LOL … by this sort of logic the President must take care to always execute his schedule like some sort of precise ritualized kabuki drama, lest one tiny deviation from expectation catapult the press and the nation into a panic.
In practice, even at the Presidential level, shit happens. Sometimes things run long or get cut short. Plans get changed and people roll with it. For example, Bush left his hotel that morning ten minutes later than planned. OMG! I’m surprised there wasn’t rioting in the streets.
Adults come and go from the presence of kids all the time, on a variety of pretexts or for none whatever. Kids are used to that and the idea that this classroom bunch would have panicked had Bush left is absurd. They almost certainly had no firm grasp on his time commitment at all and his leave-taking at some point was the only certainty.
As for the adults, well – I bet there was a TV on in the teachers’ lounge. Any panic among the adults would have emanated from that room, not from the classroom under debate. In point of fact, the very natural trepidation present in anyone at the school who knew of outside events would, to my mind, have been alleviated – not enhanced – by seeing my President going swiftly and calmly off to attend to it.
I just don’t get this emphasis on “panic”. Even if this classroom of kids would have panicked if Bush had left the room… who cares?! A national emergency does take priority over the theoretical emotional state of a classroom of small children. The only way this argument could make sense to me is if the kids were actually living bombs filled with emotion-sensitive nitroglycerin or something.
“You’ve got to keep them calm at all costs, Mr. President! If they panic… my God, we could lose half the Eastern Seaboard!”
But seriously… if 7 minutes isn’t too long to delay… how about 14? 21? 28? If 7n = “too long”, what value of n solves the equation?
I acknowledged that some kids might have been frightened. I just don’t think that’s at all important, in the scope of things.
People might have been having that discussion. But right now we’re having this one. I don’t see how that other theoretical discussion is relevant.
You actually think Bush’s decision to stay in some classroom actually had the impact of making the country calmer in the wake of 9/11? (Or just those kids?)
Oooh, I’m glad someone dredged up that preposterously ridiculous claim so that I could bring up the least successful pit thread I ever started on the SDMB, a completely misguided attempt to parody that precise position. Behold!
[QUOTE=Fotheringay-Phipps]
You actually think Bush’s decision to stay in some classroom actually had the impact of making the country calmer in the wake of 9/11? (Or just those kids?)
[/QUOTE]
Nope, though I think if he had panicked or rushed out it would have made the country less easy about having that bozo at the helm during a crisis. And that probably wouldn’t have been good for the country at the time, though as things turned out we all did find out what a bozo he was.
As I said, I think he did the right thing in this case. There was no reason for him to rush out, and I think him rushing out would have panicked or at least made nervous or uneasy not only the kids but the adults, including the press that was there. I doubt it would have been lasting harm, but there was no reason for any harm at all at that point IMHO.
[QUOTE=The Hamster King]
LOL … by this sort of logic the President must take care to always execute his schedule like some sort of precise ritualized kabuki drama, lest one tiny deviation from expectation catapult the press and the nation into a panic.
[/QUOTE]
The president has to always act presidential. He has to be seen to be calm and in charge, to never show that he’s rattled. I don’t know why this is so seemingly hard to understand. Perhaps because we have a president today that does this so effortlessly (watch Obama at the press conference when the bombing in Boston happened, or when he announced OBL got whacked).
[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
Yes, it’s really a good thing that Bush kept the press from getting wind of the fact that something was up on the morning of 9/11.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think it was a big secret, Hentor. But then I’m sure you knew that wasn’t the point I was making there.
I think someone stated above that “the administration doesn’t consist of one man”. The chain of command isn’t just something you use to beat people with - it exists specifically so that the entire operation of running the country doesn’t depend on the man at the top constantly being aware of everything and having to tell everyone what to do every moment of every day. The reason the office of National Security Advisor exists is so the president can delegate those decisions and not have to be a policy wonk on the issue, and I’d hope he’d appoint someone who he trusts to decide whether something is of such a nature that it can’t be handled without executive authority.
I think what it all comes down to me is that I see absolutely no clear picture of what people think Bush should have been doing that would have made a whit of difference. Everything that could have been done in those seven minutes was done without requiring explicit consent from the CinC to do it, and nothing that would have explicitly required his authorization would have changed anything if it had been authorized in those seven minutes.
Full disclosure: I was too young to vote in 2000, but I voted for Kerry in 2004, Obama in 2008 and 2012, and have more or less voted straight Democrat in every off-year election between.
