"60 Minutes II" Bush Interview:
(CBS) No president since Abraham Lincoln has seen such horrific loss of
life in a war on American soil. No president since James Madison, nearly
200 years ago, has seen the nation’s capital city successfully attacked.
But, one year ago, President George W. Bush was thrown into the first
great crisis of the 21st century.
This is the president’s story of September 11th and the week America
went to war. 60 Minutes II spent two hours with Mr. Bush, one, on Air
Force One and another in the Oval Office last week. Even after a year,
the president is still moved, sometimes to the point of tears, when he
remembers Sept. 11.
“I knew, the farther we get away from Sept.11, the more likely it is for
some around the world to forget the mission, but not me,” Mr. Bush says
during the Air Force One interview. “Not me. I made the pledge to myself
and to people that I’m not going to forget what happened on Sept. 11. So
long as I’m president, we will pursue the killers and bring them to
justice. We owe that to those who have lost their lives.”
The memories come back sharp and clear on Air Force One, where Pelley
joined the president for a recent trip across country. 60 Minutes II
wanted to talk to him there because that is where he spent the first
hours after the attack.
Not since Lyndon Johnson was sworn in on Air Force One has the airplane
been so central to America in a crisis.
For President Bush, Sept. 11 2001, started with the usual routine.
Before dawn, the president was on his four-mile run. It was just before
6 a.m. and, at the same moment, another man was on the move: Mohammad
Atta. Two hours later, as Mr. Bush drove to an elementary school,
hijackers on four planes were murdering the flight crews and turning the
airliners east. As the motorcade neared the school at 8:45 a.m., jet
engines echoed in Manhattan.
Atta plunged the 767 jumbo jet into World Trade Center Tower One.
“I thought it was an accident,” says Mr. Bush. “I thought it was a pilot
error. I thought that some foolish soul had gotten lost and - and made a
terrible mistake.”
Mr. Bush was told about the first plane just before sitting down with a
class of second graders. He was watching a reading drill when, just
after nine, United Flight 175 exploded into the second tower. There was
the sudden realization that what had seemed like a terrible mistake was
a coordinated attack.
Back in the Florida classroom, press secretary Ari Fleischer got the
news on his pager. The president’s chief-of-staff, Andy Card stepped in.
“A second plane hit the second tower; America is under attack,” Card
told the president
When he said those words, what did he see in the President’s face?
“I saw him coming to recognition of what I had said,” Card recalls. “I
think he understood that he was going to have to take command as
commander-in-chief, not just as president.”
What was going through Bush’s mind when he heard the news?
“We’re at war and somebody has dared attack us and we’re going to do
something about it,” Mr. Bush recalls. “I realized I was in a unique
setting to receive a message that somebody attacked us, and I was
looking at these little children and all of the sudden we were at war. I
can remember noticing the press pool and the press corps beginning to
get the calls and seeing the look on their face. And it became evident
that we were, you know, that the world had changed.”
Mr. Bush walked into a classroom set up with a secure phone. He called
the vice president, pulling the phone cord tight as he spun to see the
attack on TV. Then he grabbed a legal pad and quickly wrote his first
words to the nation.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America,” he said
in the speech. “Today, we’ve had a national tragedy.”
It was 9:30 a.m. As he spoke, Mr. Bush didn’t know that two more
hijacked jets were streaking toward Washington. Vice Pesident Dick
Cheney was in his office at the White House when a Secret Service agent
ran in.
“He said to me, ‘Sir, we have to leave immediately’ and grabbed, put a
hand on my belt, another hand on my shoulder and propelled me out the
door of my office,” Cheney recalls. “I’m not sure how they do it, but
they sort of levitate you down the hallway, you move very fast.”
“There wasn’t a lot of time for chitchat, you know, with the vice
president,” says Secret Service Director Brian Stafford, who was in his
command center ordering the round-up of top officials and the First
Family. He felt that he had only minutes to work with. “We knew there
were unidentified planes tracking in our direction,” he says.
Cheney was rushed deep under the White House into a bunker called the
Presidential Emergency Operations Center. It was built for war, and this
was it. On her way down, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
called Mr. Bush.
