In My Time (53 page)

President Bush’s decision to abrogate the ABM Treaty was exactly the
right thing to do
. Today, we are faced with a nuclear-armed North Korea experimenting with intercontinental ballistic missiles, an Iran that is trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and a China that is increasing its capabilities. Thanks to George W. Bush—and to the excellent leadership of Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld—we have developed and deployed a number of interceptors. And we are safer for it.

AS I WAS SETTLING into the vice presidency, Lynne and I were also settling into the house that would be our home for the next eight years, the Vice President’s Residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory. In warm weather, our grandkids swam in the pool, drove their battery-operated cars around the driveway, and roamed the grounds, stopping in to chat with the uniform division Secret Service agents at the guard posts.

With my oldest granddaughter, Kate Perry, enjoying an early summer day on a hammock on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

When it snowed, there were great sledding hills. Most weekends when we were in town, the grandkids would unroll their sleeping bags on the floor of our bedroom for sleepovers. We also shared our home with three wonderful Labs—Davie, who died and is buried there in the shade of a beautiful oak tree; Jackson, who came to live with us after 9/11; and Nelson, who was a bit of a misguided Mother’s Day gift for Lynne, but who quickly won a special place in all our hearts.

The vice president’s house was a great place to have guests, and
we had many events there over our eight years. We had dinners with some of the world’s leading experts on the Middle East, people such as Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis; parties to celebrate notable authors such as Nathaniel Philbrick, Jay Winik, Edmund Morris, and David McCullough; evenings with great thinkers and analysts such as Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson. We had a special evening in June 2001 when we honored President Ford and Betty. He was to have been the first vice president to live in the house but became president before they could move in.

One of my proudest moments at the Vice President’s Residence was January 30, 2008, when I managed to surprise Lynne with a party to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of our first date. I remembered the date all on my own, though it is easy to remember because we went out for the first time on my seventeenth birthday. With help from Cece Boyer, Lynne’s chief of staff; Liz Denny Haenle, the social secretary at the Vice President’s Residence; Molly Owen Soper, Lynne’s personal aide, and many others, I was able to sneak dozens of our friends from high school, along with singer Ronnie Milsap, who provided the evening’s entertainment, into the observatory without Lynne guessing anything was up. It was a very special celebration.

Our lives at the observatory were as pleasant as they were largely because of the staff of U.S. Navy enlisted aides who work there. These terrific men and women are consummate professionals. Many of them became like family to us, and we will always be grateful for everything they did.

Lynne and I felt the same way about the Secret Service agents who protected us and our family for more than eight years. After 9/11, their responsibilities and hours increased dramatically. They lived through some pretty tense days with us, did an outstanding job of providing security, and managed kindness and good humor as well.

I am particularly grateful that they had the good sense to understand how important fishing is to me when they selected my Secret Service code name, “Angler.” They also picked a great name for Lynne, “Author,” and she certainly lived up to it. While I was vice president, she
wrote six bestselling books on American history for children and their families and donated well over a million dollars in proceeds to charity.

DESPITE HAVING BEEN ELECTED in one of the closest elections in U.S. history, George Bush and I had major legislative accomplishments in those first months we were in office. The president’s education program went into place, we cut taxes, and we proposed an energy policy for the nation. We also dealt with important foreign policy issues in China, Russia, and elsewhere around the globe. We had many achievements to our credit, but the big test of our administration was yet to come. Our time in office would be largely defined by the unprecedented attacks of September 11, 2001.

O
n the night of September 11, 2001, the Secret Service evacuated Lynne and me to Camp David, a secure location apart from the president, in case there were further attacks. On Wednesday morning, September 12, we flew back to Washington, now a wartime capital, so that I could attend a National Security Council meeting at 9:30 a.m. I took newspapers with me on the helicopter. The
Washington Post
’s banner headlines read, “Terrorists Hijack 4 Airliners; 2 Destroy World Trade Center; 1 Hits Pentagon; 4th Crashes.” The
Washington Times
’ headline was a single word: “Infamy.”

Although we had experienced the fog of war in the first few hours after the attacks, plenty of things were now clear: We had been attacked by a ruthless enemy willing to slaughter innocents in an effort to bring America to her knees. This enemy wasn’t a traditional military force, but terrorists who found safe haven wherever they could and operated on a worldwide scale. They had struck us before, blowing a crater five stories deep in the World Trade Center in New York in 1993. Al Qaeda had attacked our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing hundreds,
including twelve Americans. Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda’s leader, had personally chosen the operatives who bombed the U.S.S.
Cole
in a Yemeni harbor in 2000. Seventeen crew members had died. During the nineties, the United States had treated terrorist attacks primarily as law enforcement matters, indicting terrorists when we could, trying them, and sending some of them to prison. But that approach hadn’t stopped the attacks. Al Qaeda had just delivered the most devastating blow to our homeland in its history.

