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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum is joined by John McConnell, the longtime senior speechwriter for President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, to discuss their memories of September 11, 2001—25 years later.
Then, David ends with a discussion of American Pastoral, a novel by Philip Roth, and what we can learn about domestic terrorism from the book.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Well, what I remember, that’s actually maybe one of my most vivid memories of the day, is stepping out of that building and Washington is deserted, and there’s yellow tape everywhere marking off the streets, and there’s the National Guard and armored personnel carriers everywhere.
But the flags are still flying. They’ll be lowered the next—I remember thinking, They will be lowered tomorrow. But tonight they’re high.
[Music]
Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be John McConnell, a colleague of mine in the George W. Bush speechwriting department, and himself chief speechwriter to former Vice President Dick Cheney. We’ll be talking about 9/11 at the quarter-century anniversary. John and I spent much of the day together on 9/11, 2001—and we’ll be discussing what we saw, what we thought, what we felt, and what we did.
The book discussion this week will also be terrorism-related: the novel American Pastoral by Philip Roth, his discussion of a homegrown terrorist in Roth’s own native state of New Jersey.
Before either the dialogue or the book discussion, some home news. We’re going to be conducting an experiment here in The David Frum Show with a new tempo. Twice a week: releasing one show on Wednesday, the show you see, which will contain an interview and a book discussion, and a shorter show, which we’ll be releasing each Saturday on both YouTube and on whatever audio platform you use: Spotify, Apple, whatever it is.
The second show, the Saturday show, will be much shorter—no interview, just some thoughts from me on the events of the week just passed. And the first of the shows, which we’ll release this coming Saturday, I will offer my own reflections on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. The United States has been almost unceasingly at war in the Middle East since 9/11, 2001. And I’ll be offering some of my thoughts about how I think about that experience, how others might want to think about it, whatever information I can offer. I played a small part in that history, and I think about it almost all the time, and I’ll be sharing those thoughts with you. And we’ll be continuing each Saturday after that. I do hope you’ll join and will bookmark us or subscribe to The Atlantic YouTube channel, or whatever audio channel you use, so you will not miss any of our Saturday shows.
So that’s the news. I hope you will join me this coming Saturday and each successive Saturday for the second, shorter David Frum Show weekend episode.
And now my dialogue with John McConnell.
[Music]
Frum: My guest today is John McConnell. John is one of the greatest speechwriters in American history, but that’s only incidentally why I’ve invited him today. John was a colleague in the George W. Bush administration, and I spent much of September 11th, 2001, in his company, sharing emotions of shock, dismay, and grief. As we mark the 25th anniversary of a tragic day, I wanted to be with him again.
John wrote for Vice President Dan Quayle, then for the Bob Dole for President campaign in 1996. He joined the George W. Bush campaign in 2000 and then did remarkable service in the Bush White House, where he doubled as both a writer for the president and the sole speechwriter for Vice President Richard Cheney. John was a pallbearer at Vice President Cheney’s funeral.
It was his frequent writing partner, Matt Scully, who delivered the finest verdict on John’s work: “As a general rule in Bush speeches, if the writing is graceful, judicious, and understated and makes you think about the subject at hand instead of anyone’s particular craftsmanship or religiosity, there’s a better-than-even chance it is by John McConnell.”
It’s John’s lifelong reflex to deflect attention from himself, but today he must overcome that reflex and accept his place in American history. Thank you, John, for joining me today.
John McConnell: Hello, David. Great to see you.
Frum: So we spent the day together on 9/11. Let me start by asking you to summon your memories of what happened that day, where you were at, from the beginning to the end.
McConnell: I was sitting outside Vice President Cheney’s inner office door in the West Wing.
The night before, Matthew Scully and I had been working on a speech for the president for the end of that week. And at the end of Monday, I looked at my list of things to do, and I realized that Cheney had a speech on Friday too, and I thought, Well, I haven’t given this much thought. I should go talk to him. So I called his secretary. I said, Can I pop in on him tomorrow morning? And she said, How much time do you need? I said, Ten minutes, maybe five. I just wanted to ask him about his speech. And she said, Sure. Come at 8:30.
And so the next morning—you remember how we’d get to the office, and the president’s and vice president’s schedules would be under our doors. And I looked at it; it said, “Meeting with John McConnell, 8:30,” and I thought, Oh, well, it’s an official meeting, so I really better be there at 8:30 sharp. So I went over, and the vice president was there. Sean O’Keefe, who was at the time the deputy director of the budget, former secretary of the Navy, friend of Cheney’s, had popped in on Cheney after the senior staff meeting. and so he was in there, and I waited outside the door. And I was just chatting with the vice president’s secretary’s personal aide and the Secret Service man standing post.
And then about 8:46, I’m still waiting for the vice president. We’re seeing on television early reports that a plane has hit the World Trade Center, and so we’re just watching that and speculating what could possibly have gone wrong on this beautifully, perfectly clear late-summer day. Well, not long after we started seeing these pictures, that phone at the Secret Service command point outside the vice president’s office—the phone with no keys on it that just said Secret Service only—rang. And the agent standing post picked it up and listened for a few moments and said, Okay, and put it down. And he looked at me and told me that it was a passenger jet, a big commercial flight, that had hit the North Tower. And that was the first sense of real dread that this might be a coordinated event.
