In My Time - Dick Cheney [5]
We suspected early on that this was an al Qaeda attack. There were few other terrorist organizations capable of organizing and carrying out an attack of this scale. We’d certainly go after those responsible, but that wasn’t enough. There were organizations that financed terrorist activity and provided weapons and arms. There were states that provided the terrorists with safe harbor. Those who supported terrorism also needed to be held accountable.
During the National Security Council meeting that the president convened by means of secure teleconferencing from Offutt, the contours of the Bush Doctrine began to emerge. We would go after the terrorists who had done us harm—and we would also go after those who made their murderous attacks possible.
The president returned to the White House and at 8:30 p.m. addressed the nation from the Oval Office. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them,” he said. Afterward he chaired a National Security Council meeting inside the PEOC. When it was over, Lynne and I left the bunker and walked out the diplomatic entrance of the White House onto the South Lawn, where a white-top helicopter was waiting to take us to an undisclosed location. It was the first of many times that I would leave for a location different from the president’s that we did not reveal publicly. If the terrorists tried an attack to decapitate our government, we wanted to make sure they didn’t get both of us.
As Marine Two gained altitude, we could see the Pentagon. The building was lit up for the rescue teams still at work, and smoke was rising from it. All day I had seen images of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on TV. Seeing the site of an attack firsthand brought home the vulnerability of the United States and the dangers that America faced. I thought about the fact that the city of Washington had come under attack in 1814 at the hands of the British. Now, 187 years later, al Qaeda had demonstrated they could deliver a devastating blow to the heart of America’s economic and military power. On this day all our assumptions about our own security had changed. It was a fundamental shift.
We flew toward the Catoctin Mountains and Camp David, the presidential retreat that would be our undisclosed location on the night of September 11. When we arrived we were taken to Aspen Lodge, where I stayed up into the morning hours thinking about what the attack meant and how we should respond. We were in a new era and needed an entirely new strategy to keep America secure. The first war of the twenty-first century wouldn’t simply be a conflict of nation against nation, army against army. It would be first and foremost a war against terrorists who operated in the shadows, feared no deterrent, and would use any weapon they could get their hands on to destroy us.
CHAPTER ONE
Beginnings
When I was born my granddad wanted to send a telegram to the president. Both sides of my family were staunch New Deal Democrats, and Granddad was sure that FDR would want to know about the “little stranger” with whom he now had a birthday in common. My parents had been married in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I was born there, at Bryan Memorial Hospital, on January 30, 1941—the same day that Franklin D. Roosevelt turned fifty-nine. My mother, who had a penchant for keeping scrapbooks, saved the bill for my delivery—exactly $37.50.
On the front lawn in Lincoln, Nebraska, age six months in 1941
My first memory is of riding on a crowded bus with my mother. I’m seated beside her, and my younger brother, Bob, about two, is on her lap. It’s wartime, and even the aisles are packed with servicemen. One of them leans over and offers my mother a cigarette. She takes it and he gives her a light, which is the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed. I’m not quite four years old, and I have never seen her smoke before.
Mother and Bob and I have just left our home in Lincoln and are heading halfway across Nebraska to live with my father’s parents in Sumner. Dad had received his draft