Inside the White House on 9/11

25:45That's the head of the speechwriting office. We don't know where Pete Wehner, who's sort of the operational head of the speechwriting office. We don't know where he is. And the plane is on its way from Florida to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. And that's where the president makes his first stop of the day and where he makes his first statement to the American people. Do you remember watching that statement? I don't remember watching the president's statement, but surely we did. We were just kind of disoriented. But the thing about being a speechwriter in a moment like that, we're the only ones who knew we were going to be needed.

26:18A lot of our colleagues, what are they going to ask me to do when you're in presidential speech writing on an event like this? So we were trying to be helpful in writing some things down. And I also remember Harriet Myers was there. And I think Harriet reminded us that anything we generated that day, that even though we weren't on White House property and White House facilities, that these were government records that we were generating and reminding us of that. Keep your notes and things like that. I remember watching the president from Barksdale. It was a military link. It was a poor link. And so it looked kind of like wavery.

26:59And the president still wasn't sure exactly what, hadn't thought very hard about what to say. He just wanted to make it clear that he was alive and in contact. I remember for me, that first speech, which would have been about 1.30 and which was improvised by whoever was with him on the plane. And maybe it was from Karen talking to him from the Justice Department. I remember thinking this makes it now 10 times worse because not only does the president sound uncertain, but the image looks like a scene from a movie about a nuclear attack that it looks like we've the government has lost the ability to split out a clear tv image to the american people um and so it looks like you know the government of the united states has really been knocked off its pegs uh because he looks wobbly he sounds wobbly this is really bad the the one other thing i was going to mention when we were putting these notes together mike had been on 395 trying to get into Washington, he saw that plane that hit the Pentagon.

27:55He saw it. He had a conscious memory of looking into the windows of that plane. And he said he thought, it's too low, it's too fast. And in the time it took him to process that thought, it hit the Pentagon, which he did not see. He did not have a line of sight to where it hit the Pentagon, But he saw this thing. And I know it was a haunting experience for him. Well, it was about 2 o 'clock in the afternoon when we're still in this office building that my wife was able to reach me and told me she had indeed gone to the Jewish day school, retrieved the children. The Jewish day school, because there were all these rumors of what was going on, that there had been a car bomb on the Washington Mall.

28:37And a Jewish day school would be on the list of targets you would have to, if there was any kind of local auxiliary. So when the car bomb story made it seem like this was not just a remote event. There may have been people somehow in Washington itself. And then a Jewish day school would be, as it always is, a target to worry about. The kids had been all taken into a gymnasium and the windows had been shut. In those days, Jewish day schools didn't. Today, they all have blackout blinds and bulletproof glass. But in those days, they didn't. And so the kids were all put in the gym. And Danielle, they're a line of parents who all came to retrieve the children.

29:12And she stopped by a local grocery store to get some emergency supplies. And everybody in our neighborhood seemed to be doing the same because the supplies were wiped out. And she called me, but she was able to get through to me at last at about 2 o 'clock. And that's when I heard the news that Barbara Olson, the wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson, and a close friend of, I think, all of ours, was on the plane that hit the Pentagon. I just, we would know, I think all of us knew many people who were affected by the day. but that was the first person that I heard directly. That was someone I knew well who was killed on 9-11.

29:43Yes. Yes. Barbara was a good friend of mine too. And, and, uh, and she, I had seen her not long before. And, uh, of course we all know Ted, the number three man at the justice department. And, um, uh, you, you were the one who told me about Barbara. I remember that moment and, you know, and you just, then you realize there's, there's not a chance she made it. And then the next morning, my mom called from here and she said, well, Gary Nelson called. And he was a family friend, one of my childhood teachers from up here. Gary called and Ann was in the North Tower. And that was their only daughter, Gary and Jeanette Nelson, lifelong friends of ours.

30:32There's a, there, and Nicole Nelson went to my high school, my college, the only daughter. And, and she was, and she was, she may have been killed right away because she was about right where the area where the, but you remember, David, you and I had explicitly talked about this before we knew anything, before we knew anything about, at first, you know, we were talking about how there could be 50 ,000 people in these buildings. and I said, David, we're all going to know somebody. And it's true. We all did. And Giuliani said that afternoon, he said, the numbers are going to be overwhelming because they more got out than they thought.