And around that time the vice president’s visitor, Sean O’Keefe, walked out, and Cheney motioned me in. So it’s close to 9:00 at this point, and I go in and, and he says Good morning, John. I said, Sir, just need a couple minutes of your time to talk about this little thing we’ve got on Friday. He said, Sure; have a seat. But all we did was immediately turn to his television and just look at it. It was on, and so he was aware of what was happening in New York. And instead of talking about the matter I brought or hoped to raise with him, we just sat there looking at the TV, and it wasn’t very long until we saw the live image of the second plane coming in and slamming into the South Tower. And, of course, at that moment you realize that this is a terrorist attack.
And he picked up the phone, and the president, as you recall, was out of town. He was in Florida. The vice president picked up the phone and asked to be connected to the president, as I recall. Then he got out of his chair and went out to see Andy Card’s assistant, the chief of staff’s assistant, to tell him to get in touch when he could.
And then he came back in the office. And then I remember [Republican strategist] Mary Matalin came in, [the vice president’s chief of staff] Scooter Libby came in, [assistant to the president] Josh Bolten, [National Security Adviser] Condi Rice. And at a certain point, I realized there were going to be some big, big discussions. I remember also the president being on the phone with the vice president, and I had my hands on Cheney’s desk, and he was on the phone with the president, and I couldn’t make out what was being said even though I was right there. It was just a very low, a serious conversation between the president and vice president. But at a certain point, I left and I went to my office, and I went to the phone.
Frum: Your office is in the Executive Office Building on the second floor?
McConnell: That’s right, in the Eisenhower Building. And so it was just across that little West Executive Drive.
And I picked up the phone, and I called my mom, who was here where I am today in northernmost Wisconsin, a place called Bayfield County. And I called her, and she said, Where are you? And I said, I’m in my office, and everything’s fine. And she says, Well, on television it says the White House is being evacuated. And I remember I kind of chuckled. I said, Well, I’m here. And nobody knows you better than your mother, and she knows my passive personality. She said, John, go out in the hallway and see if anyone else is there.
Frum: (Laughs.)
McConnell: And I said, Okay, okay. I will, I will, and I’ll call you. And I put the phone down, and I went out into the hallway. And sure enough, people were being told, Get out, get out.
And so I went down the stairs and then down outside, they call them the Navy Steps, which you know well, the steps from the Eisenhower Building going down. Basically directing you right into the West Wing there, across that little West Executive Drive. And I saw one of the vice president’s Secret Service men who I’d known for a long time, and he said, John, everybody’s got to get out of here. And I said, I’m going. And then just a second or two later, one of the uniformed Secret Service guys comes running from the direction of the White House, down that little set of steps near the West Wing entrance, and said, Everybody run! There’s a plane coming at us! And I don’t remember running, but I remember just pointing north and going up West Executive Drive, and it was then that I saw a big plane over 16th Street.
And I remember thinking in that moment, I swear to God, I thought, That plane is filled with people. It’s about to slam into the White House, kill them all, and destroy the White House. I cannot believe this is the year 2001. And that was the instant thought that came to my mind. I just can’t believe this is happening.
And we later found out that it was thought for a while that that was the plane that ended up hitting the Pentagon, but the Pentagon had already been hit at that point. So that plane I saw over 16th had to be a diverted commercial aircraft. I just assume that’s what it was.
And so we’re out there. Nobody knows where to go. There’s no evacuation plan. The White House has never been evacuated. And so, I ended up just out—you know, you leave the White House complex, you’re on West Executive Drive, and then boom, there’s Lafayette Park. And if you walk for one minute, you’re on Connecticut Avenue. And that’s about where I met up with you, isn’t it, David?
Frum: That’s exactly right. So let me tell you my memory up to that point. So as you say, the president was in Florida that day. So I was a little bit off duty, and so I played a little bit of hooky. Our older kids then went to a Jewish day school in Rockville, which is quite a distance from downtown D.C. And we shared often driving duties with a friend who had children in the same school. So that morning, I volunteered to take my children, Danielle’s and my children, and this friend’s children, to drive them up to Rockville, which is a long drive. And then you’re coming back with the rush-hour traffic.
So I got to the White House quite late by White House standards. I would’ve got there about quarter to nine, and parked the car. I was walking toward the Executive Office Building, and my clunky mobile phone of those days rang, and it was my wife who said, There’s something—something terrible is happening. You should get to a television screen as close as you can.
So I remember entering the Executive Building, going up the stairs that you just described going down, walking along—my office that I shared with Matt Scully was on a much busier corridor than yours. The plan of the Executive Office Building is like a big squared-off number eight. And Scully and I were on the short arm of the number eight, away from the White House on the 17th Street side. We had a huge office with a partition in between, part for him, part for me. I went to my office, and I remember walking along that corridor and hearing the sounds of every television set along the wall of increasingly agitated voices.
I got to my office and turned on my television and sat down, and just as I sat down, it was your mother who called. Danielle called me a second time, my wife, Danielle—and this would’ve been about 10 past nine—and said, A second plane has hit the World Trade Center. They’re going to attack the White House. You need to get out of there. And my personality’s a little balkier than yours, and I remember saying to her, I am not leaving. I am not leaving. And I don’t know what I thought I was going to achieve by staying there. (Laughs.) I was going to type with renewed fervor and patriotism. But what am I going to do? What am I doing? But sorry, No, I’m staying.
And I said goodbye, and I sat down at my desk to do whatever the hell it was I thought I was going to do. And just at that moment, one of the uniformed Secret Service officers pounded on the door, because we were on a busy traffic corridor, so we were right at the center of all of the traffic toward the Navy Steps was going to flow by, or almost all of it was going to flow by the front door of the Scully and Frum suite.
