0:12Good evening.
0:14I'm Stewart Mcloren, President of the White House Historical Association.
0:19I'd like to welcome you to our quarterly lecture series this year, hosted by Susan Page of USA Today.
0:27Tonight, you will have a poignant and powerful conversation with three contributors to our recent White House history quarterly, Ann Compton, Anita McBride, and Donna Smith. They will each focus on a different perspective of the White House and events surrounding President Bush on September the 11th, 2001.
0:52And now, Susan Page for our quarterly.
0:58Thank you, Stewart.
0:59It's such an honor for me to participate in this lecture series with the White House Historical Association. I'm honored to be doing it this year. It's been 20 years since nine eleven. Just about every American who was around then, even those who were just kids at the time, can remember where they were and how they heard and what they felt when they learned of the nine eleven attacks. Surely that is especially so for those who were at the White House and with the President on that day. We'll hear about their perspective in our conversation over the next hour. And we hope you will join our conversation. We'd encourage you to put questions in the comment section on Facebook or YouTube on either feed, uh for us to consider asking our guests if, if you have a memory of nine eleven or a perspective on the impact that that day had on our country. We’d like to hear it.
3:20Let me introduce the people who are joining us.
3:24First is Ann Compton, the longtime White House correspondent for ABC News.
3:30And Anita McBride, she was at the time of nine eleven, a special assistant to President Bush. She later became Chief of Staff for Laura Bush, and she’s now at American University.
3:47Where among other things, she has spotlighting the legacies of American First Ladies. And Donna Hayashis Smith, who is the associate curator of Collections and Registrar at the White House. Each of them has written an article in this new addition of the White House Quarterly that talks about what they learned, what they saw, what they felt on nine eleven. So I encourage you to read the articles that they wrote.
4:11Let’s start with
4:13with Ann Compton.
4:14Ann, you were the broadcast pool reporter with the President in Florida that day.
4:20Then you traveled with him on Air Force One. You’ve written a TikTok of that historic day, starting with 8:50 AM at the MMA Booker Elementary School in Sarasota.
4:32And you call that a place of innocence.
4:38And you end as Air Force One is heading toward Andrew's Air Force Base, where the President will that night deliver an address to the nation.
4:46That day was filled with uncertainty for all of us, even for the President.
4:53And I want to ask you about two particular moments that you write about in your article.
5:00The things that you saw firsthand. I mean, that picture, the first of verse, but that picture of President Bush being
5:08informed in one year by the Chief of Staff, Andy Card, that something was going on as he was, uh, you know, joining the second grade class has become so iconic.
5:20But you were there.
5:23Tell us what you saw and also what at that moment.
5:28You thought might be going on.
5:31It was amazing to me, especially in hindsight.
5:37How little we knew, especially the 12 reporters and photographers who were traveling with the President in his motorcade and on the plane.
5:44And we’re standing in the back of the classroom, and the President, while the world was watching jet liners crash into two iconic towers.
5:57The President and we were listening to second graders running through their vocabulary drills, the White House Chief of Staff, Andy Card,
6:10came in quickly from the side, leaned down, whispered to the President, quickly stepped away.
6:16I was stunned because nobody interrupts a President.
6:21Even in front of second graders.
6:25But then the look on the President's face, a look of gravity that I had never seen on him before.
6:35And I knew that must be real trouble.
6:37We’d heard there’d been some kind of a plane crash.
6:41So I went to the side of the room and I caught Andy Card’s eye.
6:46And I made the sign of an airplane going down.
6:54Andy Card nodded and put up two fingers.
7:00We knew.
7:02We did not know, but the President did that he had already asked the Intelligence community.
7:11What could Al-Qaeda, what could Osama bin Laden do to hurt Americans on US soil?
7:20We did not know, but he did that one month earlier in the Presidential Daily Brief, his highly secure, uh intelligence briefing every day, one month earlier on August 6th.
7:34Included a footnote that said, US Intelligence cannot confirm foreign rumors that Osama bin Laden might hijack airplanes.
