A Decade of Hope (16 page)

Then the Pentagon was hit, and so I ordered everyone to leave. My chief of staff was renting a house near the White House, so I suggested we operate there until we could find out what was going on. As I was going out the door Channel 12, a cable station on Long Island, called and asked to do a one-minute interview. Cops were ordering everybody out, and as I was standing there describing the evacuation, the TV announcer suddenly said, “I can't believe it.” I turned around, and over my shoulder on the television I saw the [first] tower was coming down. It was so hard to comprehend. People talking in New York had a split screen of me speaking and the tower collapsing, and I had no idea what would be next.

Where we were going was normally about a fifteen-minute ride, but it actually took nearly two hours to get there. At 10:28 we heard that a plane had gone down in Pennsylvania. I said to myself,
This is too bad, yet with everything else going on—it's just another tragic plane crash.
It never dawned on me that it was part of a bigger situation, or that the plane was aiming for the Capitol. If the plane had hit its target, I would've been less than two blocks away. None of us really associated where we were with what happened, except perhaps the president, and the highway we were stalled on was a highway of American political decision makers. We probably had most of the Congress, Senate, and senior Washington officials locked up in total gridlock.

We got to the chief of staff's house, where my son had planned to meet us. He decided to grab some food first, so that delayed him, and I began to wonder where he was. There was another report that a bomb had gone off at the State Department, which is only about two miles from where I live. But there was no bomb. From the chief of staff's house we could see convoys of National Guard troops going to the White House. That was sort of a scary thing—combat troops going through Washington and literally racing to the White House. Seeing our troops on the streets was the first thing that really gave me the sense of being in a war zone.

I did not think about the president at that time. I was talking to family and reporters back in New York. The reporters were calling me trying to find out what I knew, and I was asking them what they knew. Around 1:00 P.M. we heard that there was to be a briefing given by the Capitol police in their headquarters next to the Monocle Restaurant. We had no official communication; all of official Washington was shut down, and we were having a briefing in the basement of a small headquarters building next to a restaurant. There was no plan in place to contact members of Congress if Washington or the country was attacked. All of us were on our own that day. There was no central way of communicating with everybody. There were no BlackBerrys. There was no place to call, and it just became a matter of word of mouth.

There's so much that's obvious now, but at the time I was just concerned with suicide bombers. A congressman from Connecticut, Rob Simmons, who is a former CIA guy, said we really had to worry about chemical and biological attacks, which he figured would be the next thing. If this were really synchronized, there would be some chemical bomb going off somewhere or some biological attack, which would really cause the nation to panic.

Inside Capitol police headquarters the police gave us a briefing, and about half of Congress was there. We could see smoke up in the air from the Pentagon. The briefers were asking everyone to stay away from the Capitol, as they didn't know what was going to happen next, and they didn't want to overextend the police. I remember some congressmen insisting they had to go back to the Capitol, so that the country could see them. I know it looked good later on, when they all sang “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps, but I thought at the time that such demands were really irresponsible. First of all, the country was not necessarily looking to us for protection, and secondly, we shouldn't be making the cops' job tougher.

I was really disappointed with all the shouting going on at that briefing. Denny Hastert, the then speaker, and Minority Leader Dick Gephardt had been evacuated somewhere—to this day, I don't know where—and were addressing us on loudspeakers, and people were yelling at them, “No one is going to keep us from the Capitol.”

That evening I went to dinner at the Dubliner—trying to eat, talk, get collected somehow. A congressman at the briefing had said, “We have to kill these guys. We have to go to war right away.” Another congressman, sitting with me at the Dubliner, said, “Oh, how about all the people
we
kill?”

I should have known that the unity that everyone said was there really wasn't as much there as we thought it was. That night we had another briefing, but half didn't come back for that. We heard Bush's speech on television, and I did a few radio interviews. Then I heard about the people, how many people at Cantor Fitzgerald had been killed, so many hundreds—that was the first that I had learned of it. I took a sleeping pill that night to get to sleep.

