the subsequent memorial service) focused on retrieving her purse and keys as an officer shouted “Just Go!”

alone. Faulkner said, “Nancy, evacuate. Just run.

Get out of here. Tell everyone to get out of here that you see.” As Clarke returned to the Flower Shop, a Secret Service officer in the hallway said, “Go! Go! Just get out the door. Get out the door.” Clarke recalled, “Well, I didn’t know what we were doing.

I did not understand that we were evacuating, and so I thought we were going to our cars. So I wanted to get my purse, so I said, ‘Well, can I at least go get my purse?’ thinking, I need my car keys. He said, ‘Oh, no, no. Just go.’ I said, ‘I need my purse.’ He said, ‘All right, go get it.’ So I ran in the shop, got my purse, and ran out.”

When Houseman Ben Kelly went to the men’s locker room to grab his belongings, the security doors started to shut and he quickly ran upstairs to the Ground Floor, where he found Secret Service officers armed with guns. “One of the UD guys was holding a shotgun. He said, ‘Run. Get the hell out of here. What are you still doing here?’ So we started running toward the gate.”

In the Curator’s Office on the Ground Floor,

no one was aware of the severity of the situation.

Administrative and Research Assistant Barbara McMillan was there with Associate Curator Bill Allman and Curator Betty Monkman when Faulkner ran in to tell them to evacuate and head south.

McMillan said, “She was not panicked, but she didn’t slow down. She didn’t come in and tell us and leave; she said it at a run, went in one door and out the other door.”

Assistant Curator Lydia Tederick recalled Gary Walters turning to her as she stood in the Usher’s Office watching the television. “He said, ‘Curators, go home.’ And I stood there for a minute. And he said, ‘Go home.’” Tederick described everyone getting ready to leave: “And we all kind of very slowly meandered out of the office.” Monkman initially wanted to go to the basement, which she thought was the safest location, but was told by a Secret Service officer to leave, so she followed everyone out the building. McMillan recalled walking to the Farragut North Metro station with Allman and seeing an unmarked military response plane

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left

Executive Chef Walter Scheib, who had been on the South Grounds at the moment the Pentagon was struck, ran to the Kitchen to gather his staff before fleeing the White House. The group is seen here at the corner of H Street NW and Connecticut Avenue observing military jets fly over.

overhead. She remembered feeling a bit unnerved and described the streets of Washington as eerily quiet and calm before everyone knew what was happening.

Some staff received word to evacuate after most had already left the building. Staff Kitchen Chef Rachel Walker and contractor Marybeth Williams were frying 70 pounds of chicken when Ben Kelly told them about the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center tower. Cell phone reception in the Staff Kitchen was very poor, so the chefs did not receive notice to evacuate. Assistant Chef Cristeta Comerford telephoned from the Northwest Gate instructing the kitchen staff to leave the building.

Walker and Williams ran up the staff spiral staircase and met Chef Scheib, who had returned to get them.

Houseman Willie Murchison was sitting in the men’s locker room with colleagues Ben Morrow and Lindsey Little when they learned on TV that the White House had been evacuated. Murchison recalled, “It said the White House had been evacuated, and we all looked at each other like, ‘This can’t

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be, because we’re still in here.’ We got word from the television, ” he reflected.

Some staff never received notice to evacuate.

Presidential Butler William (“Buddy”) Carter remembered working with two other butlers in the walk-in refrigerator area cutting lemons and limes for the picnic. When they walked into the First Floor Pantry at approximately 11:00 a.m., no one was there. Carter said, “So when we came upstairs, the house was empty, but we didn’t know it because we don’t pay that any mind. So we came into the Pantry, and we actually sat down and started cutting lemons and limes. This was about 11:00, 11:30 a.m. Yes. Everybody in the house had gone except for the three of us.”

Two engineers, Matt McCloskey and Richie Carter, were making repairs to the hot tub located next to the Cabana on the South Grounds. They did not receive a page to evacuate, and they did not carry a cell phone or radio. When they called the Usher’s Office to check in, a Secret Service officer answered the phone and told them they should have evacuated forty-five minutes earlier. They left but were

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Unaware of the unfolding drama, Houseman Willie Murchison (seen left preparing the North Entrance for a State Dinner) and his colleagues learned of the evacuation on the television in the men’s locker room. “We all looked at each other like, ‘This can’t be, because we’re still in here,’” he later recounted.

He returned to to work the next day explaining, “I was shaken like everyone else, but we still had a job to do here. . . . We had to press on.”

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While at work in an isolated area of the South Grounds on 9/11, Engineer Matt McCloskey learned of the emergency well after the evacuation order. He did eventually evacuate but was soon called back to work where he remained for another twentyfour hours. He later explained, “It was always drilled into us that we were essential and if anything like this ever happened. . . . we would be one of the ones that would have to stay.

So I was kind of prepared for it.”

later asked by Gary Walters to return. Secret Service officers escorted them back to the White House.

