You would guess wrong. Immediately after Bush left the classroom, things swung into high gear. He immediately spoke with the Director of the FBI and the Governor of New York. Director Mueller told him that the planes that hit the WTC were commercial aircraft hijacked out of Boston.
Bush also attempted to get in touch with Dick Cheney but was unable to because the Secret Service had already hustled him into the White House bunker. Meanwhile his staff hurriedly drafted a public statement that Bush delivered to the news media about 10 minutes after he left the classroom.
Your claim that Bush didn’t need to hurry is belied by how the executive branch behaved that day. A great many things happened very quickly and a number of important decisions were made on the fly as incremental intelligence reports poured in.
That hardly proves it. No matter what Bush did or didn’t do, there will always be a threadful of Dopers to chorus “He’s wrong”. If Bush continues to read while his staffers collect information, that means he choked. If he gets up and leaves immediately, he is running away like a scared little girl. If he waits for his staff to do their jobs, that means he isn’t interested. If he spends the next seven minutes nagging, that means he is too stupid to know that they are doing their job already.
Do you have any idea what actually went down that day? The President’s actions are very well-documented. A whole lot of stuff started happening very quickly from the moment the President left the classroom and started interacting with his staff. For example, the shoot-down authorization came from the President within that first hour. Within 2 hours the President had raised the Defcon level to 3. The people involved (including the President, once he came to his senses) realized that an emergency was unfolding and that quick action was vitally important.
I have not suggested that Bush should himself have dialed up the flight controllers. Neither should he have been patched through to FDNY. And as it turned out, a comprehensive report on all the details (number of flights hijacked, number crashed, locations of crashes, results of crashes, possible guesses at perpetrators, on and on ad nauseam) would not be forthcoming within 7 minutes. Nor within 7 hours, most likely. But that doesn’t change the fact that the President of the United States should have been getting whatever he could get from his briefers and advisors, and then waving the baton to prioritize the gathering of more. And be prepared to make decisions, based upon whatever partial information was at his command, if any courses of action were identified that required decisiveness.
He should have been saying to Card and his gathered advisors “You think it’s an attack, why are you so sure? And if it’s an attack, is this all there is of it? Passenger airplanes as weapons? How many aircraft are presently in the air? THAT MANY! Holy shit! How can we tell which ones might be attacking Boston, or LA or Miami? Are we sure that no military aircraft are involved? Could it be a missile attack? Do we know or guess who is behind this? Has anything like this been reported from London or Paris? What kind of response can we field if there are indeed more? What are the casualties? What can we offer as assistance to New York?..”
Instead the leader of the free world is sitting in a grade school classroom, saying “That was a nice reading about the goat, Samantha!”
And this is defended because, well, as it turned out nobody could have done anything about it anyway (at least not at 8:56 that morning), and Bush didn’t actually make things worse. Pathetic.
Wouldn’t be the first time I’d be wrong, but I don’t see how your cite here demonstrates this. I’m not talking about him getting some scattered details, but instead getting a coherent and comprehensive report that he could use to act on as President. And your comment about the draft statement Bush delivered 10 minutes after leaving the classroom is sort of what I’m getting at. You seem to realize that Bush (or any President) doesn’t draft his own statements, but you are missing the point that while he was sitting there reading about the pet goat his staff were the ones putting all of this information together and drafting statements for him to read.
At any rate, it seems clear that most of you are as convinced that Bush did wrong on this as I am that this is one of the few instances where he didn’t totally fuck up, so I’m not seeing a lot of benefit in me continuing to say the same things and getting the same replies back. There doesn’t seem to be much more point to me in this discussion as I think the sides are too fixed in their belief. To summarize, from my perspective the President is an executive. His JOB is to LOOK presidential and calm, especially in a crisis. This was a crisis. To me there would be no benefit to him rushing off or even calmly excusing himself and leaving, since there was nothing for him to do…he couldn’t even read the hurried statement his staff was compiling for him since it hadn’t been written yet and they would need time to do so. There wasn’t any more substantial information he COULD have gotten in the time frame of the story. No decisions he COULD (or, more importantly should) have made in that time frame. There is, I suppose, a bit of validity to the point that by staying he might have made himself a target and more importantly put those kids and teachers in danger, but I’ve seen nothing indicating that the Secret Service actually worried about it, so while it’s a valid argument it doesn’t seem that substantial.
I guess it all boils down to whether you think what he did was the correct course of action. To me, it was the best thing he could have done and doing what others in this thread suggest would be, again to me, pointless. MMV of course so I’ll just leave it there.
If his job is to make the American people feel better that their leaders are calm and collected and working on their behalf, he fucked that up too. The idea that the guy at the top, most in charge of handling this crisis, froze up and decided not to take any action or seek any more information in the middle of a crisis is not reassuring at all. It’s not presidential. It only makes it look like he’s overwhelmed by the job and incapable of leadership at the time he’s most needed.
