Inside the White House on 9/11

0:00Tired of rage scrolling through AI Slop and ClickBape just to get a handle on today's news? Meet InPress, the algorithm-free news app that makes it fun and rewarding to stay informed. Track your media literacy and rediscover reality. Download today at inpress.app. That's I, N as in NewsNerd. Press. Hello and welcome to the David Frum show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at the Atlantic. My guest this week will be John McConnell, a colleague of mine in the George W. Bush speech writing department, and himself Chief Speechwriter to former Vice President Dick Cheney. We'll be talking about the 9-11 and quarter century anniversary. John and I spent much of the day together on 9-11 2001 and we'll be discussing what we saw, what we thought, what we felt, and what we did. The book discussions week will also be terrorism-related.

1:02The novel American Pastoral by Philip Roth, his discussion of homegrown terrorist in Roth's own state of New Jersey. Before either the dialogue or the book discussion, I'm some home news. We're going to be conducting an experiment here in the David Frum show with a new tempo, twice a week, releasing one show on Wednesday, the show you see, which will contain an interview in a book discussion, and a shorter show which will be releasing each Saturday on both YouTube and on whatever audio platform you Spotify, Apple, whatever it is. The second show, the Saturday show, will be much shorter, no interview, just some thoughts from me on the events of the week just passed. And the first of the shows, which will release this coming Saturday, I will offer my own reflections on the 25th anniversary of 9-11. The United States has been almost unceasingly at war in the Middle East since 9-11 2001, and I'll be offering some of my thoughts about how to think how I think about that experience, how others might want to think about it, whatever information I can offer. I play it a small part in that history, and I think about it almost all the time. And I'll be sharing those thoughts with you, and we'll be continuing each Saturday after that.

2:05I do hope you'll join and we'll bookmark us, or however, subscribe to the Atlantic YouTube channel, or whatever audio channel you use, so you will not miss any of our Saturday shows. So that's the news. I hope you'll join me this coming Saturday, and each success of Saturday for the second shorter David Frum show weekend episode. And now my dialogue with John McConnell. But first, a quick break. My guest today is John McConnell. John is one of the greatest speech writers in American history.

3:23But that's only incidentally why I've invited him today. John was a colleague in the George W. Bush administration, and I spent much of September 11th, 2001 in his company, sharing emotions of shock, dismay, and grief. As we mark the 25th anniversary of a tragic day, I wanted to be with him again. John wrote for Vice President Dan Quail, then for the Bob Dole for President Campaign in 1996. He joined the George W. Bush campaign in 2000, and then did remarkable service in the Bush White House, where he doubled as both a writer for the President and the sole speech writer for Vice President Richard Cheney. John was a Paul Barer at Vice President Cheney's funeral. It was his frequent writing partner, Matt Scully, who delivered the finest verdict on John's work. As a general rule in Bush speeches, if the writing is graceful, judicious, and understated, and makes you think about the subject at hand instead of anyone's particular craftsmanship or religiosity, there's a better than even chance it is by John McConnell.

4:24It's John's lifelong reflex to deflect attention from himself, but today he must overcome that reflex and accept his place in American history. Thank you, John, for joining me today. Hello, David. Great to see you. So we spent the day together on 9-11. Let me start by asking you to summon your memories of what happened that day, where you were from the beginning to the end. I was sitting outside Vice President Cheney's inner office door in the West Wing. The night before, Matthew Scully and I had been working on a speech for the President for the end of that week, and at the end of Monday, I looked at my list of things to do, and I realized that Cheney had a speech on Friday too, and I thought, well, I haven't given this much thought. I should go talk to him. So I called his secretary. I said, can I pop in on him tomorrow morning? And she said, how much time do you need? I said 10 minutes, maybe five. I just want to ask him about a speech. And she said, sure, come at 830. And so the next morning, remember how we

5:31get to the office and the President's and Vice President's schedules would be on our under our doors. And I looked at it, said meeting with John McConnell 830. And I thought, oh, well, it's an official meeting. So I really better be there 830 sharp. So I went over and the Vice President was there. As Sean O'Keefe, who was at the time, the Deputy Director of the Budget former Secretary of the Navy, friend of Cheney's, had popped in on Cheney after the senior staff meeting. And so he was in there and I waited outside the door. And I was just chatting with the Vice President's secretary's personal aid and the Secret Service Man Standing Post. And then about 846, I'm still waiting for the Vice President. We're seeing on television early reports that a plane has hit the World Trade Center. And so we're just watching that and speculating what could possibly have gone wrong on this beautifully, perfectly clear late summer day.