“It was brief because I was being pushed to get off the phone and get
out of the West Wing,” says Rice. “They were hurrying me off the phone
with the president and I just said, he said, ‘I’m coming back’ and we
said ‘Mr. President that may not be wise.’ I remember stopping briefly
to call my family, my aunt and uncle in Alabama and say, ‘I’m fine. You
have to tell everybody that I’m fine’ but then settling into trying to
deal with the enormity of that moment, and in the first few hours, I
think the thing that was on everybody’s mind was how many more planes
are coming.”
The Capitol was evacuated. And for the first time ever, the Secret
Service executed the emergency plan to ensure the presidential line of
succession. Agents swept up the 15 officials who stood to become
president if the others were killed. They wanted to move Vice President
Cheney, fearing he was in danger even in the bunker. But Cheney says
when he heard the other officials were safe, he decided to stay at the
White House, no matter what.
“It’s important to emphasize it's not personal, you don’t think of it in
personal terms, you’ve got a professional job to do,” says Cheney.
Cheney was joined by transportation secretary Norm Mineta who remembers
hearing the FAA counting down the hijacked jets closing in on the
capital.
Says Mineta: “Someone came in and said ‘Mr. Vice president there’s a
plane 50 miles out,’ then he came in and said ‘Its now 10 miles out, we
don’t know where it is exactly, but it’s coming in low and fast.’”
It was American Flight 77. At 9:38 a.m., it exploded into the Pentagon,
the first successful attack on Washington since the War of 1812.
As the Pentagon burned, Mr. Bush’s limousine sped toward Air Force One
in Florida. At that moment, United Flight 93 - the last hijacked plane -
was taking dead aim at Washington. At the White House, the staff was in
the West Wing cafeteria, watching on TV. Press Secretary Jennifer
Millerwise was in the crowd when the order came to evacuate.
“I no sooner walked outside when someone from the Secret Service yelled
‘Women drop your heels and run, drop your heels and run,’ and suddenly
the gates that never open except for authorized vehicles just opened and
the whole White House just flooded out,” she recalls.
In Florida, as Mr. Bush boarded Air Force One, he was overheard telling
a Secret Service agent “Be sure to get the First Lady and my daughters
protected.” At 9:57 a.m., Air Force One thundered down the runway,
blasting smoke and dust in a full -hrust take off. Communications
Director Dan Bartlett was on board.
“It was like a rocket,” he remembers. “For a good ten minutes, the plane
was going almost straight up.”
At the same moment, 56 minutes after it was hit, World Trade Center
Tower Two began to falter, then cascade in an incomprehensible avalanche
of steel, concrete and human lives.
“Someone said to me, ‘Look at that’ I remember that, ‘Look at that’ and
I looked up and I saw and I just remember a cloud of dust and smoke and
the horror of that moment,” recalls Rice of the TV newscast.
She also felt something in her gut: “That we’ve lost a lot of Americans
and that eventually we would get these people. I felt the anger. Of
course I felt the anger.”
Down in the bunker, Cheney was trying to figure out how many hijacked
planes there were. Officials feared there could be as many as 11.
As the planes track toward Washington, a discussion begins about whether
to shoot them down. “I discussed it with the president,” Cheney
recalls. “‘Are we prepared to order our aircraft to shoot down these
airliners that have been hijacked?’ He said yes.”
“It was my advice. It was his decision,” says Cheney.
“That’s a sobering moment to order your own combat aircraft to shoot
down your own civilian aircraft,” says Bush. “But it was an easy
decision to make given the – given the fact that we had learned that a
commercial aircraft was being used as a weapon. I say easy decision, it
was, I didn’t hesitate, let me put it that way. I knew what had to be
done.”
The passengers on United Flight 93 also knew what had to be done. They
fought for control and sacrificed themselves in a Pennsylvania meadow.
The flight was 15 minutes from Washington.
“Clearly, the terrorists were trying to take out as many symbols of
government as they could: the Pentagon, perhaps the Capitol, perhaps the
White House. These people saved us not only physically but they saved us
psychologically and symbolically in a very important way, too,” says
Rice.
Meanwhile, Tower One was weakening. It had stood for an hour and 43
minutes. At 10:29 a.m., it buckled in a mirror image of the collapse of
its twin.
The image that went round the world reached the First Lady in a secure
location somewhere in Washington. “I was horrified,” she says. “I
thought, ‘Dear God, protect as many citizens as you can.’ It was a
nightmare.”