Right, but that’s YOUR impression…not mine. Maybe it’s a majority impression, but I doubt it. My impression is that most people don’t thing Bush fucked up on this or ‘froze’ either, but perhaps it is. No idea really, and don’t really care all that much either. He fucked up in real, substantial ways enough during the rest of his presidency that I doubt he’ll ever break back into the 30%ish approval ratings…and that’s probably being generous.
You have an inaccurate picture of what unfolded after Bush left the classroom. From the link I provided:
After he left the classroom, Bush actively directed his staff, as he should have. There was no benefit to him staying in the classroom for seven minutes after he heard the news. All it did was interfere with his team’s ability to respond to the crisis.
It’s as though the captain of the Titanic had decided to hang out in his cabin for a bit after the collision so that he could finish the last chapter of the book he was reading. In the long run, the delay wouldn’t have made any difference – the ship was going down whether Captain Smith went straight up to the bridge or not. But it still would be an example of poor leadership under pressure.
In the grand narrative of 9/11 it’s a very small point. But it’s maddening to listen to people try to put a positive spin on what was clearly a bone-headed move.
[QUOTE=The Hamster King]
In the grand narrative of 9/11 it’s a very small point. But it’s maddening to listen to people try to put a positive spin on what was clearly a bone-headed move.
[/QUOTE]
I feel exactly the same way about people boneheadedly trying to put a negative spin on something which, at most was a neutral. C’est la vie. As to your point, Bush reworked THE BRIEF STATEMENT HIS STAFF PUT TOGETHER FOR HIM. He didn’t compose it himself, and 7 minutes earlier his staff would have still been working on it. He conversed with Chaney and they figured that, yeah, it was probably a terrorist attack…and if they had that same discussion 7 minutes before they would have probably still come to the same conclusion which would have lead…no where, since they didn’t have the kinds of detailed information they needed to do more than converse together.
Etc etc. It’s a very small point, and to me it’s as if the folks who really, REALLY hated Bush just need to tear down every single thing he did. I mean, it’s not a target rich environment enough, but they have to attack him on everything. The way he walked, the way he talked, the way he looked at a camera…and this. To me, this is by far the stupidest thing to ding him on, but as I said, MMV.
Unless of course, Bush had been killed during those seven minutes, in which case Cheney - who had been moved immediately to a more secure location - would have been President.
The reason people are always saying Bush was wrong was because he was wrong about so many things.
The handful of times he got something right, people acknowledged it. Or at least kept quiet about it. We’ve never had to resort to inventing scandals and screw-ups.
I think part of the problem here is that you basically take it as a given that Bush was more or less a ceremonial figurehead type. Maybe that’s how you see presidents in general. But a lot of us think they should be hands-on leaders.
Ha! Nice analogy.
The White House bunker does not have a telephone?
I have yet to see anyone respond to the question about what if Card had instead whispered in Bush’s ear that Laura Bush had been in a serious accident.
[QUOTE=SlackerInc]
I think part of the problem here is that you basically take it as a given that Bush was more or less a ceremonial figurehead type. Maybe that’s how you see presidents in general. But a lot of us think they should be hands-on leaders.
[/QUOTE]
Then people have the wrong idea of what a President (any President) is or does. Or any other executive for that matter.
Probably because it’s not a very good analogy and is kind of silly. What would he have done? Who knows. He’s a politician, so perhaps he’d have done exactly the same thing he did. On the other hand, he’s a politician, so perhaps he’d have quietly gotten up and said something like “I have news that my wife was in an accident. Please excuse me”. It’s all going to depend on what his inner politician thinks would be expected of him in a particular crisis, and what he thinks people will think of his actions. My WAG is that he’d do the later because he’d expect people to be upset and pissed off if he did nothing, while they would understand if a personal emergency came up that his actions in leaving would be understood.
Regardless of what he might have done in this mythical situation, however, it has no bearing on what he did in THIS (actual, real) situation, since the circumstances are totally different and his actions are tuned to the individual situation, not a single action good for all situations. That’s why it was a stupid analogy in the first place, and why no one bothered to address it in this thread. I’m doing so merely so you’ll stop bringing it up and move on.
I think there was an interval where the White House switchboard didn’t know how to route calls between the President and the VP. The Secret Service had rushed Cheney to the bunker, but not everyone at the White House knew that.
but, he wasn’t the real president. just someone you might want to have a beer with.
Cheney ruled the roost. and he let if happen. maybe orchestrated it. Halliburton sure did well.
Wow. Perhaps you don’t understand what a thought experiment is? It’s interesting that despite all of your nonsensical hand-waving babble, your response is really that he would have excused himself from the room after all.
There’s really an autistic quality to many of the responses in this thread.
“Bush’s advisers knew exactly what I knew watching CNN.”
“Bush knew he couldn’t have changed any outcomes, because we know what the outcomes were.”
“I cannot conceive of any other way to leave a room than in a panic.”
“I don’t get the relevance of thinking about an alternative that didn’t really happen.”
I’m not saying that any person here is autistic. I’m saying that many responses have similarities in terms of ability to take perspectives, use theory of mind, or engage in flexibility of thought.