6:33Well, not long after we started seeing these pictures, that phone at the Secret Service command point outside the Vice President's office, the phone with no keys on it that just said Secret Service only rang. And the office of the Agent Standing Post picked it out and listened for a few moments and said, okay, and put it down. And he looked at me and told me that it was a a passenger jet, a big commercial flight that had hit the North Tower. And that was the first sense of real dread that this might be a coordinated event. And around that time, the Vice President's visitor, Sean O'Keefe walked out and Cheney motioned me in. So it's close to 9 o'clock at this point. And I go in and he says, good morning, John. I said, sir, just just need a couple minutes of your time to talk about this little thing we've got on Friday. He said, sure, have a seat. But all we did was immediately turn to his television and just look

7:39at it was on. And so he was aware of what was happening in New York. And instead of talking about the matter I brought, I hope to raise with him, we just sat there looking at the TV. And it wasn't very long until we saw the live image of the second plane coming in and slamming into the South Tower. And of course, at that moment, you realize that this is a terrorist attack. And he picked up the phone. And the President, as you recall, was out of town. He was in Florida. Vice President picked up the phone and asked to be connected to the President, as I recall. Then he got out of his chair and went out to see Andy Cards assistant, chief of staff, chief of staff's assistant to tell him to get in touch when he could. And then he came back in the office and then remember Mary Madeline came in, Scooter Libby came in, Josh Bolton, Condi Rice. And at a certain

8:41point, I realized there were going to be some big big discussions. I want to remember also the President being on the phone with the Vice President. And I had my hands on Cheney's desk. And he was on the phone with the President. And I couldn't make out what was being said. Even though I was right there, it was just a very, a very low, serious conversation between the President and Vice President. But at a certain point, I left. And I went to my office. And I went to the phone. Your office isn't in the executive office building on the second floor? That's right. In the Eisenhower building. And so it was just across that little west executive drive. And I picked up the phone and I called my mom, who was here where I am today in Northern Most Wisconsin, a place called Bayfield County. And I called her and she said, where are you? And I said, I'm in my office. And everything's fine. And she says, well, on television, it says the White House is being evacuated. And I kind of, I remember I kind of chuckled. I said, well,

9:45I'm here. And nobody knows you're better than your mother. And she knows my passive personality. She said, John, go out in the hallway and see if anyone else is there. And I said, okay, okay, I will. I will. I'll call you. And I put the phone down and I went out into the hallway. And sure enough, people were being told, get out, get out. And so I went down the stairs and then down outside, they call them the Navy steps, which you know, well, the steps from the Eisenhower building going down basically directly right into the west wing there across that little, little west executive drive. And I saw one of the vice president's secret service man, and who I'd known for a long time. And he said, John, everybody's got to get out of here. And I said, I'm going. And then, but just a second or two later, one of the uniform secret service guys comes running from the direction of the White House down that little set of steps

10:46near the west wing entrance and said, everybody run, there's a plane coming at us. And I don't remember running, but I remember just pointing north and going up west executive drive and it was then that I saw a big plane over 16th street. And I remember thinking in that moment, I swear to God, I thought that plane is filled with people. It's about to slam into the White House, kill them all and destroy the White House. I cannot believe this is the year 2001. And that that is the instant thought that came to my mind. I can't believe this is happening. And we later found out that it was, it was thought for a while that that was the plane that ended up hitting the Pentagon, but the Pentagon had already been hit at that point. So that plane, I saw over 16th had to be a diverted commercial aircraft. I just assumed that's what it was. And so we're out there. Nobody knows where to go. There's no

