The super-awesome 9/11 Commission’s (PDF) version of events:
About this time Card, the lead Secret Service agent, the President’s military aide, and the pilot were conferring on a possible destination for Air Force One. The Secret Service agent felt strongly that the situation in Washington was too unstable to return. Card agreed. The President, however, needed convincing. All witnesses agreed that the President strongly wanted to return to Washington and only grudgingly agreed to go elsewhere. The issue was still undecided when the President conferred with the Vice President at about the time Air Force One was taking off. The Vice President recalled urging the President not to come back to Washington. Air Force One departed at approximately 9:55, with no destination at take-off. The objective was to get up in the
air—as fast and as high as possible—and then decide where to go.
Condi Rice’s super-awesome version of events:
“The president got on the phone and he said: ‘I’m coming back,'” Rice recounted to the documentary. “I said: ‘You cannot come back here. The United States of America is under attack. You have to go to safety. We don’t know what is going on here.'”
“He said, ‘I’m coming back.’ I said, ‘You can’t.'”
“I said to him in a raised voice — and I had never raised my voice to the president before — ‘You cannot come back here.’ I hung up.”
Rice said Bush was “quite annoyed with me to say the least.”
“I’ve known the president a long time and I knew that he wanted nothing more than to be there at the helm of the ship,” she said.
Who knows what the truth is? All I know is that Cheney was commander-in-chief that morning…
Cheney, who told the commission he was operating on instructions from Bush given in a phone call, issued authority for aircraft threatening Washington to be shot down. But the commission noted that “among the sources that reflect other important events that morning there is no documentary evidence for this call, although the relevant sources are incomplete.” Those sources include people nearby taking notes, such as Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Cheney’s wife, Lynne.
…and that only afterwords did Bush exert control over our national security decisions. And, even then, he deferred to Cheney far too much and didn’t stop listening to him until after the Democrats retook Congress in 2006. When Robert Gates came in to replace Rumsfeld, Cheney no longer had the credibility or clout to win every argument. And things started to gradually improve.
I’m sorry, but no way was the prez on the tarmac awaiting departure at 9:45 am.
I was in Sarasota watching the slow-speed procession of police-escorted limousines from Longboat Key through my town to the airport at lunchtime. Bitching to myself that of course george had to stay at the Colony Beach Resort because Al Gore had stayed there earlier.
Of course we all have our version of history. It’s galling that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice get to tell this story.
fascinating. anyone know where they were all morning? at the resort?
no, that escort would not have had the president in it. Not at noon. By noon he had already landed in Louisiana and moved on to Nebraska.
Funny, I grew up in Sarasota.
Re: Bush’s whereabouts, wasn’t he reading a book about a goat to a bunch of kids at Booker Elementary? There’s that famous video and all.
yes, he was. But that was during the attacks on the WTC. He dilly-dallied for over ten minutes and then went to talk to some people, from there he went to the school’s communications room and made a statement and then headed for the airport. Around that time, the Pentagon got hit.
It was a compressed period of time. The first plane hit around 8:46 while Bush was headed to the school. The second plane hit while he was in the classroom. The third plane hit while he was on the way to the airport. And the fourth plane hit after Bush was in the air.
Cheney gave an order to down planes between the third and fourth plane. It was not received in time to have any effect on the fourth plane’s fate. And the order wasn’t respected anyway, so it wouldn’t have prevented a fifth or sixth attack.
Cheney didn’t need explicit authority; he had implicit authority… from before the beginning of Bush’s first campaign for the presidency. Everyone in the club assured themselves that George would not actually be in charge, for goodness’ sake.
So, if Cheney “issued authority for aircraft threatening Washington to be shot down,” where was the response from Andrews AFB, Patuxent NAS, Davison AAF, Dover AFB, all of which are much closer than Oceanna?
What Cheney forgot was that an order from the VP carries no weight. His orders were ignored. And, no, he didn’t bother consulting the president on the matter because he considered the president an idiot and the crisis too immediate to dither. That created an inconvenient truth later on which is one of the reasons they begged Congress not to investigate and opposed an independent commission and then stonewalled Congress and the commission.
That doesn’t seem right. It seems like the kind of situation where an old Executive Branch expert like Cheney would center his actions around functional, not fictional, chain of command. He’s no Al Haig. There’s no doubt that lies are being told – big ones – but I’m not sure we know much of the truth. The air response and the whole chain of command thing smells especially funny to me.
Actually, this part of the 9/11 episode was pretty well documented.
I can’t give you all the details off the top of my head, although the links above will help you.
In short, the president was in Florida. Cheney and Rice were in the White House. Rumsfeld was helping out with the crash at the Pentagon.
Cheney gave an order to down the flights, but that order wasn’t respected and was ignored (unsurprising since it was illegal). Bush was not consulted prior to giving the order, and that was well established by looking at things like phone records, timelines, and the contemporaneous notes of Scooter Libby and Cheney’s wife, who were with Cheney in the WH bunker.
Once the attacks were underway, Bush was informed fairly promptly, but told to carry on as if nothing was happening, which he did. Then, we he got engaged after the second tower was hit, he was told under no circumstances to return to Washington and assume command. In fairness, the Secret Service agreed with that advice.