At the Executive Residence, essential staff are expected to provide support to the first family during inclement weather and emergencies, and September 11 was no different. One shop that is required to work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, is the Engineer Shop. After McCloskey returned to the White House, he stayed for the next twenty-four hours. In the afternoon he set up the Oval Office for President Bush’s address to the nation that evening. “I knew as an engineer nothing like this has ever happened,” he said, “but it was always drilled into us that we were essential and if anything like this ever happened or an emergency ever happened, that we would be one of the ones that would have to stay. So I was kind of prepared for it.” Others, including Dennis Freemyer, Bill Cliber, Dink Chapman, Dale Haney, and Bob Gallahan, and Buddy Carter, did not evacuate but sheltered in a White House corridor.

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in Manassas, Virginia, on his day off testing out a local golf course for an upcoming Residence staff outing. His wife notified him about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center tower. He was able to reach Gary Walters, who told him not to come to the White House. White went home and set up a telephone network after Walters said he did not know where many of the staff had evacuated to.

Because White lived in Virginia, it was easier for him to make calls than it was for those in Washington. He gathered people’s contact information through Residence staff and called families to let them know loved ones were okay and who they were with. “It just felt like I could do something. I wanted to do something,” White said. “Don’t know what, but you want to do something.”

Emotions ran high on September 11, and staff described feelings of vulnerability and fear, and also appreciation, as they reflected the next day and the following weeks. Many people spoke of confusion and rumors: were there car bombs at the State Department? The explosive sounds were later explained as sonic booms from fighter jets

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P H O T O B Y T I N A H A G E R F O R T H E G E O R G E W. B U S H L I B R A R Y

Joel Jensen, purchasing agent of the storeroom, was out on the road with a driver earlier than usual, making a number of last-minute food pickups for the Congressional Picnic. He heard about the World Trade Center towers while at a distributer and saw smoke from the Pentagon as he traveled from Maryland toward the District. He desperately tried calling his co-workers and the Usher’s Office, but everyone had evacuated. He eventually reached Assistant Chief Usher Dennis Freemyer, who instructed him to return all perishable foods to the vendors and avoid driving into Washington. Jensen said, “To me it was so frustrating, not knowing what’s going on. We’d probably spent at least half an hour by the edge of the road, just sitting there pulled off because I didn’t know what to do, what was going on. Even though I was not down here, the trauma to me was just bizarre. Every office—I mean, I’m calling the engineers, I’m calling electricians. I couldn’t believe nobody answered the phone. I had no idea what was going on. It’s sort of like I was in a black hole.”

Administrative Usher Worthington White was

Purchasing agent Joel Jensen, seen here in the White House storeroom, was on the road picking up food needed for the Congressional Picnic on the morning of September 11, 2001. Instructed to return the perishables after the attacks canceled the picnic, he was unable to contact his colleagues. “We’d probably spent at least half an hour by the edge of the road, just sitting there pulled off because I didn’t know what to do, what was going on. . . . I had no idea what was going on. It’s sort of like I was in a black hole.”

WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

Chief Usher Gary Walters (below) relied on Administrative Usher Worthington White to set up a telephone network to communicate with the dispersed Residence staff and their worried families. “It just felt like I could do something. I wanted to do something,” White said.

flying over the city. Executive Housekeeper Christine Limerick recalled the chaotic environment outside the White House: “Sirens were screeching.

Emergency equipment was trying to get through and traffic was stopped dead. Rumors were flying.

We heard that several of the embassies on Sixteenth Street had been bombed.” Remembering the walk up Connecticut Avenue, Walter Scheib said, “All the cars were stopped, doors open, radios up loud, and then at any store that had a TV in the window, people were crushed up against it, trying to look inside to see what was going on.”

Rachel Walker acknowledged feelings of uncertainty. “No, it was odd. It was like limbo. I mean, it didn’t seem that anybody was particularly hysterical, and it didn’t seem that anybody was complacent. It was just sort of a limbo, because nobody knew what was going on and everybody was just

sort of waiting for—you know, we’re so spoiled, we’re always being told, ‘Oh, you can come in this way. You can walk down that street.’ We were all just sort of waiting, I think, for the Secret Service agents to say, ‘Okay, come on back to work.’”

Rickey McKinney expressed his appreciation for the Secret Service. “You take for granted the officer that sits by the Map Room or the officer that’s at the South Portico, or the officers that are on the roof or at the North Portico, and you know that if something would have happened, they couldn’t leave the building. They didn’t have a choice. And it gives you a newfound respect for what they do, because you know that they had to stay, that, ‘I can’t leave. If this plane hits here, I’m just going with the rubble.’ It was very emotional to come and see the expressions on the officers’ faces. I know the four of us that were on that lawn that day will never forget it. I know that we’ll never take certain things for granted anymore.”

Assistant Chief Usher Dennis Freemyer described a conversation with Secret Service officer Dwayne (“Smitty”) Smith, who was not allowed to leave his post during the evacuation. “So I remember saying good-bye to him and saying, ‘You know if you can, run. Don’t be a hero and stand there and guard a room that nobody is going to be in.’”

When Freemyer stood on the White House roof and saw fighter jets, he experienced a sense of relief. “I remember going all the way up to the roof and standing there, and we could see the Pentagon burning from there. And that was just such an amazing sight and feeling. And then an F-16 or F-18 went just screaming right across just by us, and that made you feel a whole lot better. I mean, that was when I really felt safe, I guess, because then I knew our planes were up and they were patrolling.