11:49evacuation plan. The net White House has never been evacuated. And so I ended up just out. I you know, you leave the White House complex, you're a west executive drive and then boom, there's Lafayette Park. And if you walk for one minute, you're on Connecticut Avenue. And that's about where I met up with you, isn't it, David? That's exactly right. So let me tell you why memory up to that point. So as you say, the president was in Florida that day. So I was a little bit off duty. And so I played a little bit of hooky. Our kids, our older kids then went to a Jewish day school in Rockville, which is quite a distance from downtown DC. And we shared off and driving duties with a friend who had children in the same school. So that morning, I volunteered to take my children, Daniels and my children and the neighbor and this friend's children to drive them up to Rockville, which is a long drive. And then you're coming back with the rush hour traffic. So I got to the White House quite late by White House standards. I would have got there about quarter to nine. Park

12:51the car. I was walking toward the executive office building and my clunky mobile phone of those days rang. And it was my wife who said there's something something terrible is happening. You should get to a television scene screen as close as you can. So I remember entering the executive building, going up the stairs that you just described going down, walking along. I, my office that I shared with Matt Scully was on a much busier corridor than yours. The plan of the executive office building is like a big squared off number eight. Scully and I were on the long, the short arm of the number eight away from the White House on the 17th Street side with a huge office with a partition in between him, apart from him, apart from me went to my office. And I remember walking along that corridor and hearing the sounds of every television set along the wall of increasing, increasingly agitated voices. I got to my office and turned on my television and sat down. And just as I sat down, it was your mother who called Danielle called me a second time. My wife, Danielle and this would have been about 10 past nine and said a second plane has hit the World Trade Center.

13:57They're going to attack the White House. You need to get out of there. And my personality is a little balkier than yours. And I remember saying to her, I am not leaving. I am not leaving. And I don't know what I thought I was going to achieve by staying there. I was going to type with renewed, with renewed fervor and patriotism. But what am I going to do? What am I doing? But sorry, no, I'm staying. I said goodbye and I sat down. I just to do whatever the hell it was. I thought I was going to do. And just at that moment, one of the uniform secret service officers pounded on the door because we are on a busy traffic corridor. So we were right at the all of the traffic toward the Navy steps was going to flow by or almost all of it was going to flow by the front door of the skullion and from sweet. So they pounded and said, get out of here. And I stepped out of the office and the secret sir, I remember the secret service officers uniform saying don't run. So we began to walk briskly. And then two beats later, they changed their tune. They said run. And they shouted, ladies, if you can't run in heels, kick off your heels. And so we ran out across the crossbar

15:01to the Navy steps down the Navy steps. As you say, up that through Lafayette Square. And that's where I met you. And we all realized at the same time that we had no way of communicating with the world. All the mobile phones were dead. The only thing that still worked were pages. And I didn't have one. One of the things that people may not recall today is in 2001, a phone was not part of your body the way it was today. That it was a much cludger. All you could do with it was make phone calls, basically. You didn't carry it around all the time the way people do today. So people were separated from their phones. But anyway, they didn't work because everyone in the world, everyone in Washington, you see anyway, was trying to get on to the same number of very finite circuits that existed in 2001 at the same time. And all the lines went dead. Yeah. And that's a very good point. You make David. If you weren't around then, if you're 30 or less, we didn't have, we got blackberries in 2004. When you could look at your email for the first time without being at your desk. But text messages, all that stuff came

16:04much later in terms of just ordinary usage in everyone's hand. I think there's no social media of any kind. There's no YouTube, there's no Facebook, there's no Twitter, nothing. And mobile computers do, mobile computers do exist. But they're pretty cludgy. So it's still very much a desk bound world of communication. Well, there was, I remember when I was a kid reading about the day the president of Kennedy was assassinated. And there was some vignettes of that day. And one of them was a blind beggar in New York City had a little pocket radio. And people were gathered around this man listening to that radio. And 9-11 was kind of still kind of that world because you had, I mean, you had 24 hour news on TV and stuff. But I'm on the street. I remember at one point during that day hearing a very loud car radio somewhere, maybe on our walk, David, and it's popping momentarily

