The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [39]
Then the President was off again, this time heading for Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Once aboard, in a conversation he did succeed in having with Cheney, Bush said: “We’re at war, Dick. We’re going to find out who did this and kick their ass.” And: “We’re not going to have any slap-on-the-wrist crap this time.”
A rear admiral at Offutt, the underground headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command, would say he thought the President “very much in control … concerned about what was happening … calm … articulate … presidential.” In mid-afternoon, Bush took part in a videoconference with National Security Council members in Washington—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, CIA director Tenet, and FBI director Robert Mueller.
The President, however, was by now preoccupied with the thought that his continued absence from the capital made him look bad. The Secret Service was still advising him to stay away from Washington. His staff wanted him to address the nation again from Offutt. Bush, however, would apparently have none of it.
“I’m not going to do it from an Air Force base,” he reportedly said. “Not while folks are under the rubble.” And, in another account, “I don’t want a tin-horn terrorist to keep me out of Washington.” Press secretary Fleischer agreed that the President’s whereabouts was becoming “an increasingly difficult issue to deal with.”
Air Force One at last made the return trip to the capital. From the helicopter carrying him to the White House, Bush got his first glimpse of the reality of 9/11. There in the evening light was the Pentagon, partly veiled in black smoke, a deep gouge in its west side. “The mightiest building in the world is on fire,” Bush muttered, according to Fleischer. “That’s the twenty-first century war you’ve just witnessed.” Then he was down, landing on the South Lawn and walking back into the White House almost ten hours after the attacks had begun.
Political Washington had begun to show a brave face to the world. More than a hundred members of Congress had gathered on the steps of the Capitol in a display of unity. “We will stand together,” declared Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert—now back on the Hill—and he and colleagues broke into a chorus of “God Bless America.” An hour and a half later, once he was anchored back in the Oval Office, Bush delivered a four-minute address to the nation. It is said that he had an audience of eighty million people.
“Evil, despicable acts of terror,” the President said, “have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger.” Though he could not have known it, he ended by citing the same passage from the Twenty-third Psalm to which United 93 passenger Todd Beamer had turned in a moment of terror: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil …”
The address also included something Bush had added himself just before going on air. “We will make no distinction,” he said, after assuring Americans that those behind the attacks would be brought to justice, “between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”
Afterward, in the underground bunker where Cheney and others had spent the day, Bush met with key officials—the group he was to call his “war council.” The words “al Qaeda” and “Osama bin Laden” had been on everyone’s lips for hours, and CIA director Tenet said al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan were essentially one and the same.
There was talk of reprisals and then, according to counterterrorism coordinator Clarke, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld came out with a remarkable comment. “You know,” he said, “we’ve got to do Iraq.”
PRESIDENT BUSH