And you know, just a whole lot of emotions that go through at that point. I mean, you are thinking of all the people that have died that you knew over at the Pentagon, and how probably the plane that hit the Pentagon had been intended for us and how we’d been spared.”

Walter Scheib was overcome with emotion as he expressed his appreciation for the passengers and crew aboard the plane that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. “So out of the whole deal, if I had to say who were the real heroes, they’re . . . passengers on a plane in a Pennsylvania hillside who felled it so that several hundred people here in the Residence who will never know them lived.”

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Despite the horror and confusion on that September morning, staff members tried to help each other cope during the intense moments of stress.

Cris Comerford formed an impromptu prayer group at Farragut Square. She said, “Okay. Let me just give these people a word of encouragement and do whatever I can do in my own little way and help to make this an easier time for them, even though I don’t know the answers and I don’t have the answer.

And we kind of like huddled and prayed.” As much as possible, the Residence staff stood together and accounted for each other, often moving as a group to safe locations where they found food, bathrooms, televisions, and landline phones.

Having a hospitality background, Christine Limerick encouraged the staff to congregate at the Capital Hilton Hotel, at the corner of Sixteenth

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and K Streets NW, where there were televisions, food, phones, and bathrooms. She purchased Tylenol and Advil at the hotel, knowing many people would probably have headaches. Those gathered at the Hilton included chefs, housekeepers, a butler, and Storeroom Chief Bill Hamilton. Hamilton offered to walk to his church, at Twenty-Seventh and Dumbarton Streets NW, to borrow his church’s van to take everyone home. Once he got the van, what would normally be a ten-block drive back to the hotel turned out to be thirty to forty blocks, due to road closures. Those at the hotel walked to Sixteenth and R Streets NW to meet him at a corner.

Hamilton transported Cris Comerford to Wheaton, Maryland, and Housekeeper Sylvia DaSilva and Rachel Walker to their homes in Northeast and Northwest Washington. Walker recalled

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ALL PHOTOS THIS SPREAD: WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

Storeroom Chief Bill Hamilton gathered at the Capital Hilton with colleagues before walking to Georgetown to borrow his church’s van in order to drive everyone home. Making long detours to navigate closed roads, he insisted on driving even those who offered to walk to their homes. Rachel Walker recalled Hamilton’s kindness. “He wanted us all to stay together as a group and get everybody to where they needed to go safely. . . .

Everybody from the Residence was so thoughtful that day . . . I didn’t see anybody panic.”

Florists Wendy Elsasser and Keith Fulghum retreated with twelve others to Fulghum’s home on Capitol Hill, stopping at the Department of Justice to borrow a wheelchair for a staff member recovering from surgery.

Hamilton’s kindness. She said she could walk the 3 miles to her home but he insisted on taking her.

“He wanted us all to stay together as a group and get everybody to where they needed to go safely. And that was all. But I just think that everybody from the Residence was so thoughtful that day and, you know, compassionate. I didn’t see anybody panic.”

People remembered these kindnesses. Betty Monkman gave Christine Limerick a $20 bill when she realized Limerick did not have time to grab her purse. From that day on, Limerick always kept a credit card and $20 with her White House identification badge.

Florists Wendy Elsasser and Keith Fulghum gathered other Residence staff as they walked.

“Anywhere Keith and I went,” said Elsasser, “one of us would say, ‘Do you need to come with us?

Are you okay? Are you with anybody?’” Fulghum described the 5 miles that he, Elsasser, and twelve others walked to his home on Capitol Hill as “The Long Walk.” “We were just thinking, ‘We’ve got to find a place to go where we can all be together, and then we’ll figure out what we’re going to do from there.’” Housekeeper Anita Costello had recently undergone leg surgery and could not walk well so Fulghum borrowed a wheelchair from the Department of Justice. “I just went in and said, ‘I work at the White House. We have a lady that has hurt her leg, and we need a wheelchair. Is there a possibility of borrowing one? You can have my pass [White House identification badge].’ They said, ‘We don’t want your pass. Your word’s good enough that you’ll bring it back. Just bring us our wheelchair back when you’re through.’ I said, ‘Fine.’”

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Reflections

I try to put it into a perspective of it was a black day, but it’s also a day that we can remember what’s really important, which is family.

—Bernard Ward, Houseman

September 11th was a terrible day for mankind. It is impossible to me to understand how human beings can commit horrific acts of atrocity against fellow human beings. The only positive experiences I remember that day involve Residence employees who truly cared about one another and who went out of their way to help each other. I wish we could continue to do this every day.—Christine Limerick, Executive Housekeeper

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A L L P H O T O S T H I S S P R E A D B Y T I N A H A G E R F O R T H E G E O R G E W. B U S H L I B R A R Y

I don’t know if I was ever really afraid of dying, but I was more afraid of actually losing the White House, not just for me, but just the thought of not having the White House as a national monument, and all of the things inside, that was what was so horrifying.

—Claire Faulkner, Administrative Assistant, Usher’s Office

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I think that being intimidated by that is giving in to terrorism, and I think then they win. I think you need to be alert and watch for signs. Just being scared is giving in.

