Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [179]
I arrived at the Pentagon the next morning recalling my time as secretary of defense twenty-five years earlier, when I had to convince skeptics on the need for more investment in the defense budget. Again I found myself trying to persuade reluctant members of Congress to increase funding. At a eakfast for nine members of the House Armed Services Committee, most expressed support for my efforts but doubted if we would be able to get the necessary votes. Republicans feared that supporting a significant defense increase could leave them politically vulnerable.*
“Sometime within the coming period,” I said, “an event somewhere in the world will be sufficiently shocking that it will remind the American people and their representatives in Washington how important it is for us to have a strong national defense.” Mine was not a particularly original statement, and I’d said a variation of it many times before. Several months earlier, in fact, I had dictated a note to myself that I intended to offer when I was next testifying before Congress. “I do not want to be sitting before this panel in a modern day version of a Pearl Harbor post-mortem as to who didn’t do what, when, where and why,” I wrote. “None of us would want to have to be back here going through that agony.”9
I sometimes remarked that the only thing surprising is that we continue to be surprised when a surprise occurs. In 1962, Harvard economist Thomas Schelling wrote a foreword to a book on Pearl Harbor that captured this idea perfectly. “We were so busy thinking through some ‘obvious’ Japanese moves that we neglected to hedge against the choice that they actually made,” he wrote. “There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable.”10 I was so taken with his piece that I sent a copy to President Bush during our first month in office as well as to many members of Congress. I expressed the hope that the Senate Armed Services Committee would hold hearings on the subject of surprise.
As my breakfast with the members of Congress was coming to a close that September morning, my senior military assistant, Vice Admiral Edmund Giambastiani, passed me a note. An aircraft had crashed into one of the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York. It was, I assumed, a tragic accident. I said good-bye to the members of Congress, who returned to Capitol Hill, escaping by only a few minutes the traumatic scene that was about to play out at the Pentagon.
Back in my office, Giambastiani turned on the television to see the video of one of the towers burning. Putting the set on mute but glancing at it from time to time, I received an intelligence briefing from Denny Watson, my regular briefer. Her daily presentations were similar to those provided to the President each morning. Watson was a fine intelligence professional: engaged in the details and willing to pose questions to her fellow analysts. As we reviewed the threat reports from around the world, September 11 seemed to be no more or less different than any other day. From our chairs we could hear airplanes going by the building en route to Washington National Airport’s runway; the flight path down the Potomac River was only hundreds of feet from my office window. Aircraft often took off and approached for landing close to the eastern side of the Pentagon.
We were a few minutes into my briefing when the scenes on the television set distracted us. A fireball was erupting from the other World Trade Center tower as a second airliner tore through the upper floors of the building. Within the seventeen minutes between the first and second plane crashes, the world passed from one period of history into another.
I watched, stunned, as the twin towers of the World Trade Center, symbols of America’s economic strength, were engulfed in smoke and flames. Hundreds