By 10:30 a.m., America’s largest city was devastated, its military
headquarters were burning. Air force One turned west along the Gulf
Coast.
“I can remember sitting right here in this office thinking about the
consequences of what had taken place and realizing it was the defining
moment in the history of the United States,” says President Bush. “I
didn’t need any legal briefs, I didn’t need any consultations, I knew we
were at war.”
Mr. Bush says the first hours were frustrating. He watched the
horrifying pictures, but the TV signal was breaking up. His calls to
Cheney were cutting out. Mr. Bush says he pounded his desk shouting,
“This is inexcusable; get me the vice president.”
“I was trying to clear the fog of war, and there is a fog of war, says
the president. "Information was just flying from all directions.”
Chief of staff Card brought in the reports. There was word Camp David
had been hit. A jet was thought to be targeting Mr. Bush’s ranch.
“I remember hearing that the State Department might have been hit, or
that the White House had a fire in it. So we were hearing lots of
different information,” says Card.
They also feared that Air Force One itself was a target. Cheney told the
president there was a credible threat against the plane. Using the code
name for Air Force One, Mr. Bush told an aide, “Angel is next.” The
threat was passed to presidential pilot Colonel Mark Tillman.
“It was serious before that but now it is -no longer is it a time to get
the president home,” Tillman says. “We actually have to consider
everything we say, everything we do could be intercepted, and we have to
make sure that no one knows what our position is.”
Tillman asked for an armed guard at his cockpit door while Secret
Service agents double-checked the identity of everyone on board. The
crew reviewed the emergency evacuation plan. Then came a warning from
air traffic control – a suspect airliner was dead ahead.
“Coming out of Sarasota there was one call that said there was an
airliner off our nose that they did not have contact with,” Tillman
remembers.
Tillman took evasive action, pulling his plane high above normal
traffic. They were on course for Washington, but by now no one thought
that was a good idea, except the president.
“I wanted to come back to Washington, but the circumstances were such
that it was just impossible for the Secret Service or the national
security team to clear the way for Air Force One to come back,” says
Bush.
So Air Force One set course for an underground command center in
Nebraska. Back in Washington, the president’s closest advisor, Karen
Hughes, heard about the threat to the plane and placed a call to Mr.
Bush.
“And the military operator came back to me and in a voice that, to me,
sounded very shaken said, ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry, we can’t reach Air Force
One.’” Hughes recalls. Hughes was out of the White House during the
attacks. When she came back, it was a place she didn’t recognize.
“There were either military, or maybe Secret Service, dressed all in
black, holding machine guns as, as we drove up. And I never expected to
see something like that in, in our nation's capital,” says Hughes.
When she walked into the White House, no one was inside. “I knew it was
a day that you didn't want to surprise anybody, and so I yelled,
‘Hello?’ and two, again, kind of SWAT team members came running, running
through the, the hall with, again, guns drawn, and then took me to, to
the location where I met the vice president.”
On Air Force One, Col. Tillman had a problem. He needed to hide the most
visible plane in the world, a 747 longer than the White House itself. He
didn’t want to use his radio, because the hijackers could be listening
to air traffic control. So he called air traffic control on the
telephone.
“We actually didn't tell them our destination or what directions we were
heading,” says Tillman. “We, we basically just talked to 'em and said,
'OK, fine, we have no clearance at this time, we are just going to fly
across the United States.'”
Controllers passed Air Force One from one sector to another, warning
each other to keep the route secret.
“OK, where’s he going?” one tower radioed to another.
“Just watch him,” a second tower responded. “Don’t question him where’s
he's going. Just work him and watch him, there’s no flight plan in and
we’re not going to put anything in. Ok, sir?”
Air Force One ordered a fighter escort, and air traffic control radioed
back: “Air Force One, got two F-16s at about your 10 o’clock position.”
“The staff, and the president and us, were filed out along the outside
hallway of his presidential cabin there and looking out the windows,”
says Bartlett. “And the president gives them a signal of salute, and the
pilot kind of tips his wing, and fades off and backs into formation.”
The men in the F-16s were Shane Brotherton and Randy Roberts, from the
Texas Air National Guard. Their mission was so secret their commander
wouldn’t tell them where they were going.