—Rachel Walker, Staff Kitchen Chef

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In the end, we all recognized the fact that we’ve always all had a target on our chest here that anyone who works within the Residence confines always is in danger. This just made it a little bit more immediate that somebody actually tried to take action on it. But I think each and every one of us knows that every single day you come, and anytime that you’re near or in the Residence, that there’s potential for terrible things happening to you, but that’s just one of the things that makes this job so unique. But the honor and the pleasure of serving the first family and the country, I mean, that, to me, we’re not unique in that respect. There are plenty of people that would do it. We’re just privileged to get the chance to do it.—Walter Scheib, Executive Chef

P H O T O B Y T I N A H A G E R F O R T H E G E O R G E W. B U S H L I B R A R Y

Trying to put it in perspective, the terrible tragedy and the loss of life and the potential loss of life that we had, the loss of life we had with the planes, those too that were brought down in Pennsylvania: I try not to get comfortable with what happened, if that makes sense.

—Worthington White, Administrative Usher

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made a list of everyone’s belongings and where they were located and even had to break into a housekeeper’s locker.

Purchasing Agent Bill Grayson recalled literally catching a ride from Housekeeper Diane Kittle’s daughter on a construction crane to get to his car.

“We walked to Fifth Street,” he recalled. “And she got inside the crane, and I got up and held on the outside of it, and [her uncle] drove us across town to his car. It was her uncle, and he drove us to Waldorf.”

Staff who stayed or returned to the White House helped Gary Walters clear the South Grounds for the arrival of Marine One. Daniel Shanks recalled coordinating with Walters and Walter Scheib to serve meals to the Residence and administration staffs and security personnel. He described how he, Walter Scheib, Kitchen Steward Adam Collick, Buddy Carter, and Painter Bob Gallahan prepared a buffet out of the Main Kitchen using the food planned for the Congressional Picnic. Approximately 650 meals were served. When the D.C. Metropolitan policemen and Secret Service officers thanked Scheib, he responded, “Listen, you guys keep the guys on the outside that are supposed to be on the outside, and I’ll feed you. You’ll get all the food you want.”

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WENDY ELSASSER

The group got separated. Elsasser and Lydia Tederick were with others who eventually caught a cab to Fulghum’s home at Ninth and C Streets NE. Fulghum and his group walked as he pushed Costello’s wheelchair. They were reunited around 1:00 p.m. Fulghum offered his landline telephone so that everyone could make local and long distance calls to loved ones. He said, “But we still didn’t know if Washington was safe at that point.

We knew that we were safe together, but we didn’t know what else was going to happen for the rest of the day.” Some people watched TV; others chose not to. Keith ordered sandwiches for everyone and offered whatever food he had in his home.

Lydia Tederick finally heard from her husband, Mike, who worked in the Operations Department at the White House. He had stayed to help Gary Walters remove the picnic tables from the South Grounds. At about 3:30 p.m. Mike Tederick offered to come in his Toyota pickup truck and drive people back to the Ellipse if they needed to get to their cars.

Staff piled into the truck. Elsasser recalled, “I mean, literally, there were like six of us in the back of the pickup truck, a couple in the front, and there was nobody on the roads. And that was an eerie thing.”

Before picking up his colleagues, Mike Tederick

Staff members who had evacuated to Fulghum’s house on Capitol Hill show their relief after climbing into the back of Operations Aide Mike Tederick’s pickup on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. Tederick, who stayed and continued to work at the White House during the evacuation, had retrieved his colleagues’ abandoned car keys and delivered the group back to their cars. Elsasser remembered, “There were like six of us in the back of the pickup truck, a couple in the front, and there was nobody on the roads. And that was an eerie thing.”

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Residence staff who either remained at the White House during the evacuation or who were called back helped prepare the Oval Office for the President Bush’s 8:30 p.m. televised address to the nation. Dennis Freemyer, Matt McCloskey, and Richie Carter are seen (above) moving a sofa from the Oval Office to make way for the lights, cameras, and production crew.

After addressing the nation the president met with his National Security Council.

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SEPTEMBER 12, 2001 RETURNING TO WORK “Everybody was back at work the next day,” recalled Rachel Walker. “We were all so glad to see each other and be here. I think it couldn’t have been better. And I really think that people’s best sides showed that day.” Chef Walter Scheib recalled, “For most of the Residence staff, basically the next day was business as usual. It was really amazing to see the level of dedication that the staff had and that they knew what their job was.”

But other staff described mixed emotions. To many, management’s request that everyone return at first seemed insensitive, but they later thought it was the right decision. Wendy Elsasser said, “We were told by Gary Walters, chief usher. And at first I thought, ‘Gary, what are you thinking? We need a break.’ And then I realized how important it was that he did that. I felt it was a very wise decision to just proceed as normal. No, I didn’t want to come back to work.”

Roland Mesnier remembered the Pastry Shop contractors expressing hesitation about returning, but he agreed with Gary Walters’s approach. “So if I’d shown any of the same feeling they probably would have left. But by showing that it’s business as usual, then, no, nobody has left.”