So they pound and say, Get out of here. And I stepped out of the office, and I remember the Secret Service officers in uniform saying, Don’t run. And so we began to walk briskly, and then two beats later they changed their tune. They said, Run! And they shouted, Ladies, if you can’t run in heels, kick off your heels!
And we ran out across the crossbar to the Navy Steps, down the Navy Steps, as you say, up through Lafayette Square, and that’s where I met you. And we all realized at the same time that we had no way of communicating with the world. All the mobile phones were dead. The only thing that still worked were pagers, and I didn’t have one. One of the things that people may not recall today is in 2001, a phone was not part of your body the way it is today, that it was a much cludgier—all you could do with it was make phone calls, basically. And so you didn’t carry it around all the time the way people do today. So people were separated from their phones. But anyway, they didn’t work. Because everyone in the world, or everyone in Washington, D.C., anyway, was trying to get onto the same number of very finite circuits that existed in 2001 at the same time, and all the lines went dead.
McConnell: Yeah, and that’s a very good point you make, David. If you weren’t around then, you know, if you’re 30 or less, you don’t know. I mean, we got BlackBerrys in 2004 when you could look at your email for the first time without being at your desk. But text messages, all that stuff, came much later in terms of just ordinary usage in everyone’s hand.
Frum: I think there’s no social media of any kind. There’s no YouTube, there’s no Facebook, there’s no Twitter, nothing. And mobile computers do exist, but they’re pretty kludgy. So it’s still very much a deskbound world of communication.
McConnell: Well, I remember when I was a kid reading about the day that President Kennedy was assassinated, and there was some vignettes of that day. And one of them was a blind beggar in New York City had a little pocket radio, and people were gathered around this man listening to that radio.
And 9/11, it was still kind of that world. Because you had—I mean, you had 24-hour news on TV and stuff. But out on the street, I remember at one point during that day hearing a very loud car radio somewhere, maybe on our walk, David, and stopping momentarily to see if there was anything coming through that radio that we could learn.
Frum: Yeah. Well, one of the reasons we’re all milling around, this is something I learned later. So 9/11, 2001—it’s only a dozen years after the end of the Cold War. And it’s at the end of a long period of security and peace. So the evacuation plans for the White House are still the Cold War plans, and the contingency that they planned for was a Soviet decapitation strike on the centers of government of the United States. And so the plan was: Get the president up in the air on Air Force One as fast as you can, so he can command whatever response is required to this Soviet decapitation strike. Get other key White House personnel into the tiny little bomb shelter underneath the West Wing that’s, I think, basically left over from the 1950s. So it has room for what? A dozen, 15 people. Get them down there, and then everybody else is going to be vaporized in the strike. Which is very sad for them, but it means you don’t need a plan as to where you’re going to put these people. (Laughs.) Because you assume not only are they all dead, but their bodies don’t exist anymore.
McConnell: Right. (Laughs.) And you know, I never saw the bunker, obviously. I left the vice president’s office just before they realized that there was a plane coming directly at the White House at 500 miles an hour. And that’s when Jimmy Scott, the head of the vice president shift, ran into him and said, Sir, we have to leave.
Frum: Yeah.
McConnell: And Cheney said, All right. And he said, Now.
Frum: So they’re taking him to the bunker, and that’s where Condoleezza Rice will go, and then the presidential entourage is on its way to Air Force One. But we don’t know any of that as we’re standing there. I think we’re on the corner of, like, I Street and Connecticut Avenue with no way of knowing what’s going on in the world.
McConnell: And no, as you say, no evacuation plan. We were never briefed. Boy, if something happens and you’re told to leave the building, there was just nothing. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. And I’m sure it’s not that way now. (Laughs.)
Frum: So I remember a lot of people had to make a prompt decision: Do I go home and check on my loved ones? Do I try to find some way to be useful, but with no contingency plan? There are people who are stuck in traffic on the way into town who haven’t—it was a late morning because the president was away, so there are people who were planning on arriving at 8:30 or 9:00. And they’re stuck in traffic, presumably because the I-395, the main road from northern Virginia, where a lot of Republican White House people would live, that’s just that’s past the Pentagon. It’s just immobilized. There’s no moving on I-395. And so you and I had to decide what to do in that moment, and I had this intuition. I knew Danielle. I knew Danielle was already in our other car on our way to the school to get the kids. So if I went home, there would be nobody home.
There was nothing for me to do. And maybe somebody would need some words at some point, and I remember saying to you, We need to find a place to figure out where we can watch what’s going on, get access to a television set. My first thought was we should go to the Mayflower Hotel, which was across the street, and rent a room. And then I had the brainwave, or you had the brainwave, I forget which of us was, that we should go to the American Enterprise Institute, which is another block beyond the Mayflower Hotel, and which would probably still be open. And one or the other of us said—and we wandered over there together.
McConnell: And do you remember, David, that at one point we were headed right to where you say the American Enterprise Institute is at 17th and M. Just south of that is the Mayflower, and we saw [journalist] Tony Snow. Do you remember? And he was on his phone, and we didn’t speak to him, but we kind of waved at each other.
Frum: Yeah.
McConnell: And and then we—
Frum: How he had a phone connection, I cannot at this point understand. He must have been—
McConnell: Yeah, he was with, was he with Fox at the time? I can’t remember. Yeah.
Frum: Yeah. So we walked over to 11th and M, a building that is now demolished.
McConnell: 17th and M.
Frum: 17th and M. Yeah. And went up to the American Enterprise Institute, and they were all still there. This must have been about near 10:00.
