Ari Fleischer served as White House press secretary from the inauguration of President George W. Bush until July 2003. Fleischer released his handwritten notes from September 11th in 2016. He recorded his oral history on September 29–30, 2010, and was interviewed by the Miller Center's Russell Riley and Barbara Perry, along with Paul Freedman of the UVA Politics Department.

Read Ari Fleischer's complete oral history interview

 

Ari Fleischer

We were getting out of the motorcade at the end of Booker Elementary School in Sarasota and I received a page—Back then there were no BlackBerrys, just an old-fashioned pager. I thought, These are really sophisticated pagers. You could respond by saying, "Yes, no, maybe, five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes," and it had these preprogrammed messages. It was like two-way communication. I thought it was really high tech. The page said, "World Trade Center has been hit by an airplane." Like everybody, my first reaction was that it must have been some terrible accident; there was no indication of the size of the plane. We got to the school and the president was shaking hands with people, the superintendent, the principal, along the inside wall of the school. He got to the end of shaking hands and Karl was the first one to get to the president and whispered in the president's ear, "The World Trade Center has been hit by an airplane."

Everywhere presidents go, a hold is set up, and inside the hold are two secure phones. In my eight or nine months, I had never seen the president use the hold. But if he came here, for ten minutes in this room, you would have a room down the hall, guarded by a Secret Service agent, that would be the hold, where the military would have set up phone lines. He went into the hold that day and Condi was waiting for him on the phone. She didn't really have any information and he directed her just to monitor it, keep him apprised, and let him know what's going on.

I received a second page telling me the second tower had been hit, and I instantly knew it was terrorism.

We talked informally—I guess somebody had wheeled in a TV at that point, so we could see the fire. Maybe it was later that you could see the fire—but he knew enough to know that the building was on fire and New York City had to fight this. He was going to say in that briefing room, as I indicated yesterday, that the federal government would make resources available to New York to help deal with the plane hitting the World Trade Center. Then he went into the schoolroom and was reading to the kids. I received a second page telling me the second tower had been hit, and I instantly knew it was terrorism.

Interestingly for me—I had not seen this until three weeks ago—I was watching one of the specials about 9/11 and it showed me getting that second page on TV and I saw my reaction. I had never seen that until nine years later. I saw when I got the page. I looked at my pager and I just went like this. [Grimaces] You just knew what it was.

Russell Riley

Yes.

Fleischer

Moments later, Andy walked in and did what I said yesterday, whispered in his right ear. I wrote on the pad and then the press started to ask questions of the president. My instructions to my press advance staff were to get the press out of there as quickly as they could. The president motioned to the press that he would talk with them later. He then went into the hold. We were just working the phones—he was working the phones, Andy was working the phones—all trying to get information.

I started to write what I thought President Bush should say, because he was going to go to the gymnasium, where he had been scheduled to give a big speech to everybody outside the classroom; the bigger group was waiting for him and all the press was in there. He was going to go there, explain something about what happened to the World Trade Center, and then get to Air Force One. But I had a hard time writing it; nothing was coming to me. The president started to write, Dan started to write, and it was just cobbled together. It's one of my regrets; I wish I could have done more that morning to have written something. Part of it, I guess, was that I was out of practice, maybe part of it was just the magnitude of the day.

Can our president stand on his own two feet?

But the president went to the gym and was talking basically off the cuff. He called them "those folks," and his remarks, in many people's eyes—I think deservedly so—weren't terribly strong. That "those folks" line raised eyebrows about why he was so informal about it, and then he also said, "This will not stand," which is what his father had said. At a time when people were still questioning whether Cheney was in charge and whether Bush was smart, for him to say what his father had said created more doubts in the minds of cynics, Can our president stand on his own two feet?