17:06to see if there was anything coming through that radio that we could learn. Yeah. Well, one of the reasons we're all milling around, this is something I learned later. So 9-11, 2001, it's only a dozen years after the end of the Cold War. And it's at the end of a long period of security and peace. So the evacuation plans for the White House are still the Cold War plans. And the contingency that they planned for was a Soviet decapitation strike on the centers of government of the United States. And so the plan was get the president up in the air on Air Force wine as fast as you can so he can command whatever response is required to the Soviet decapitation strike, get other key White House personnel into the tiny little bomb shelter underneath the West Wing that's, I think basically left over from the 1950s. So it has room for what? A dozen 15 people get them down there. And then everybody else is going to be vaporized in the strike, which is is very sad for them. But it means you don't need a plan. As to where you're going to put these people is your assume not only are they all dead, but their bodies don't exist anymore.

18:12And you know, I never saw the bunker obviously. I left the vice president's office just before a V realized that there was a plane coming directly at the White House at 500 miles an hour. And that's when Jimmy Scott, the head of that the vice president shift ran into him and said, sir, we have to leave. And Jamie said, all right. And he said, so they're taking him to the bunker. And that's where condolese rice will go. And then the presidential entourage is on its way to Air Force one. But we don't know any of that as we're standing there. I think we're on the corner of like ice street and Connecticut Avenue with no way of knowing what's going on in the world. And and no, as you say, no evacuation plan. We were never brief boy, if something happens and you're told to leave the building, there was just nothing. No way to go, nothing to do. And it just I'm sure it's not that way now. So I remember a lot of people had to make a prompt decision. Do I go home and check on my loved ones? Do I try to find some way to be useful, but with no

19:16contingency plan, there are people who are stuck in traffic on the way into town. Who haven't, there are some people who, it was a late morning because the president was away. So there are people who are planning on arriving at 830 or 9 o'clock. And they're stuck in traffic presumably because the I-395, the main road from northern Virginia where a lot of Republican White House people would live. That's just that's past the Pentagon. It's it's just immobilized that there's no moving on I-395. And so you and I had to decide what to do in that moment. And I had this intuition. I knew Danielle, I knew exactly. Danielle was was already in our other car on our way on our way to the school to get the kids. So if I went home, there would be nobody home. There's nothing for me to do. So and maybe somebody would need some words at some point. And I remember I think we need to find saying to you, we need to find a place to figure out where we can watch what's going on. Get access to a television set. My first thought was we should go to the Mayflower Hotel, which was across the street in Renroom. And then I had the brainwave or you had the brainwave, I forget which of us was. We should

20:19go to the American Enterprise Institute, which is another block beyond the Mayflower Hotel, which would probably still be open. And one of the other of us had them. We wandered over there together. And do you remember David that at one point we were headed right to where you say the American Enterprise Institute at 17th and M just south of that is the Mayflower. And we saw Tony snow, do you remember? And he was on his phone and we didn't speak to him, but we kind of waived at each other. And then we had a phone connection. I cannot at this point understand. He must have been. Yeah, he was with what he was fox at the time. I can't remember. So we walked it. We walked over to 11th and M building that is now demolished. 17th and 17th and M and went up to the American Enterprise Institute. And they were all still there. This must have been about near 10 o'clock. They had television sets and we could catch up. By that point, we had a pretty good idea about the World Trade Center and what had happened. I think the World Trade Center, I don't know if it

21:20had collapsed as of 10 o'clock, whether we were still waiting for the horrors of that disaster to unfold. And when you and I arrived in the A and I think by that point, we had intercepted Matthew Scully. And Matthew, the reason I say that is Matthew remembers seeing Tony as well. And I think we had intercepted him. And the three of us went up into into AI and Christa Mooth met us. You remember? And he said one of the towers just fell. And I remember the image in my mind was that it had been gone over that it had fallen over to the side. And that was the image that came to my mind before we saw it on the TV. And then we remember we saw the horrible picture and how it just sort of fell down on its own footprint. But that was just moments after we got in there. And so we're there probably for about half an hour, just absorbing impressions from this terrible day. I don't know if we would have known yet about flight 93. I don't remember the time of the day

