Seriously? You think “President Bush leaves event unexpectedly” was going to be the lead story - on September 11, 2001?
Yeah, for all my criticism of Bush’s (in)actions, I’m sure that the Secret Service always has a hair trigger for getting him the F out of wherever he is if they think he’s in danger. And they chose not to. And I’m sure some very smart people have spent some amount of time deciding when the “well, the terrorists know he’s here, so he’s in danger, we should get him into a car” side of things outweighs the “at least right now he’s in a building where everyone has been metal detected and everything has been searched for bombs and we already have comm centers and escape routes set up, he’s safer there than in the motorcade which is inherently more difficult to control” side of things.
I have no interest in second guessing decisions the Secret Service made about whether or not he should leave the elementary school. I’m just saying he should have left the classroom and gone into the hallway, or wherever his aides-with-comm-equipment were.
The Secret Service works for the President, not vice versa. They can’t order him to move.
Bush was the President. It was his responsibility to know he should have moved. He chose to run for the office. Being woken up at four in the morning and told you have to make a life-and-death decision within the next sixty seconds is part of the job. Being President means you’re not allowed to choke in a huge crisis, even for a minute or two. If you can’t handle that, you’re not ready to be President.
Did anyone notice on the timeline of events all of the things that were being done even before Bush knew what was happening? Seems to me the System worked as intended. I’m certain that most Agencies have plans in place for almost any emergency, and clearly those were being put into place almost immediately, without the President having to be The Decider.
Again, one man does not a Government make.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
The Secret Service works for the President, not vice versa. They can’t order him to move.
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Actually, I’m pretty sure they can. Or at least they can strongly suggest that he leave if they really feel his life is threatened. AFAICT, and feel free to correct me with a cite, they didn’t even suggest to him that he should be leaving immediately.
[QUOTE=Czarcasm]
Many? How about not one. Dorothy’s Scarecrow himself wouldn’t want to be seen with the strawman you just created.
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Fair enough, though my intent was more mocking hyperbole. But you are right…no one is saying that. It’s just my impression of what folks in these threads are always on about, folks who are trying to be Monday morning quarterbacks and assert that Bush should have been doing something that he wasn’t. There was absolutely nothing he could have done during that period of time that wasn’t already being done, and the smartest thing for him to do was to not go rushing off, but instead wait for more information. Hell, I wish he’d have fucking done that about Iraq.
[QUOTE=The Hamster King]
Clearly the principal and the students are definitive authorities on Presidential crisis response.
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And clearly the fact that they were there is meaningless next to your opinion on this, right? 
Seriously, I never said they were authorities…what I said was they were there and their opinion is a bit different than yours (who wasn’t). However, feel free to show me a cite from an ACTUAL authority (preferably the Secret Service who was also there if you don’t mind) showing me the error of my ways.
And I’m saying I think that’s wrong and wrong headed. So, where does that leave us?
Would you care to respond to the point I’ve made? Namely that Bush shouldn’t have remained stationary in a potential target while the attacks were still going on.
Since Bush didn’t give any orders, he clearly didn’t order the Secret Service not to move him, so how is that a failure on his part?
So, does anyone think that upon being told that Laura was in a serious accident, Bush should have just sat there? Made no moves and asked no questions? There would be nothing practical he could do.
And yet, I can see no rational person saying that yes, sitting and listening to children read is what he should do in such a situation. I know I would be up and moving, politely but expeditiously excusing myself from the classroom.
What about this: what if Andy Card told him what he whispered.in his ear just before Bush was to enter the classroom. According to the logic of many people here, the proper course of action would have been to go ahead with the reading thing. If you feel there is a difference, how do you justify it?
Heck, the first reaction I had on 9/11 was “What is going on?” and getting myself to a television in order to get more information.
Bush didn’t even ask a single question.
If the secret service thought the president was a target, leaving him in a room full of kids seems like a bad plan to me.
But I don’t think too many people were thinking very clearly that morning. It really was quite a shock.
Another literal LOL (and I mean old school “literal”).
BTW, I am perfectly willing to stipulate that the Secret Service also fucked up, assuming they had been given the same warning Card delivered to Bush.
I’m still frustrated nobody wants to talk about the bizarre Card interview. But let’s flip it around: he said it was an easy call that the president needed to be told. But why not just wait until the lesson was over if Bush wasn’t going to do anything?
The deafening silence from the other side on this point speaks volumes.
To be fair, Andy Card said he very carefully planned it out so as not to give Bush a chance to ask any questions. Which again is a huge WTF for me. I mean, huh?!?
People are going to differ on their views of Bush’s actions. Those who present a position in the way that you have, here, are at least not rolling around in hyperbole, expressing misplaced outrage.