They had television sets, and we could catch up. And we learned about the—by that point, we had a pretty good idea about the World Trade Center and what had happened. But I think the World Trade Center, I don’t know if it had collapsed as of 10 o’clock, or whether we were still waiting for the horrors of that disaster to unfold.
McConnell: And when you and I arrived in the AEI, and I think by that point, we had intercepted Matthew Scully. And the reason I say that is Matthew remembers seeing Tony as well. And I think we had intercepted him, and the three of us went up into AEI, and [former president of the American Enterprise Institute] Chris DeMuth met us, you remember? And he said, “One of the towers just fell.”
Frum: Yes.
McConnell: And I remember the image in my mind was that it had gone over, that it had fallen over to the side. And that was the image that came to my mind before we saw it on the TV. And then we remember we saw the horrible picture, and how it just sort of fell down on its own footprint. But that was just moments after we got in there.
Frum: And so we were there probably for about half an hour, just absorbing impressions from this terrible day. I don’t know if we would’ve known yet about Flight 93. I don’t remember the time in the day when that impressed itself on my consciousness.
What I remember is we were at AEI for about half an hour, and then it must’ve been Matthew Scully who had the pager, because he got the information that there had been improvised an office, a workspace away from the White House for people who were needed. And that the three of us were needed. And the workspace was, I remember, it was on, I think, H Street or I Street. And we walked over there, and I remember my first thought, I had no—it was on Scully’s pager, so I didn’t know where I was going. And, and we walk into this brand-new office building, gleaming, and we take the elevator.
And the White House—I don’t know what it’s like today, but in 2001 it was not as glamorous a place as The West Wing made it look. It was quite, you know, it looked like a—it didn’t have the state-of-the-art except in the president’s personal suite and the vice president’s personal suite. They were still using the big bulbous computer screens. There were very few flat screens. Everything was a little like a government-procurement office. And I remember walking into the space, and you take the elevator, and the elevator is much sleeker, and then these glass doors that go [imitates whooshing sound] with sensors, which is a very new thing in 2001. I was so impressed. I thought, That’s it. The CIA has it. Oh, okay, now I get it. There’s a secret government that has cool offices, unlike the West Wing. Prepare for justice contingency.
And then we learn, no, no—this is the government-relations offices of Daimler Chrysler, and somebody on the West Wing staff was married to somebody at Daimler Chrysler, and they were all evacuated, so they let us use their offices. (Laughs.) Which were much sleeker than anything that the government had to offer.
McConnell: Yeah, right. That’s right. And that’s where we spent the rest of the day.
Frum: One thing I remember also about that was walking in, and they were going to have some kind of lunch at Daimler Chrysler, and they prepared a spread of sandwiches. And there’s a big difference between government food culture and private-sector food culture. The government food culture in those days was much more turkey on white bread with mayo. And these were like arugula sandwiches. That was my first inclination, Oh, maybe this was not a secret CIA facility. (Laughs.) Or my first indication this is not a secret CIA facility, but they would still have been the turkey on white bread with mayo.
Frum: So that’s where we started to work. So by this time we are with Scully, and this is now, I would say, about 11:30 in the morning, I’m guessing. And we arrive there, and we start thinking about, What should the president say? And again, we don’t have a good ways of communicating with anybody. And the whole team is sort of distributed all over the place. Mike Gerson is stuck in traffic, I think, on I-395. That’s the head of the speechwriting office. We don’t know where Pete Wehner, who’s sort of the operational head of the speechwriting office—we don’t know where he is. And the plane is on its way from Florida to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, and that’s where the president makes his first stop of the day, and where he makes his first statement to the American people.
Do you remember watching that statement?
McConnell: I don’t remember watching the president’s statement, but surely we did. We were just kind of disoriented. But the thing about being a speechwriter in a moment like that, we’re the only ones who knew we were going to be needed. There are a lot of our colleagues—What are they going to ask me to do? Where when you’re in presidential speechwriting, on an event like this, we were trying to be helpful in writing some things down. I also remember [White House staff secretary] Harriet Miers was there, and I think Harriet reminded us that anything we generated that day, that even though we weren’t on White House property and White House facilities, that these were government records that we were generating. And reminding us of that. Keep your notes, and things like that.
Frum: I remember watching the president from Barksdale, and it was a military link. It was a poor link, and so it looked kinda like wavery. And the president still wasn’t sure exactly what, hadn’t thought very hard about what to say. He just wanted to make it clear that he was alive and in contact. I remember, for me, that first speech—which would’ve been about 1:30, and which was improvised by whoever was with him on the plane, and maybe it was from Karen [Hughes] talking to him from the Justice Department. I remember thinking, This makes it now 10 times worse. Because not only does the president sound uncertain, but the image looks like a scene from a movie about a nuclear attack. That it looks like the government has lost the ability to put out a clear TV image to the American people. And it looks like, you know, the government of the United States has really been knocked off its pegs—because he looks wobbly, he sounds wobbly. This is really bad.
McConnell: The one other thing I was gonna mention when we were putting these notes together, Mike had been on 395 trying to get into Washington. He saw that plane that hit the Pentagon. He saw it. And he had a conscious memory of looking into the windows of that plane, and he said he thought, It’s too low; it’s too fast. And in the time it took him to process that thought, it hit the Pentagon, which he did not see. He did not have a line of sight to where it hit the Pentagon. But he saw this thing.
Frum: Yeah.
McConnell: And I know it was a haunting, haunting experience for him.