Houseman Ben Kelly admitted to feeling uncomfortable when told by Housekeeping Supervisor Ron Jones to return the next day. “I didn’t know if I wanted to be anywhere near downtown, let alone in the White House. I’d never felt fear the way I felt that, because it really shakes you, because you have no control, and you don’t know what’s going to happen next.” Willie Murchison was not called to return to work but reported anyway. “I mean, of course, I was shaken like everyone else, but we still had a job to do here. I just felt as though I was scared, but we had to press on.”

Lydia Tederick’s van pool was not running on September 12 so she took Metro into the city. She remembered smelling the burning odor from the Pentagon when the door opened at the Pentagon station and how nervous she felt to be at work. “The whole time that I was at work that day, I felt as if I sat at my desk with one foot out the door. I didn’t feel safe sitting still. I felt like I had to move around a lot, and subsequently I don’t think a lot of work was actually done that day.”

Accountant Theresa Luchsinger was on vacation on September 11, and when she returned, “I

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walked up the parking area to the gates on East Executive Avenue there on the south side, and I just stopped, and I stared at the avenue for probably five minutes, and I just watched all the people walking around, and I just really had to think about going back to work, and this is where I work.”

Gary Walters gathered the staff on September 13 for a meeting to discuss the reality of working at the White House. He asked each person to consider if he or she wanted to continue working at what could be a “target.” The trauma of the day affected some staff more than others. Houseman Steven Gates recalled, “Gary Walters had a meeting with different parts of the staff, and he mentioned if anybody wanted to leave it might be in their best interest.

He’d rather that no one really leave, but if you’re that afraid, maybe that you should. Leaving never entered my mind.”

Electric Shop Foreman Bill Cliber described initial conversations when staff returned. “Some of the supervisors made bad statements at first. It was a reflection of bad times and an unusual event, but the quality people that we have working here, they’re dependable. They respond on their own.

They don’t have to be called. When they hear of an incident, they’re here on their own. Nobody has to pick up the phone and say, ‘Report to work.’

They’re either here or on their way to show up. So, I mean, just a couple of loose tongues got loose, and they shouldn’t have done that. But other than that, everybody else knows their job here, and they just know what we have to do.”

Barbara McMillan, Administrative and Research Assistant in the Curator’s Office said, “As people did learn about the plane that was possibly coming to the White House, and the enormity of it sank in, by Thursday, when people came back to work, they were very subdued, very quiet, beginning to lick their wounds, as it were. You know, you couldn’t defend yourself, ‘Oh, it’ll never happen to me.’ You began to come to grips with the fact that you had had a very close call, and that even though you were okay, a lot of people weren’t, and it could have turned out differently. I felt uncomfortable. . . . . I just didn’t really want to be here, but there wasn’t a better place to be.”

Some staff members reported feeling anxious and cautious, more vigilant of people and their surroundings, especially when entering and exiting the complex. Walter Scheib said, “You’re looking to see when you leave here, does anybody follow

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WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

you, are you being watched by somebody who’s trying to find a way to get to the family through you?” Some who had once proudly said they worked at the White House no longer divulged it for fear of becoming a target. Theresa Luchsinger said, “I don’t tell anybody where I work, what I do. That’s not because I think it’s super confidential; it’s just because you don’t really think about who that person might know or, ‘oh, hey, my neighbor works at the White House,’ or whatever. You just really don’t know, and I guess I probably consider not myself, but in general how the staff here could become a target. So, I have changed in that respect. I really don’t talk about what I do or where I work.”

On the other hand, Cris Comerford felt proud.

“Even though it was a scary feeling that the day before you were so vulnerable and you didn’t know what was happening, but being called in, I felt like one of the military guys. Even though, granted, we’re just cooking food, but I felt really proud working and coming back, like, ‘Fine. You might have hit the tower, but you didn’t hit my spirit.’”

Dennis Hawk of the Operations Department remembered Residence staff carrying pens inscribed “September 11, 2001” and wearing laminated images of the American flag with their work badges. Many wore American flag lapel pins.

There was a sense of camaraderie among the staff who had gone through this traumatic event together. Claire Faulkner reflected, “And people tell their stories and what happened to them on that day and their thoughts, and so it still weighs on everyone’s mind quite a bit. And knowing that we were sort of all in the same situation and all had a difficult time. Some people were not as open emotionally to each other as they are now. Now they feel that they really maybe have a stronger bond to each other.” Florist Bob Scanlan seemed to agree. “I enjoy my job,” he said. “I enjoy the people here, and I think because of the friendships that everyone has created and just, in general, the concern we have for one another is—I hate to use the term ‘family,’ but we really sort of are.”

Chef Roland Mesnier agreed with Gary Walters’s decision to call the Residence staff back to work on September 12, 2001, but also recalled, “There was a certain feeling of cold, death, not sure of what the next day’s going to be, for the longest time.”

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In the weeks that followed, counseling services were offered and staff were encouraged to use them. Small groups met with a chaplain, psychologist, and social worker. One-on-one counseling was also offered. As a way to personally cope, Administrative Usher Worthington White helped to coordinate these sessions. He said, “So, I tried to focus on making a difference post event, to identify what people needed and help facilitate some remedies.

So instead of just sitting around feeling sorry for the fact that I wasn’t here, I tried to be helpful on the day that it happened, and I tried to be helpful post event in getting people some therapy and some communication.”

