The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (38 page)

“Because that’s the second plane,” someone responded.

Once Walters realized that the event wasn’t an isolated accident, he called the Bushes’ social secretary, Catherine Fenton. They decided to cancel the event, and Walters went back to the South Portico, where he had just seen Laura Bush off moments before. There was so much confusion and uncertainty but he couldn’t waste a moment.

Just as they had after President Kennedy’s assassination, the residence staff delved into their work with a single-minded focus. Walters coordinated with the National Park Service, in charge of the White House grounds, to determine who would be moving the picnic tables and cleaning up the chuck wagons.

“As I walked out of the South Portico, I saw the terrible smoke and flames at the Pentagon,” Walters recalled. It suddenly struck him: the White House could be next.

Even as people started to evacuate the White House, Walters knew he would be staying: “As far as I was concerned, my responsibility was there at the White House.”

His job was to make the house run at all costs, even if it now felt like he was working in the center of a giant bull’s-eye. He couldn’t do it alone. He asked the uniformed division of the Secret Service to allow Executive Chef Walter Scheib, who had already been evacuated, to return. He grabbed a few others, including Chief Electrician Bill Cliber, and told them they needed to stay and help clear the picnic tables, even as the Secret Service was screaming for everyone to drop everything and run for their lives. “I got the word that everybody was evacuating, but we had something that we needed to do,” Walters said.

Meanwhile Walters’s daughter, a student at Boston College, was anxiously watching the news, terrified for her father after someone mistakenly told her that a plane had crashed into the White House, not the Pentagon. Walters and his small crew were too focused on clearing space for the president’s helicopter to call their families.

Cliber’s wife, Bea, was home watching TV with relatives. She didn’t know whether her husband was going to be all right. “It was panicsville,” she recalled. “We just sat and waited.” She didn’t hear from him until eight o’clock that night.

On his way up the driveway—and, potentially, back into harm’s way—Scheib yelled at the colleagues streaming toward him out of the mansion to leave the grounds as fast as they could. He shouted at the president and first lady’s staffs, already racing out of the West and East wings, warning them that the police were saying another plane was heading for the White House.

“Everyone who worked for me in the East Wing—they were mainly young women who expected a very glamorous job at the White House—were told to kick off their high heels and run,” Laura Bush recalls. “Can you imagine what it would be like to all of a sudden have a job where you were told to run?”

Walters and the others cleared 190 picnic tables, weighing hundreds of pounds each, from the South Lawn. “My knees banged together,” Walters said. “It sounded like a bass drum.” Rumors of further attacks kept coming in, but they blocked them out. “We’ve got a job, we’ve got to do it,” Cliber said.

Even then, when the world felt like it was turned upside down, the residence staff focused on keeping their beloved house running and not spilling any secrets. As some reporters noticed them feverishly working to clear the South Grounds, they asked whether the president was coming back to Washington right away. “Haven’t heard a word,” Cliber told them, even though he knew they were working to help speed up the president’s return.

The first lady’s car was driving up Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill when she learned that a second plane had hit the other World Trade Center tower. “The car fell silent; we sat in mute disbelief,” she wrote in her memoir. “One plane might be a strange accident; two planes were clearly an attack.”

W
HEN
M
AID
B
ETTY
Finney started working at the White House in 1993, she had no housekeeping experience except for taking care of the home she shared with her husband and their two daughters. She was working at a steakhouse in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, when her husband died suddenly. She needed a job—fast. As with most White House positions, hers came through a connection: her daughter knew Executive Housekeeper Christine Limerick, who brought her on board.

BETTY FINNEY

Eight years after she was hired, she found herself fearing for her life.

Finney was cleaning the second floor Queens’ Bedroom, where the president’s parents had spent the night on September 10. When they left for the airport, the Bushes had forgotten to turn off the TV. Finney and a couple of other terrified maids gathered around it, watching as the second tower was hit. Like so many other tragedies that affected the presidency, even as they were standing at the heart of the story, the residence workers were left to learn the news from the TV.

“I ran down the hall to the Yellow Oval Room and looked out the window, and you cannot see the Pentagon from there, but I saw smoke,” she says. “I went back to the Queens’ Bedroom and then I had to run upstairs for something.”

Before she made it to the third floor, she heard one of the Secret
Service agents yelling “Get out of the house! Get out of the house!” She never made it upstairs; instead she ran downstairs. “I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know they had started the evacuation. We got out and everybody was on the streets. It was really scary. Everybody just went in a different direction, wherever they could get out.”

On Capitol Hill, Laura Bush got out of the car to meet with Senator Edward Kennedy, chair of the Education Committee, both knowing that there would be no briefing that day. He escorted her to his office.