Frum: Well, it was about 2:00 in the afternoon when we’re still in this office building that my wife was able to reach me, and told me she had indeed gone to the Jewish day school, retrieved the children. The Jewish day school—because there were all these rumors of what was going on, that there had been a car bomb on the Washington Mall. And a Jewish day school would be on the list of targets you would have to—if there was any kinda local auxiliary. So when the car-bomb story made it seem like this was not just a remote event, there may have been people somehow in Washington itself, and then a Jewish day school would be as it always is a target to worry about.
The kids had been all taken into a gymnasium, and the windows had been shut. In those days, Jewish day schools didn’t—today, they all have blackout blinds and bulletproof glass, but in those days they didn’t. And so the kids were all put in the gym, and Danielle, there were a line of parents who all came to retrieve the children. She stopped by a local grocery store to get some emergency supplies, and everybody in our neighborhood seemed to be doing the same because the supplies were wiped out. And she called me, but she was able to get through to me at last at about 2:00. And that’s when I heard the news that Barbara Olson, the wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson, and a close friend of, I think, all of ours, was on the plane that hit the Pentagon. I think all of us knew many people who were affected by the day, but that was the first person that I heard directly. It was someone I knew well, who was killed on 9/11.
McConnell: Yes. Yes. Barbara was a good friend of mine too, and I had seen her not long before. And, of course, we all know Ted, the No. 3 man at the Justice Department. And you were the one who told me about Barbara. I remember that moment. And you realize there’s not a chance she made it.
And then the next morning, my mom called from here, and she said, Well, Gary Nelson called, and he was a family friend, one of my childhood teachers from up here, said, Gary called, and Anne was in the North Tower. And that was their only daughter, Gary and Jeanette Nelson, lifelong friends of ours. Anne Nicole Nelson went to my high school, my college, the only daughter. aAnd she may have been killed right away, because she was about right where the area where the—
But you remember, David, you and I had explicitly talked about this before we knew anything, before we knew anything about. Because at first, we were talking about how there could be 50,000 people in these buildings. And I said, David, we’re all going to know somebody. And it’s true. We all did.
And [New York City Mayor Rudy] Giuliani said that afternoon—he said the numbers are going to be overwhelming. Because—more got out than they thought. But it was just this foreboding thought that you have these images and everything, but these human stories that are going to be coming at us. And these moments of loss that are gonna be experienced not just by us, but by people who are even closer to the murders.
Frum: Well, the Barbara Olson story, I learned later some details that were especially heartbreaking. And again, this is going to be an old-timey detail, but in those pre-cellphone days, planes often had a single telephone on the plane that passengers could use with a credit card. It was very expensive, so they didn’t get a lot of use. But Barbara somehow was able to get access to the telephone, and to call her husband, Ted, solicitor general, and to tell him that the plane had been hijacked. And Ted, I remember him talking with us and saying—and he knew about the two planes, and he had to make a decision in that moment whether to tell Barbara the news of what the likely fate of her plane was. Or not to tell her, and to let her have another few seconds of hope. And I remember, I can hear his voice—he’s now passed too—saying, I felt I had to tell her. And so he told her what had happened, and he told her what he feared was probably going to happen. They had no idea of the target, but of the fate. And they said their goodbyes. And that was the end.
That’s one of the many, many heartbreaking stories of that day. One, again, that came close to home.
McConnell: Yeah. And then it was only days later that Ted was on Capitol Hill testifying, I think, in favor of the Patriot Act. And it was just days later when all these measures had to be taken, and this man was on duty and remained so.
Frum: Yeah. So the president flew from Barksdale, then, to Strategic Air Command near Omaha, Nebraska.
McConnell: Against his wishes, as we know.
Frum: Yeah.
And that’s where he spent most of the day as the world tried to figure out exactly what was the scale of this attack. What had happened, and what had not happened. Because there were so many rumors. As the car bombs on the Mall were one. I’m going to forget the others, but there were so many, of things that had happened all over the place.
McConnell: Well, yes. And I remember in those first few days just the rumors you’d hear. And I also remember not wanting to know what the rumors were.
There was one point where I was momentarily in the Oval Office with Mike, and I think Matthew was there. The president said, Would any of you guys have a home computer? And Mike said, I got a computer at home. He said, Well, why don’t y’all go to Mike’s house? And I thought, What’s this all about? And then Andy Card walked in, and he said, We’re not going to do it. And the president said, Okay, y’all can stay here.
But apparently they were contemplating an evacuation of the White House. And you remember there were a few times the building was emptied out.
Frum: Yeah. Anthrax.
So after the Barksdale communication, you and I and Matt—we wrote a number of drafts. And what I remember us doing was writing alternative versions. Again, we had very little information. We didn’t know what the president wanted. We didn’t know exactly what was happening.
I remember—and maybe this was all of us, or maybe it was just me—that I wrote speeches of varying degrees of matter-of-factness, rhetorical flights. I had, like, four versions of the same statement depending on—Here are four different ways of doing it. Well, that was the way I often worked in those days. You would say, You could do it this way; you could do it this way; you could do it this way. And I always thought it was that while you could pitch it, say—Well, we can do a more matter-of-fact, we can do a more rhetorical—but it was often helpful for people for whom words were not their first trade to see it. This is what a matter-of-fact version would look like. This is what a different version would look like. This is what an aggressive version would look like. This is what a lean-back, if we’re not going to take aggressive action. The speechwriters don’t decide what to do. They just decide how to describe what the president’s decided what to do.
McConnell: Well, I’m sorry to interrupt, but you were so good that way. Very, very few writers can get tone as well as you can. But sorry, sidebar.
Frum: Yeah. But that’s what I remember. Thank you for that. But I remember that’s what I spent the afternoon doing, is writing the same thing in, I think, four, maybe five different versions, which are probably in Harriet Miers’s notes somewhere.