We went in the motorcade—the president heard about the third plane hitting the Pentagon in the motorcade—and went aboard Air Force One. Instead of going to my usual seat on Air Force One, I spent almost the entire day in the president's cabin, taking all those notes down. The first word we got about the fourth plane was that it went down near Camp David. Karl actually corrected that and said it was south of Pittsburgh. We got reports about the Mall being on fire, a car bomb at the State Department, watching TV—on Air Force One back then, you didn't have satellite TV, so as we flew above major media markets, the TV would come in and go out. Over rural areas, it was totally out. It was remarkable how poor Air Force One's communications turned out to be.

Riley

There aren't many major media markets between where you were in Florida and where you were headed.

Fleischer

Well, we were headed back to Washington.

Riley

Oh, you were headed back to Washington at that point? Okay. Forgive me. Go ahead.

Fleischer

Bush was working the phones, talking to Cheney in the bunker underneath.

Riley

Right.

Fleischer

I was at his side when he gave the order to go to DEFCON 3.

The phone was cutting out on occasion--again, bad communications. He was talking to Rumsfeld. He said, "We're at war, boys"—I gave you this quote yesterday. I think he said that to the military aide, with Andy, Karl, and me standing there—"that's what we get paid for," and "They're not going to like me as president." I was at his side when he gave the order to go to DEFCON 3, which was the first time we had been at that level of readiness since the Yom Kippur War. The only time before that was the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we actually went to DEFCON 2, so it was extraordinarily rare.

Paul Freedman

Did the military aide say, "You need to consider this?"

Fleischer

Bush gave the instruction to Cheney in the bunker is how I think it was conveyed, or to Andy. I don't remember.

Freedman

So the vice president probably said, "Mr. President, we have to—"

Fleischer

I didn't hear Cheney's side of the conversation. I could only hear Bush. I only heard—I wish I had brought my verbatim notes—"You're authorized to go to DEFCON 3" is how I remember it. Then Cheney would have had to convey that directly to the secretary of defense because—you might want to ask Andy this, but—it has to go directly from commander in chief to the secretary of defense. Bush spoke to Rumsfeld, but in my notes, he said it to Cheney in the bunker.

Freedman

So the communication problems weren't bunker-based, they were Air Force One based?

Fleischer

Bush also said, "We're at war."

Correct. The other thing I heard was Bush give the authorization to shoot down commercial airliners, which was so—And Bush also said, "We're at war." For me, to be next to the Commander in Chief, hearing, "We're at DEFCON 3," "Shoot down commercial airliners," "We're at war," just sent a chill down my spine. My whole background having been domestic, I recognized it was a new day and a military operation was beginning.

Riley

Ari, there was a dispute at one point, and I think this came up in the 9/11 Commission Report, about whether the vice president had jumped the gun at some point and issued instructions to shoot down commercial aircraft before the president had authorized him to do so. Do you have any light to shed on that question?

Fleischer

My notes are unclear on it, because I have a time code on the left where I just wrote things down but I would write "10:25" and then write down a bunch of notes and then "10:35," and keep writing my notes. It is unclear from my notes about when Bush said, "Give the authority," whether it was before or after Cheney did.

Riley

The commission had your notes, so presumably they would have been the most authoritative record they had at the time?

Fleischer

I think that's right.

Riley

Were those telephone conversations from Air Force One to the bunker recorded?

Fleischer

I have no reason to believe so.

Riley

Okay. I suspect that they were not, but I've also asked this question about the video conferences that occurred later on between the president and field commanders, whether those were recorded, and we've talked about presidential recordings.

Fleischer

Yes. Good questions. I don't know.

Riley

Okay. Don't let me get you away from the narrative. Go ahead and pick up. You were taking notes when you went to DEFCON 3.

Fleischer

Right.

Barbara Perry

And at that point you were headed back to Washington.

Fleischer

That's correct. We were definitely headed back to Washington.

Freedman

At this point, had you winnowed down the press corps or was it the full—

Fleischer

No.