I feel like we’re going around in circles here, but…
(1) It doesn’t matter if we know, IN HINDSIGHT, that nothing he did could have mattered*, it matters if that was 100% clear AT THE TIME
(2) He certainly could/should have started gathering or refreshing background information about airliners, terrorism, current military deployment, etc., so that when more information was available later he would be better able to make quick decisions
(3) Your belief that there was in fact a National Security Adviser busy doing all the things that needed to be done is interesting, but does not accord with my understanding of the situation. I’m far from certain here, but I don’t think the National Security Adviser’s job is to start making snap decisions in moments of intense and sudden national crisis. That’s the PRESIDENT’s job. (Or, these days, possibly the Director of Homeland Security, who did not exist at the time.)
*I’m also not at all convinced that there was nothing he COULD have done. If Bush had heard that America was under attack and then immediately said “get on the phone to the FAA and have them immediately warn all airliners in flight about possible hijacking”, might that have made a difference? I certainly think it might have, as it seems that at least some of the delay in doing precisely that came from the fact that there wasn’t some single executive authority figure deciding that that was in fact what should be done. Again, I may be wrong here, and possibly the FAA Emergency Activity Officer (or something) had, 10 minutes earlier, already decided to do just that, and it just took 20 minutes to implement… But from my very limited experience of crises, part of the reason that it took so long for things to get going was precisely because there was NOT some leader saying “OK, it is decided, do this RIGHT NOW”. Which is what a president should have been doing.
Exactly. Which is why it is so distressing to see the President sitting around like a deer caught in the headlights in a moment of crisis.
That’s exactly what at the heart of this. Bush’s performance at that moment wasn’t Presidential. He wasn’t projecting leadership, or confidence, or reassurance. He was confused and lost.
The Presidential thing to do would have been for him to calmly excuse himself and go find out what the fuck was happening in NYC.
[QUOTE=Smapti]
I think what it all comes down to me is that I see absolutely no clear picture of what people think Bush should have been doing that would have made a whit of difference.
[/QUOTE]
It’s impossible to know what difference it would have made. Probably none.
But Bush didn’t know that. He didn’t know if his immediate involvement was important or not. Maybe he was going to need to authorize shooting down an airliner. Maybe he was going to need to get on the phone with Russia or China. He didn’t know what the exact nature of the crisis was and what was going to be required of him to see the country through it. So his job at that moment was to meet with his advisers and find out what the situation was. And he blew it.
Now, fortunately the fact that he blew it didn’t make things any worse. It turns out he could have hung out at the school for several hours, having a relaxing cup of coffee and chatting amiably with the teachers, and it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. He could have taken the afternoon off and shot a round of golf, and it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. That doesn’t mean that either of those courses of action would have been defensible.
But Hentor’s point is completely valid. There are situations in which the type of projecting-calm that you’re talking about are important… if you’re the pilot of an airplane and you know that the landing gear aren’t deployed, and you calmly tell people that there might be a bit of a snag and they should assume crash positions, but do so in a very calm and authoritative fashion, then that’s actually likely to have a potential impact on whether there’s a riot, and will actually affect people’s likelihood of survival, and your likelihood of being able to continue to do your job.
But if you’re the pilot and you’re back in the cabin chatting with some folks, and the copilot calls you up on your earphone and says that one of your engines just fell off, and everyone sitting in window seats can look out and and see that one of the engines just fell off, you don’t get extra bonus points for sitting around for 7 minutes finishing chatting with the family before heading up to the cockpit to see what’s going on.
What specifically could Bush have done in the realm of “gathering or refreshing background information etc.” that wasn’t already occurring without his specific participation, and which would have made a difference re: “quick decisions” if he’d known about it seven minutes sooner?
It remains my assumption that if the situation had existed in which “we can shoot down this airliner but first we need the president to say it’s OK” was a possibility, his staff would have taken action and removed him from the classroom instead of waiting for him to excuse himself. And since his staff didn’t do that, he felt that his best option was to wait until the photo op ended or they took the initiative. It would have done absolutely no good for him to leave and “meet with his advisors” if all his advisors had to tell him was the same thing that was being reported on CNN.
[QUOTE=The Hamster King]
Exactly. Which is why it is so distressing to see the President sitting around like a deer caught in the headlights in a moment of crisis.