“He just said, 'You’ll know when you see it,' and that was my first
clue, I didn’t have any idea what we were going up until that point,”
says Brotherton. He knew when he saw it.
“We, we were trying to keep an 80-mile bubble, bubble around Air Force
One, and we'd investigate anything that was within 80 miles,” says
Roberts.
Bush says he was not worried about the safety of the people on this
aircraft, or for his own safety: “I looked out the airplane and saw two
F-16s on each wing. It was going to have to be a pretty good pilot to
get us.”
We now know that the threat to Air Force One was part of the fog of war,
a false alarm. But it had a powerful effect at the time. Some wondered,
with the president out of sight, was he still running the government? He
hadn’t appeared after the attack on Washington. Mr. Bush was clearly
worried about it. At one point he was overheard saying, “The American
people want to know where their dang president is.” The staff considered
an address to the nation by phone but instead Mr. Bush ordered Air Force
One to land somewhere within 30 minutes so he could appear on TV. At
11:45 a.m., they landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
“The resolve of our great nation is being tested. But make no mistake,
we will show the world that we will pass this test. God bless,” Bush
said to the nation from Barksdale.
At Barksdale, the Secret Service believed the situation in Washington
was still unsafe. So the plane continued on to Nebraska, to the command
center where Mr. Bush would be secure and have all the communications
gear he needed to run the government. Aboard Air Force One, Mr. Bush had
a job for press secretary Fleischer.
“The president asked me to make sure that I took down everything that
was said. I think he wanted to make certain that a record existed,” says
Fleischer
Fleischer’s notes capture Mr. Bush’s language, plain and unguarded. To
the vice president he said: “We’re at war, Dick, we’re going to find out
who did this and kick their ass.” Another time, Mr. Bush said, “We’re
not going to have any slap-on-the-wrist crap this time.”
The President adds, “I can remember telling the Secretary of Defense, I
said, ‘We’re going to find out who did this and then Mr. Secretary, you
and Dick Myers,’ who we just named as chairman of the joint chiefs, ‘are
going to go get them.’”
By 3 p.m., Air Force One touched down at Offutt Air Force Base in
Nebraska. Mr. Bush and his team were herded into a small brick hut that
gave no hint of what they would find below.
At the bottom of the stairs was the U.S. Strategic Command Underground
Command Center. It was built to transmit a president’s order to go to
nuclear war. But when Mr. Bush walked in, the battle staff was watching
the skies over the United States. Many airplanes had still not landed.
After a short briefing, Mr. Bush and Card were taken to a teleconference
center which connected them to the White House, the Pentagon, the FBI
and the CIA. Mr. Bush had a question for his CIA Director George Tenent.
According to Rice, Bush asked Tenent who had done this. Rice recalls
that Tenent answered: “Sir, I believe its al Qaeda. We’re doing the
assessment but it looks like, it feels like, it smells like al Qaeda.”
The evidence would build. FBI Director Robert Mueller says that an
essential clue came from one of the hijacked planes before it crashed.
A flight attendant on American Flight 11, Amy Sweeney, had the presence
of mind to call her office as the plane was hijacked and give them the
seat numbers of the hijackers. “That was the first piece of hard
evidence. We could then go to the manifest, find out who was sitting in
those seats and immediately conduct an investigation of those
individuals, as opposed to taking all the passengers on the plane and
going through a process of elimination,” says Mueller.
In Nebraska, the White House staff was preparing for an address to the
nation from the Air Force bunker, but by then the president had had
enough. He decided to come back.
“At one point, he said he didn’t want any tinhorn terrorist keeping him
out of Washington,” Fleischer says. “That verbatim.”
On board, he was already thinking of issuing an ultimatum to the world:
“I had time to think and a couple of thoughts emerged. One was that
you're guilty if you harbor a terrorist, because I knew these terrorists
like al-Qaeda liked to prey on weak government and weak people. The
other thought that came was the opportunity to fashion a vast coalition
of countries that would either be with us or with the terrorists.”
As Air Force One sped east, the last casualty of the attack on America
collapsed, one of the nation’s worst days wore into evening. At the
World Trade Center, 2,801 were killed; at the Pentagon, 184; and in
Pennsylvania 40. Altogether, there were 3,025 dead.
“Anybody who would attack America the way they did, anybody who would
take innocent life the way they did, anybody who's so devious, is evil,”
Bush said recently.