Freedman

Everybody was—

Fleischer

We're flying from Sarasota to D.C. At 10:32, Bush was on the phone with the vice president and said to the mil aide [military aide] standing there, which, by the way, is unusual. The mil aide is never in the president's office, but he was lingering. He'll probably talk to you. You can probably talk to him.

Riley

Do you remember what his name is?

Fleischer

I think I have it in my book, and I know Karl has it in his book.

Riley

Okay.

Freedman

So who else was in the office?

Fleischer

The Air Force mil aide.

Freedman

It was the three of you and—

Fleischer

The president, mil aide, Andy, and me. Karl and Dan would come in and out, so they could have been there for part of this.

Riley

Okay.

Fleischer

At 10:32, he turned to the mil aide, who said they had just received a report saying, "Angel is next." "Angel" is the code name, at least it was back then, for Air Force One. The Secret Service has code names for everything. The report came to Bush, "Angel is next."

The Secret Service believed there were still six missiles in the sky.

The other piece I haven't told you yet is that when we got aboard Air Force One, the word was that there were six unidentified aircraft that hadn't responded to the order to land. The Secret Service believed there were still six missiles in the sky at a time when we were hearing there was a car bomb at the State Department, the Mall was on fire, a plane went down south of Pittsburgh, and six missiles—six airplanes—hadn't responded. "Angel is next." This was the environment in which we were operating. Much of it later turned out to be wrong, but when you're in that moment and this was what you're—I am a firsthand witness to what the President of the United States was hearing; this is what he was hearing.

The "Angel is next" report ended up being that somebody said to somebody in the Situation Room that they had some type of report about Air Force One was next or could be next. I don't remember exactly what it was; the 9/11 Report has this. Somebody in the sit room then passed it up to the bunker and when the person in the Sit Room passed it to the bunker underneath the White House in the PEOC [Presidential Emergency Operations Center], they changed the phrase "Air Force One" to "Angel," speaking code speak.

The report that originally came in did not use the word "Angel," but in using the word "Angel," it made people fear it could now be an inside job, so the Air Force actually posted security police—the Air Force has its own armed people aboard Air Force One. They are in uniform standing at the base of the steps when the President comes down. The Air Force posted its own guy at the bottom of the stairs who wasn't going to let anybody up to the cockpit in case there was an inside job on Air Force One.

The report turned out to be wrong. It turned out to be one of the things the press jumped on the Bush White House for, for exaggerating, but what goes wrong on a day like that is that bureaucracies are trained to filter information so only the most important and verified information gets to the top. Except on a day of reckoning. Except on a day of horrible crisis. In this case, people's instincts change and you pass it up to the top because, after seeing these attacks, everything becomes credible. The filters vanish and your job then is to let your boss know what you just picked up, because, God forbid, it could be true. That's why people call it the "fog of war." That's why a lot of information that would typically be filtered and would never reach the sit room, the bunker, the commander in chief, went straight up.

The American people want to know where their dang president is.

Then the Secret Service said it wasn't safe to return to Washington. Bush wanted to return to Washington. There was a bit of an argument going on about whether it was safe enough or not. Andy Card, the mil aide, and the Secret Service agent would leave the president's office to go into the president's bedroom, adjoining, and hash out these things. Sometimes I'd wander into the bedroom, but more typically I just stayed with the President. They all agreed he couldn't go back to Washington. He just couldn't. One of the president's quotes was, "I don't want some tin-horned terrorist keeping me out of Washington. The American people want to know where their dang president is." But he also got it; it was not safe to come back. I saw Condi on one of the shows talking about what she had said to the president. She hung up on the president. "You can't come back. You can't." And she hung up on him.

We only had sufficient fuel to come back to Washington and not a whole lot farther than Washington. With this, we needed to top off and get Air Force One totally full of fuel because we didn't know how long we'd be up in the air or where to go, so Air Force One went up to 45,000 feet and started to fly around in a zigzag pattern in the sky, which I later learned was part of the old Cold War doctrine of what the mil aides actually do drill for, how to evacuate the United States government.