The next day, again realizing that this was war, I was trying to go back and think about how would we have done at Pearl Harbor. We got a briefing on the House floor that afternoon by [John] McLaughlin, the number two guy at the CIA. [Attorney General John] Ashcroft was there. I saw FBI director [Robert] Mueller there; he'd just been released from the hospital, back from prostate cancer [surgery] the week before. The head of FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] was there, and I thought that on the whole it was basically a good briefing. But then again some congressman accused them of covering up, of not giving us all the facts. Then all the yelling really started—it was just so wrong. Another congressman was talking about this terrible disaster, and the members around him were screaming, making partisan points, and I finally just walked out. When you go into these briefings you have to leave your cell phone outside, so I picked mine up and got a voice mail that Jimmy Boyle's son had died. Jimmy Boyle is a former president of the New York City firefighters' union. That was really tough. I called Jimmy, and he said, “My son Michael was killed.” Michael Boyle was the first person who died whom I really knew well, so that made me feel even more disgusted with all the screaming going on in Congress. Then I heard about Father Mychal Judge, the Fire Department chaplain, whom I also knew. It was all feeling very real.

On Thursday we went down to the White House for a briefing, and that was interesting. They had gathered all the members of Congress from close to the regions that had been attacked: downstate New York, northern New Jersey, and Virginia. Bush came in, and we all applauded. Outside the room we could see troops with camouflage and the sort of heavy-duty weapons that you never thought you'd see at the White House. The first thing the president announced was that the vice president of the United States had been evacuated, and then he told us that they thought there could be more attacks. He'd been in contact with [Russian president Vladimir] Putin, and with [Pervez] Musharraf from Pakistan, and announced that NATO had gone to DefCon 5, or whatever the top level of alert is. Then he told us that he had agreed to give New York $20 billion. [New York senator Chuck] Schumer said, “Mr. President, I am so startled. I was all set to give long speeches about why we needed the $20 billion. I don't know what to say.” Then Bush said, “The only reason I gave it to you was to keep you quiet, Chuck. I didn't want to hear your speeches.”

That was good, because everybody laughed, even if it wasn't really that funny. There was so much tension in the room that we truly needed some lightness, so people chose to laugh. And then there was some pontificating. [Republican senator] John Warner from Virginia said, “I sat here when your father was the president during the first Gulf War, and you have my support.” It became more about themselves again. Hillary was good; she said, “I'm backing the White House,” for the first time, and “I'll support you in any way.”

Bush had said in the meeting, please, he didn't want anything to be known about Cheney's being evacuated and asked that nothing be shared outside of the meeting—which was actually a designation of making the meeting classified, so that Congress did not broadcast what we were doing in our government. When I returned to my office I got a call from a reporter I knew at CNN, who asked, “Can you tell us what went on?” And I said, “No, I really can't, this is serious stuff.” As I was talking they were announcing Cheney's evacuation on television. Within twenty minutes of a meeting where the president basically swore us to secrecy because we were at war, someone at the meeting had leaked to the press what was considered classified information.

President Bush announced that he was going to New York the next day, and that night I got a call from the White House saying I would be going up with the delegation. On Friday morning, after watching Bush's speech on television from the National Cathedral, we took off from Andrews Air Force Base on an Air Force jet. We landed at LaGuardia and took buses in from there. The streets were strangely empty, especially as we got into the city. People were walking around, but it was an apprehensive walk, a walk of pending doom. We parked about a quarter of a mile north of Ground Zero, and I saw all that white stuff from the buildings, mud on the streets, demolished fire trucks and chief 's cars. People were cheering along the way as police, fire, and official cars passed. I saw the Sixty-ninth Regiment guys on duty, and I thought,
Wow
. That hit me: There at the corner of Vesey and West streets were armed troops.