Mr. Bush would soon see that evil face to face. After arriving in
Washington, he boarded his helicopter and flew past the Pentagon on the
way to the White House.
Was there a time when he was afraid that there might not be a White
House to return to? “I don’t remember thinking about whether or not the
White House would have been obliterated," he recalls. "I think I might
have thought they took their best shot, and now it was time for us to
take our best shot.”
Mr. Bush arrived back at the White House nine hours after the attacks.
His next step was an address to the nation. Karen Hughes and her staff
were already working on the speech.
“He decided that the primary tone he wanted to strike that night was
reassurance,” remembers Hughes. “We had to show resolve, we had to
reassure people, we had to let them know that we would be OK.”
Just off the Oval Office, Mr. Bush added the words that would become
known as the Bush Doctrine - no distinction between terrorists and those
who harbor them. The staff wanted to add a declaration of war but Mr.
Bush didn’t think the American people wanted to hear it that night and
he was emphatic about that.
He prepared to say it from the same desk where Franklin Roosevelt first
heard the news of Pearl Harbor. Now Bush was commander in chief. Eighty
million Americans were watching.
“Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under
attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts,” he said
from the Oval Office that night.
The Oval Office speech came at the end of the bloodiest day in American
history since the Civil War. Before he walked to the White House
residence for the night, Mr. Bush dictated these words for the White
House daily log: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.
We think it's Osama bin Laden.”
(CBS) When Sept. 12 dawned, President Bush was demanding a war plan. No
one in the White House or the Pentagon could be sure of what the
president would do. In office for just eight months, he’d never been
tested as commander-in-chief.
“I never asked them what they thought,” President Bush said of the
Pentagon brass, “because I didn’t really – because I knew what I was
gonna do. I knew exactly what had to be done, Scott. And that was to set
a strategy to seek justice. Find out who did it, hunt them down and
bring them to justice.”
In the cabinet room, the president made clear what was next: “The
deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against
our country were more than acts of terror, they were acts of war,” he
said.
To the war cabinet, al Qaeda was no surprise. National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice says the administration had been at work on a plan to
strike bin Laden’s organization well before Sept. 11.
“The president said, ‘You know I’m tired of swatting at flies, I need a
strategy to eliminate these guys,’” Rice recalls.
In one of the worst intelligence failures ever, the CIA and FBI didn’t
pick up clues that an attack in the United States was imminent. Without
a sense of urgency, the White House strategy the president had asked for
came too late.
Chief of Staff Andrew Card recalls that the plan Mr. Bush had asked for
was “literally headed to the president’s desk, I think, on the eleventh,
tenth or eleventh, of September.”
On Sept. 12, the war cabinet was debating the full range of options -
who to hit and how to hit them. There were some at the Pentagon who
worried in the early hours that Mr. Bush would order up an immediate
cruise missile strike, of the kind that had not deterred bin Laden in
the past.
“Well, there’s a lot of nervous Nellies at the Pentagon, anyway,” Mr.
Bush tells Pelley. “A lot of people like to chatter, you know, more than
they should. But no, I appreciate that very much. Secretary of Defense
(Donald) Rumsfeld early on discussed the idea of making sure we had what
we called ‘boots on the ground.’ That if you’re gonna go to war, then
you’ve gotta go to war with all your assets.”
The president says he wanted to “fight and win a guerilla war with
conventional means.”
It was an innovative but risky idea being proposed by CIA Director
George Tenent. Tenent wanted to combine American technology and
intelligence with the brute force of Afghan fighters hostile to the
Taliban government.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, noting that the CIA had already
developed a long relationship with the Afghan resistance, called it an
unconventional solution to an unconventional problem.
“As I like to describe it to my friends,” Powell says, “we had on the
ground a Fourth World army riding horses and living in tents with some
CIA and special forces with them and we had a First World air force, the
best in the world. How do you connect it all?”
The president gave them 48 hours to figure it out.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bush went to the battlefield himself. Just the day
before, he had called the Pentagon the “mightiest building in the
world.” Now one-fifth of it was in ruins. The wreckage of American
Flight 77 was being examined by Navy investigators. And before Mr. Bush
left, he made a point of speaking personally with the team recovering
the remains of the first casualties of war on his watch.
