In My Time - Dick Cheney [4]
A decision had been made to set Air Force One down at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where the president would tape a brief message to the American people. Shortly before he landed, we began to get word in the PEOC of international flights in trouble. The Coast Guard was receiving distress calls from United, Air Canada, and Continental planes, all over the Atlantic. Within a half hour, we were told that those flights were no longer cause for concern, but there was a Korean Air flight over the Pacific inbound for Anchorage with its hijack code squawking. Fighter jets had been scrambled from Alaska’s Elmendorf Air Force Base to shadow it.
Condi Rice asked me where I thought the president should go from Barksdale. “Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha,” I told her. From my time as secretary of defense, I knew that the U.S. military has facilities throughout the country that offer a combination of high security and state-of-the-art communications. STRATCOM was one. The president would be safe there, and on a day when the weaknesses of our communications capability had become painfully obvious, he could be in close touch with the key members of his government in Washington, D.C.
BY EARLY IN THE afternoon, we had gotten most of the planes out of the sky. We had learned that many of the reports of attacks and hijacked airliners were false. The situation and the flow of information about it were stabilizing. I knew that the president was anxious to get back to Washington, and during a call with him as he was on his way to Offutt, I recommended he begin thinking about a time to return. He had scheduled a secure videoconference at Offutt so he could talk to his National Security Council, but I had no doubt that after that he’d be on his way to D.C.
As the day progressed, it became clear that someone from the executive branch who was fully briefed on our early responses to the attack needed to go on the air to reassure the American people and the world that the president was safe and that the U.S. government was functioning. The attack had not succeeded in shutting us down. As we watched television reports in the PEOC, it seemed that none of the reporters had been in contact with anyone in the executive branch who could talk authoritatively about what we were doing. Several members of Congress had been on the air, but they were all removed from the business of actually running the country.
Someone needed to make a formal statement to the nation—and I knew it couldn’t be me. My past government experience, including my participation in Cold War–era continuity-of-government exercises, had prepared me to manage the crisis during those first few hours on 9/11, but I knew that if I went out and spoke to the press, it would undermine the president, and that would be bad for him and for the country. We were at war. Our commander in chief needed to be seen as in charge, strong, and resolute—as George W. Bush was. My speaking publicly would not serve that cause.
Presidential Counselor Karen Hughes seemed to me to be the right one to talk to the press. She’d taken a rare day off, but had made her way to the White House and soon started working with Vice Presidential Counselor Mary Matalin to draft a statement. For a range of security reasons, the Secret Service did not want Karen to use the White House press briefing room, so they arranged for her to be driven to FBI headquarters, where she briefed reporters.
In the meantime I was starting to think about our response to this act of war. I had managed to get my general counsel, David Adding-ton, back into the White House after he had been forced to evacuate. Almost as soon as he arrived in the PEOC, he began coordinating by phone with a team of the president’s staff who were in the Roosevelt Room thinking through what kind of legislative authorities we would need in the days and months