31:14But it was just this foreboding thought that, you know, you have these images and everything, but these human stories that are going to be coming at us and these moments of loss that are going to be experienced not just by us, but by people who are even closer to the murders. The Barbara Olson story, I learned later some details that were especially heartbreaking. And again, this is going to be an old-timey detail, but in those pre-cell phone days, planes often had a single telephone on the plane that passengers could use with a credit card. It was very expensive, so they didn't get a lot of use.

31:55but Barbara somehow was able to get access to the telephone and to call her husband, Ted, Solicitor General, and to tell him that the plane had been hijacked. And Ted, I remember him talking with us and saying, and he knew about the two planes and he had to make a decision in that moment whether to tell Barbara the news of what the likely fate of her plane was or not to tell her and to let her have another few seconds of hope. And I remember, I can hear his voice, he's now past two, saying, I felt I had to tell her. And so he told her what had happened, and he told her what he feared was probably going to happen.

32:36And they had no idea of the target, but of the fate. And they said their goodbyes.

32:46And that was the end. That's one of the many, many heartbreaking stories of that day, one again that came close to home. Yeah. And then it was only days later that Ted was on Capitol Hill testifying, I think, in favor of the Patriot Act. And it was just days later when all these measures had to be taken. And this man was on duty and remained so. Yeah. So the president flew from Barksdale then to Strategic Air Command near Omaha, Nebraska. Against his wishes, as we know. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where he spent most of the day as the world tried to figure out exactly what was the scale of this attack, what had happened and what had not happened.

33:33Because there were so many rumors. The car bombs on the mall were one. I'm going to forget the others. But there were so many of things that had happened all over the place. Well, yes. And I remember in those first few days just the rumors you'd hear. And I also remember not wanting to know what the rumors were. And there was one point where I was momentarily in the Oval Office, Mike, and I think Matthew was there. The president said, any of you guys have a home computer? And Mike said, I got a computer at home. He said, well, why don't you all go to Mike's house? And I thought, what's this all about?

34:15And then Andy Card walked in and he said, we're not going to do it. and the president said, okay, y 'all can stay here. But apparently there was good, they were contemplating an evacuation of the White House. And you remember there were a few times the building was emptied out. Anthrax. So after the Barksdale communication, you and I and Matt, we worked, we wrote a number of drafts. And what I remember us doing was writing alternative versions. Again, we had very little information. We didn't know what the president wanted. We didn't know exactly what was happening. I remember, maybe this was all of us or maybe it was just me, that I wrote speeches of varying degrees of matter-of-factness, rhetorical flights.

34:57I had like four versions of the same statement, depending on, here are four different ways of doing it. That was the way I often worked in those days. You would say, you could say, do it this way. You could do it this way. You could do it this way. And I always thought it was good that while you could pitch it, say, well, we can do a more matter-of-fact, we can do a more rhetorical, but it was often helpful for people for whom words were not their first trade to see it. This is what a matter of fact version would look like. This is what a different version would look like. This is what an aggressive version would look like.

35:24This is what a lean back, if we're not going to take aggressive action, is the speechwriters don't decide what to do. They just decide how to describe what the president's decided what to do. Well, I'm sorry to interrupt, but you were so good that way. Very, very few writers can get tone as well as you can, but sorry, sidebar. so i remember that's what i remember thank you for that i remember that's what i spent the afternoon doing was writing the same thing and for four i think four maybe five different versions which are probably in harriet myers's note somewhere and then we got word as sunset fell that the president was returning and i didn't expect that we would see him uh and of course we didn't but you remember getting back to the white house and the mess the mess stewards the Navy mess.

36:10They had never left. These guys, they had never, they, they stay, they stayed at their post and there were men with long guns all over the white house lawn. And, and it was quite a, it was quite a, well, that's what I remember. That's actually maybe one of my most vivid members of the day is stepping out of that building and Washington is deserted and there's yellow tape everywhere, marking off the streets. And there are armored, there's the national guard and armored personnel carriers everywhere, but the flags are still flying. They'll be lowered the next, I remember thinking they will be lowered tomorrow, but tonight they're high and they're lit up.