The next day, Sept. 13, there was another warning of attack that the
public never heard about. Threats had been were coming in constantly but
this one sounded credible: a large truck bomb headed to the White House.
The Secret Service wanted the president back in the bunker.
“He wasn’t real receptive to that, to that recommendation,” remembers
Brian Stafford, director of the Secret Service. “And he ordered a
hamburger and said he was going to stay in the White House that evening
and that’s what he did.”
The next day, would be one of the longest and the most difficult for the
president. On Friday, Sept. 14, Mr. Bush started the day with a cabinet
meeting, but he wept when he walked in and was surprised by applause.
“He sat down, slightly overcome, for a moment but he recaptured it,”
says Powell who remembers being worried that the president might have
trouble getting through his speech at the national memorial service
later that morning.
“And I just scribbled a little note to him,” Powell recalls, “and I
said, ‘Mr. President, I’ve learned over the years when you are going to
give a very emotional speech, watch out for certain words that will
cause you to start to tear up.’ He looked at me and he smiled and then
at the next break in the conversation he said, ‘The Secretary of State
told me not to break down at the memorial service,’ and that broke the
tension and everybody started laughing and I felt embarrassed.”
First Lady Laura Bush was involved in planning the memorial service and
she says she wanted it to be both dignified and comforting. “I wanted
the Psalms and everything to be read to be comforting, because I think
we were a country, that needed, everyone of us, needed comforting.”
It also stirred the mourners’ resolve, as Rice remember. “As we stood to
sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic,” she says, “you could feel the
entire congregation and I could certainly feel myself stiffen, the kind
of spine, and this deep sadness was being replaced by resolve.
“We all felt that we still had mourning to do for our countrymen who had
been lost but that we also had a new purpose in not just avenging what
had happened to them but making certain that the world was eventually
going to be safe from this kind of attack ever again.”
Next came a visit to ground zero. The president was not prepared for
what he encountered there.
“You couldn’t brief me, you couldn’t brief anybody on ground zero until
you saw it," Mr. Bush says. “It was like – it was ghostly. Like you’re
having a bad dream and you’re walking through the dream.”
The president found the scene very powerful, particularly when the men
and women at ground zero began to chant, “USA! USA!.”
“There was a lot of bloodlust,” the president recalls. “People were, you
know, pointing their big old hands at me saying, ‘Don’t you ever forget
this, Mr. President. Don’t let us down.’ The scene was very powerful.
Very powerful.”
When Mr. Bush tried to speak, the crowd kept shouting, “We can’t hear
you.”
The president responded, “I can hear you. I can hear you. The rest of
the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down
will hear all of us soon.”
Mr. Bush had been in New York just a few weeks before; he’d posed with
the firemen who always stood by whenever the president’s helicopter
landed there. Now, five of the men who stood with the president in the
picture were dead – lost at ground zero.
When the president arrived Sept. 14, Manhattan was papered with the
faces of the lost. Families, unable to believe that so many had vanished
in an instant, held onto the hope that their loved ones were just
missing. It was a place where a child comforted a grieving mother.
At a meeting the public never saw, the president spoke with several
hundred of these families in a convention hall.
“People said to me, ‘He’ll come out. Don’t worry, Mr. president, we’ll
see him soon. I know my loved one, he will - he’ll find a place to
survive underneath the rubble and we’ll get him out.’ I, on the other
hand had been briefed about the realities, and my job was to hug and
cry, but I remember the whole time thinking, ‘This is incredibly sad
because the loved ones won’t come out.’”
One little boy handed the president a picture of his father in his
firefighter uniform and as he signed it, Mr. Bush remembers, he told the
boy, “Your daddy won’t believe that I was here, so you show him that
autograph.”
It was an effort “to provide a little hope,” the president recalls. “I
still get emotional thinking about it because we’re dealing with people
who loved their dads or loved their mom, or loved their…wives who loved
their husbands. It was a tough time, you know, it was a tough time for
all of us because we were a very emotional, and I was emotional at
times. I felt, I felt the same now as I did then, which is sad. And I
still feel sad for those who grieve for their families, but through my
tears, I see opportunity.”
The president was supposed to be with the families for about 30 minutes;
he stayed for two and a half hours. It was there he met Arlene Howard.
The body of her son, George, was among the first to be found at ground
zero.
