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At four o’clock, the president landed at Andrews Air Force Base and flew to the White
House lawn in
Marine One,
with three other helicopters acting as decoys. Several F-16 fighter jets patrolled
the skies over Washington—along with military planes flying over New York, the only
airborne aircraft anywhere in the United States, now that the FAA had ordered all
commercial flights grounded. For two hours, members of Congress had been making their
way to the White House, and as they filed into the East Room they exchanged what scraps
of information or misinformation they had:
Was Speaker Hastert dead? Where was Tom Daschle? Were there really dozens of their
colleagues killed, injured, and missing? And what had happened at the Supreme Court?

At 5 p.m., an ashen-faced but composed President Gore stepped into the East Room to
deliver a televised address to the nation. With him were former presidents Clinton
and Bush, as well as Texas governor George W. Bush—flown to Washington from Dallas
on a military jet.

“This day, September 11, 2001, will forever live in our memory as the most deadly
assault on the United States in our history,” President Gore began. “Thousands of
innocent citizens, of all ages, races, and creeds, are dead in the heart of our greatest
city. Hundreds more are dead in the building that houses those who wear the uniform
of our country and defend our freedom.

“And in the halls of the Congress, where I was once privileged to serve, we do not
yet know the full toll of who we have lost.

“But this much I pledge to you: September 11 will also go down in history as the day
when the United States demonstrated to the world that we will survive this assault
on freedom; that we will respond massively to those who unleashed this barbarous assault;
and that we will emerge from this tragedy stronger and more united than ever. Our
answer to our enemies will be swift, remorseless, and overwhelming. They will learn
what our enemies have learned through two centuries of struggle. And they will learn—starting
right now—that they have fatally misjudged the courage, resilience, and will of this
great nation.

“Now, I would like to ask the former presidents who have come here, and members of
Congress as well, to join me as we march down Pennsylvania Avenue to pay homage to
those who have fallen, and to reaffirm our determination to meet this challenge, as
we have met every challenge before.”

With that, the president beckoned to those behind him and to his silent, somber audience.
They filed out of the East Room and out of the West Gate of the White House and began
to march in absolute silence down Pennsylvania Avenue. At 8th Street, a congressman—no
one later remembered exactly who—began to sing “God Bless America,” and within seconds
the president and those marching behind him joined in. They sang “America the Beautiful”
and then, as they reached the Capitol grounds, lit by floodlights powered by dozens
of emergency generators, they bowed their heads in silent prayer and sang “God Bless
America” once again. That evening, it appeared that the president’s plea for national
unity would be honored.

But appearances can be deceiving.

Had the courageous passengers aboard United 93 had more time—even ten minutes more—the
history of the United States might well have taken a very different turn.

Had that plane and its thirty-three passengers and seven crew members crashed into
a rural area of southeastern Ohio or the middle of Pennsylvania or even a Maryland
suburb, the focus of national grief and anger would have been on lower Manhattan,
with its three thousand dead, the tens of thousands more who had somehow escaped the
collapse of the Twin Towers, the 343 firefighters and twenty-three police officers
who had died trying to save others.

But the nation’s focus now was two hundred miles south; the shocking images of the
wounded Capitol building dominated every newscast, every front page, with a cost that
would not be fully understood for months.

There was, at first, the wrenching reality of the near-destruction of the Capitol.
At every other moment of national crisis, this was the place where the nation had
sought—and found—solace and ceremony. The murdered presidents, from Lincoln to Kennedy,
had lain in state there; it was on the East Front steps that Franklin Roosevelt had
told America in 1933 that “the only thing we have to fear is … fear itself,” and it
was inside the House chamber on December 8, 1941, that he had pledged, on the day
after Pearl Harbor, “We shall gain the inevitable victory—so help me God.”

But now the Capitol was gravely damaged; on that evening of September 11, when President
Gore and the members of Congress had walked to the site, the gathering had less the
appearance of a stalwart band of fighters and more the look of the residents of a
hurricane-ravaged town, stunned, shocked by the force of what had just hit them.