There was a time when we actively drilled these things in case of a Soviet attack. And if the Soviets launched something--which was a new word that I didn't know, but I learned on September 11—called a "decapitation," we have plans to survive a decapitation. One of them is that you get the president airborne and he flies around in zigzag pattern in the sky at extraordinarily high altitude for a 747, and that plan was partially implemented.

Are you all familiar with decapitation? Decapitation would be if the Soviets launched a sufficient number of nuclear missiles to take out the president, the vice president, and the entire Congress, the Supreme Court, all the cabinet, to decapitate the government. One of the things our Air Force had—I don't know if you know this. It isn't classified, obviously. The Interstate Highway System was also sold as a defense project. There are many stretches of the interstate system that are absolutely flat, with no signs or anything else to interfere with them, so if we have to disperse the Air Force, there are plenty of places on the highway for our planes to land. In a decapitation, they go after all our military bases. They go after our Air Force. We're built to survive it and the military drills it. On September 11, they partially implemented it.

So we were flying zigzag, the decision was made then to go to Barksdale Air Force base—

Riley

Can they refuel? Airborne refuel?

Fleischer

It had never been done. And they were loath to do it because it's a little more risky than just flying the plane, which is why you want to get on the ground and do a fuel up.

Perry

So they didn't refuel in the air?

Fleischer

Nor could they assemble a fighter pack that was fast enough and I don't really know the reasons why. They may have been waiting for the AWACS [Airborne Warning and Control System] to deploy, but as I remember it, we did not get picked up by fighter aircraft until we were turning from Offutt [Air Force Base] back to Washington, D.C., which was substantially many hours later in the day.

Perry

That seems odd, and the communications gaps seem odd, given the Cold War, when you think of the fact that the Internet came about because of the need to have stable communications in case of decapitation.

Fleischer

Right. But the system was overwhelmed because of cell phones and other modern technology that our military systems just didn't keep up with.

Freedman

You'll get back to the chronology, but—you're one of the few people on the planet who can shed light on what George W. Bush seemed like at this point.

Fleischer

Yes. He seemed like he was in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Just steady. No emotions.

There was only one person who really acted emotionally, and she was very quickly removed from the president's presence.

Freedman

He wasn't scared? He wasn't swearing? He wasn't—

Fleischer

Nope. It was a remarkably office-like calm. There was only one person who really acted emotionally, and she was very quickly removed from the president's presence. He never wanted to see her again. Everybody from the mil aide was absolutely straight. Everybody. Karl. Dan. Me. Andy. It's amazing. You kick in to do your job. And it was done all level-headed, all rational. There was no "Oh, my God!" None of my notes show anything like that. I just don't recall that.

Riley

But you had not had any previous training in evacuations or anything like this?

Fleischer

No.

Riley

I didn't think so, but I didn't—

Fleischer

What I learned about myself—and it probably manifested itself before September 11 in different ways—when things enter a crisis, when the press, particularly, is jumping up and down and screaming, I just get calmer. I don't know why. But that's my nature and was probably reinforced because everybody around me was like that, so that became the way to be.

Riley

Sure.

Fleischer

But it was one of the interesting insider things on September 11. I didn't even think about my safety until we were at Barksdale. There actually was some down time at Barksdale while the president was waiting to be able to address the nation. I called home just to tell my mother that I was okay. It didn't even occur to me that my safety could be an issue. I knew I was with the Secret Service. Why should I worry about it?

Riley

You called your mother on a cell phone? Okay, so you weren't warned against using cell phones in the president's party?

Fleischer

Well, I was told to go back to tell the press they couldn't bring their cell phones to Barksdale, they couldn't tell anybody that we were landing in Barksdale, not to use their cell phones, which was part of the whole question of whether Air Force One was a target.

Riley

Sure.

Fleischer

But as we were landing in Barksdale, the TV showed us landing in Barksdale. [laughter] The local media was tipped off. "Here comes Air Force One!"

Riley

Okay.