22:23when that impressed itself on my consciousness. What I remember is we were at AEI for about half an hour. And then it must have been Matthew Scully who had the pager because he got the information that there had been there had been improvised a play an office of workspace away from the White House for people who were needed and that the three of us were needed. And the workspace was I remember was it was on I think H Street or I Street. And we walked over there. And I remember my first thought I had no I was on Scully's pager. So I didn't know where I was going. And we walk into this brand new office building gleaming. We take the elevator and the White House. I don't know what it's like today. But in 2001 it was a pretty it was not as glamorous a place as the West Wing made it look. It was quite you know it looked like a it didn't have the state of the art except in the president's personal suite and the vice president's personal suite. They were still using the big bulbous computer screens and very few flat screens. Everything was a little like government procurement. They like government procurement office. And I remember walking into the space and you take the elevator and the elevator is much sleeker. And then these glass doors that go

23:27with sensors which is a very new thing in 2001. I was so surprised. I thought that's it. The CIA has it. Oh, okay. Now I get it. There's a secret government that has cool offices unlike the West Wing prepared for justice contingency. And then we learned no, no, this is the government relations offices of of Daimler Chrysler. And somebody on the West Wing staff was married to somebody at Daimler Chrysler and they were all evacuated. So they let's use their offices. Exactly. We're much sleeker than anything that the government had to offer. Yeah, right. That's right. That's where we spend the rest of the day. One one thing I remember also about that was was walking in and they were going to have some kind of lunch at the Daimler Chrysler and they prepared a spread of sandwiches. And there's a big difference between government food culture and private sector food culture. The government food culture in those days was much more turkey on white bread with mayo. And these were like a Rugala sandwich. That was my first inclination. Oh, maybe this was not a secret CIA facility.

24:28Or my first indications, not a secret CIA facility, but they would still have been the turkey on white bread with mayo. So that's where we started to work. So yeah. So by this time we are with Scully. And this is now, I would say, about 1130 in the morning. I'm guessing. And we arrive there and we start thinking about what should the president say. And again, we don't have a good ways of communicating with anybody. And the whole team is sort of distributed all over the place. Mike Gerson is stuck in traffic, I think on I 395. That's the head of the speech writing office. We don't know where Pete Wainer who is sort of the operational head of the speech writing office. We don't know where he is. And the plane is on its way from Florida to Barclay 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 speech writer in a moment like that, we're the only ones who knew we were going to be needed. You know, a lot of our colleagues, you know, what are they going

25:28to ask me to do? You know, when you're in presidential speech writing on an event like this. So you, 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 in 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 Barclay. It was a military link. It was a poor link. And so it looked kind of like wavry. And the president still wasn't sure exactly what hadn't thought very hard about what to say. Just wanted to make it clear that he was alive in contact. I remember, for me, that first speech, which would have been about 130 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, 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

26:34attack that it looks like the government has lost the ability to put out a clear TV image to the American people. And so it looks like the government of the United States has really been knocked off its pegs because he looks wobbly. He sounds wobbly. This is really bad. 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. He 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 just, I know it was a haunting, haunting experience for him. It was about two o'clock in the afternoon when we're still in this office building that my wife

27:34was able to reach me and told me she had indeed gone to the Jewish day school, retrieve 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. And a Jewish day school would be on the list of targets you would have to, if there was any kind of local auxiliary as well. So when the car bomb story made it seemed like it was, this was not just a remote event. They 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, 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, if there are a line of parents who all came to retrieve the children, 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 it lasted about two o'clock. And that's when I heard the news that Barber Olsson, the wife of

28:35Solicitor General Ted Olsson, 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. It was someone I knew well who was killed on 9-11. Yes, yes. Barbara was a good friend of mine too. And she, I had seen her not long before. Of course, we all know Ted, the number three man at the Justice Department. And you were the one who told me about Barbara, I remember that moment. And you know, and you just, then you realized 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. So Gary called and, and was in the, in the North Tower. And that was their