Bob Scanlan chose not to think about September 11. “Actually, I try not to. It’s not that it’ll ever be forgotten. I think it’s just you have to get past it.

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If we dwell on things too long, we only find anger.”

Ben Kelly followed a similar strategy. He said he suffered emotionally and physically days after September 11, as he avoided thinking about it. He experienced a tightness in his head and started having headaches. “And I realized I was just doing a lot of thinking. Coming here was just so much tension. It was getting to me a little bit. But, actually talking about it, made it feel better.” He also acknowledged the importance of family, felt grateful, and decided not to put off opportunities. “People actually were a little bit more cordial on the street,” he recalled.

Roland Mesnier recounted struggling with feelings of anxiety in the days and weeks after September 11. “The first day after, the first day that I came back, I felt fine. But shortly after that, mainly in the morning I got some anxiety attacks, if you will, for several weeks. And even though my mind

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In the days and weeks that followed the attacks, Dennis Hawk in the Operations Department recalled staff expressing their patriotism by adding laminated flags to their badges and flag pins to their lapels.

WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASS OCIATION

THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED

would say, ‘Oh, come on. Don’t be a fool. This is nothing to worry about. Everything is cool,’ there was a certain feeling of cold, death, not sure of what the next day’s going to be, for the longest time.” He experienced two months of looking up in the sky and feeling anxious whenever he heard an airplane overhead, observing its height in the sky. “And then I must say, I observed people much more than I did before.” Later Mesnier purchased a painting of the World Trade Center twin towers. He said he needed to have it even though he is not a New Yorker and not religious, but he believed God was giving sun and dry weather for people to recover the remains of those who died in New York.

Rickey McKinney said, “Personally, I think it has made me aware of how short life can be. There are a lot of things that we take for granted. We take for granted that we’re going to get up in the morning.

We take for granted we’re going to go to work. And you learn to appreciate the things that ordinarily you would take for granted personally. Family is a given. You learn to appreciate and realize how much your family means to you, but in my case, I think I’ve learned to appreciate the fact that out of all the people in the world, I’m among the few chosen ones that get to come through that gate every day.”

In the aftermath, safety procedures were developed and security policies improved. An emergency response committee was established to address procedures and preparedness. This small group unified and empowered staff to make changes and improvements for all emergencies. It recommended additional communications devices, Victim Rescue Units (VRUs), and emergency supplies for all staff. Daily procedures changed. Copies of the computer database were stored at off-site locations. Departments instituted new policies and security procedures. Offices printed small cards listing emergency contact phone numbers for staff to store with their badges. Administrative Usher Worthington White led much of this effort. “I try to calm people’s nerves, that our getting prepared is less response to the terror attack than it is to the fact that those attacks showed us that we had a lack of preparedness for all kinds of different emergencies.”

Lydia Tederick said the Curator’s Office staff began carrying radios and regularly communicated to others in the office where they were working in the Residence, especially if in basement storage areas or Private Quarters where there was no

telephone reception. Bill Allman received a government-issued cell phone. China and glassware collections were divided for storage between off-site and on-site locations so that an emergency could not eliminate an entire collection.

Public tours and events hosted by President and Mrs. Bush ceased for many weeks. East Executive Avenue and the Ellipse were closed to the public.

New steel plate barriers to control vehicular traffic appeared. Soon after September 11, procedures were changed to require every visitor that enters the White House for a tour to undergo a Secret Service background clearance. Staff must now show photo identification and a parking pass to access the Ellipse.

Through the day of September 11 and the year thereafter, the Residence staff remained steadfast in their sense of duty and commitment to the president and first lady and the White House itself.

Buddy Carter said, “But, we’re here to take care of the president and first lady. That’s our job. That’s our obligation.” Claire Faulkner recalled, “I don’t know if I was ever really afraid of dying, but I was more afraid of actually losing the White House, not just for me, but just the thought of not having the White House as a national monument, and all of the things inside, that was what was so horrifying.”

sources The conversations on which this article is based were conducted by the author in 2002 and 2003.

The author would like to thank her colleagues at the White House and the National Archives and Records Administration in the publication of this article.

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PRESIDENTIAL SITES Quarterly Feature

The President’s Retreat at CAMP DAVID

LEFT AND ABOVE: GETTY IMAGES

m at t h ew w endel

A short trip from the White House by Marine One, Camp David, the secluded compound in the Maryland mountains, proved a fitting retreat for President George W. Bush and his advisers as they continued their postSeptember 11 meetings over the weekend of September 15, 2001. Matthew Wendel, senior advance representative in the Office of Presidential Advance and personal chef and personal assistant to the president, evacuated the White House with his colleagues on the morning of September 11. He later prepared meals at Camp David for President Bush with the goal of providing some comfort through food during the weekend meetings. The account that follows is Matthew Wendel’s firsthand experience of serving the president at this historic presidential site.

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located just 60 miles north of washington, d.c., in the catoctin mountain park outside of Thurmont, Maryland, Camp David is a mysterious place to most of the country. It is like a small resort with the feel of a camp, but it is officially Naval Support Facility Thurmont, a military facility run by the navy. It has been used as a presidential getaway ever since the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who called it Shangri-La. It was later renamed Camp David by President Dwight D. Eisenhower for his grandson.