Fleischer

So they were there to watch it.

Riley

All right. The cat was out of the bag.

Fleischer

It's another example of where the press would say, "Why is he telling us this? This is ridiculous treatment of the press." I told them that because I was told to tell them that. I think Andy was the one who told me to tell them that. We just went into this operative mode: It's an evacuation; protect the secrecy of it. But the world doesn't cooperate.

Riley

Right. Okay.

Perry

You said yesterday that from your notes had been taken out—literally cut out—the safe places for the First Lady and the two Bush daughters, but was the president speaking back to Washington about them, particularly given the fact that the First Lady was at the Capitol building with Senator Kennedy?

Fleischer

The first thing he said when he got on board was to Eddie [Lorenzo], the lead Secret Service agent, "Are my wife and kids safe?" or "Did you get my wife and kids safe?" That was the first thing he said when we boarded Air Force One.

Perry

And so Mrs. Bush was taken from the Capitol then to a safe place?

Fleischer

Correct.

Freedman

Wait, the four cutouts were the First Lady, the two girls, and—

Fleischer

Communications. Just a little more granularity on why communications were bad.

Riley

Okay. Why don't we take a break?

Fleischer

Okay.

[BREAK]

Riley

All right. So we have you in Louisiana.

Fleischer

The president addressed the nation and, again, there were mediocre reviews of it.

Riley

Who was the author of that statement? Did you have a hand in that?

Fleischer

I don't remember. I don't remember if at that stage Karen, from Washington, was able to get him something. That's a great question. I don't know.

Riley

By the time you got there, was there buzz on the plane about who was responsible for this?

Fleischer

Yes. Andy Card said, "This sounds like Osama bin Laden to me," but that was the extent of it.

Freedman

He said that to the president or to you in an aside?

Fleischer

It was to my notes.

Perry

Why were they saying that? From the famous August briefing that—

Fleischer

Just that it was al-Qaeda's M.O. [modus operandi]: spectacular, large, well-timed, coordinated attacks.

Freedman

But did anybody say—

Fleischer

We had no evidence.

Freedman

Nobody harked back to that briefing?

Fleischer

Oh, no. No. That briefing, which later became one of the most huge controversies, gave rise to the 9/11 Truth Movement, was a reiteration of a PDB that Bill Clinton received--this is from the 9/11 Commission—that "Al-Qaeda wants to attack in the United States." That's it. There was nothing about hijacking airplanes that would crash into buildings, nothing about timing, nothing about wheres or whens.

Perry

Did people raise the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center?

Fleischer

Not in my presence.

The other thing about Barksdale that was notable to me was, and this led to the decision to tell reporters they could leave—keep in mind that wherever the president goes, an army goes in ahead of him, and the Secret Service goes in, in huge numbers, to secure the facility. The dogs go in to sniff for bombs; they post people around the facility so it's a secure zone, inviolate; military communications are set up. Everything is in order, and Air Force One lands. Air Force One doesn't have a lot of people on it. There are 70 to 80 of us, including the Air Force personnel. There are 13 reporters typically, including cameramen and technicians. The Secret Service detail is the immediate detail around him, which is 10 to 12 agents. The armored vehicle and all of those things are flown in ahead of time. Now we were just Air Force One.

That was a day when there was no waiting. He got in and they moved.

We landed at Barksdale, and there was no infrastructure, no motorcade, no Secret Service. One of the reasons Barksdale was chosen was that the base was on lockdown; they were actually having some type of B-52 exercise. We went in; everyone got off the airplane—typically you get off and the car with the president in it is waiting for everybody to board up in the motorcade and then takes off. That was a day when there was no waiting. He got in and they moved. He actually joked later that day that the biggest danger he faced on September 11 was that the driver of the up-armored Humvee that he was put in was driving so fast he had to say, "Slow down, you're going to kill us."

