Political Dog Days, Part II

As serious as the problems of the Bush economy have proved to be for all but the most affluent of Americans, they pale in comparison to the damage done by what has come to be called the Bush Doctrine, which now governs our conduct in the family of nations.

For the first 234 days of his presidency, George W. Bush appeared to be ambling along like a west Texas drifter, with no discernible destination and nothing much on his mind. He logged tens of thousands of air miles between Washington and Waco, and showed more enthusiasm for clearing brush on his ranch outside Crawford than charting a productive path for a nation still staggering from the 2000 election debacle. His job approval ratings hovered in the vicinity of 50 percent as people waited to see what policies he might be inclined to pursue (other than tax cuts, his agenda-topper).

Then came the 235th day—September 11, 2001—and in a little more than 100 minutes on that sunny autumn morning, everything changed so massively and so traumatically that the very date would become the name for a chain of horrific events that took place on that Pearl Harbor-like day of infamy. Not even the year is needed to bring to mind all the inflictions of terror and agony, and their indelible impact. September 11, or 9/11, says it all.

This is not the place and I am not the person to describe yet again the unspeakable horror of that day. Only the survivors of the 3,000 people who died, the tens of thousands who narrowly escaped, and the numberless heroes, sung and unsung, who ministered to the needs of others with no thought to their own safety can claim authority to tell the rest of us what a living hell 9/11 was, and is, and will remain. All the rest of us are in the lower ranks of the aggrieved. We were among the hundreds of millions worldwide who became unwitting onlookers via television to a diabolical and masterfully orchestrated sequence of suicide bombings unprecedented in their scale and shock. If there is anyone in this multitude of removed eyewitnesses to whom the rest of us might be expected to look in such a time of speechless confusion, grief, and rage, it would surely be the president of the United States.

The first fragmented details of the hijacking of four commercial airliners and the crash of one of them into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York at 8:46 a.m. were communicated within five minutes directly to President Bush by one of his top aides as they were traveling by motorcade to an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, for his first appearance of the day. At 9:04 a.m.—one minute after another of the planes had struck the South Tower—the president walked into a classroom at Booker Elementary School to listen in on a reading lesson. (Some in his entourage saw this second explosion live on a television screen in another room of the school.) A minute or two later, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card approached the president and whispered to him that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center, and added: "America is under attack."

President Bush sat speechless, like a man in shock. His glazed eyes blinked slowly, as if his brain were trying to break through the frozen expression of puzzlement on his face. The only sound or movement in the room came from the children as they read in unison from their storybook. The minutes ticked agonizingly by. At length, the president began to make comments to the children, giving them encouragement and praise. His aides were pacing nervously at the back of the room, but he averted their gaze. Some seven or eight minutes into the reading, the students were stopped by their teacher, but Bush remained seated and lingered to chat and pose for photographs. Finally, at about 9:16, he made his way to the door and followed an aide into an adjacent classroom, where his staff had set up a temporary communications post.

At 9:30, the president read a terse statement to the press corps, saying, "Today we've had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack." Seven minutes later, as the presidential motorcade was racing to the Sarasota airport and Secret Service agents in Washington were whisking Vice President Dick Cheney from his White House office to a "safe location" underground, yet another of the hijacked planes exploded on impact into the Pentagon, just three miles west of the U. S. Capitol.

Air Force One took off from Sarasota at 10 a.m., flying north toward Washington, but 45 minutes into the flight it turned west after Vice President Cheney and the Secret Service advised Bush not to return to the White House while it was under high alert. The plane landed about an hour later at an air base in Louisiana, where Bush taped a short speech. By 1:30 p.m., they were airborne again, on a northward course to a Strategic Air Command base in Nebraska. There, it was finally decided that President Bush must address the nation on television from the Oval Office that evening.