After many layers of security, the approach to Camp David is down a winding one-lane road through beautiful woods. Then cabins—some are more like small houses—come into view, all painted dark green so that they perfectly blend into the landscape.

The cabins have names such as Hickory, Chestnut, and Aspen, which is the president’s well-appointed three-bedroom cabin with its own swimming pool and putting green. My one-room cabin was named Linden. Much like a studio apartment, it had everything I needed and was next to the kitchen in the main lodge, named Laurel. That was where everyone congregated to talk about their day before they sat down for meals together. Laurel was also where the president’s office was, as well as a large conference room. I spent much of my time in the kitchen at Laurel.

Shangri-La is now the name of the cantina where I sat after a long day in the kitchen, drinking a cold beer and socializing with the staff stationed there or traveling with the president.

There is also a small movie theater in Shangri-La—much like a home theater.

Guests invited for the weekend often watch first-run movies sent to the president for his viewing after dinner, and I often joined them.

The Bushes used Camp David as often as they could. It was close to Washington, D.C., and offered just about any recreational activity you would care to

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do—from tennis to swimming to horseshoes to horseback riding. Everyone got around at Camp David by walking or biking, or by using a golf cart. I was lucky to always have my own golf cart. It was a retreat for all of us. Even though I might work twenty to thirty hours on the weekend there, it was a chance to get away from the craziness of Washington.

Initially I didn’t go to Camp David with the president and first lady, but after a couple of visits, Mrs. Bush asked me to start going with them and to teach the staff some of my recipes. Since Camp David is a naval facility, it is staffed by navy personnel who take care of all the white house history quarterly

previous spread

Cabins line the roadway at the presidential retreat at Camp David and the president is saluted as he arrives at the camp. opposite and above

Matthew Wendel, seen at work in the Camp David kitchen, often stayed in Linden Cabin (above) during his visits to cook for the president and his guests.

O P P O S I T E : A U T H O R’ S C O L L E C T I O N / A B O V E : G E O R G E W. B U S H P R E S I D E N T I A L L I B R A R Y A N D M U S E U M

maintenance, from upkeep and cleaning of the cabins to cooking for all the people stationed there. I worked mainly with chefs Mike Hadley and Ronnie Mills, great guys and talented chefs who were used to cooking in large quantities for sailors on ships. They were willing and able to learn all they could from me about the likes and dislikes of the Bushes and to help prepare foods that gave the first family a familiar taste of home. My managing of food and entertainment also took some of the pressure off the staff. As far as I can tell, I am the only civilian to have been at Camp David on a regular basis to cook for a president.

At the White House the food was prepared by a team of trained chefs and was a bit fussier. It had to be, as the meals were prepared not only for the family but also for world leaders, staged as large formal events. But at Camp David, the Bushes wanted relaxed, casual food.

To get ready for weekends at Camp David, my routine was to first find out

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what guests would be there and then send Mrs. Bush’s assistant suggested menus. Mrs. Bush then made the choices, and I sent the menu to the chefs at the camp to give them a heads-up.

Shopping choices were limited in Thurmont, so I often brought hard-to-find items with me from D.C. The staff at the camp would always be on the lookout for fresh vegetables from farmers’ markets when they were available. But the growing season in the mountains of Maryland is very short compared to central Texas! As time went on, Mike and Ronnie got to know the preferences of the first family, and I trusted them to make the right choices.

THE DAYS AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 On the morning of September 12, 2001, I rode a nearly empty bus to the White House. That morning, and every morning afterward, I scanned the bus for anyone who looked suspicious. Like everyone else, I was on edge, the more so

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above and left

Working from Camp David on September 15, 2001, President George W. Bush answers a reporter’s question during a meeting with members of the National Security Council and delivers his weekly radio address to the nation. opposite

ALL IMAGES THIS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES

During the weekend of September 15, 2001, the president’s guests at Camp David dined together at one large table, as seen here in 2007.

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because I was returning to work at one of the previous day’s targets. The bus stopped short of its regular route and I got off with trepidation, then walked up to a new barricade that was now a block farther away from the White House.

We had a new perimeter. I wondered if this is how life would be from then on. I showed my White House identification and was allowed through the checkpoint.

Once inside, I got word that President Bush wanted to go to Camp David that weekend to meet with his advisers. Mrs. Bush wanted to have a simple menu like burgers and fried chicken— comfort foods of a sort. The president would first travel to New York City to see the devastation of the World Trade Center, and once at Camp David he would meet with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and many other top officials. The whole world had changed. And, like the rest of America, I was unsure of the future.

That Thursday morning, I arrived at Camp David in a secure car with an army sergeant who drove me through multiple checkpoints heavily guarded

by Marines with bomb-sniffing dogs.

The van was searched along with my luggage. It felt like I was entering a military base in a war zone. In essence, I guess I was. I finally made it through the camp’s large, iron gates.

I had been in touch with the camp staff to let them know about the menu and number of guests expected. This was not a typical visit to Camp David, where the first family had been many times already for relaxation. Vice President Cheney was already there, and the other top administration officials would soon follow. The president arrived about 11:00 p.m. after a long day viewing the destruction in New York City.

At Camp David, the guests eat at one large table. Meals are served family style.