But Andy Card made the decision that we needed to shrink the number of people on Air Force One, because we just couldn't afford these makeshift motorcades, who knew how long we were going to be out of Washington, and these people were not essential. There were Members of Congress from Florida aboard Air Force One, who typically flew down to Florida to do a political event, and we'd fly them back to Washington; we threw off Members of Congress. White House staffers who were deemed to be nonessential, we threw them off. Then Andy came to me and said, "You need to shrink the press pool down to three." I convinced him we needed to make it five for technical reasons—to have a meaningful pool, you have to have a cameraman, a photographer, and three reporters. Andy said, "Fine, just do it."

I gave instructions to one of my assistants, Gordon Johndroe, as to who would stay on and who would go, which was almost as dramatic as who do you pick for a life raft. This was the most newsworthy day of anybody's career and here I was saying to eight of them, "You, news reporters, you may not be here any longer." Nevertheless, I had to do it. One reporter, Steve Holland, one of the kindest, most gentle people I've ever met, as we were reboarding Air Force One—he was stranded on the tarmac—said, "Ari, what about us?" Another reporter, Jay Carney, then of Time magazine, now he's Vice President Biden's communications director, started screaming at the top of his lungs, "Who's in charge, the military or the civilians?" Jay wasn't happy.

Freedman

Did you say, "That's why I kicked you off the plane?" [laughter]

Fleischer

The ones I chose to stay were the ones who represented the biggest media outlets in the country. I tried to have a principle for who could stay, actually. Even though they were pool, so anything they would file would go to everybody, I had Sonia Ross and Doug Mills of the Associated Press stay, and Ann Compton, who was both radio and TV for ABC. I had wire, TV/radio, print, then a cameraman and a still photographer, so that was the crew of five.

Perry

You needed their seats?

Fleischer

No. We just weren't going to take time for 70 people to get off an airplane to board a makeshift motorcade. Andy wanted to shrink it so it was only essential people, so when we could get off the plane, we'd be gone.

Riley

And you were not going back to Washington at that point?

Fleischer

We didn't know what we were doing or how long we would be out of Washington, so the fewer hangers-on, the more efficiently we could operate the movements of the president.

Riley

And I guess your fuel, you'd get more—

Fleischer

I don't think fuel was a consideration, but I don't know that. I think it was much more just that Andy said only essential people need to be on board, we didn't need other people, strip it down to the bare minimum. There was the sheer logistics issue of not even having our advance people to get people into their cars and tell them, "You're in this car. You're in that car." There would be no waiting around.

That was a pretty rough thing to do to the press. We left and the president wanted to go back to Washington. There was another discussion about it. It was "too unsteady still" was what the Secret Service said to him. We flew out to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Offutt was chosen because it had—it's kind of like the movie WarGames—incredible communications facilities where the President could convene a secure video teleconference with anybody around the world, many different places all at one time, and was an ultra-secure facility. We landed at Offutt and Air Force One taxied up—I'll never forget this—as we pulled up, right next to us was the "Doomsday Plane."

We were in something like a WarGames movie set and the president went into one side of it to convene a meeting of the National Security Council.

The Doomsday Plane was again part of the old Cold War apparatus. The Doomsday Plane is designed to fly for extraordinarily long periods of time. It can be refueled aerially, but what is more important, it can launch nuclear missiles from the sky. Like the mil aide that carries the "football," that plane can do it, too. In a Soviet attack, if almost everything on the ground is destroyed and the president authorizes a counterattack, as part of our redundancies of operation, that plane can get it done. The plane was on the ground, but here we were parking next to the Doomsday Plane as we arrived at Offutt.

We walked off the plane and I brought my overnight bag with me, thinking we might spend the night here. Who knew? There was this little brick outhouse, kind of, not very big, 10 feet by 10 feet with a door, and that's what we went into. Down. Down. Down. Down. Down. Deep into the earth. That's how we entered the bunker. Way under the ground, from this totally nondescript little outhouse.