36:43And this Capitol is that ghostly beauty of Washington at night. One of the most, maybe the most beautiful city in America at night. And there are armor personnel everywhere, there are military everywhere. And you may not share the view that I'm about, this is my view and I won't attribute it to you. But if you live, if you've been to Washington recently and you've had feelings about seeing armed men in the streets of the nation's Capitol, and they seem like an unwelcome force, like something imposed from outside. Just imagine the opposite. The farthest of looking at it and saying, this is the armed forces of the United States here to protect the nation's capital.

37:18Thank God they're here, how proud we are of them, how much we admire them, how grateful we are. I remember later, just a flash ahead, talking to a National Guard commander saying that one of his biggest problems with his deployment in Washington was managing his troops' weight because local merchants kept bringing them donuts and cake and coffee and cookies. And after like the third round, he had to say, no, no more cookies, no more cookies. Well, and you remember the president said the following week, just meditating on that day. And as you were noting, it was the perfect, perfect day. and uh as so and remember the national book festival had been on the 8th uh saturday the 8th on the mall i think the 8th and 9th and the national book festival would just spread out on the mall lawn of the library congress it people walking in and out of the library congress building and it was just free movement and i think the president and mrs bush went up there at one point and wandered around in the book festival.

38:27And anyway, what the president said after the events, he said, night fell on a different world. Yeah, so it's about eight o 'clock at night. We get into the White House. Again, and it's a different White House because the security, although there was security before 9-11, a lot of security, it was different after. And it was instantly different. So we didn't go watch the president speak, which is not what I think we normally would have done. It was, again, there were just many more barriers to moving around inside. And the president spoke to the nation, but still in a way that was a little punch drunk, in my opinion.

39:04I looked this up later. After the firing on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln's first communication to the nation is a written proclamation that he issued three days after the firing on Fort Sumter. And after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt's first communication to the nation was his day of infamy speech. But Pearl Harbor was struck at Don Hawaii time on Sunday, which is about midday Washington time Sunday. And the president spoke first thing Monday. So however many hours that is before the first communication. It's not yet the social media age, but it's the cable TV age. And the president has to speak the same day, immediately.

39:39And in a way, there isn't really time. That isn't enough time to organize what you're going to say. And so even the 8 o 'clock speech struck me as not the right tone, not the right message exactly. Well, and then it was Monday the 17th where we got the assignment to do the speech to Congress on Thursday. And that was, of course, that would be then September 20th. It was nine days after the events in question. and you know if you look at history it it feels like a long time uh but he did have the speech of the national cathedral on friday and the radio address which i don't even remember what i want to put a break again i want to slow down here a little bit here are the things i remember that are um that are signal events between before the speech to congress uh there's the speech in the national cathedral as you said which was i thought so beautiful that was that was beautiful And these are, I'm, this is not my own work.

40:37I'll say my, my, because my portfolio was domestic and economic. So I was spending all my time on like the stock market and the reopening of the airlines. So the speeches I'm about to praise, or I had nothing to do with, but he got beautiful speech at the national cathedral, which I think you and Scully mostly wrote. And then he went to New York to speak at ground zero. And that, that famous moment, I can hear you. That was as far as I'm more completely improvised in the moment. And then, and I think this is the thing I think people don't remember enough. that he went to the Washington Mosque on Massachusetts Avenue, I think, again, before the speech to Congress and stood with dignitaries, local and national, and made a speech for tolerance.

41:18And I just want to stress this point, because there is a lot of misremembering and I think a lot of misinformation about what it was like to belong to the American Muslim community after 9-11. There were a flurry of hate attacks in the immediate aftermath. of 9-11. I remember, in fact, I think three of them were murders. Two of the murders were carried out by the same person. And the three victims, only one of the three was Muslim, one was Sikh, and one was South Asian of non-Muslim background. And then many other incidents of harassment and intimidation and insult and vandalism. But the president was so forceful condemning it that that flurry of hate crime incidents and three of the murders in the immediate after that was quickly stopped.