Moreover, that image of a broken symbol was instantly embraced around the world by
enemies and adversaries of the United States. In the Arab streets, from Ramallah to
Cairo, in Muslim nations from Pakistan to Morocco, T-shirts appeared, emblazoned with
the Capitol in flames.
“Allahu Akbar!”
some proclaimed.
SUPERPOWER?
was the mocking question asked on posters that began appearing in the streets of
Damascus and Karachi.

For the president, and for the Congress, there were immediate, urgent matters to resolve:
where to convene the nation’s political leaders for the speech that would reassure
the citizenry and the world—and where to find a temporary home for the legislative
branch of the government. The answer to the first came quickly: On Thursday, September
20, a joint session of Congress was convened at Constitution Hall, the seventy-two-year-old
headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution, across from the Ellipse
that faces the White House. The neoclassical design and limestone exterior mirrored
the look of official Washington, and its 1,234-seat orchestra was more than large
enough to accommodate the members of Congress, the Cabinet, and the other dignitaries
who attended such events. All 2,200 seats in the tiers above the orchestra were filled;
in each of the fifty-two boxes sat families and colleagues of the fallen: New York
City police and firefighters, Pentagon personnel, families of the House and Senate
members. Behind the president sat Vice President Lieberman and acting speaker Tom
DeLay—a reminder that Speaker Hastert had been one of the victims of the strike on
the Capitol.

The president’s speech met with near-universal favor. There was solemn, sustained
applause for the widow of United 93 passenger Todd Beamer, whose “Let’s roll!” had
become a national rallying cry; a standing ovation for the family of the Capitol Police
sergeant who had pulled six House members to safety before being killed by a falling
piece of rubble. There were cheers for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had
flown from London (and whose presence led a half-dozen TV talking heads to note that
the last attack on the Capitol had been at the hands of British troops during the
War of 1812).

The speech itself drew repeated standing ovations: its invocation of America’s traditions;
its indictment of Al Qaeda as “a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings
of Islam”; its injunction that “the malevolent spirit of their now dead leader continues
to spawn new horrors”; its declaration of a new Office of Homeland Security, “to be
led by New York’s heroic mayor, Rudolph Giuliani”; the pledge to “rebuild our Capitol
by the time we celebrate the nation’s birthday on July 4, 2002.” And then there was
its concluding promise: “Fellow citizens,” President Gore said, staring directly into
the camera, “we shall meet violence with patient justice, assured of the rightness
of our cause and confident of the victories to come.”

The second matter to be resolved was far more difficult: Where could the Congress
meet? The answer came from Elaine Kamarck, one of President Gore’s closest advisors,
who had stepped out of the White House for ten minutes of fresh air after three straight
all-day, all-night crisis meetings.

“It’s right there, across the street from the Treasury building,” she said to Chief
of Staff Ron Klain. “It even looks like it could be part of the Capitol.”

“It” was the seventy-five-year-old national headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the country, one deeply devoted
to low corporate tax rates, accelerated depreciation schedules, and a gentle regulatory
environment. With its three-story Corinthian columns, its Indiana-limestone facade,
its spacious Hall of Flags auditorium, and its many meeting rooms, the building came
as close as possible to meeting the needs of a suddenly homeless Congress. And with
the joint importuning of a Democratic president and a Republican House, along with
the pledge of “just compensation,” the Chamber agreed to let the Congress use the
building as its temporary home.

“It’s really not that much of a stretch,” Representative Barney Frank remarked during
a CNN interview. “The Chamber has half the House on permanent retainer as it is.”

The relocation to a temporary home, however, only underscored just how devastating
the attack on the Capitol had been.