And then—whoosh. We were in something like a WarGames movie set and the president went into one side of it to convene a meeting of the National Security Council. Only Andy went in with him. Karl, Dan, and I stayed out. I was able to watch TV at that time. I saw Karen do her news conference that day. I don't even remember how long we were down there. An hour? I don't remember.

Freedman

Was the press with you?

Fleischer

The press was somewhere else. No, they didn't go down there with us. I think they were taken somewhere else and held. The president came out and said, "We're going home. We're going back to Washington." On the flight back is when I remember the fighter escorts were off our wings. The cameraman asked for permission to film them, and I gave him permission. We landed at Andrews Air Force Base. At that point, we knew there were no more aircraft in the sky.

Oh, there's one other thing from Offutt. While the president was in there getting his briefings, he was told two intercontinental flights were approaching the United States, neither of which had responded to the order to land. We were thinking two more missiles had been newly launched from abroad. One was coming in, I think, from Tokyo and the other was somewhere in Europe. While we were there, both those reports resolved themselves. But again, six aircraft hadn't responded. Two more were coming. That was what the Commander in Chief was hearing about.

Perry

Can I ask, before you get back to Washington—from your book you said that you and Dan Bartlett and Karl Rove were in a room while the president was being briefed elsewhere at Offutt. What were the three of you talking about?

Fleischer

I don't remember.

Perry

Did you have notes? Did you keep notes on that discussion?

Fleischer

No. My notes really were what the president said. I didn't take notes about what Karl would have said or what Dan would have said. I remember watching Karen. But we may have just been watching TV.

Perry

And when was it that you knew, or did you know, that the White House had been evacuated in the chronology of that day?

Fleischer

I don't think I knew until the next day. I'm not sure. Good question.

We flew back, landed at Andrews, got in Marine One, were flying back, and took the best, most majestic, beautiful route back to the White House, going over the Capitol, right over the Mall; the Washington Monument was right in front of us. The helicopter banked right to land on the South Lawn and the Pentagon came clearly into view. The president was in the front left of the helicopter. I was on a bench right across from him. Just then the president said out loud, "The mightiest building in the world is on fire. That's the face of war in the 21st century."

What I don't remember about September 11 is what I said to the press.

We landed and went straight to the private dining room off the Oval Office. Karen, Al Gonzales, I don't remember who else, were waiting there. I went in with Andy, the president, I think Karl, and Karen handed him the speech for that night. At one point earlier in the day, the president was on the phone with Karen, giving her instructions for what he wanted to say that night to the nation. The president went to the Residence, and I went to my office.

What I don't remember about September 11 is what I said to the press. I know I went back to the press several times on Air Force One to give them briefings and I would suspect transcripts exist of it, but I don't remember what I said to them. I did an interview with an Indianapolis radio station this September 11, and they had Ann Compton on ahead of me. Ann said that I went back and told the press that the president was being evacuated, but I don't remember what I told the press or how often I briefed the press.

Then the president addressed the nation and I walked with him to the PEOC, but I didn't go into the meeting at the PEOC. That was now the National Security team, but what I do remember, I still can't believe this, but I remember there was a—the Secret Service agents are armed with their regular guns, but there are places throughout the White House where they have long rifles set up; if they need them, they grab them. And leaning against the wall was a long rifle. It was just there, in the safest spot, the bunker underneath the White House, the Secret Service was so trigger ready, in case. In case of who knew what? The next day they doubled the Secret Service presence inside the West Wing. It was remarkable. At that point security kicks in and does what it does, prepares for the worst, and from that day forward I remember what I always called a "hard-headedness" of what it was like inside the White House.

It was a sense of no one knowing what to expect. We were all told that there would be a second wave and you saw the people whose job it was to protect the president doubled at all their posts. You saw weapons out when you had never before seen weapons out. You saw the perimeter of the White House pushed back to the other side of Lafayette Park. E Street on the south side of the White House was closed. It remains closed. Physically, things changed. Emotionally, things changed. Everything changed.