In My Time - Dick Cheney [3]
TWO THOUGHTS WERE UPPERMOST in my mind that morning: preventing further attacks by getting planes out of the skies and guaranteeing the continuity of a functioning United States government. We began immediately taking precautions to ensure that any attack on Washington would not decapitate the leadership of our nation. The president stayed away from the city until things clarified. We evacuated key leaders in the House and Senate to a secure location away from D.C. I had trouble getting hold of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, but finally reached him at Andrews Air Force Base, where his security team had taken him. I brought him up to date and urged him to move to a secure location, which he did. I called him at least once more that day. It was crucial that he know what was happening since he was second in line to succeed to the presidency.
The president pro tempore of the Senate, Robert Byrd, who was next in the presidential line of succession after the Speaker, refused to move to a secure location. He went home instead. Others who did evacuate were anxious to return to Washington as soon as possible. At one point my friend Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma asked why the executive branch had the right to decide when members of Congress, a coequal branch of government, could come back to Washington. “Because we’ve got the helicopters, Don,” I told him.
With all air traffic to and from the continental United States being grounded, requests began to come in for planes to fly senior officials who had been stranded. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, was stuck in Zurich, Switzerland. The magnitude of the economic impact of the attack would be significant, and we needed Alan back in the United States to help us manage it. We asked the Pentagon to get him a plane.
While we were managing things from the PEOC, another meeting was under way in the White House Situation Room. The PEOC staff attempted to set up a videoconference to connect the two rooms, and we managed to get images of the Situation Room meeting up on one of our screens, but we couldn’t get any audio of the meeting. We were getting better real-time information from the news reports on TV, but because of a technical glitch, I couldn’t hear those reports when the video of the Sit Room meeting was on display. Finally I asked that the videoconference to the Sit Room be turned off so we could follow the reporting on TV. I told Eric to get on the phone and try to listen in on the Sit Room meeting, but after a few minutes he described the audio quality as “worse than listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks at the bottom of a swimming pool.” I told him to hang up. If something important was happening upstairs, they could send someone down or call us direct.
In the meantime, Secretary Rumsfeld had made the decision to take our nation’s military alert level from the peacetime Defense Condition 4 to DefCon 3, higher than we’d been since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Scooter Libby, my chief of staff, and Eric Edelman pointed out that someone needed to tell the Russians that we were going to a higher alert level. They were at that moment conducting major military exercises, and we didn’t want them to be surprised or think our alert level had been raised because of them. We had all lived through the Cold War and knew the possibility of a mistaken nuclear launch had to be kept in mind. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice made the call, got through to