There was the mundane but vital business of Washington—the requests, demands, pleas
from citizens in dealing with the behemoth that was the federal government; “constituent
services,” it was called.
My Social Security check has gone missing. Medicare won’t reimburse me. What happened
to my veteran’s benefits? My son needs an emergency discharge from the Army.
Now, hundreds of thousands of these requests in the files of congressional offices
had either been lost or rendered inaccessible. On the legislative side, there was
simply no way to measure how much had been lost—how many tons of paper, how many gigabytes’
worth of bills, amendments, congressional research memos, committee-hearing transcripts,
and all the other fuel of the work of Congress.

But the human cost was incalculably greater.

Twenty-nine members of the House were known to have been killed when United Flight
93 sideswiped the Capitol Dome; eight others were missing and presumed dead, including
Speaker Hastert.

On the other side of the dome, nine United States senators had died, among them Senate
Majority Leader Tom Daschle and all six members of his leadership team, who had perished
when hundreds of pounds of cast iron slammed into Room 219, where they had gathered
for that morning’s meeting. As longtime congressional watcher Norm Ornstein first
noted, five of them—Daschle, Dorgan, Mikulski, Bill Nelson, and Harry Reid—came from
states with Republican governors; their power to appoint replacements for the deceased
members meant there was a real chance that the terrorists had potentially given control
of the United States Senate to the Republicans.

The news from across 1st Street, at the U.S. Supreme Court, was equally unsettling.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist had been struck by a piece of marble when a stray
part from United 93 dislodged the cornice over the Supreme Court’s main entrance;
he had died instantly. With him was Justice Antonin Scalia, who had made a last-minute
decision to join the Judicial Conference in order, he had joked, to do “some serious
cocktail time lobbying on originalism.” Scalia was in critical condition at Bethesda
Naval Hospital, where his prospects for survival were, according to National Public
Radio’s Nina Totenberg, “no better than fifty-fifty. His return to the court,” she
added, “is at this moment dubious at best.” Because the court was legally able to
function with a quorum of six members, the removal of two conservative justices would
leave the court with seven members, shifting the balance of power from a 4–4 liberal-conservative
split (with Sandra Day O’Connor as the occasional swing justice) to a 4–3 liberal
majority.

Still, in those first days after the attacks, there was reason to believe that the
sheer magnitude of what had happened had shocked America’s leaders into shelving the
political concerns these deaths had triggered, and perhaps even putting aside the
toxic politics that had dominated the last days of the twentieth century and the first
days of the twenty-first.

On Saturday, September 22, President Gore summoned the congressional leaders of both
parties to a weekend gathering at Camp David. By Sunday night they had hammered out
a response to the impending political crisis.

“We’ve lost nine senators,” Gore said to the leaders of both parties, “and five of
them are from states with Republican governors. We’ve also lost two Supreme Court
justices; I learned last night that Justice Scalia will be unable to return to the
bench. What I propose is that, as much as possible, we offer up a clear signal to
the world that we’re responding to this with one voice.” In a joint television appearance
Sunday night, Gore and the congressional leaders urged the governors to appoint the
chiefs of staff of the deceased senators as their temporary replacements and to schedule
special elections in November to replace both the senators and the House members who
had perished.

“Given the political realities in those states,” the president said, “this will likely
lead to a Republican Senate majority when Congress reconvenes in January, but that
pales in comparison to the proof our agreement will offer that our system is alive
and flourishing.”

The president also agreed to an extraordinary break with tradition in replacing Chief
Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia. He would choose one nominee and pick the other
from a five-person list submitted by the Republican leadership. Three days later,
the president stood in the Rose Garden to announce the two new Supreme Court nominees:
José Cabranes, the sixty-year-old liberal judge from the Second Circuit—who would
become the first Hispanic on the high court—and fifty-seven-year-old J. Harvie Wilkinson,
a conservative favorite from the Fourth Circuit. There were grumblings from the left
(“Why are you letting the right wing pick a justice? That’s your prerogative!”) and
from the right (“Why are you enshrining a liberal court for the next decade?”), but
the compromise met with widespread approval.