29:36only daughter, Gary and Janet Nelson, lifelong friends of ours. And their, 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 were 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, and, Giuliani said that afternoon, he said the numbers are going to be overwhelming because they, they more have got out than they thought. But it was a, it was just just the, the, 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

30:36us, but by people who are even closer to the, to the, to the, to the, to the murders. Well, 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. The passengers could use with a credit card. It was very expensive. So they didn't get a lot of abuse. But Barbara somehow was able to get, 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 here, I can hear his voice. He's now passed to saying, I felt I had to tell her. And so he told her what had happened. And he

31:41told her what he feared was probably going to happen. And they had no idea of the target, but of the fate. And they said they said they're goodbyes. And that was the end. That was one of the many, many heartbreaking stories of that day that I went one again that came close to, close to home. Yeah. And then it was only days later that Ted was on Capitol Hill testifying, I think, in favor of the, you know, the Patriot Act. And if it was just days later, when all these measures had to be taken, and that this man was on duty and remained so. Yeah. So the president flew from Barxdale, then to strategic air command near Omaha, Nebraska against his wishes. We 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? Because there are so

32:41many, there are so many rumors as the car bombs on the mall were one, I'm going to forget the others, but there are 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 then, 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, would you want to, any of you guys have a home computer? And Mike said, I got a computer home. He said, well, why don't you all go to Mike's house? And I thought, what, what's this all about? And then Andy Cardwalked, Andy said, we're not, 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 Barclay communication, you and I met, we worked, we wrote a number of

33:46graphs. 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 is all of us or maybe it was just me that I wrote speeches of varying degrees of matter of factness, rhetorical flights. I like four versions of the same statement. I'm depending on here are four different ways of doing it. That was a way I often worked in those days. You could say, you can 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 from words were not their first trade to see it. This is, 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. This is what a lean back. We're not going to take aggressive action. Is the speech writers don't decide what to do? They just decide how to describe what the president's decided what to do. Well, I've started in a rut, but you were so good that way. Very, very few writers can get

34:46tone 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 this writing the same thing. And for four, I think four, maybe five different versions, which are probably in Harriet Meyers' 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. And of course, we didn't. But you remember getting back to the White House and the mess, the mess stewards, the Navy mess they had never left. These guys are. They had never, they they stayed at their posts. And there were men with long guns all over the White House lawn. And it was quite a, it was quite a, well, that's actually maybe one of my most vivid memories today is stepping out of that building. And Washington is deserted. And there's yellow tape everywhere marking off the streets. And there are, 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 that they will be lowered tomorrow. But tonight they're high. And

35:50they're lit up. And this capital is that ghostly beauty of Washington at night. One of what, maybe the most beautiful city in America at night. And their armor personnel everywhere, their military everywhere. And you may not share the view that I'm about. This is my view. And I want to tribute 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 capital, and they seem like an unwelcome force, like something imposed from outside, just imagine the opposite. The far this of looking at the saying, they, this is the armed forces of the United States here to protect the nation's capital. Thank 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 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 and after like the third round, he had to say, no, no more cookies. No more cookies.

36:54Well, and you remember the, the president said the following week, just meditating on that day. And as you were, as you were noting, it was the perfect, perfect day. And so, and they remember the National Book Festival had been on the eighth Saturday, the eighth on the mall. I think the eighth and ninth in the National Book Festival would just spread out on the mall, lawn of the Library Congress, eight 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. And anyway, but what the president said on after the events, and he said, night fell on a different world. Yeah. So it's about eight o'clock at night. We get, we get into the White House. Again, it's all, it's a, 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

37:55already, it was instantly different. So we didn't go watch the president speak, which is not what, I think we normally would have done was that there 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. I look this up later, after the firing on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln's first communication of the nation is a written proclamation that issued three days after the firing on Fort Sumter. And after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt's first communication of the nation was his day of infamy speech, but Pearl Harbor was struck at Don Hawaii time, which 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. And 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. And in a way, there isn't really time. That isn't enough time to organize what you're going to say. And so the, that, that even the eight o'clock speech struck me as, as not the right tone, not,

