Spoken from the Heart (36 page)

That afternoon, White House staffers lined up in the Indian Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to give blood. Already, overseas, American embassies were choked with flowers. By week's end, millions of people had paused for moments of silence; over 100,000 came to stand in remembrance in Ottawa, on Canada's Parliament Hill. Truck drivers stopped and blew their horns in unison all over Poland. In Berlin, 200,000 Germans marched in support of the United States. Israel, Ireland, South Korea, and many other countries held national days of mourning. In Great Britain, at Buckingham Palace, the queen's band played our national anthem during its changing of the guard, while in Paris, the newspaper
Le Monde
headlined we are all americans.

The next morning, September 13, I had been asked to appear on all the major morning television shows. What I could think to offer were words of comfort, both to parents for their children and for the nation at large. I had already written two letters, one for middle and high school students and one for kids still in elementary school, about the tragedy. To the youngest children, I wrote, "When sad or frightening things happen, all of us have an opportunity to become better people by thinking about others. . . . Be kind to each other, take care of each other, and show your love for each other." And that is what I saw, in the footage showing the faces of rescue workers at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in the eyes of the burned and injured Pentagon soldiers at Walter Reed and Washington Hospital Center, in the people who brought food to grieving neighbors and those who simply sat and grieved with them. I could feel us joined together as a nation.

Some of the worst victims of the Pentagon attack had been brought to Washington Hospital Center, which has a state-of-the-art burn unit. On Thursday afternoon, George and I went to visit them. I was the first to enter the room of Lieutenant Colonel Brian Birdwell, who had suffered severe burns on his hands and his back. He was covered in white gauze. His wife was at his side, where she had been since he was brought to the hospital. I spoke with both of them, hugged her, and then said that "someone else" was waiting to see them. George walked into the room. He asked Lieutenant Colonel Birdwell how he was doing and told the Birdwells that he was very proud of them both. "You are my heroes," he said, and then George raised his hand to salute the injured soldier on the bed. For almost half a minute, Lieutenant Colonel Birdwell worked to move his heavily bandaged hand to his head to return the salute. George would not break his salute until after the soldier was finished with his own. In the military, there is no higher sign of respect than for an injured officer to be saluted first by his commander. Then George hugged Mrs. Birdwell.

At the World Trade Center, we still didn't know exactly how many were dead--initial reports had been in the tens of thousands--or if anyone else might be found alive.

George had chosen Friday as a national day of prayer and remembrance for the victims of the 9-11 attacks, and we had scheduled a memorial service at Washington's National Cathedral, where less than nine months before George and I had gone for the wonderful celebratory prayer service on the day after his inauguration. There would be private family memorials in communities across the Northeast and in scattered spots around the rest of the country. But this was a time for all of us to mourn as a nation. I had selected a variety of speakers, Reverend Billy Graham to preach, Rabbi Joshua Haberman to read from the Book of Lamentations, and Imam Muzammil Siddiqi to offer verses from the Koran. Even Reverend Graham said he could not, to his own satisfaction, answer the question of why God would allow such tragedy and suffering. He added that he just had to accept that God "is a God of love and mercy and compassion in the midst of suffering." When George spoke, he said, "We are here in the middle hour of our grief." He recalled those who died, having begun "their day at a desk or in an airport, busy with life." And he remembered the rescuers, "the ones whom death found running up the stairs and into the fires to help others." After the service, George flew north to visit the remains of the Twin Towers. When he returned, he told me of the incredible heart of the rescue workers and of the posters and homemade signs plastered across posts and buildings, made by people searching for missing family and friends in that week of hope. Those were the images we reflected on that night, people holding out every last shred of faith that the ones they loved might have been spared from this tragedy. Because we knew by then that it was not to be. The bodies of some had been consumed by an ocean of fire and ash, and their resting places were the wind, the river, and building niches across Manhattan.

We spent that Friday night and Saturday cloistered away at Camp David with key cabinet members and the national security team. George was convening a council of war. On Saturday evening, after a day of intense meetings, Condi Rice, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, took a seat at the Camp David piano and began to play hymns. As she played, Attorney General John Ashcroft encouraged us all to join him and sing. With intelligence being analyzed and plans under way, on Sunday, we returned somberly to Washington.

For over a month, I had planned a small dinner at the White House that Sunday to celebrate the wedding anniversary of Debra and Alan Dunn, friends of ours from Gampy's 1988 presidential run. George had read at their wedding ten years before. I decided to keep the evening. I knew that George was consumed, almost every waking hour, with responding to the attacks, and for an hour or two, I wanted to change the subject, to give him a chance to briefly refocus and be surrounded by friends. There were seven couples, and we all chatted, but our guests had driven through largely deserted streets to a White House that was heavily secured and fortified. It was even slightly disconcerting for some of them to be within our walls. The threat was too new and too raw. But we lived with that low-level anxiety all the time, and would do so for years to come. It was almost 9:00 p.m. when George walked onto the South Lawn with the last of our guests to take Spot out. Above, a plane roared. George and everyone else looked up, and George asked, "Is that supposed to be there?" That is the question we asked about every plane, every noise. As the engine rush grew fainter, George lowered his gaze and said quietly, "I'm fighting an enemy that I can't see."

At noontime the next day, Monday, I flew to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, for a memorial for the victims of Flight 93, which had been bravely forced down by some of its passengers before it reached Washington, D.C. Whenever I visited Shanksville or later Manhattan, or almost anywhere in the Northeast, people would hand me prayer or memorial cards that they had made for their loved ones. Some families held out bracelets that they had engraved with the names of those they had lost. These items were given with such reverence to me and also to George, and we were careful to collect each one. I kept one card with the photo of a twenty-five-year-old, raven-haired girl, on my mirror. Suzanne was her name; her mother had handed it to me along a rope line, where people gathered so that we might shake their hands or say a quick word. I never knew Suzanne's last name; I only knew that she had died in one of the towers. I kept her photo tucked in my mirror frame at the White House until January 20, 2009. Every day I looked at her beautiful, young face. And in the mornings after 9-11, I longed to hold my own daughters in my arms.

