9.11 Voices: What If You Had To Tell The President?

9.11 Voices: What If You Had To Tell The President?

by Andrew Card
The San Francisco Chronicle
September 11, 2002
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/09/11/MN911voice03.DTL

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card was with President Bush during a children's reading event at a Sarasota, Fla., public school when word came that planes had hit the World Trade Center. Card had to decide how to tell Bush without creating a national panic...

I usually ask myself this: If I were president, would I want to know? And the test was yes, I would want to know. So then I decided that I would tell the president. And I went over to the door, and I actually did give some thought as to what I would say to the president because it's not an easy thing to interrupt a president during an event.

First of all, you're watching, the cameras are on, and the audience is paying particular attention. And when it's a student audience, it's even a greater challenge.

So I was very uncomfortable about interrupting the president during one of his events ... so I wanted to think, how can I convey to the president the situation? And I made a conscious decision to state the facts and to offer editorial comment. And the facts, as I knew them, were -- since he knew about the first plane, I said, "a second plane hit the second tower." Those were the facts. And the editorial comment was, "America is under attack."

I said those things into the president's right ear, and I stepped back, because I did not want to invite a discussion from the classroom. But I tried to be succinct in what I told him so that he understood the enormity of the problem. He looked up -- it was only a matter of seconds, but it seemed like minutes -- and I thought that he was outstanding in his ability not to scare either the American people that were paying attention to the cameras or, more importantly, the students that were in the classroom.

And he just excused himself very politely to the teacher and to the students, and he left.

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