“I called the police department,” Howard remembers, “ and they said he
hadn’t called in for roll call and to call back in an hour and I said,
‘No, I don’t need to call back.’ If he hadn’t called in, I knew where he
was.”
George Howard had rescued children trapped in an elevator back in 1993
when the World Trade Center was bombed. He had been off duty that day,
and he was off duty on Sept. 11, but couldn’t stay away. The police
department gave his badge to his mother and she gave it to the president.
“He (the president) he leaned over to talk to me,” Howard recalls. “And
he extends his sympathy to me and that’s when I asked him I’d like to
present George’s shield to him in honor of all the men and women who
were killed over there.”
By the end of that day, Mr. Bush flew to Camp David visibly drained.
“He was physically exhausted, he was mentally exhausted, he was
emotionally exhausted, he was spiritually exhausted,” recalls Card..
The next day – Saturday, Sept. 15 - Mr. Bush met members of his war
cabinet at the presidential retreat for a last decisive meeting.
“My message is for everybody who wears the uniform – get ready. The
United States will do what it takes,” Mr. Bush told them.
As Powell remembers it, “He was encouraging us to think boldly. He was
listening to all ideas; he was not constrained to any one idea; he
wanted to hear his advisors talk and argue and debate with each other.”
President Bush was pleased with the progress that had been made. “On the
other hand,” he says, “I wanted to clarify plans and I went around the
room and I asked everybody what they thought ought to happen.”
When he left that meeting on Saturday night, he still had not told the
cabinet what he was planning.
“I wanted to just think it through,” Mr. Bush remembers. “Any time you
commit troops to harm’s way, a president must make sure that he fully
understands all the consequences and ramifications. And I wanted to just
spend some time on it alone. And did.”
What were his reservations?
Mr. Bush says, “Could we win? I didn’t want to be putting our troops in
there unless I was certain we could win. And I was certain we could win.”
Nine days after the attacks on America, before a joint session of
Congress the president committed the nation to the war on terror.
“Each of us will remember what happened that day and to whom it
happened,” Mr. Bush told the Congress and the nation. “We’ll remember
the moment the news came, where we were and what we were doing. Some
will remember an image of a fire or a story of rescue. Some will carry
memories of a face and a voice gone forever. And I will carry this. It
is the police shield of a man named George Howard, who died at the World
Trade Center trying to save others. It was given to me by his mom,
Arlene, as a proud memorial to her son. It is my reminder of lives that
ended and a task that does not end.”
A year has passed since then, but the president says his job is still to
remind Americans of what happened and of the war that is still being
waged, a war he reminds himself of every day in the Oval Office,
literally keeping score, one terrorist at a time.
In his desk, the president says, “I have a classified document that
might have some pictures on there, just to keep reminding me about who’s
out there, where they might be”
And as the terrorists are captures or killed? “I might make a little
check there, yeah,” Mr. Bush admits.
But there is no check by the name that must be on the top of that list –
Osama bin Laden.
(CBS) A lot has happened in the year since Sept. 11. One year ago, the
president was new on the job, with little experience in foreign policy.
He had wanted to pull the military back from foreign entanglements. Now,
on his orders, U.S. forces are engaged around the globe in a war he did
not expect, in a world completely changed. In the Oval Office last week,
CBS News Correspondent Scott Pelley asked the president about Iraq,
about whether Americans are safe at home and about Osama bin Laden.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scott Pelley: You must be frustrated, maybe angry. After a year, we
still don’t have Osama Bin Laden?
President Bush: How do you know that? I don’t know whether Osama bin
Laden is dead or alive. I don’t know that. He’s not leading a lot of
parades. And he’s not nearly the hero that a lot of people thought he
was. This is much bigger than one person anyway. This is — we’re slowly
but surely dismantling and disrupting the al Qaeda network that, that
hates America. And we will stay on task until we complete the task. I
always knew this was a different kind of war, Scott. See, in the old
days, you measure the size and the strength of the enemy by counting his
tanks or his airplanes and his ships. This is an international manhunt.
We’re after these people one at the time. They’re killers. Period.
Pelley: But have you won the war before you find Osama bin Laden dead or
alive?