38:57not 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, because that would be then, September 20th, it was nine days after the events in question. And you know, if you look at history, it feels like a long time. But he did have the speech of the National Cathedral on Friday and the radio address, which I don't even remember what that, I want to put a break. Again, I want to slow down here a little bit. Here are the things I remember that are, that are signal events between before the speech to Congress. There is the speech of the National Cathedral as you said, which was, I thought, so beautiful. That was, I was beautiful. I'm, I'm, this is not my own work. I'll say my, my, is my portfolio was domestic and economic. So I was spending all my time on like the stock market and the reopening of the airline. So I'm, the speeches I'm about to praise or I had nothing to do with. But he, that's beautiful speech of the National Cathedral, which I think you and, and

39:59Scully, mostly wrote. And then he went to New York to speak at Grand 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 a 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, and made a speech for tolerance. And I just want to stress this point, because there is a lot of will miss remembering and I think a lot of misinformation about what it was like to belong to the American Muslim community after 9-11. There was a, there were a flurry of hate attacks after not, and me and the immediate aftermath of 9-11. I remember, in fact, I think three of them were murders. There are three, 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,

41:05that that flurry of hate crime incidents and three, three, three of them murders in the immediate aftermath was quickly stopped. And that there is a dramatic drop off between after September, after the month of September, and it's 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 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. I mean, this is that 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.

42:10And 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 teeders on the state of Florida, where on a few dozen votes in the state of Florida, by, as in those days, they say, every county got to design its own ballot. And many of the counties did a bad job. And there was tremendous 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 the education as an early initiative because that had brought broad pipe harders in support. You could pass it with big majorities of both Republicans and Democrats in both House of Congress. But still, there was a question mark over his presidency up to that moment. And I think there was there was this feeling of would he measure up? Could this accidental president be someone who could speak for the nation after 9-11? Well, that's right. And I remember Bob Dole candidly said some

43:16months 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 we're 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 there many, in the case of many Americans allowed themselves to have. On his way to that moment, he landed in New York and he was taken in a car to lower Manhattan. And the emergency workers there are there, the firefighters and a lot of not onlookers, but the areas close to the public. But there are a lot of people there. And they're all cheering and clapping and enthusiastically 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 from the man he

44:19is now. And I I later heard that he had said to the president, you see all these people cheering for you? Not one of them voted for you. Well, and President Bush, you've heard him tell the story, David. And he he repeated in his book, he has a strong emotional memory of just one guy in a hard hat standing on a mound of rubble, making eye contact with him and pointing his finger and said, don't you let me down. Yeah, really, really touched his heart and stays with him to this day. All right. So I we have just a few minutes left. I want to I want to flash forward. Now look back on this from the perspective of 25 years. How did the country do? How do 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 deeper profound. I I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I remember once one I was about nine or 10 years old. I grew up in a

45:22town of 500 people in northern Wisconsin. And I had this memory of walking with one of my little friends around this little town on a summer day. And we agreed that we were probably never going to see a war in our lifetimes. Is it people? They don't do this anymore. You know what I mean? That's how things felt in the mid to late 70s. And people are going to fight wars anymore. Big tanks and armies and all this stuff. And and we just looked ahead to a future where where you know that kind of tragedy and sorrow just wouldn't wouldn't fall on the human race like it used to. This is you know innocent kids stuff right? And and the 80s were pretty quiet and you had the cold war but but it's pretty pretty quiet decade when you think about it. And and so the point is when 9-11 happened that was very jarring for me as it was for everybody. And you get this sense that

46:23that 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 having found itself vulnerable that day would 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 the president you and I worked for and the responsibilities that we had. And there's only so much that speech writers 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 such a great job in those moments it's really because of him and the kind of man he was. And and this was a man meaning his moment. And and our country has not descended into the kind of fright and vulnerability that that many of us feared feared could happen.