And then we got word as sunset fell that the president was returning.
McConnell: And I didn’t expect that we would see him. And, of course, we didn’t. But you remember getting back to the White House, and the mess stewards, the Navy mess, they had never left.
Frum: Yeah. I do remember.
McConnell: These guys. They stayed at their posts. And there were men with long guns all over the White House lawn, and it was quite a picture.
Frum: Well, what I remember, that’s actually maybe one of my most vivid memories of the day, is stepping out of that building. And Washington is deserted, and there’s yellow tape everywhere marking off the streets, and there’s the National Guard and armored personnel carriers everywhere.
But the flags are still flying. They’ll be lowered the next—I remember thinking, They will be lowered tomorrow. But tonight they’re high, and they’re lit up. And this capital is that ghostly beauty of Washington at night, one of the most, maybe the most, beautiful city in America at night. And there are armored personnel everywhere; there are military everywhere.
And you may not share the view—this is my view, and I won’t attribute it to you. But if you’ve been to Washington recently, and you’ve had feelings about seeing armed men in the streets of the nation’s capital, and they seem like an unwelcome force, like something imposed from outside, just imagine the opposite. The farthest of looking at it, and saying, This is the armed forces of the United States, here to protect the nation’s capital. Thank God they’re here; how proud we are of them. How much we admire them; how grateful we are.
I remember later, just to flash ahead, talking to a National Guard commander saying that one of his biggest problems with his deployment in Washington was managing his troops’ weight, because local merchants kept bringing them donuts and cake and coffee and cookies. And after, like, the third round he had to say, No, no more cookies. No more cookies.
McConnell: Well, and you remember the president said the following week, just meditating on that day, and as you were noting—it was the perfect, perfect day. And then, remember the National Book Festival had been on the 8th. Saturday the 8th on the Mall; I think the 8th and 9th. And the National Book Festival would just spread out on the Mall, the lawn of the Library of Congress. People walking in and out of the Library of Congress building. And it was just free movement. And I think the president and Mrs. Bush went up there at one point and wandered around among the book festival.
And anyway, what the president said after the events—he said, Night fell on a different world.
Frum: Yeah. So it’s about 8:00 at night. We get into the White House. Again, and it’s a different White House. Because the security—although there was security before 9/11, a lot of security—it was different after. And it was already, it was instantly different.
So we didn’t go watch the president speak, which is what I think we normally would’ve done. Again, there were just many more barriers to moving around inside. And the president spoke to the nation, but still in a way that was a little punch drunk, in my opinion.
And I looked this up later. So, after the firing on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln’s first communication to the nation is a written proclamation that he issued three days after the firing on Fort Sumter. And after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt’s first communication to the nation was his Day of Infamy speech. But Pearl Harbor was struck at dawn Hawaii time, which on Sunday, which is about midday Washington time Sunday. And the president spoke first thing Monday. So however many hours that is before the first communication. In—it’s not yet the social-media age, but it’s the cable-TV age, and the president has to speak the same day, immediately. And in a way, there isn’t really time. That isn’t enough time to organize what you’re going to say. And so even the 8:00 speech struck me as not the right tone, not the right message exactly.
McConnell: Well, and then it was Monday the 17th where we got the assignment to do the speech to Congress on Thursday. And that was, of course, that would be then September 20th. It was nine days after the events in question. And if you look at history, it feels like a long time. But he did have the speech at the National Cathedral on Friday, and the radio address. Which I don’t even remember what that—
Frum: Well, I want to put a break—again, I want to slow down here a little bit, because here are the things I remember that are signal events before the speech to Congress.
There’s the speech to the National Cathedral, as you said, which was, I thought, so—that was beautiful. This is not my own work. I’ll say, because my portfolio was domestic and economic, so I was spending all my time on, like, the stock market and the reopening of the airlines. So the speeches I’m about to praise, I had nothing to do with. That beautiful speech at the National Cathedral, which I think you and Scully mostly wrote. And then he went to New York to speak at Ground Zero. And that famous moment, “I can hear you,” that was, as far as I’m aware, completely improvised in the moment. And then—and I think this is the thing, I think, people don’t remember enough—that he went to the Washington mosque on Massachusetts Avenue, I think, again, before the speech to Congress. And stood with dignitaries local and national, and made a speech for tolerance.
And I just want to stress this point, because there is a lot of misremembering and I think a lot of misinformation about what it was like to belong to the American Muslim community after 9/11. There were a flurry of hate attacks after 9/11, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I remember, in fact, I think three of them were murders. Two of the murders were carried out by the same person. And the three victims—only one of the three was Muslim; one was Sikh, and one was South Asian of non-Muslim background. And then many other incidents of harassment and intimidation and insult and vandalism. But the president was so forceful condemning it that that flurry of hate-crime incidents—and three of them murders in the immediate aftermath—was quickly stopped.
And there is a dramatic drop-off between, after the month of September into October. I think the killings were in September and October. By January of 2002, the FBI is recording a steep drop, I think, of hate-crime incidents, from that last half of 2001. And that the leadership of President Bush and people like him really made an important difference in creating an atmosphere of tolerance and respect that is not as remembered as well as it should be.
McConnell: Well, that’s a nice point, David. And this is a great country, and no patriot is going to want to harm an innocent, unsuspecting person in response to something like this. I mean, this is the horror of 9/11, is that very thing: harming innocent, unsuspecting people. And President Bush in that sense spoke for the best in our country and brought out the best, as I like to think he always did, and I know that he tried to do.