Mr. Bush: If he were dead, there’s somebody else to replace him. And we
would find that person. But slowly but surely, we will dismantle the al
Qaeda network. And those who sponsor them and those who harbor them. And
at the same time, hopefully lay the seeds for, the conditions necessary
so that people don’t feel like they’ve got to conduct terror to achieve
objectives.
Pelley: Do you look back on the Afghan campaign with any doubts?
Certainly, we’ve overthrown the Taliban government. Certainly, al Qaeda
has been scattered. But some of the Taliban leaders appear to have
gotten away. And there have been many civilian casualties as well.
Mr. Bush: Uh huh. Well, you know, I am sad that civilians lost their
life. But I understand war. We did everything we can to — everything we
could to protect people. When civilians did die, it was because of a
mistake. Certainly not because of intention. We liberated a country for
which I’m extremely proud. No, — I don’t second guess things. It’s —
things never go perfect in a time of war.
Pelley: Are you committed to ending the rule of Saddam Hussein?
Mr. Bush: I’m committed to regime change.
Pelley: There are those who have been vocal in their advice against war
in Iraq. Some of our allies in the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia, Turkey for
example. Even your father’s former national security advisor, Mr.
Scowcroft has written about it in the paper. What is it in your
estimation that they don’t understand about the Iraq question that you
do appreciate?
Mr. Bush: The policy of the government is regime change, Scott, hasn’t
changed. I get all kinds of advice. I’m listening to the advice. I
appreciate the consultations. And we’ll consult with a lot of people but
our policy hasn’t changed.
Pelley: On Air Force One you described the terrorists as evil.
Mr. Bush: Yeah.
Pelley: I don’t think anyone would disagree with that, but at the same
time, many in the Arab world are angry at the United States for
political reasons because of our policy in Israel or our troops in the
oil region of the Middle East. Is there any change in foreign policy
that you’re considering that might reduce Arab anger against the United
States.
Mr. Bush: Hmm. Well, I’m working for peace in the Middle East. I’m the
first president that ever went to the United Nations and publicly
declared the need to have a Palestinian state living side-by-side with
Israel in peace. I’ve made it clear that in order for there to be peace
the Palestinians have gotta to get some leadership that renounces terror
and believes in peaces and quits using the Palestinian people as pawns.
I've also made it clear to the other Arab nations in the region that
they’ve got responsibilities. If you want peace they gotta work toward
it. We’re more than willing to work for it, but they have to work for it
as well. But all this business isn’t going to happen as long as a few
are willing to blow up the hopes of many. So we all gotta work to fight
off terror.
Pelley: Arafat has to go?
Mr. Bush: Either, he’s, he’s been a complete failure as far as I am
concerned. Utter disappointment.
Pelley: There has been some concern over the year about civil liberties.
Mr. Bush: Yeah…
Pelley: In fact, an appeals court recently was harsh about your
administration’s decision to close certain deportation hearings. They
said, quote, “A government operating in secrecy stands in opposition to
the Constitution.” Where do you draw the line sir?
Mr. Bush: I draw the line at the Constitution. We will protect America.
But we will do so on, within the guidelines of the Constitution,
confines of the Constitution, spirit of the Constitution.
Pelley: Is there anything that the Justice Department has brought to you
as an idea that you’ve thought, “No, that’s too far. I don’t wanna go…"
Mr. Bush: Nah, not that that I remember. And I am pleased with the
Justice Department. I think that Attorney General’s doing a fine job, by
the way...and to the extent that our courts are willing to make sure
that they review decisions we make, I think that’s fine. I mean, that’s
good. It’s healthy. It’s part of America.
Pelley: Franklin Roosevelt said that America should stand in defense of
four freedoms. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want
and freedom from fear. Do we have that today Mr. President? Freedom from
fear?
Mr. Bush: I think more than we did, in retrospect. The fact that we are
on alert, the fact that we understand the new circumstances makes us
more free from fear than on that fateful day of September the 11th.
We’ve got more work to do.
Pelley: And Americans should not live their lives in fear?
Mr. Bush: I don’t think so. No. I think Americans oughta know their
government’s doing everything possible to help. And obviously if we get
information that relates directly a particular attack we’ll deal with
it. And if we get noise that deals with a general attack, we’ll alert
people. There are a lot of good folks working hard to disrupt and deny
and run down leads. And the American people need to go about their
lives. It seems like they are.