7:44I knew that moment in the classroom was stunning, but I didn't know why.
7:53Well, it changed everything for the President.
7:57And for his administration.
7:58I’d like to talk to you, I’d like you to talk about a second moment. You, you, you got on Air Force One, uh, they took the President to, uh, to an undisclosed location.
8:10That everybody knew about, because reporters on the ground were finding out about it outside of Omaha at the Strategic Air Command.
8:16You end with him coming back to Washington. And you say that you’re, you’re coming back to Washington Air Force One and President Bush stops in the entrance to the press cabin of Air Force One.
8:26Tell us, tell us how he looked at that point.
8:30And also what he said to the reporters.
8:34This was nine hours into this Odyssey.
8:39Where we had no idea where we were going to be going, when we ended up in Omaha to go to go into a bunker and he was able to finally get a classified briefing from everybody.
8:50Including the ent, the head of Intelligence, the CIA Director, of what was really going on, and by the moment that we got back on the plane.
9:01And we were finally allowed to say on the record the president’s returning to Washington.
9:06And he’d been begging to for hours.
9:10For the president on that flight back, everything had changed.
9:18His demeanor was different.
9:20He now knew who was behind it.
9:23He had been told that two of the passengers on the flight that hit the Pentagon were known Al-Qaeda operatives, the names were known and on a CIA watchlist.
9:35We knew during that flight back, the President was already formulating.
9:43What it was he wanted to tell the nation, he was determined he said to do it from the Oval Office, not from a hole in the ground under Nebraska.
9:52When he came back through the plane, he stopped in the Secret Service cabin, which is right in front of ours, and the door was open.
10:01And he patted them on the back, and then he stood at the doorway.
10:05Waved away our reporters notebooks, waved the camera away.
10:10He said something to the effect.
10:14We’re going to get those thugs.
10:17So that was a President who had been in office less than eight months.
10:25And he was now a wartime President, and he was three hours away from addressing the American people to the world from the Oval Office desk.
10:34Did he use the word thugs?
10:37Or you cleaning up his language?
10:40Uh, no, I'm not cleaning up his language.
10:43I don't clean up presidential language.
10:45You know, and you covered the White House for 41 years.
10:50You may be the person who’s covered the White House longer than, I certainly don’t know of anyone who’s covered it longer than.
10:55Well, Helen Thomas.
10:57Helen Thomas, All right.
10:59So you’re in good company there.
11:02Is this when you think about the historic events that you’ve, the many historic events that you covered over 41 years in the White House.
11:11Where does that day rank?
11:15It ties at the top.
11:18There was one other day, Christmas 1991, where I spent the day, not in this living room with my four little children and my husband, but on the White House lawn.
11:28Because the Soviet Union dissolved, Mikhail Gorbachev brought down the hammer and sickle over the flag over the Kremlin.
11:36And that day changed the geopolitical map of the world.
11:40And that day had more impact globally.
11:44But the day that Americans were hit, an innocents were targeted and died in their offices or walking to work or taking their kids to school.
11:57That day changed America, a vulnerability we had never felt before.
12:05Those were amazing stories.
12:06Anita McBride, I want to talk to you, you have also written an article in the quarterly.
12:12That talks about what happened on that day for a whole range of people who work in the West Wing, from Vice President Cheney to 112 White House interns who are just starting their internship at the White House.
12:23There are dozens of stories in your article, some of them are familiar, some of them have never been told before.
12:31I was really taken by your account of what was going on in the situation room at the White House.
12:37Really the, the center of activity at a time of national crisis like this.
12:42Tell us about the situation room, uh, soon after the nine eleven attacks took place.
12:49Sure, well, the situation, uh, room, as you know, is really the nerve center for presidential crisis management. I mean, it is on the ground floor of the West Wing, it’s not subterranean like the bunker, but there are about a dozen people that are working there 24 hours a day that are from all branches of the military, from the State Department, from the Intelligence agencies.