42:04And there is a dramatic drop-off after the month of September and October. I think the killings were in September and October. By January 2002, the FBI is recording a steep drop of hate crime incidents from that last half of 2001. And that the leadership of President Bush and people like him really made an important difference in creating an atmosphere of tolerance and respect that is not as remembered as well as it should be. Well, that's a nice point, David. And this is a great country. And no patriot is going to want to harm an innocent, unsuspecting person in response to something like this.

42:48I mean, this is the horror of 9-11 is that very thing, harming innocent, unsuspecting people. And President Bush, in that sense, spoke for the best in our country and brought out the best, as I like to think he always did. And I know that he tried to do. Yeah. Again, to conjure it up. So President Bush is kind of an accidental president in a way. He lost the popular vote in the election of 2000. He becomes president. He wins the electoral vote. And everything teeters on the state of Florida. where on a few dozen votes in the state of Florida, in those days, every county got to design its own ballot and many of the counties did a bad job.

43:28And there was recount upon recount and tremendous ill feeling about it. And it left behind, I think, a shadow. I know he spent a lot of the first half of 2001 trying to find ways to broaden his support. There is an emphasis on education as an early initiative because that had broad bipartisan support. You could pass it with big majorities of both Republicans and Democrats in both houses of Congress. But still, there was a question mark over his presidency up to that moment. And I think there was this feeling of, would he measure up? Could this accidental president be someone who could speak for the nation after 9-11?

44:03Well, that's right. And I remember Bob Dole candidly said some months after that, he said, you know, this September, I think he was talking about September 14th when Bush was on that flattened fire truck in New York City with the bullhorn and didn't even know he was expected to speak and had nothing prepared for him. And then, you know, had one of the iconic moments of his presidency. And Bob Dole said that was like a second inauguration, you know, and really, really, it really was the man, the man meeting his moment and people getting a sense of him that they really hadn't had or allowed, or in the case of many Americans, allowed themselves to have.

44:46on his way into on his way to that moment he landed in new york and he was taken in car in a car to lower manhattan and the emergency workers there are there the firefighters and a lot of not onlookers but the area is closed to the public um but there are a lot of people there and they're all cheering and wave and clapping and enthusiastic and greeting him enthusiastically and mayor giuliani who was in the car with bush and then and mayor giuliani was a very different man in 9-11 uh from the man he is now and i um i i later heard that he had said to the president And you see all these people cheering for you?

45:17Not one of them voted for you. Well, and President Bush, you've heard him tell the story, David. And he repeated it in his book. He has a strong emotional memory of just one guy in a hard hat standing on a mound of rumble, making eye contact with him and pointing his finger and said, don't you let me down.

45:42really, really touched his heart and stays with him to this day. All right. So we have just a few minutes left. I want to flash forward. Now look back on this from the perspective of 25 years. How did the country do? How did the Bush administration do? What did we get right? What did we get wrong? Do you have thoughts looking backward from a perspective of a quarter century on 9-11 and what it meant and what it led to? nothing deep or profound. I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I remember once when I was about nine or 10 years old, I grew up in a town of 500 people in Northern Wisconsin. And I have this memory of walking with one of my little friends around this little town on a summer day.

46:24And we agreed that we were probably never going to see a war in our lifetimes. Because that people, they don't do this anymore. You know what I mean? That's how things felt in the mid to late 70s. People aren't going to fight wars anymore, big tanks and armies and all this stuff. And we just looked ahead to a future where that kind of tragedy and sorrow just wouldn't fall on the human race like it used to. This is innocent kid stuff, right? And the 80s were pretty quiet and you had the Cold War, but it's a pretty quiet decade when you think about it. And so the point is when 9-11 happened, that was very jarring for me as it was for everybody.

47:13And you get this sense that the world, we might see a lot of things like this from now on. And we might see a lot of things like this inside the United States. That was my biggest fear, that the United States would, having found itself vulnerable that day, would continue to be. I didn't think we had to be, but I was afraid that we might be. And so when I look back, I think mainly of the president you and I worked for and the responsibilities that we had. And there's only so much that speechwriters can do. There's only so much that's on the page and the rest is up to him. And when he did such a great job in those moments, it's really because of him and the kind of man he was.