Frum: Well, again, to conjure it up, so—President Bush is kind of an accidental president in a way. He lost the popular vote in the election of 2000. He becomes president, he wins the electoral vote, and everything teeters on the state of Florida, where, on a few dozen votes in the state of Florida—because in those days, every county got to design its own ballot, and many of the counties did a bad job. And there was recount upon recount, and tremendous ill feeling about it. And it left behind, I think, a shadow. I know he spent a lot of the first half of 2001 trying to find ways to broaden his support. There is an emphasis on education as an early initiative, because that had broad bipartisan support. You could pass it with big majorities of both Republicans and Democrats in both houses of Congress.
But still, there was a question mark over his presidency up to that moment. And I think there was this feeling of—would he measure up? Could this accidental president be someone who could speak for the nation after 9/11?
McConnell: Well, that’s right. And I remember Bob Dole candidly said, some months after that, he said—I think he was talking about September 14th, when Bush was on that flattened fire truck in New York City with the bullhorn, and didn’t even know he was expected to speak and had nothing prepared for him. And then had one of the iconic moments of his presidency—and Bob Dole said, that was like a second inauguration. (Laughs.) And it really was the man meeting his moment, and people getting a sense of him that they really hadn’t had or allowed. Or, in the case of many Americans, allowed themselves to have at that time.
Frum: Well, on his way to that moment, he landed in New York, and he was taken in a car to Lower Manhattan. And the emergency workers there are the firefighters, and a lot of, not onlookers because the area’s closed to the public, but there were a lot of people there. And they’re all cheering and waving and clapping and greeting him enthusiastically. And Mayor Giuliani, who was in the car with Bush—and Mayor Giuliani was a very different man in 9/11 from the man he is now—and I later heard that he had said to the president, You see all these people cheering for you? Not one of them voted for you.
McConnell: Well, and President Bush—you’ve heard him tell the story, David, and he repeated it in his book. He has a strong emotional memory of just one guy in a hard hat standing on a mound of rubble, making eye contact with him, and pointing his finger and said, “Don’t you let me down.”
Frum: (Laughs.)
McConnell: And it really, really touched his heart and stays with him to this day.
Frum: All right. So we have just a few minutes left. I want to flash forward; now look back on this from the perspective of 25 years. How did the country do? How did the Bush administration do? What did we get right? What did we get wrong? Do you have thoughts looking backward from a perspective of a quarter century on 9/11, and what it meant and what it led to?
McConnell: Nothing deep or profound. I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. I remember once when I was about nine or 10 years old—I grew up in a town of 500 people in northern Wisconsin, and I have this memory of walking with one of my little friends around this little town on a summer day. And we agreed that we were probably never going to see a war in our lifetimes, because people, they don’t do this anymore. You know what I mean? That’s how things felt in the mid- to late ’70s. People aren’t going to fight wars anymore, big tanks and armies and all this stuff. And we just looked ahead to a future where that kind of tragedy and sorrow just wouldn’t fall on the human race like it used to. This is, you know, innocent kid stuff, right?
And the ’80s were pretty quiet. And you had the Cold War, but it’s a pretty, pretty quiet decade when you think about it. And so the point is—when 9/11 happened, that was very jarring for me, as it was for everybody. And you get this sense that the world—we might see a lot of things like this from now on, and we might see a lot of things like this inside the United States. That was my biggest fear, that the United States would, having found itself vulnerable that day, would continue to be. I didn’t think we had to be, but I was afraid that we might be.
And so when I look back, I think mainly of the president you and I worked for, and the responsibilities that we had. And there’s only so much that speechwriters can do. There’s only so much that’s on the page, and the rest is up to him. And when he did such a great job in those moments, it’s really because of him and the kind of man he was. And this was, as I said before, a man meeting his moment. And our country has not descended into the kind of fright and vulnerability that many of us feared could happen, and that’s not by accident. A lot of good decisions were made; a lot of difficult decisions were made that kept us safe. We could talk about any number of particulars and wars and things of that nature that have come since.
But by and large, I look back on that time as a pivotal point, a moment of great decision. And things were handled well by the people in power.
Frum: I will have a somewhat different view, which I’ll present on a later occasion. I’ll say just one thing as I think back on it. I think there are many might-have-beens in history, and I’m not a big believer in these alternative scenarios, because usually things that have big consequences don’t have happenstance causes. If the guns firing at Fort Sumter had missed, the Civil War would still have happened.
But one I do think about is, if [Osama] bin Laden had not got away in Tora Bora in December of 2001, if the United States and Britain and the many other allies who were there, and the Afghan partners of the United States—if they had succeeded in cornering him and killing him in Tora Bora at the end of 2001, would we have had the quarter century of wars in the Middle East that have since happened? His getting away caused an upping of the ante of American policy. The United States had to do something, and had failed to do in December 2001 the most necessary and logical and demanded thing. And so, sometimes when you fail to solve a problem, you redefine the problem to make the problem bigger.
It’s September 11th, 2026. The United States is at war with Iran; American troops have been engaged in anti-terrorist and counterterrorist operations all over the planet for a quarter century. The death toll has been high for Americans, and even higher for others. And I think that 9/11 of 2001 put us on this path. There was an exit in December of 2001, and we didn’t take the exit. We missed the exit. Not through anyone’s fault, or not through anyone’s intention. Maybe somebody’s fault. Not through anyone’s intention. We missed the exit, and here we are. And we’ll be talking about that more in the coming weeks.
