Spoken from the Heart (37 page)

My first stop was Madison Square Garden, where I was scheduled to address three thousand of the city's Learning Leaders, a nearly ten-thousand-strong volunteer school corps--larger than the U.S. Peace Corps--composed of specially trained parents, retirees, college students, businesspeople, and senior citizens who donate their time to New York City students and schools. My role was to help encourage them to return to their schools and classrooms because the city's children were in desperate need. My friend Andi Bernstein, who had been one of our co-owners of the Texas Rangers and whose husband was the business partner of one of George's oldest friends, had asked me to come. From Madison Square Garden, the motorcade headed south to one of the city's elementary schools, P.S. 41. That day, P.S. 41 was more than a school packed to bursting. It was a refuge, as it had been for the last fifteen days.

On the morning of 9-11, students at another school, P.S. 234, an elementary school for grades pre-K through fifth, were on their playground four blocks from the Twin Towers. They heard the thunderous crash and saw the first plane hit. Other children, already in their classrooms, where windows were open to let in the air on that bright, fresh fall morning, caught sight of the North Tower engulfed in flames.

Within minutes of the attack, many parents had rushed to the school to pick up their children, but as the streets clogged with evacuees and emergency vehicles racing south, 150 students remained behind. The school's principal, Anna Switzer, herded them, their teachers, and a few parents inside. Before the South Tower fell, Switzer and her teachers lined up the students, ages five to eleven, in a single file and told them to hold hands. They stepped out of the building into the ash and smoke. Some looked up and watched as men and women flung themselves from the upper floors of the towers, their bodies passing through the billowing flames. One child said, "The birds are on fire."

Running, some being carried, others being pulled, they moved north. Moments later, the air rumbled and the South Tower fell. The torrent of dust blotted out all signs of sky and sun. Students and teachers at the front of the line kept going north. Switzer grabbed those at the rear and raced back into the school's basement. "The day turned into night, and we ran for our lives," she later recalled. At first, Switzer did not know if her caravan of students and teachers who had left survived. They did, walking and running about a mile and a half north to the sheltering brick walls of P.S. 41.

Not only were many of the P.S. 234 students forced from their school but their families also had to abandon their homes for weeks or even months. Staff, parents, and children in both schools, P.S. 41 and 234, had friends who had died.

With rescue workers using the school building and the Trade Center site still aflame, the P.S. 234 children and teachers were sharing the classrooms at P.S. 41; two sets of students and two teachers were crowded into each room. I was there that morning to try to comfort them. I spoke to the children, and I read the storybook
I Love You, Little One
while, in the back of the classroom, teachers wept into their hands.

Governor George Pataki's wife, Libby, had joined me at the school. Now we were on our way to Engine Company 54 and Ladder Company 4 in lower Manhattan. The fire battalion had lost fifteen firefighters. The sidewalk in front had become a makeshift memorial of candles, notes, and flowers. The flowers were stacked one bouquet on top of another, creating a slowly fading mound. We placed our own fresh bouquets of sunflowers on the sidewalk and went inside to meet the men who remained. They were the ones who hadn't been on duty that day, who had been somewhere else when their friends suited up and raced south, climbing the stairs of the North Tower in full gear, including helmets and oxygen tanks, and wearing the locator devices that are designed to chirp so firefighters who fall in the dark can be found. I think sometimes of all those chirpers that suddenly went silent.

Inside the firehouse, the men were grieving. Unlike the grief of the teachers, which was laced with fear and uncertainty for the future, this was a very different grief--raw, aching, and angry.

The next week, on October 2, George and I went out to dinner in Washington, D.C., with Mayor Anthony Williams and his wife, Diane, at Morton's, a steakhouse. Across the country, people had stopped going to shopping malls and to restaurants. They had stopped flying on airplanes and staying in hotels. No one could promise them that other strikes would not come. But now, in addition to all the fears of another terror attack, George was concerned that the economy would spiral into a full-blown crisis. We had already been in a recession from the bursting of the dot-com bubble. He did not want the specter of more people losing their jobs, of storefronts being boarded up and businesses going bankrupt. It's not a large gesture for a president to go out to dinner, but we hoped that by doing so we might encourage other Americans. It was why George wanted them to shop, to fly on commercial airlines, and to travel again--those were all ways to bolster business. If the terrorists had succeeded in undermining our economy too, they would have scored a double blow.

The White House was abuzz with foreign leaders arriving for meetings with George. They came for Oval Office sit-downs and for small working lunches and dinners, at times with their spouses. On September 28, I hosted Jordan's Queen Rania for a coffee while her husband, King Abdullah, talked terrorism and security with George. In all, over the next six months, more than twenty-five foreign leaders would fly to Washington to meet with George, and he would keep in near constant touch with others by phone. I also wanted to invite friends over. As the blistering intensity of the early days continued unabated, I felt very strongly that every so often George needed an hour or two to clear his mind, or at least to have the distraction and the comfort of longtime friends. From before dawn each morning, he was reading threat assessments and reviewing retaliation options. I wanted him to have a few brief moments of respite. So our friends came: Penny Slade-Sawyer, who had been one of our good friends when we moved back to Midland and who now lived in Northern Virginia, as well as Joan and Jim Doty, whom we had met in 1988 during Gampy's campaign, and other friends scattered around Washington. At the start of October, our longtime friends from Lubbock, Mike and Nancy Weiss, came for a few days. We took immeasurable comfort in seeing all of them.