Mrs. Bush’s choice of comfort foods for that weekend aimed to ease some of

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the stress and sadness that everyone was feeling. I had never expected anything like an attack on our nation to happen, and now I was to prepare and serve foods that would not only comfort but sustain the people who were making the hardest decisions of their lives, decisions that would affect our country forever.

SOURCE Matthew Wendel’s account first appeared in his Recipes from the President’s Ranch: Food People Like to Eat (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2020), 20–21, 22–25, 26.

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REFLECTIONS History’s Perspective

it is hard to believe that twenty years have passed since that beautiful early fall morning in September 2001 that changed our lives forever. At that time, I was serving as chief of staff to the president of Georgetown University. Founded in 1789, just three years before the cornerstone was laid at the President’s House, the university is built on one of the highest vantage points in Washington, D.C. From its towers, generations of scholars have witnessed life unfold in the nation’s capital city below. On my way to campus early on the morning of September 11, I drove past the western side of the Pentagon shortly before it was struck by a hijacked passenger plane. I will never forget the smoke that soon crossed the sky to the White House and filled the historic vista that could be seen from the Georgetown hilltop. At the end of the day, our community would be changed and the impact of loss on the university’s alumni and supporters would be felt for years.

As the smoke rose from the Pentagon, a dramatic evacuation was unfolding at the White House just a couple of miles away from my office in Georgetown.

After 201 years, it was a real possibility that the nation’s most treasured symbol of freedom and democracy could be lost along with the extraordinary archival and fine and decorative arts collections housed within its walls.

Almost two centuries earlier, when the White House was just fourteen years old, British troops had descended on the

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President’s House as First Lady Dolley Madison fled, but only after seeing to the safe removal of Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington. The fire set by the British consumed the interior of the house and much of its early history.

Had the events of September 11, 2001, been different, the White House itself may have been damaged again or even destroyed completely. The magnitude of the impact on the nation would have reverberated well beyond the tragedy that occurred that day.

I returned to work on September 12, along with thousands of Washingtonians and the dedicated White House staff, many of whom are featured in this issue. On my daily commute over the next sixteen months, I witnessed the swift reconstruction of the Pentagon.

We now look back on the events of September 11 with the perspective that history allows. American presidents, first families, and White House staff have faced fires, wars, pandemics, depressions, protests, and other challenges for 221 years, rose to each occasion, and delivered this extraordinary home—the “people’s house”—to each president and staff who followed.

For the past sixty years, the White House Historical Association has been privileged to be the private partner to the White House to support and provide non-taxpayer funding to preserve the museum standards that First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy envisioned, fund historic preservation and acquisitions

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for the collection, and share the rich stories of American history that have taken place in the building we call the White House.

As this issue marks the twentieth anniversary of the horrific tragedies of one day in American history, we at the Association also count our blessings for the potential destruction that did not occur on that day and this makes us all the more mindful of our responsibility to carry out the Association’s mission.

As I begin my eighth year as president of the Association, I continue to have the privilege of working with the president, first lady, and their staffs. Since 1961, we have worked with twelve presidents and first ladies. Our role on behalf of the American people has remained the same from presidency to presidency. It is our nonpartisan, nonprofit, and public-private partnership with the White House that makes us unique. We owe a debt of gratitude to Mrs. Kennedy for her vision to create this organization, and its historic work is her living legacy in the White House. opposite

A view from Georgetown University south to the Washington Monument and across the Potomac River to Virginia, 2021. above

Stewart D. McLaurin stands beside a Double Scottish Rose hand carved from Aquia sandstone. Commissioned in 2018 by the White House Historical Association, the carving is inspired by those that embellish the White House.

A B O V E : W H I T E H O U S E H I S T O R I C A L A S S O C I AT I O N / O P P O S I T E : P H I L H U M N I C K Y/ G E O R G E T O W N U N I V E R S I T Y

STEWART D. M C LAURIN PRESIDENT, WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

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The 2021 Christmas Ornament features a reproduction of a colorful painting of the Blue Room Christmas tree that was made for President and Mrs. Lyndon Baines Johnson’s 1967 Christmas card.

The quote on the reverse, from a speech delivered

by President Johnson in 1965 honors his dedication to civil rights reform: “Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man.”

to order visit shop.whitehousehistory.org

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WHITE HOUSE HISTORY Quarterly

WHITE HOUSE HISTORY QUARTERLY features articles on the historic White House, especially relating to the building itself and life as lived there through the years. The views presented by the authors are theirs and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the White House Historical Association.

front cover: Timeline of events, September 11, 2001.

back cover: The American flag flies at half staff above the North Portico of the White House as President George W. Bush addresses the nation from the Oval Office on the evening of September 11, 2001.

[Tim Sloan, AFP via Getty Images] the white house historical association was chartered on November 3, 1961, to enhance understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of the historic White House. Income from the sale of White House History Quarterly and all the Association’s books and guides is returned to the publications program and is used as well to acquire historical furnishings and memorabilia for the White House.

address inquiries to: White House Historical Association, P.O. Box 27624 Washington, D.C. 20038 books@whha.org © Copyright 2021 by the White House Historical Association. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the White House Historical Association.

issn: 2639-9822

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