And John, I thank you so much. Not only did I spend that day with you, I remember also very vividly spending my last day at the White House with you. We had lunch that day, and I remember going with you to the big bow in the South Lawn, the iron fence, and looking out and thinking, All my life I’ve wanted to look into this fence. I’ve had a year and a half of looking out of the fence, and now I’m looking out of it for the last time, with my good friend McConnell by my side. And for the rest of my life, I’ll be back to looking inside and trying to make sense of this with everyone else’s eyes of looking in.
But you, you’ve spent so much of your life inside, and your knowledge is so profound, and your heart is so big, and it was an honor to work with you and to be your friend.
McConnell: Thank you, David. It was an honor to be your colleague as well. It was a great time, and we’re so privileged to have had that experience.
Frum: Bye-bye.
McConnell: Thank you.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to my friend John McConnell for joining me today on The David Frum Show. This week’s book is also a contemplation of terrorism, but in this case, a contemplation of homegrown, domestic American terrorism. The book is American Pastoral by Philip Roth, published in 1997. In my opinion, probably his greatest novel.
American Pastoral tells a story of an American Jew whose daughter gets mixed up in extremist activity. The novel is narrated by a man named Nathan Zuckerman, who’s Roth’s recurring literary alter ego. And Nathan Zuckerman tells a story of his childhood friend, Seymour “The Swede” Levov, a golden-boy athlete from Zuckerman and Roth’s hometown of Newark, New Jersey. The Swede seems to have it all. He’s a former high-school sports star. He marries a Miss New Jersey. He takes over his father’s successful glove-manufacturing business, and he settles into an idyllic life in rural Old Rimrock, New Jersey. He has one child, an adored daughter named Merry, M-E-R-R-Y.
Merry becomes increasingly politically outspoken in the course of the 1960s, when the novel is set. She gets involved in radical causes. She becomes increasingly dogmatic. Merry has a speech impediment, and somehow that concentrates her rage into forms of action that are beyond speech. And ultimately, that expressed itself when, in order to oppose the Vietnam War, Merry plants a bomb in the local post office that kills a local doctor. Merry then disappears, goes underground, and The Swede spends years looking for her.
When he finally tracks her down, she’s back in Newark, New Jersey, living in terrible filth and squalor, and she has converted to a form of ultra-pacifism. She becomes a Jain, J-A-I-N, a religion from India that is so opposed to violence that it refuses to kill even an insect. And The Swede has to contemplate how his beloved daughter could swing from one extreme of murder to this other extreme of pacifism almost beyond reason.
The Swede, who’s had this perfect life—sheltered from everything, coasting on inherited prosperity and success on an American dream in a country that has been a golden land for Jews like himself—he has to confront this eruption of what Roth calls “the American berserk,” the country’s capacity to burst out from anybody’s planned order into these forms of strange, bizarre personal violence.
Roth is here describing something very real. I mean, I went through, did a quick scroll through incidents that reminded me of the story of Merry Levov—of privileged people, people at every American advantage who lash out, who would adopt some scheme of or some personal ideology of extremist hate, and then lash out in violence against others. There’s so many examples of this. Let me just mention a few that just come to mind in the course of an ordinary search.
Remember Elliot Rodger? Elliot Rodger was the son of a Hollywood director. He grew up in very comfortable circumstances. He developed this ideology of misogyny; incel, I think, is the term. Misogyny, violent hatred to women. He killed six people and wounded 14 in a rampage, leaving behind a manifesto justifying what he did.
Or Patrick Crusius. He was the man who turned a weapon on a parking lot in El Paso to kill 23 people, motivated by his “Great Replacement,” anti-immigrant ideology. He also acted alone, and he also had a comfortable middle-class upbringing in Dallas, Texas.
Or Luigi Mangione—this is a perfect example of this—who comes from a prominent family in Maryland, and he gunned down an insurance executive in New York City. Again, for some crazy, bizarre ideological reason all his own, that unfortunately has found resonance in some of the more malicious corners of online life.
Or Ayman Mohamed Ghazali; I’ve talked about him before. He’s the Lebanese immigrant who settled in Michigan, was given the opportunity to make a life for himself in America, given the amazing gift of American citizenship, and instead took guns to Temple Israel in West Bloomfield.
You know, these people all have motives. They may be diagnosable as having some kind of mental illness, but they’re not so delusional as not to understand what they’re doing. But they’re acting on some script, some sense of grievance—the American berserk that Roth talks about—that pushes them in these directions.
And notice something else. They all have these remarkable resources and freedom. They have the resources to acquire weapons, and they have the freedom to conduct their work without surveillance. There are many societies in which people like this would be caught early because they lived in more of a surveillance state. Americans have freedom, resources. They have the ability to become whoever they are. And for most of us, the ability to become whoever we are is a great gift. It allows us to realize ourselves in all kinds of ways, in ways that people could not realize themselves even in countries that are comparably free but are not as supremely abundant and affluent as the United States.
But when you’re given the right to be who you are, that reveals something in some people that is berserk, that is bad. It allows, it gives you more scope to be indulged in wickedness and cruelty and hatefulness, to come up with some crazy set of ideas all your own, or that link in some other way. And to act out against your fellows in ways that bring hurt and harm and sorrow and suffering to the human species.
America gives all of us the means to be ourselves, and the question we all face is: Who will we be?
That’s it for this week’s episode of The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for watching. As ever, please, the best way to support the work of the show, if you can, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. That helps me and all of my colleagues. Please also consider subscribing to our YouTube channel, or whatever social-media channel you enjoy the program on. Share it with others, and spread the word. See you next week on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.
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