Former President George W. Bush called the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks a “clarifying moment” when he, his administration, and the country realized America was “vulnerable to attack based on what we believe.”
Bush and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shared their reflections on Sept. 11 at an event at the George W. Bush Presidential Center two days before the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
Bush was listening to a child read in a Florida elementary school classroom when he was informed that the first plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York.
“We both initially thought this was an accident,” Rice recalled. “Because how could this actually be happening?”
Bush remembered the moment former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card whispered to him to inform him that a second plane had hit.
“I didn’t have much time to process that, but it was pretty clear to me that if we were under attack, that my job was to defend the child that was reading to me, and her family, and her country,” he said. “So it was a moment of clarity.”
Bush and Rice spoke again after the second plane hit, and Rice recalled “raising” her voice after Bush said he wanted to return to Washington.
“I raised my voice to you because you said, ‘I’m coming back,’ and I said, ‘Stay where you are. The United States of America is under attack. It’s not safe here,’” Rice recalled. “That was the first time I articulated to myself that the country was under attack.”
Bush recalled planning to get to a safe location to address the country in the aftermath of the attack. He said he was determined that the address wouldn’t be given ‘from a bunker in Omaha, Nebraska.’”
“I thought that would be a psychological victory for those who attacked us and so I flew back,” he said.
As they sought to ground flights across the country, Bush and Rice recalled the “horrible moment” they feared Flight 93, the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers sought to gain control from the hijackers, had been shot down by the military.
“You’d given the order, through the vice president, that should a plane not squawk properly, it should be shot down,” Rice said. “We thought initially standing in that bunker that Flight 93 had been shot down.”
“There was this horrible moment where the vice president kept trying to get confirmation as to what had happened, and for about 10 minutes, we thought we’d shot down a civilian aircraft,” she added.
Following the attack, Bush and Rice recalled the effort to return the country to a sense of normalcy. They attended a mosque to, as Rice said, “make sure our Muslim American citizens knew we didn’t blame them for what had happened.”
“I didn’t want us to lose our soul,” Bush added. “As we defended our freedoms, I wanted people to remember how precious they are.”
He also said the team he had in place during his administration helped him cope with the pressure following Sept. 11.
“You want people who’ve got a lot of experience to be able to give you good advice,” Bush said. “I had the benefit of watching a really great man be president and he taught me a good lesson — that a leader must be humble enough to know what they don’t know and find people who do and listen to them — and I wisely did that.”
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