Oddly, even as an old TV in the corner of the room was blaring the devastating news out of New York, Kennedy wouldn’t look at the screen. Instead he gave the first lady a tour of the family memorabilia in his office, including a framed note that his brother Jack had sent their mother when he was a child. It said, “Teddy is getting fat.”

“All the while,” the first lady said, “I kept glancing over at the glowing television screen. My skin was starting to crawl, I wanted to leave, to find out what was going on, to process what I was seeing, but I felt trapped in an endless cycle of pleasantries.” Later she wondered if Kennedy had simply seen too much death in his lifetime and couldn’t face another tragedy, especially one on such a massive scale.

After they made a statement to the press telling them there would be no briefing and expressing concern about the attacks, Bush walked toward the stairs to go back to her car and the White House. The lead Secret Service agent stopped her and her staff abruptly and told them to run to the basement. Deeply worried about her husband’s safety, she waited with her friend Senator Judd Gregg, the ranking Republican on the Education Committee, in his private interior office in the lower level of the Capitol. There, they huddled together and called their children to make sure they were safe. Reports were coming in from everywhere, some less reliable than others—including one
rumor that Camp David had been hit and another that a plane had flown into the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Moments after the second plane hit the South Tower, Christine Limerick ran to the linen room on the third floor and told her staff to drop everything and leave. Immediately.

She heard American Airlines Flight 77 crash into the Pentagon. “It sounded like an explosion,” she recalled.

When she returned to her office, she realized she couldn’t account for maid Mary Arnold. She tried to go back upstairs into the residence to search for her, but the Secret Service wouldn’t let her. She was told she had two minutes to get out of the White House and that a plane was on its way.

“Nobody questions them when it’s on lockdown,” she said. Arnold somehow got out of the White House and had enough money on her to get home.

Limerick remembers being haunted when she realized that not everyone would be allowed to evacuate the potential target. “The look on the faces of the Secret Service agents who were told that they had to stay,” she said. “I will never forget that.”

Workers say the Secret Service told everyone to head north because they thought the plane would come from the south—a less obstructed flight path to the White House. Cooks, butlers, carpenters, and maids fanned out, running for their lives. Some members of the Pastry Shop walked across Arlington Memorial Bridge, crossing the Potomac together and gathering at the nearest person’s home.

Finney and half a dozen of her colleagues went to one of the florists’ houses on Capitol Hill, where they huddled around the television in disbelief. They had all run out so fast that hardly anyone had time to collect their purses, leaving them all without wallets. That night they walked miles to their cars back at the White House and drove home, many still in shock.

Some staffers didn’t make it out in time to evacuate at all. There were butlers on the second and third floors who were working on setting up the bars for the picnic—peeling lemons and making lemon wedges—who didn’t get the word that something was going on until nearly an hour after the house was evacuated. A few engineers were stuck in the basement for hours, oblivious to the panic upstairs and the danger they were in.

Amid the chaos, one butler ran down to his locker in the basement to change his clothes before riding home on his motorcycle. The gate slammed behind him, trapping him, and he couldn’t get out until a Secret Service officer recognized him and finally opened the gate.

A
LITTLE AFTER
ten that morning, a few minutes after the World Trade Center’s South Tower collapsed and about twenty minutes before the North Tower followed, the first lady was collected from Senator Gregg’s office by Secret Service agents and an Emergency Response Team dressed in black wielding guns. “GET BACK!” they shouted to Capitol Hill staffers as they raced the startled first lady to a waiting car. At about the same time, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, when a group of brave passengers tried to wrestle control of the plane from the terrorists. If they hadn’t acted, that plane would likely have headed straight for the Capitol or the White House. Many White House workers credit the passengers on that plane for saving their lives.

There was a lot of discussion about where to take the first lady during those confusing hours. The Secret Service eventually decided to move her to their own headquarters, a few blocks away from the White House. She sat there for hours, in a windowless basement conference room, watching the video of the twin towers falling over and over.

Phone lines were jammed that day as petrified family members tried to make sure their loved ones were safe. Even the president had trouble reaching his wife from Air Force One after he took off from Florida. A little before noon, after three unsuccessful attempts, the Bushes finally managed to connect. She told him she’d reached their daughters and that they were safe.

Meanwhile dozens of residence workers dressed in their uniforms gathered in Lafayette Square across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Chef John Moeller described the aftermath of the Pentagon attack: “I could see huge plumes of smoke swirling in the sky—it was a beautiful day—it was as black as black can be. They were just swirling, swirling, swirling into the sky. I’ve never seen an explosion that big in my life.” Finally, a group of workers decided to walk to the nearby Capital Hilton in search of bathrooms, landlines, and a television.