47:25And that's not by accident. A lot of 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 on that time as a pivotal point, a moment of great decision and 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. I think there are many might have been in history. And most I'm not a big believer in these alternative scenarios because usually things that have big consequences don't have happened stance causes. If the guns firing at Fort Sumter had missed the Civil War would still have happened. But I one I do think about is if Bin Laden had not got away in Toriborah in December of 2001. If the United States and Britain and the many other allies were there in the Afghan

48:26partners of the United States if they had succeeded in cornering him and killing him in Toribor and just at the end of 2001. Would we have had the quarter century of wars in the Middle East that have since happened. I think his getting away caused an upping of the anti of America. Well say 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 11th, 2016. The United States is a war with Iran. American troops have been engaged in anti terrorist and counter terrorist operations all over the planet for quarter century. The death toll has been high for Americans and even higher for others. And I think that all 911 of 2001 put us on this path. There was an exit in December of 2001 and we didn't take the exit. We missed the exit. Not throwing it as fault or not. Not throwing it as intention. Maybe somebody's fault. Not throwing it as intention. We missed the exit and here we are.

49:27And we'll be talking about that more in the coming weeks and John. I thank you so much. Not only to spend that day with you, I remember also very vividly spending my last day 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. I've had a year and a half of looking out of the fence and I'm looking at it 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 you. You've spent so much of your life inside and your knowledge is so profound 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. If you're trying to get news today you'll find a lot of biased algorithms ragebait and AI noise.

50:32Thanks social media. That's where impress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism. Not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with the impress. Download it today for iOS or Android at impress.app. That's I and as in news nerd press. Thanks so much to my friend John McConnell for joining me today on the David from show. This week's book is also a contemplation of terrorism. But in this case a contemplation of homegrown domestic American terrorism. The 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 whose Roth's recurring literary alter ego. And Nathan Zuckerman tells the story of his childhood friend Seymour the sweet love of.

51:38A golden boy athlete from Zuckerman and Roth's hometown of Newark New Jersey. The sweet 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 room rock New Jersey. He is 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 said she gets involved in radical causes. She was 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 sweet spends years looking for her. When he finally tracks her down she's back in Newark

52:40New Jersey living in terrible filth and squalor. And she is converted to a form of ultrapassivism. The her religion becomes a Jane J A I N a religion from India that is so opposed to violence that refuses to kill even an insect. And the sweet has to contemplate how his beloved daughter could swing from one extreme of murder to this other extreme of pacifism almost beyond reason. The sweet 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. Yes, 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. Roth is here describing something very real. I went through it to quick scroll through incidents that reminded me of the story of Mary Levov of privileged people, people at every American

53:41advantage who who lash out who had adopt some scheme of or some personal ideology of extremist hate and then lash out in violence against others. There's so many examples. Let me just mention a few that just come to mind in the course of an ordinary search. Remember Elliot Roger? Elliot Roger was the son of a Hollywood director. He developed this ideology of misogyny in cell, I think is the term misogyny, violent hatred to women. He killed six people and wounded 14 in a rampage, leaving behind a manifesto justifying what he did. Or Patrick Kusius, 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

54:41bizarre ideological reason all his own that unfortunately found, has found residents in some of the more malicious corners of online life. Or Amen Muhammad Gzali, 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. Instead took guns to temple Israel in West Bloomfield. You know, these people all have motives. They may have be diagnosable as having some kind of mental illness, but they're not so delusional as not to understand what they're doing. But they're acting on some script, some sense of grievance, the American berserk that Roth talks about that pushes them in these directions. And notice something else. They all have these remarkable resources and freedom. They had the resources to acquire weapons and 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

55:47whoever 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. But when you're given the right to be who you are, that reveals something in some people that is berserk, that is bad. It allows us to give you more scope to be indulged 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 From 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. It helps me and all of my colleagues. Please also consider subscribing to our YouTube channel or whatever social media channel you

56:47want. Enjoy the program on. Share it with others and spread the word. See you next week on the David From Show. Bye bye. This episode of the David From Show was produced by Nathaniel from and edited by Andrea Voltes. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Voltes is our managing editor. If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage-baiting, day eye noise. Thanks social media. That's where in press comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points.

57:53It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with InPress. Download it today for iOS or Android at InPress.app. That's I and as in NewsNerd Press.