48:03And this was a man meaning his moment. And our country has not descended into the kind of fright and vulnerability that many of us feared could happen. And that's not by accident. A lot of good decisions were made. A lot of difficult decisions were made that kept us safe. We could talk about any number of particulars and wars and things of that nature that have come since. But by and large, I look back on that time as a pivotal point, a moment of great decision, and things were handled well by the people in power. I will have a somewhat different view, which I'll present on a later occasion. I'll say just one thing as I think back on it.

48:47I think there are many might have beens in history. And most, I'm not a big believer in these alternative scenarios because usually things that have big consequences don't have happenstance causes. If the guns firing at Fort Sumter had missed, the civil war would still have happened. But what I do think about is if bin Laden had not got away in Tora Bora in December of 2001, If the United States and Britain and the many other allies were there and the Afghan partners of the United States, if they had succeeded in cornering him and killing him in Tora Bora at the end of 2001, would we have had the quarter century of wars in the Middle East that have since happened?

49:30I think his getting away caused an upping of the ante of American policy. The United States had to do something and had failed to do in December 2001 the most necessary and logical and demanded thing. And so sometimes when you fail to solve a problem, you redefine the problem to make the problem bigger. It's September 11, 2026. The United States is at war with Iran. American troops have been engaged in anti-terrorist and counterterrorist operations all over the planet for a quarter century. The death toll has been high for Americans and even higher for others. And I think 9-11 of 2001 put us on this path.

50:07There was an exit in December of 2001, and we didn't take the exit. We missed the exit, not through anyone's fault or not through anyone's intention. Maybe somebody's fault. Not through anyone's intention. We missed the exit, and here we are. And we'll be talking about that more in the coming weeks. And John, I thank you so much. Not only did I spend that day with you, I remember also very vividly spending my last stay at the White House with you. We had lunch that day. I remember going with you to the big bow in the South Lawn, the iron fence and looking out and thinking all my life I've wanted to look into this fence.

50:39I've had a year and a half of looking out of the fence and I'm looking out of it for the last time with my good friend McConnell by my side. And for the rest of my life, I'll be back to looking inside and trying to make sense of this with everyone else's eyes of looking in without. But you've spent so much of your life inside and your knowledge is so profound and And your heart is so big. And it was an honor to work with you and to be your friend. Thank you, David. It was an honor to be your colleague as well. It was a great time. And we're so privileged to have had that experience. Bye-bye. Thank you.

51:18When was the last time you indulged your desires, felt true Range Rover refinement? When was the last time you drove in total serenity, the outside world reduced to a hush? The last time you were confident on uncertain terrain? The last journey that made you feel at home, conveniently connected at every step? In a Range Rover, pioneering innovation meets leading-edge luxury to make every drive an occasion. Limitless, effortless, peerless. How far will you let it take you? Range Rover, designed for distinction. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Well, now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back.

51:57So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills. But it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Thanks so much to my friend John McConnell for joining me today on The David Frum Show. This week's book is also a contemplation of terrorism, but in this case, a contemplation of homegrown domestic American terrorism.

52:32The book is American Pastoral by Philip Roth, published in 1997, in my opinion, probably his greatest novel. American Pastoral tells the story of an American Jew whose daughter gets mixed up in extremist activity. The novel is narrated by a man named Nathan Zuckerman, who's Roth's recurring literary alter ego. And Nathan Zuckerman tells a story of his childhood friend, Seymour the Swede Lvov, a golden boy athlete from Zuckerman and Roth's hometown of Newark, New Jersey. The Swede seems to have it all. He's a former high school sports star. He marries a Miss New Jersey. He takes over his father's successful glove manufacturing business, and he settles into an idyllic life in rural Old Rimrock, New Jersey.

