The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [17]
Two months later, the President would offer a sort of explanation. He had gone on listening to the schoolchildren, he said, because he was “very aware of the cameras. I’m trying to absorb that knowledge. I have nobody to talk to … and I realize I’m the commander-in-chief and the country has just come under attack.”
Once out of the classroom, Bush joined aides watching the TV news, saw the Trade Center burning, and talked on the phone with Cheney and Rice. He decided to make a brief statement, then fly back to Washington.
Unknown to the President, though, as he mulled what to tell the national audience, crisis was spiraling into calamity.
FIVE
SIX TIMES, MAYBE MORE, THE PHONE HAD RUNG THAT MORNING IN THE office at the Justice Department of Theodore Olson, the solicitor general. The caller was his wife, Barbara, and she finally got through some time after 9:15. Mrs. Olson, a prominent attorney who often made television appearances, was no shrinking violet. Now, though, she sounded hysterical.
Olson knew his wife was flying to California that day. He had seen the television coverage of the Trade Center attacks, had thanked God there had not been time for his wife’s flight to get to New York. Now Barbara was on the line—from American 77.
Her flight had been seized, she said, by men “with knives and box cutters.” After an interruption—Mrs. Olson was cut off—she came back on the line and spoke with her husband for about ten minutes.
The pilot, she told him, had announced that the flight had been hijacked. Had Flight 77’s legitimate pilot, Charles Burlingame, remained alive and told his passengers what was happening? Today, there is no way of knowing. Mrs. Olson, who by now sounded calmer, consulted with someone nearby and said she thought the plane was headed northeast. She could see houses below, so the plane must—she realized—have been flying fairly low. She and her husband talked of their feelings for each other, and Olson assured her that things were “going to come out okay.” In his heart, he thought otherwise.
Nothing more would be heard from anyone aboard Flight 77. Ted Olson tried to reach the attorney general, John Ashcroft, only to find that he, too, was out of Washington and in the air. Olson spoke with the Department of Justice Command Center and provided his wife’s flight number, but the effort went nowhere. With the minutes rushing by, the solicitor general of the United States proved no more effective than had flight attendant Renee May’s mother, calling American Airlines to report her daughter’s desperate call.
Flight 77 had been flying on undetected, for ground controllers worked on the assumption that it was still flying not east but west. Then at 9:32, controllers monitoring radar at Dulles Airport, outside Washington, spotted an unidentified airplane speeding toward the capital. Reagan National, the airport situated alongside the Potomac River in Washington itself, was notified. So were Secret Service agents, who were by now fretting both about the safety of the Vice President—still in his White House office—and of the President, still at that school in Florida.
ISOLATED FROM THE ONRUSH of events, but very aware of the catastrophe in New York, the President was launching into his thank-you remarks to the teachers and fifth-grade students—remarks rapidly reshaped to take account of the attacks and suggest that the nation’s leader was at the helm:
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America. I unfortunately will be going back to Washington.… Today we have had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.… I have ordered the full resources of the federal government to go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation