Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [188]
By then it was approaching 11:00 p.m., more than twelve hours since the morning’s attack. “No, I haven’t,” I answered.
Clarke bore in. “You mean you haven’t talked to Joyce?”
When the Pentagon was hit, Joyce was at the Defense Intelligence Agency at Bolling Air Force Base for a briefing with the defense attachés and their spouses from around the world. I had been so engaged that day that I hadn’t even thought of calling her. After almost forty-seven years of marriage, one takes some things—perhaps too many things—for granted. I had been told Joyce was taken from the meeting and that she had been informed that the Pentagon had been hit.
Clarke looked at me with the stare of a woman who was also a wife. “You son of a bitch,” she blurted out.
She had a point.
CHAPTER 26
War President
America awoke the next day a nation at war. Above pictures of the burning World Trade Center, the Washington Times had a one-word front-page headline that read, in large, bold, capital letters: “infamy.”1 Across the United States, Americans expressed anger and sadness. They also voiced fear of further attacks. Many wondered if they were safe, how their lives might have to change, whether their family members and friends were in danger. Major landmarks considered likely targets were watched with anxiety. Each rumor of another attack set people on edge. Some feared for family members in the military. The financial world was in shock. The stock market suffered one of its biggest drops in history when it reopened six days after 9/11. Hundreds of billions of dollars—property damage, travel revenue, insurance claims, stock market capital—all lost in a single day because nineteen men with a fanatical willingness to die boarded four commercial airliners wielding box cutters.
Throughout the Pentagon, the environment had changed radically. Smoke and the smell of jet fuel lingered. Many of the Pentagon’s seventeen miles of usually bustling corridors were quiet. Halls were sealed off with yellow police tape. Armed Air Force jets patrolled the skies overhead.
NATO unanimously invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which provides that “an armed attack against one…shall be considered an attack against them all.”2 The NATO nations sent five AWACS aircraft and crews to help patrol American airspace in the months after 9/11. It was a welcome sign of commitment and support from the alliance, for which I was and remain deeply grateful. NATO was born early in the Cold War, when it was thought that the United States might have to come to the defense of our allies in Western Europe. Despite my many years of association with the alliance, it had never crossed my mind that NATO might someday step up to help defend the United States.
At the Pentagon, I noticed a different look on people’s faces as I passed them in the corridors. We had lost members of our Pentagon family and were determined to protect the country and prevent this from happening again. Calling for “a fundamental reassessment of intelligence and defense activities,” even the New York Times sounded almost unilateralist; they suggested America should be prepared to take the fight to the terrorists, with or without our allies. “When Washington has prepared to act in the past it has often been stymied by faint-hearted allies,” the paper’s editorial board charged. “Some of America’s closest friends have found it more useful to do business with countries that have either supported terrorists on their soil, been indifferent to them or been too afraid to go after them.”3 Members of Congress