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Speaking to reporters Thursday at the White House, President Bush’s national security adviser described those frantic, terrifying moments when, in quick succession, senior officials learned that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been hit and that the White House might be next.
Rice and Vice President Cheney scrambled into elevators that took them to a blast-proof chamber deep underground, called the President’s Emergency Operations Center. There they learned one more terrifying bit of news: a terrorist threat had come in saying that Air Force One, then with the president in Sarasota, Fla., was being targeted. What made the threat so scary was that the caller used a Secret Service code name for the aircraft.
When the news first broke of an attack on the World Trade Center, Rice went from her West Wing office to the White House Situation Room on the ground floor.
“It was pretty remarkable in those first few hours, coming out of the Situation Room. We had just heard that there was a second plane [that flew] into the World Trade Tower. And coming out, we heard something had hit the Pentagon and that something was likely headed for the White House,” Rice said.
Then she and Cheney went to the secure underground facility, capable of withstanding a nuclear blast, and heard that Air Force One had been targeted.
The effect of these cataclysmic events was oddly divided. On the one hand, Rice and her aides were overloaded with simply dealing with the crisis, keeping in touch with Bush. On the other, she and others with her knew that something had changed irrevocably.
“I don’t think that you can underestimate at that moment that you’re sorting lots of information and you’re trying to deal with the consequences, but you recognize that something’s changed forever in the way the United States thinks about its security,” Rice said.
The searing experience did more than shake Rice and her colleagues to the core; it changed, in a few moments, the entire direction of the Bush administration.
On Thursday, Bush said that while his domestic agenda–education and Social Security reform–remains important, the war on terrorism is now the driving issue of his presidency.
“The nation must understand this is now the focus of my administration,” Bush said. “Now that war has been declared on us, we will lead the world to victory.”