Cardinal [Edward] Egan and Mayors Dinkins and Ed Koch were there. I saw some cops I knew, who told me how bad it was. On television, the reporters were talking about finding survivors. But I spoke to cops, who said that's all bullshit; no one's alive. There were still rumors about hundreds being rescued, and these cops said that there was no chance that anyone was alive. The president arrived and we heard this massive cheering, apparently when Bush got on top of a battered fire truck with Bob Beckwith, a retired NYC firefighter. I spoke to the president briefly, and to Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani. It was a memorable and patriotic time.

The congressional delegation was flying back to Washington, because we had a vote that night—a resolution to take action in Afghanistan. But the next morning was Pete Ganci's funeral, the chief of the FDNY, who [had] lived about a mile or so from me, so I stayed in New York for the funeral. The Secret Service let me off at my car at LaGuardia Airport after being at Ground Zero. The airport was empty; all you saw were Port Authority cops at fifty-foot intervals. As I was driving home on the Grand Central Parkway, I heard many F16s overhead. It was so eerie and unusual for America.

At Pete Ganci's funeral there was a tremendous turnout. The cops dropped off Mayor Rudy Giuliani about a block away from the church. He had just come from Father Judge's funeral in the city, and the funeral of Chief Ray Downey, the famous catastrophe expert. They asked me to go greet him and bring him back to the front of the church. I'd known Rudy for decades, and we didn't always get along, but we had worked things out over a breakfast one day. And I was glad we had resolved any differences.

I could see that Rudy hadn't fully realized the impact he was having on the nation. He had no idea of all the press on television. He was living in the zone, or almost as if he had tunnel vision. As we were walking toward the church, people were applauding and cheering, which seemed to genuinely surprise him.

Later that afternoon I worked up the nerve to go over to Jimmy Boyle's house to pay my respects for Michael. And Jimmy made it easy. I walked in the door, and it was all graciousness—not,
Here's another politician coming in
, and that kind of thing. Jimmy's role was to keep everybody contained, but he did so in as lighthearted a frame as possible. He was speaking to everybody, introducing everyone. It was almost like the classic Irish wake that you read about.

I talked to Jimmy and he had told me he had seen the first plane hit that day and then thought about the first World Trade Center bombing. He remembered that the terrorists had taken refuge in a camera store on Broadway. So Jimmy thought how crazy it would be—and he was going to make a citizen's arrest—if they were there again, hiding out. On 9/11 he actually walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and headed to that camera store, but just as he got to Broadway, the South Tower came down.

About a month later I went back to Ground Zero with some of the 9/11 families. I saw all the destruction again, partial buildings, fallen and bent steel, and that unforgettable smell in the air. I didn't even realize that the buildings had pancaked. I just couldn't imagine . . . where did it all go? Think about the combined two hundred stories of these two buildings, and suddenly there's nothing there, just bits and pieces. How could this ever be put back together? It was like [pictures of] places you see in Germany after World War II or Hiroshima in Japan.

They didn't create the Homeland Security Committee until after 9/11, so it officially began in the next congressional session, in January of 2003. Though it's called a select committee, it is not a permanent one. None of the old-timers wanted it; none of the institutional people wanted it. Why? Because if you create a new committee it takes power from other committees. I was way down on [Speaker of the House] Denny Hastert's list, and not even in the top half when they set it up. What Hastert thought to do to win over the recalcitrant was to put the chairmen of all the powerful committees on the Homeland Security Committee. He said, “That way they'll work with the select committee.” Instead, all they did was sabotage it and spend the next two years not showing up for votes, and going out of their way to weaken every bill. It became, at best, like a debating society for two years.

At the end of 2004, though, Hastert became far more serious about it. He made it a permanent committee; cut its size in half, with twenty-eight or twenty-nine members instead of fifty or sixty, and threw everybody off who was a chairman of any other committee, seeing them as obstructionists. I became chairman of the Emergency Preparedness Subcommittee. I figured that was the one best in tune with New York, to be more aware of the needs of the firefighters and cops, to make sure the preparedness money was coming in, and to ensure that training would be available. And then President Bush appointed the then chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Chris Cox of California, to be head of the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission]. So there's an opening, and I decided to run for chairman, even though I was fifth down on the Republican side.