Thought experiment. Suppose Bush had acted in the way many of us are saying he should have… that is, upon getting the news of the second plane hit, he’d gotten up, told the kids and teachers that something had come up, left the room, and started talking to his aides in the hallway. (For the purposes of this hypothetical, I’m happy to stipulate that nothing useful was accomplished in this time and the rest of 9/11 played out identically to real life.)
Is there even a CHANCE that, 10 years later, there would be an entire thread full of people on the SDMB who remembered the incident and complained that Bush had done the wrong thing and should have stayed in the room reading?
Ha, some people will claim there would just to avoid being caught in an inconsistency (or they will just ignore the question as they do the other toughies); but the idea is patently absurd.
You know, I’m all about taking one for the team but in this case… you first.
The President is safest where his security team is at the time. In this case, they would have already cleared the school, checked background on the staff, had the dogs sniff for bombs, set up snipers on the roof, cleared the local airspace, et cetera. Once they’re out on the open road they lose control over all of these elements. Maybe there was a seven minute delay because a Secret Service agent had to drive a few miles down the road to make sure a particularly nasty intersection was clear and safe to travel through. Maybe the first thing the Secret Service did was call NORAD and say “We need to move the President right now so let us know if there’s any commercial air traffic headed this way.” After spending six minutes on hold (because NORAD was legitimately too busy to give a quick answer to anyone, even the President’s bodyguards), they move him. In any case, I’m willing to give Bush a pass on this one simply because it might just take seven minutes to get everyone ready to move safely and the best thing to do in that situation is to carry on as if nothing is wrong. YMMV.
By not giving the orders he should have.
Are you claiming that the Secret Service had routine precautions in place - at the time of the 9/11 attack - for protecting the President from a kamikaze airplane attack? Because I’m going to need a cite on that one.
Otherwise, I’m sticking with what I’ve already said. If people are flying planes into buildings, the proper plan was to move the President out of the building. Get him in a limo and he’s a moving target that you can’t fly a plane into.
And it’s not like it’s some unforeseeable possibility. Tom Clancy had used it in a book in 1994 - it was a best-seller.
You seem to not understand the difference between the procedures the Secret Service follows when they conducting routine movement and want to make sure they’re moving the President into danger and the procedure they follow when the President is in danger at his current location. At that point you’re no longer dealing with routine - you move the President out of the area as fast as possible. Look at the footage of when people shot at Ford or Reagan - you can hear the Secret Service agents yelling “Get him out! Get him out!” as they stuff the President into a car.
The whole “they couldn’t move the Pres because it wasn’t time yet to move the Pres and they needed to wait 7 minutes….” is less than silly. Had someone set off a firecracker outside the school while Bush was in the classroom, the Secret Service would have stuffed him in a sack and hauled him out to a car before anybody could say “WTF?” The reason they didn’t haul him away to avoid a possible airplane falling on him is because such a thing, while occasionally mentioned both in security analyses and fiction, just had not sunk into anyone’s brain as a serious possibility. And at 8:56 on the morning of 9/11, no one in the security detail made the leap of imagination it would have taken to connect those particular dots. That realization came sometime during the actual exit from the school, and caused the whole “where are we flying him to?” confusion.
As has been repeated endlessly in this thread, those of us who find fault with Bush’s actions only condemn his apparent lack of interest in the news brought by his senior advisor that “America is under attack”. Whatever my position in government, had I been so informed, the last thing I’d have done would be to sit through a children’s story. We find this particularly egregious in the case of our President. His later explanation that he didn’t want to cause alarm is clearly self serving bullshit. No one would have been alarmed, least of all the children, had the man with the distracting entourage who some of them might have slightly recognized from TV but with whom they had no personal connection merely risen from his chair, announced “Your teacher will continue with story time. Something has come up and I am sorry that I must go now” and walked calmly out of the room. Kids see nothing strange, let alone alarming, in the inexplicable comings and goings of adults.
I’m willing to accept that the 7 minutes made exactly zero difference to the unfolding of events that day. Might some immediate call, some kind of warning have changed the outcome on one of the flights? Perhaps. Highly unlikely, but possible. I do not fault Bush or his team for failing to come to such an immediate comprehension of the situation, nor for failing to take an immediate course of action. Hindsight clarifies what is obscure in foresight. I honestly doubt that anything different would have eventuated had he been in his office at the White House that morning. (Decision-making, at any rate; not the ‘scram’ scenario ;))
But I do think it fair to fault him for the 7 minute delay, because foresight, while always imperfect, is greatly improved by information. And Bush did nothing to obtain information. Neither he nor this country had any *a priori *assurance that it wouldn’t matter.
I can’t imagine any kind of call or warning that only the President of the United States is capable of giving that would have changed anything.
I don’t know what the actual procedure is, but it seems likely they’d try to get presidential authorization for the air force or ANG to shoot down an airliner.