On Friday, October 5, we traveled to Camp David with Mike and Nancy. We had known them since George's race for Congress back in 1978. Mike was an accountant who had been George's Lubbock County chairman for the campaign; the two had met in the back of a men's clothing store when George had dropped by to introduce himself and shake hands. Mike had supported George on every run since, even moving to Austin to help George set up the Texas budget office, and Nancy and I had spent countless mornings walking around the city's lake trails. They were with us to lend their companionship and friendship, but as we ate our meals or took brief walks at the edge of the Catoctin Mountains, George knew what was to come. I knew as well. He spent most of the weekend closeted with his staff, and in the evening, when we were alone, he talked about sending our forces into combat. I knew how anxious he was; along with the fears of more terrorism, he now had the added worry of the safety of our own troops. There was no precedent for this type of war and for what would have to be done. But he and I said nothing about it to Mike and Nancy.

On Sunday morning, on our return to Washington, we stopped at the National Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Emmitsburg, Maryland, to honor firefighters who had died during the year. Over three hundred firefighters had perished on 9-11. When we landed at the White House, George left to prepare for his remarks to the nation. I took Mike and Nancy upstairs, into our bedroom, and told them: at one o'clock that afternoon, George was going to announce the first round of bomb and missile strikes against the Taliban rulers in Afghanistan. He would speak from the Treaty Room, the place where other presidents had pursued peace, with the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial rising in the background. A few doors down, technicians were adjusting the lights and checking the audio feed, and George was reading his speech a final time. I turned on the television and got in bed; Nancy and Mike drew up chairs beside me, although Nancy later told me that she felt like getting in bed too.

George's voice was steady as he spoke, but I knew the consequences. Twenty-six days after 9-11, my husband was formally announcing military action. The Taliban had ignored every ultimatum. "The battle is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail," he said. Less than two hours before, American and British forces had launched the first strikes on the cities of Kabul and Kandahar. Missiles and bombs would be followed by drops of food, medicine, and transistor radios that were tuned to a message broadcast for the people of Afghanistan. George had been given update reports on the military plans since before we boarded Marine One that morning. "Peace and freedom will prevail," he said as we watched him on the television screen.

In our system of government, while Congress is the body that can officially declare war, presidents are the ones who make the ultimate call to send our troops into battle. My father-in-law had done it at the start of 1991; four presidents--John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford--had presided over a single war: Vietnam. After two years of Nazi aggression in Europe, Franklin Roosevelt took the country to war against Japan and then Germany in 1941. Harry Truman had the Korean War, although it was undeclared, and every post-World War II president through George H. W. Bush had faced the nuclear specter of the Cold War. The history lessons are easy; what is hard to find are the words to convey my emotions when my husband had to commit precious American lives to combat. In his speech, George spoke of a letter he had received from a fourth-grade girl whose father was in the military. "As much as I don't want my dad to fight," she wrote, "I'm willing to give him to you." I pictured the faces of the sailors and Marines on the cruisers in San Diego, where I had gone for my first Troops to Teachers event, six months ago; I thought of the Navy personnel who sat alongside us in the chapel at Camp David; I thought of the faces of the men and women in uniform who had met us at the Pentagon, of the injured at Walter Reed. They were people with names, with hometowns, with parents, spouses, and families, and they were willing to give themselves and their lives so that other dads and moms going to work on a quiet, late-summer morning might never know terror again.

For months, I would lie in bed at night or wake in the darkness and think of our troops, think of them sleeping on cold, hard ground beneath the unforgiving Afghan winds, and feel guilty that I had a warm room and a warm bed while they risked everything. At Camp David, on that first Sunday morning after 9-11, our chaplain, Navy Lieutenant Bob Williams, had selected as the scripture reading Psalm 27, "I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." I knew that goodness wore camouflage and khaki; it wore Army green, Navy white, Marine tan, and Air Force blue.

The first anthrax-laced letters were mailed from Princeton, New Jersey, on September 18, 2001. Four were addressed to major New York City media companies, including to the NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw; a fifth letter arrived at the offices of American Media, a tabloid newspaper and magazine company in Florida. The Florida letter killed a photo editor and nearly killed a mail room employee. Robert Stevens died on October 5, two days before George gave the final order for attacks to begin on the Taliban. Then, on October 12, five days after our air strikes began, an assistant to Tom Brokaw tested positive for skin anthrax, an infection marked by sores or boils that can spread to the bloodstream if left untreated. Anthrax was found at ABC and CBS news, as well as the
New York Post,
and each news organization had at least one employee with a confirmed case of skin anthrax. On October 15, the anthrax reached Washington, D.C. Contaminated letters had been sent to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. The Hart Senate Office Building was evacuated and shut down, and all mail, including all mail to the White House, was quarantined. But no one thought to close the post office that had processed the mail. Two employees at the Brentwood postal facility, Thomas Morris Jr. and Joseph Curseen Jr., would die from inhaled anthrax; two others would fall ill but, after prolonged treatment with antibiotics, would recover. The entire mail facility, along with the Hart Building, would be sealed shut while chlorine gas was pumped in to kill any remaining bacteria. October was the month of anthrax. Suddenly, threats seemed no longer confined to the sky; they were coming from all directions.