The leaves were already turning in the rural Pennsylvania southwest when Governor Tom Ridge and I drove to the memorial service at the crash site. We stood alongside the field where the plane had plummeted to the ground; the trees at the edge of the woods were blackened from the fireball that had enveloped this small spot of earth. It was windy, and we stood under a tent while the families lit candles in honor of their loved ones. The flames flickered as the air swirled by. It was not a place of orderly white crosses and Stars of David, like the green fields above the beaches of Normandy in France. It was a crater in the ground, a mark that time and weather would erode until perhaps the land would lie almost flat again. This would always be the last resting spot for their loved ones.

When it was my turn to speak, I said, "America is learning the names, but you know the people. And you are the ones they thought of in the last moments of life. You are the ones they called, and prayed to see again. You are the ones they loved. A poet wrote, 'Love knows not its own depths until the hour of parting.' The loved ones we remember today knew--even in those horrible moments--that they were not truly alone, because your love was with them."

As we left Shanksville, my staff and I had our arms filled with pages of notes and reflections from children whose school building had been within earshot of the crash site, who had felt the earth shudder and who had heard the ground and woods convulse in flames.

For the one-week anniversary of 9-11, I flew to Chicago to tape Oprah Winfrey's talk show. Then, on September 20, as the initial estimates of the dead at the World Trade Center passed six thousand, George prepared to address a joint session of Congress, the nation, and the world. British prime minister Tony Blair flew in from London to visit the World Trade Center site and then came to Washington to stand alongside us. We had a private dinner at the White House and drove over to the Capitol. The sergeants at arms for the House and the Senate met us at the door, and I was escorted to a small waiting room off the gallery. But unlike at the State of the Union, now I was not alone; Tony Blair was waiting with me. Inside the gallery, we were joined by Tom Ridge, as well as New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor George Pataki. We had invited a group of hero guests, representatives of the New York fire and police departments and the Port Authority, as well as the U.S. Army and Navy, and Lisa Beamer, the pregnant widow of Todd Beamer, one of the passengers on board Flight 93. Vice President Cheney was absent from his customary spot behind the podium and was spending the night in a secure location because of fears of a mass attack on the Capitol. I listened as my husband gave the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan the first of a series of ultimatums, including surrender Osama bin Laden or face military retribution, and as he recalled how Republicans and Democrats, senators and representatives, had come together on the steps of the Capitol to sing "God Bless America."

I was always nervous when George spoke before Congress, but on this night, with all that was at stake, having Tony Blair, Tom Ridge, Rudy Giuliani, and George Pataki surrounding me was a great comfort.

Both George and I find the presence of close friends and the people we love comforting. Our whole married life, though, we have been comforted most by each other. Being nearby was how in those days, weeks, and months we reassured each other. We do not have to speak; ours is a language not just of words but of a shared presence. We take comfort simply from knowing that the other one is in the room. We are anchored to each other. And if it is my nature to be calm, it is also George's to steady and buoy me. We are two symbiotic souls.

I was anxious, but I was never fearful. And I received so many forms of unsolicited comfort. My old roommate from Houston, Janet Heyne, told me on the phone that "the whole time you've been in Washington, I've been so glad that I wasn't you and that I didn't have to do what you're doing." She went on, "Now I'm jealous for the first time because you can do something after this horrible tragedy." And I
could
do things, things that could make a difference. That was my solace, even as the roar of Air Force fighter planes flying cover patrols echoed through the walls and Secret Service details conducted new rounds of evacuations because there were reports of a truck bomb waiting to detonate on a nearby street.

That weekend, September 21, our girls came home. They flew on commercial airplanes that had just begun returning to the skies. We went to Camp David for Saturday night and spent Sunday afternoon at the White House, basking in the sunshine. I was so grateful just to hold them in my arms again. Monday brought a meeting at the White House with family members and friends of the victims of Flight 93. I read their stories in the customary White House briefing binders prepared beforehand, but there is almost no way to be "briefed" on such a visit. Passenger Thomas Burnett had called his wife, Deena, four times from Flight 93. In the fourth call, he said, "I know we're all going to die--there's three of us who are going to do something about it. I love you, honey." Jeremy Glick also managed to phone his wife, Lyzbeth. After they spoke, she gave the phone to her father, who heard the final screams before the connection went dead. The GTE phone operator Lisa Jefferson heard Todd Beamer's final words, "Are you ready, guys? Let's roll." Flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw had called her husband, Phil, and told him that they were gathering hot water and were going to rush the hijackers. He heard men on the plane nearby whispering the Twenty-third Psalm, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me." Then his wife said, "Everyone's running to first class. I've got to go. Bye." In the Blue Room, under the portraits of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe, George and I shook hands and embraced their families, and the families of the other passengers and crew members who gave their lives on that bright blue morning.

In the evening, I joined Senator Kennedy on the stage of the Kennedy Center for a concert in remembrance of 9-11. The next morning, I was on a government plane, bound for New York City.

Manhattan from the air looks doll-size, a perfect expanse of individual buildings rising from the island. With no way to build out, the city built up, until the thousands of building tops have meshed together to create a kind of aerial terrain, gleaming mountains of steel and glass high-rises, shadowy valleys of tenements and brownstones. And now, at the tip, a cataclysm. We circled the still smoldering wreckage where the Twin Towers had been, before landing in Newark, New Jersey, and traveling into the city.