In My Time - Dick Cheney [180]
AT 1:10 P.M. ON October 18, 2001, Lynne and I boarded Air Force Two for the forty-five-minute flight to New York’s LaGuardia Airport. It would be our first visit to the Ground Zero site of the 9/11 attacks. We had been airborne just a short time when Scooter Libby received a call on the plane. There had been an initial positive test result indicating a botulinum toxin attack on the White House. If the result was confirmed, it could mean the president and I, members of the White House staff, and probably scores of others who had simply been in the vicinity had been exposed to one of the most lethal substances known to man. A single gram of botulinum toxin, evenly dispersed and inhaled, can kill a million people. There is an antitoxin, but it does not reverse the paralysis that botulinum causes, although it does keep it from progressing further.
Biological weapons attacks on the homeland were not just the stuff of science fiction. The first attacks with anthrax mailed in letters had occurred just a month before. The most recent case—anthrax mailed to Senator Tom Daschle’s office on Capitol Hill—had occurred three days earlier. Against that backdrop, the report of a positive hit for botulinum at the White House had to be taken seriously indeed. When we landed at LaGuardia at 1:55 p.m. to board helicopters headed to Ground Zero, I told Scooter Libby to stay on board the plane, keep working the phones, and get as much information as he could.
As our helicopters neared the southern tip of Manhattan, Ground Zero came into sight. I felt the same sense of anger and sadness I’d felt on the night of 9/11 when I’d first seen the wreckage at the Pentagon. Viewed from the air, the devastation was staggering. My resolve needed no strengthening after what we had already lived through, but the destruction below made me hope the time for justice would be soon. As the helicopter banked away from Ground Zero, I caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty in the distance. On a day as brilliantly sunny as 9/11 had been, there she was, tall and proud in the harbor, a reminder of America’s goodness and strength.
I met with Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor George Pataki for a briefing on the recovery efforts at Ground Zero, and then we visited the site on foot. A section of the steel frame at the bottom of one of the World Trade towers still stood, wrenched and charred, pointing toward the sky. In front of it, recovery workers from around the country were gathered. They spoke of coming back to the site day after day and working past the point of exhaustion. They spoke of their commitment to continue until the job was done. I walked down the line and thanked each one.
Scooter Libby was waiting for me back at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, where I was scheduled to give the keynote address at the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner in a few hours. He told me there had been two positive hits for botulinum toxin on one of the White House sensors. Tests were being run, he said, and we would have those results by noon the next day.
I put on the white tie and tails required for the evening’s speech while a connection to the president, who was in Shanghai, was set up. Then I sat down in front of my secure video screen and delivered the news to him and his traveling party. “Mr. President, we and many others may well have been exposed.” In eighteen hours, when the tests came back, we would know.
I went downstairs to the dinner and with the possibility of the botulinum attack weighing on my mind, delivered my remarks. Each of the men and women in the room that night had been touched in some way by the attacks of September 11. The memory was