53:15He has one child, an adored daughter named Mary, M-E-R-R-Y. Mary becomes increasingly politically outspoken in the course of the 1960s when the novel is set. She gets involved in radical causes. She becomes increasingly dogmatic. Mary has a speech impediment, and somehow that concentrates her rage into forms of action that are beyond speech. and ultimately that expressed itself when in order to oppose the Vietnam War, Mary plants a bomb in the local post office that kills a local doctor. Mary then disappears, goes underground and the Swede spends years looking for her. When he finally tracks her down, she's back in Newark, New Jersey living in terrible filth and squalor and she is converted to a form of ultra-pacifism.

54:06She becomes a Jain, J-A-I-N, a religion from India that is so opposed to violence that it refuses to kill even an insect. And the Swede has to contemplate how his beloved daughter could swing from one extreme of murder to this other extreme of pacifism almost beyond reason. The Swede has to, who's had this perfect life, sheltered from everything, coasting on inherited prosperity and success on an American dream in a country that has been a golden land for Jews like himself. He has to confront this eruption of what Roth calls the American berserk, the country's capacity to burst out from anybody's planned order into these forms of strange, bizarre, personal violence.

54:49Roth is here describing something very real. I mean, I went through it, did a quick scroll through incidents that reminded me of the story of Mary Lvov, of privileged people, people at every American advantage, who lash out, who would adopt some scheme of, or some personal ideology of extremist hate, and then lash out in violence against others. There's so many examples of this. Let me just mention a few that just come to mind in the course of an ordinary search. Remember Elliot Rodger? Elliot Rodger was the son of a Hollywood director. He developed this ideology of misogyny, incel, I think is the term, misogyny, violent hatred to women.

55:27He killed six people and wounded 14 in a rampage, leaving behind a manifesto justifying what he did. Or Patrick Crucius. He was the man who turned a weapon on a parking lot in El Paso to kill 23 people motivated by his great replacement anti-immigrant ideology. He also acted alone, and he also had a comfortable middle-class upbringing in Dallas, Texas. Or Luigi Mangione. Here's a, this is a perfect example of this, who comes from a prominent family in Maryland, and he gunned down an insurance executive in New York City, again, for some crazy, bizarre, ideological reason all his own, that unfortunately has found resonance in some of the more malicious corners of online life.

56:09Or Amen Mohamed Ghazali. I've talked about him before. He's the Lebanese immigrant who settled in Michigan, was given the opportunity to make a life for himself in America, given the amazing gift of American citizenship, and instead took guns to Temple Israel and West Bloomfield. These people all have motives. They may be diagnosable as having some kind of mental illness, but they're not so delusional as not to understand what they're what they're doing, but they're acting on some script, some, some sense of grievance, the American berserk that Roth talks about that pushes them in, in these directions.

56:45And notice something else. They all have these remarkable resources and freedom. They have the resources to acquire weapons and they have the freedom to conduct their work without surveillance. There are many societies in which people like this would be caught early because they lived in more of a surveillance state. Americans have freedom resources. They have the ability to become whoever they are. And for most of us, the ability to become whoever we are is a great gift. It allows us to realize ourselves in all kinds of ways, in ways that people could not realize themselves, even in countries that are comparably free, but are not as supremely abundant and affluent as the United States.

57:19But when you're given the right to be who you are, that reveals something in some people that is berserk, that is bad. It also gives you more scope to indulge wickedness and cruelty and hatefulness, to come up with some crazy set of ideas all your own or that link in some other way, and to act out against your fellows in ways that bring hurt and harm and sorrow and suffering to the human species. America gives all of us the means to be ourselves. And the question we all face is, who will we be? That's it for this week's episode of The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for watching. As ever, please, the best way to support the work of the show if you can, is by subscribing to The Atlantic.

58:01That helps me and all of my colleagues. Please also consider subscribing to our YouTube channel or whatever social media channel you enjoy the program on, share it with others, and spread the word. See you next week on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

58:36This episode of The David Fromm Show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grain. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. When was the last time you indulged your desires, felt true Range Rover refinement? When was the last time you drove in total serenity, the outside world reduced to a hush? The last time you were confident on uncertain terrain? The last journey that made you feel at home, conveniently connected at every step? In a Range Rover, pioneering innovation meets leading-edge luxury to make every drive an occasion.

59:20Limitless, effortless, peerless. How far will you let it take you? Range Rover, designed for distinction. Amen.