We needed a new way forward, one based on the recognition that we were at war. We needed to go after the terrorists where they lived, rooting them out before they could attack. And we needed to hold those who gave them sanctuary and support responsible. As the president had said in his address to the nation on the night of September 11, “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

In the PEOC on 9/11 with Josh Bolten, Tucker Eskew, Karen Hughes, Nick Calio, Mary Matalin, Eric Edelman, Scooter Libby, Condoleezza Rice, and Larry Lindsay. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

In this new kind of war, intelligence would be crucial. We had to find the terrorists so we could take down their networks. We had to stop others from supporting them. And we needed to place high priority on identifying networks and states that were trafficking in weapons of mass destruction so that we could shut down their efforts and prevent terrorists from acquiring those weapons. Terrible as 9/11 had been, the next attack, if it involved nuclear or biological weapons, would be exponentially worse.

In the morning meeting of the National Security Council, we discussed crisis management tasks, figuring out when commercial airline operations should begin again, when the military alert status would return to DefCon 4 from its current elevated level of DefCon 3. We agreed that combat air patrol flights would continue to fly over Washington and New York, and we discussed briefing Congress on the continuing threat.

The NSC meeting that afternoon concentrated more on our military response. The president was determined to use every tool of our national power to defeat the new kind of enemy we faced and to hold those who supported them responsible. I stressed the importance of
going after state sponsors of terrorism. By holding them accountable for the acts of the terrorists, we would begin to deny terrorists safe haven and bases from which to operate—two elements they needed to plot, plan, and execute attacks.

We were confident that we would have help in the effort ahead. NATO announced that for the first time in its history, it was prepared to invoke Article V of the NATO Charter, which declares that an attack against one is an attack against all. Other nations would be with us as we responded to 9/11, but it was important, I said, that we not allow our mission to be determined by others. We had an obligation to do whatever it took to defend America, and we needed coalition partners who would sign on for that. The mission should define the coalition, not the other way around. The president made clear that he’d prefer to have allies with us, but we were at war, and if America had to stand alone, she would.

The next day, September 13, we were told that another attack on Washington, D.C., appeared imminent, and the Secret Service recommended that I go to Camp David. Thus Lynne and I missed the prayer service the next day at Washington National Cathedral and the president’s eloquent words about grief and justice. Instead on Friday, September 14, we attended a small memorial service at Camp David’s Evergreen Chapel. As light from an overcast sky came through the windows, we joined members of the military serving at Camp David in prayers for the lost and those who were suffering and for guidance in the way ahead.

Later that afternoon, members of the National Security Council began arriving at the camp for a series of meetings that the president had called. Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and I met for dinner that evening in Holly Lodge, which had been the main cabin at the presidential retreat for many years before the newer Laurel Lodge was built. Holly was the place where meetings were held the first time I had visited Camp David as a young Rumsfeld staffer in 1970. As the four of us gathered on the evening of September 14, we talked about the significant challenges ahead.

We were embarking on a fundamentally new policy. We were not simply going to go after the individuals or cells of terrorists responsible for 9/11. We were going to bring down their networks and go after the organizations, nations, and people who lent them support. In 2011 this is a familiar notion, but in 2001 it was all new, and as Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and I talked in Holly Lodge on that cool September night, we understood that this would be a long war. There would be no easy, quick victory followed by an enemy surrender. I thought it probable that this was a conflict in which our nation would be engaged for the rest of my lifetime.

WHEN THE NSC CONVENED the next morning, the subject was primarily Afghanistan, where al Qaeda’s leadership had plotted the attacks on the United States and trained those who carried them out. Since 1996, Afghanistan had been under the control of the Taliban, who had imposed an extreme form of Islam on the country, closing schools for girls, forbidding music, and carrying out grisly executions. The Taliban had gotten the world’s attention earlier in 2001 by blowing up two monumental sixth-century Buddhas at Bamiyan in central Afghanistan on the grounds that they were idols.

George Tenet described what the CIA could accomplish in Afghanistan with increased authority and expanded covert operations, working with the Northern Alliance, a group of fierce fighters opposed to the Taliban. Their leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, had been assassinated by al Qaeda a few days before 9/11 in an effort to diminish the Northern Alliance’s fighting capability.