That’s exactly what at the heart of this. Bush’s performance at that moment wasn’t Presidential. He wasn’t projecting leadership, or confidence, or reassurance. He was confused and lost.
The Presidential thing to do would have been for him to calmly excuse himself and go find out what the fuck was happening in NYC.
[/QUOTE]
And yet, the people who were actually there seem to disagree with you assessment. From Wiki (since I can’t be assed to look up the cites I’ve used in the past for this silly argument):
I disagree that the Presidents job is to leap to the rescue, or that his best move was to leave at the time. I suppose there is nothing more to say. Obviously many in this thread feel that real life is like Hollywood and the President supposed to be like a movie star hero, with the President taking charge and issuing orders to the FAA and perhaps contacting NORAD to dispatching fighters, while he tears off his tie and then gets in a fast car to race off to deal with the terrorists first hand. I just don’t see it that way. The things that needed to be done and could reasonably be expected to be done were being done. Until more information was available there was simply nothing more that he could do.
Clearly the principal and the students are definitive authorities on Presidential crisis response. :rolleyes:
No one in this thread is saying that. They’re saying he should have stood up, excused himself, and walked over to the classroom next door to get briefed on what was going on.
The fact that the only way you can make your argument seem reasonable is by grossly exaggerating what the other side is saying is strong evidence that you’re wrong.
You’ve got the burden of proof backwards. Can you persuasively argue that there was NOTHING he could have done, and not only that, but he could have known at that time, with the information he had, that there was nothing he could do?
When a clearly, immediate and ongoing national crisis occurs, the default position is that the president can and should be doing things. Maybe, MAYBE there are weird freakish corner cases where this absolutely positively literally ZERO he can be doing to help the situation, and (even more unlikely) nothing he can be doing to prepare to help the situation in the near future. But that’s the exception, not the rule.
All of this, of course, assumes that the president is an intelligent and active leader, as opposed to a pawn or figurehead of his underlings.
Are you under the misapprehension that schoolteachers are never supposed to think about the possibility of danger to their kids? I assure you this is not true. My wife teaches second graders, and they frequently drill and discuss with the kids issues of school shooters. Periodically there are relatively minour potential threats, like an adult in the building who did not check in with the office, and the alarm is sounded and school is put on lockdown. The teachers lock their classroom doors and pull down shades, they gather the kids to hide, and with older kids they tell them to grab objects and prepare to throw them at a potential assailant. The idea that when the country is under attack, you should not do this with a school when the president is there…well, it’s just absurd. You are really grasping at straws here.
Yeah, and they probably weren’t stupid enough not to notice that two planes hit the World Trade Center. Let’s keep in mind that this was the entire reason Card said he knew it was an attack. Not because of any top-secret information. So the press would think, yes: this is an attack on the country, and that is why the president is leaving. Big whoop, so what? Another straw grasped at.
No. Absolutely no one would be saying that. They would be dinging him on all the other stuff, but not this.
I literally LOL’d over the nitroglycerin thing; and your last question is really a great one. Let’s see if anyone answers it.
QFT (I notice no one has responded to my “officer down” scenario).
I really feel that everyone arguing the other side has seriously blown their credibility. And I don’t just say that lightly; you don’t see me going around saying it on every thread. But this one is just…wow.
I still want to know though why Andy Card thought it was important not to give Bush the opportunity to ask any questions.
In fairness, I’ve kind of argued that he should have been giving orders to the FAA. But really, the point I’m making is not that I am certain, in hindsight, that he should have given orders to the FAA. Rather, I’m saying that there’s some small chance that giving orders to the FAA would have made a difference, something that presumably could have been weighed or evaluated by discussing the possibility with his knowledgeable advisers. The chance that deciding to do that would have been wise or even logistically possible may be small. But the chance that he could have given that order, or even decided whether to give that order, while sitting in the classroom reading to the kids is zero.
Call a bomb threat into a building where the President is giving a speech. Blow up a few bombs while you’re on the line to show you’re credible. Then see if the Secret Service spends seven minutes clearing the hallways before they move the President.
That was the failure on 9/11. A series of terrorist attacks were being made. The President, by definition, is a major target for terrorist attacks. He should have immediately been moved to a safer location. Even if they just got him on the road in an armored limo, he would have been safer than he was sitting inside a stationary undefended building.
Doesn’t this work both ways, though? The Secret Service didn’t move him. They let him stay there. Doesn’t that suggest that they thought he would be just as safe there as anywhere else?
