“The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness and a quiet, unyielding anger,” Bush said in a televised address from the Oval Office nearly 12 hours after attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and Pentagon in Washington began.
“These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed,” said Bush, for whom Tuesday’s calamity marked the supreme challenge of a young presidency.
Noting that government buildings and financial institutions vacated during the attacks would reopen Wednesday, Bush said, “America was targeted for attack because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one will keep that light from shining.”
The president vowed revenge on the terrorists, who by late Tuesday had not been identified. And he made it clear that no nation associated with the acts would be spared America’s wrath.
Perhaps not since President Franklin Roosevelt declared the bombing of Pearl Harbor a “date that will live in infamy” has an American president faced a moment such as the one Bush confronted Tuesday.
President Ronald Reagan helped America cope with the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. President Bill Clinton saw the country through the Oklahoma City bombing. But those events, as calamitous as they were, did not have the deep impact on the American way of life that Tuesday’s terrorist attacks are likely to leave.
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On the shoulders of a president rested the responsibility for expressing America’s grief, guaranteeing its revenge and calming citizens, whose hands were still shaking in grief, fear and confusion.
“None of us,” Bush said, “will ever forget this day.”
The president’s low-key approach and the brevity of his remarks offered a troubled nation a measure of comfort.
“It did not have any soaring rhetoric, but it did say what needed to be said,” Henry Aaron, a Brookings Institution scholar, said of Bush’s effort.
If Bush’s speech was a critical moment for a nation in crisis, it was just as important for the Bush presidency, political analysts said.
Presence important
Even more important than a few minutes on national television, however, will be Bush’s presence on the national stage in coming days and weeks.
“There is going to be the necessity of balancing a kind of ruthless determination with a very mature strength, and that’s not easy,” Aaron said.
Added Larry Sabato, a political analyst at the University of Virginia: “He has a history of coming through in the clutch and then resting on his laurels. He needs to be out there every day. You cannot overexpose a president in a case like this.”
Immediately after the speech, Bush held a meeting of the National Security Council.
The pandemonium that marked the day for so many Americans was evident in Bush’s schedule as well.
The president began his day in Sarasota, Fla., where he intended to remind 2nd graders at Emma E. Booker Elementary School to read more and watch television less.
But at 9:05 a.m., as the students ran through their reading exercises, Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, walked across the room and whispered the news in Bush’s ear. Terrorists had attacked in New York.
“Ladies and gentlemen this is a difficult moment for America,” Bush told the hushed crowd of students, parents and teachers. And then he was gone.
For much of the rest of the day, while Americans sorted through the confusion and horror that had shut down the federal government, the nation’s air traffic system and its financial institutions, President Bush was airborne.
He set off from Florida for Washington, but shortly after he was aloft he received word aboard Air Force One that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. Fighter jets soon were flanking the wings of the presidential aircraft, escorting it not north, but west to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
It was there, flanked by the portraits of Air Force commanders, American flags arrayed behind him, that Bush declared, “Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward.”
Moments later, the president was again airborne, headed this time for a nuclear command center near Omaha, where he used the ultra-secure communications system to hold a teleconference with top aides back in Washington before finally arriving at the White House about 90 minutes before his speech began.
Below White House
While Bush flew around the country in what the White House called a necessary security measure, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were in a bunker below the White House, surrounded by gun-toting Secret Service agents, snipers and scores of law-enforcement personnel.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon’s fortified National Military Command Center, nicknamed “The Tank” because it is so heavily protected.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was attending a meeting in Lima, Peru, was preparing to return.
First Lady Laura Bush and the Bushes’ twin daughters were taken to secure facilities.
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Tribune national correspondent Frank James contributed to this report.