Then Bush was flown first to an air base in Louisiana, where he made a brief, panicky, and far from reassuring speech, and then we was ushered to some super protected nuclear bunker in Nebraska, where he waited to be allowed to play president again.
Later, Bush had to slap down a suggestion from Cheney that he be allowed to direct the response. And Bush become the actual president on that day.
Ah yes, helpful links. The link to the 9/11 commission report: A tour de force of rigorous detail and accuracy, as you noted yourself in the main post! The post titled “Two Sets of Lies” ! Then an article whose main source was Condoleeza Rice, and then an article in the Washington Post. I’m blinded by the sweet light of illumination!
I mean come on, “well-documented?” It was documented by the people who would be held responsible if their massive failure on and before 9/11 ever came to light. I’m sure they included all the key details. Har. Har.
PS – Why would Cheney be giving orders that no one would follow, as opposed to pressuring Bush to do what Cheney thought best?
Why would Cheney give orders that no one would follow?
Because he is an incompetent asshole with an ego the size of Texas. That’s why.
Prior to 9/11, Bush was basically a figurehead on foreign policy. He was a student, an apprentice, and Cheney, Rummy, Rice, Powell, Card, and the rest were the adults that Poppy had put around him to help him fake it.
Cheney was basically formulating policy, filling up the bureaucracy with like-minded neo-cons, and Rumsfeld was working a second partner against Powell.
On the morning of 9/11, a real emergency presented itself, and Cheney leapt into action in his assigned role. Bush was far away, not always available because communications were shaky, and his opinion didn’t mean anything to Cheney. Their relationship at that time was that Cheney would tell Bush what to think and what to say. Bush was a clown. Cheney had been Secretary of Defense during the Persian Gulf War.
So, Cheney issued the orders without bothering to consult Bush, which was a waste of precious time that Cheney didn’t have. He felt like the president because he basically was the president on national security matters, and it never occurred to him that his orders didn’t have the cover of law. The military received his orders, but they didn’t act on them because they involved something only the president was authorized to authorize.
It’s slightly more complicated and nuanced than my retelling (it was chaotic situation) but that’s the basic truth of it.
And the 9/11 Commission did a piss-poor job, but they ran this part of the story down well enough to establish and report that Cheney lied when he said he had Bush’s say-so.
Is there any clear agreement about what caused Bush to start rejecting Cheney’s advice over the years, to the extent he did? I assume, for example, that Cheney was against firing Rumsfeld and replacing him with Gates. And I remember a lot of talk in ’06-’07 that Cheney had convinced Bush to unilaterally attack Iran before the end of his administration. But that never came to pass.
This is a hard question to answer. The way you asked it makes it harder. Is there a clear agreement? I don’t know.
But here’s my opinion.
Bush initially respected Cheney a great deal (which is why he told Cheney to stop scouting for VP material because he wanted him to be VP).
Bush listened to other voices, including Powell’s, Scowcroft’s, his father’s, but they were from a failed administration that wasn’t tough enough on Saddam. Bush liked Cheney’s toughness and he wanted to rebel against his daddy’s realism.
But Cheney proved to be wrong, time and time and time again. And, eventually, it cost Bush his Republican majorities in Congress. By November 2006, Bush would have fired Cheney and Rumsfeld if he could have. But he was stuck with Cheney.
His Daddy’s people had won the argument, and Gates was brought back to run things. Cheney was on the sidelines for the most part after that.
So, the answer is that Bush stopped listening to Cheney because Cheney’s predictions never came true, and because it eventually caused enough political pain that Bush was willing to privately admit as much and go back to the realists to try to save his bacon.
Interesting – thanks for the historical analysis. I guess I always imagined Bush was so clueless as to be immune to the political ramifications of anything. But maybe not completely, as it turns out. And it’s a strange thing about Cheney. You’d think such an incredibly successful bureaucrat, at least in terms of his ability to amass power, would have done a better job at maintaining all that power once he had it. Specifically, by being a more competent manager, and executor of his policies.
As for Rumsfeld, I had a professor in law school who worked for him in the Pentagon as a Deputy Secretary of something-or-other. Classic Gates-style Republican, conservative temperament but valuing competence and rational thinking about all else. He said Rumsfeld was one of the most unpleasant and arrogant people he ever dealt with in his 20 years at the Pentagon. Second only to Doug Feith, as a matter of fact. My prof got fired by Rumsfeld around ’04-’05, and went off to teach law school, so obviously their relationship wasn’t the best. But given the history I think my prof gets the benefit of the doubt, and its no surprise to me that Rumsfeld was a terrible manager and thus incompetent bureaucrat.
-the insistence on Cheney and Bush testifying together seems to me was more about Cheney making sure Bush didn’t talk on his own. isn’t Cheney giving orders without Bush’s ok is a constitutional problem besides just that they aren’t valid?
another item that interests me is the camera crew who came to interview GWB at the club in FL and were turned away because they had no credentials (according to a timeline Oui posted, constructed from public reports of all events; sorry I was not able to find this link, will bookmark and link when I do). speaking of luck we may have so lucked out that this “camera crew” was not allowed to “interview” our prez, and I’m guessing that gwb’s fear was not just about the towers but what he realized that morning was his own close call, and that had something to do with waking him up to become more active and ultimately somewhat independent of Cheney.