PROJECT STRENGTH
Mettle is a family value
On New Year's Day, 2001, my wife and I watched Thirteen Days, a somewhat hagiographical film about John Kennedy's cool handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. As the closing credits rolled, I said to my wife, "I hope nothing like this happens during the next four years. I don't think Bush can handle it."
Fast-forward eight months and ten days.
On September 11, 2001, I arrived for work at Associated Press headquarters in Rockefeller Center a few minutes before nine. By then the first plane had already crashed into the World Trade Center. I thought it was one of those prop planes John Denver used to fly.
"Geez," I said to the receptionist, "how can you hit a building like that? What an idiot!"
President Bush, en route to an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, had the same first impression I did. When told that plane had struck the tower, "the President's reaction was that the incident must have been caused by pilot error," according to the 9/11 Commission Report.
At 9:05, when a second plane hit the other tower, everyone knew the harrowing truth: this was the work of terrorists.
George W. Bush was in a classroom, reading to children. Andrew Card, the White House Chief of Staff, whispered in his ear, "A second plane hit the tower. America is under attack."
Bush proceeded to sit there for seven full minutes, a children's book opened in his hands. If you've seen Fahrenheit 9/11, you've seen the look on his face. My impression at the time was, deer in headlights. Here's Bush's own account, according to the 9/11 Commission:
The President told us his instinct to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction in a moment of crisis. The press was standing behind the children; he saw their phones and pagers start to ring. The President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening.
I submit that the best way to understand what was happening might not have been to continue reading Dick and Jane to a bunch of second graders. But that's just me.
* * *
As for Yours Truly, I was in Midtown Manhattan, far enough away from Ground Zero, and in the world headquarters of the largest newsgathering organization on Earth. The press is a free PR firm for al Qaeda; no way anything would happen where I was. And yet I was drawn to Ground Zero. I wanted to go down there. So did my wife, so did my friends. Everyone who wasn't in the area wanted to, to help.
Bush did not. A terrified Dick Cheney called him from the infamous underground bunker beneath the White House, and Bush spent the day aboard Air Force One, flying to and from undisclosed locations, none of them Washington or New York.
* * *
So how did Bush behave in the face of the greatest crisis he would face in his presidency? He sat in an elementary school classroom like one of the children until one of his staffers retrieved him, and then the self-styled "cowboy" turned tail. He was absent -- conspicuously, embarrassingly absent -- most of the day.
* * *
Also absent, in the first few hours after the attacks, was New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
On September 10, 2001, Giuliani was a lame-duck mayor leaving office with piss-poor approval ratings. His marriage, fodder for the tabloids for months, was no more. Prostate cancer forced him to end his run for the vacant seat in the Senate, although word on the street was the Republicans asked him to step down, as he had no chance against Hillary Rodham Clinton. New Yorkers, Democrats and Republicans alike, reviled him. He was a broken man, with few prospects of what to do next.
He was also something of a media whore. The guy loved to be on TV. So where was the Mayor, I wondered, in the early hours after the attacks? Had he followed the President's lead and chickened out?
Au contraire. Giuliani wasn't on TV that morning because he and some city officials rushed to the World Trade Center complex, and he got trapped in one of the buildings. When he emerged some hours later, covered in soot, he projected strength and calm. He led, and New York followed. And we've loved him ever since.
* * *
In crises, politics go out the window. What matters is the mettle of our leaders. Mayor Giuliani demonstrated a heart few of us knew he had. His political turnaround, an AP colleague told me a few months later, was the most abrupt and total he had ever seen.
President Bush and his pusillanimous Vice President, meanwhile, let fear and self-preservation rule their hearts. Are these really the people you want "leading" our country in the fight against al Qaeda?
At one point during the Civil War, the Confederates were surging, and Washington, nestled between a slave state and a tenuously free one, was in peril. His advisors urged President Lincoln to evacuate for his own safety. Lincoln refused. He preferred to die than have the country perceive him as a coward.
Bush talks a big game, but when push came to shove, he did not share Abe's sentiment.
—Greg Olear
Editor, LARGEREGO
August 24, 2004
Editor, LARGEREGO
August 24, 2004
"We are a nation in danger." |