The September 11th attack
Cheney gives insight into chaotic Tuesday

Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney, highest-ranking member of the administration in Washington on Tuesday, was organizing senior staff to handle the unfolding terrorist attack in New York when the Secret Service burst into his office.

Vice President Dick Cheney refused to leave the White House after a huge command center had been established. Associated Press

"Under these circumstances, they just move," Cheney said yesterday on NBC's "Meet the Press."

His Secret Service agents — "bigger than I am," said the vice president, whose driver's license lists him at 5-10, 210 pounds — grabbed the surprised Cheney and carried him through a seemingly endless series of corridors and stairwells until he was in a secure underground facility.

"Your feet touch the floor occasionally," Cheney said.

A glimpse inside

That was the beginning of a chaotic day in Washington, as government officials worked to deal with the horrific strike against the United States: Two commercial airliners crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center; another — Flight 77 — apparently changed targets from the White House to the Pentagon; and a fourth, clearly on its way to Washington, crashed in a field near Pittsburgh. The passengers, crew and hijackers on all four planes were killed.

In his interview with "Meet the Press," Cheney offered one of the first glimpses of the frenzy of activity inside the White House Tuesday as planes fell from the sky and thousands were about to die in the World Trade Center collapse.

The first thing he did once the Secret Service put him down was call President Bush in Florida and tell him to stay away from the capital. "I said, 'Delay your return. We don't know what's going on here, but it looks like, you know, we've been targeted,' " he said he told the president.

The White House was receiving the same confusing misinformation most television viewers were: a car bomb at the State Department, planes down across the country — rumors that proved false.

The Secret Service received a call that Air Force One, the president's plane, also had been targeted, so Bush was sent to airbases first in Louisiana, then in Nebraska. "It may have been phoned in by a crank, but in the midst of what was going on, there was no way to know that," Cheney said.

Meanwhile, steps were being taken to keep the line of presidential succession intact, should the worst happen to Bush or Cheney. Congressional leaders, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill, third in line, were whisked into hiding (as was first lady Laura Bush, on Capitol Hill that morning to testify before a Senate committee).

Interior Secretary Gail Norton, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson — ninth, 10th and 13th in line to the presidency, respectively — also were evacuated to a secure location.

Cheney holds his ground

Agents also continued to try to talk Cheney into leaving the White House, but he refused. A huge command center already had been established, and secure communications devices were readily available linking him to the president and all the Cabinet and intelligence agencies he needed. He had Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice with him.

"If I'd left, gotten on a helicopter and launched out of the White House, all of that would have broken down," he said. "And we had the presidential succession pretty well guaranteed, so I thought it was appropriate for me to stay in the White House."

The White House itself was not hit, he believes, because it is harder to see from the sky than you might think, being relatively small, and obscured at a low altitude by the Treasury Department and Old Executive Office Building, its larger neighbors on either side.

"I think it turned out to be tougher to see than they had anticipated," Cheney said, so the terrorists hit the Pentagon instead.