![]() ![]() For the day, it was pretty fancy-fancy stuff. I had this high-tech pager on my belt-it was two-way, in that you could send back one of like 14 preprogrammed responses. Emma Booker Elementary School, Sarasota, Fla.Īri Fleischer: Back in 2001, no one had iPhones or BlackBerrys. Those were probably the last carefree moments he had in his term.Īndy Card: I remember literally telling him, “It should be an easy day.” Those were the words. We were out of the Oval and he was relaxed. It was a beautiful day-we were in his suite. Rod Paige and I briefed him ahead of his remarks to the press. He was pushing No Child Left Behind as Congress was coming back to Washington. Alexander “Sandy” Kress, senior education adviser, White House: The whole point of the trip was education. It was very routine-just him, me, Andy Card and Deb Loewer from the Situation Room.Īndy Card: The president was in a great mood. There was nothing in the briefing about terrorism. There was one thing that caught his attention, and he picked up the phone to call Condi to ask her to follow up on it. A good bit of the briefing that morning was about Israeli matters. The second intifada was well underway then, and the briefings at that time were very heavy on Israeli-Palestinian stuff. He asked me if I’d gone to the beach the night before, and I told him I’d just gone right to bed. Mike Morell, presidential briefer, Central Intelligence Agency: I walked into his suite he was surrounded by breakfast foods and he hadn’t touched any of it. It was low-ranking staff and a lot of the top journalists didn’t come. Sonya Ross, reporter, Associated Press: This was a garden variety trip. He said, “Yeah, we’ll get you something when we get to the airplane.” Needless to say, I promptly forgot about it that day. Tubb if he had something he could give me for the swelling. I remember I got stung by a bee, and I asked Dr. Gordon Johndroe, assistant press secretary, White House: The day starts off very normally-the president went for a run, and I took the pool out with the president. It was unusual for President Bush to stay out late like that, but it was a relaxing evening.Īri Fleischer, press secretary, White House: The day couldn’t have begun any better or more beautifully. I remember being struck by that smell coming from Air Force One the night before. There was a terrible stench in the air-the red tide had killed a lot of fish that had washed up on the shore. This oral history, based on more than 40 hours of original interviews with more than two dozen of the passengers, crew and press aboard-including many who have never spoken publicly about what they witnessed that day-traces the story of how an untested president, a sidearm-carrying general, top aides, the Secret Service and the Cipro-wielding White House physician, as well as five reporters, four radio operators, three pilots, two congressmen and a stenographer responded to 9/11.Īndy Card, chief of staff, White House: We woke up in Sarasota, Florida, at the Colony Resort. The story of those remarkable hours-and the thoughts and emotions of those aboard-isolated eight miles above America, escorted by three F-16 fighters, flying just below the speed of sound, has never been comprehensively told. Bush struggled even to contact his family and to reach Vice President Dick Cheney in the White House bunker. ![]() All the while, he and his staff grappled with the aftermath of the worst attack on American soil in their lifetimes, making crucial decisions with only flickering information about the attacks unfolding below. On board, President Bush and his aides argued about two competing interests-the need to return to Washington and reassure a nation and the competing need to protect the commander in chief. Bush, as well as 70 box lunches and 25 pounds of bananas-traversed the eastern United States. Shortly after the attacks began, the most powerful man in the world, who had been informed of the World Trade Center explosions in a Florida classroom, was escorted to a runway and sent to the safest place his handlers could think of: the open sky.įor the next eight hours, with American airspace completely cleared of jets, a single blue-and-white Boeing 747, tail number 29000-filled with about 65 passengers, crew and press, and the 43rd president, George W. But for a tiny handful of people, those memories touch American presidential history. Nearly every American above a certain age remembers precisely where they were on September 11, 2001. Graff ( is the author of The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, and a former editor of POLITICO Magazine. ![]()
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