The following remarks by Tucker Eskew were delivered to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Alexandria, Virginia, on September 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the attacks. They are re-posted here with permission.
So much was about to change.
I had turned away from the television for a moment. A colleague standing next to me said another plane just hit.
In disbelief, I blurted a word I won’t repeat here.
It was 9:03 a.m., September 11, 2001 at the White House.
We were a long way from forgiveness. We were just then struggling for awareness.
Trying to shake off the shock and somehow be constructively busy, I called my Media Affairs staff together and asked them to research presidential responses to major crises.
I was pivoting between the televisions in my office and my computer. I was typing an email when my phone rang.
“Are you all right?” It was a friend from Atlanta.
“Sure, what do you mean?”
“Your building’s on Fire.”
I turned and saw what he meant. News cameras seemed to show fire and smoke billowing from the rear. I knew it wasn’t the Executive Office Building, but I did peer into the hallway just in case.
The Media Affairs team gathered in my office at 9:40 or so. This was, we learned later, only a few minutes after the attack on the Pentagon. The last staffer to arrive said, “people are evacuating, should we go?” I said I’d go if and when an alarm went out. I took one breath, and the door opened with an order to leave.
I told everyone to grab their phones and we began filing out.
As we turned down the steps leading to West Executive Drive, agents yelled at us to run. Women were told to take off their shoes and run.
–
That’s how it began. It’s imprinted on my memory. When Oran asked me to do this, the word he used was ‘preach.’ I told him I was hesitant to call it that. He gave the right direction. “Just keep it simple. Tell us what happened to you. Tell us your story.”
And we all have a story. Here at St. Paul’s, my administration colleagues Melissa Bennett, Courtney Elwood, Kirsten Chadwick, Brian Conklin, Tim Adams and John Elwood all have stories. All of you do.
Just in the last few weeks, I’ve been able to ask people from here, people in San Francisco, in South Carolina and they, we, all have sharp, clear memories. This is a phenomenon given a name nearly 50 years ago, when researchers at Harvard coined the term “flashbulb memory” for those vivid, highly detailed memories around highly consequential and emotional news.
Like after the assassination of President Kennedy. Like September 11th.
We retain these memories due, in part, to the fact we tell and retell them. They become common narrative.
So for a few moments, I’ll touch on my stories of the day, and reflect on the stories of grace and heroism that came to light, and the stories we curate and share in our church.
–
As we began running north toward Lafayette Park, I had the presence of mind to call Lisa, knowing the media would soon report on our evacuation. I got a voice mail and left a message, telling her I was fine and would call when I could.
In and around the park, we stood in our confusion. We heard rumors of a car bombing at the State Department.
There was plenty for all of us to be troubled about. But I began almost immediately to feel — as a former intern for Ronald Reagan, a current staffer for George W. Bush, as a proud American – anger at being forced out of the White House.
After 30 minutes, my colleague Anita McBride asked some of us if we wanted to go to her husband Tim’s corporate offices on H St. We could use phones and watch the news and have a place to work. I went there with the president’s top economic advisor, Larry Lindsay, the Cabinet Secretary Albert Hawkins, and many others.
We watched a television in the conference room. It was there that I saw the second tower crumble.
It was hard to be productive. We watched news and tried to gather information. The cabinet secretary couldn’t get in touch with most of the cabinet. The economic aide struggled to gather news of world markets. The crisis plan was clearly missing some chapters.
At noon sharp, a group of us was taken by Secret Service back to the White House.
We walked down deserted streets. Like a movie set. Not quite: there were security personnel positioned every half-block and as we drew within a couple blocks of the WH, their arms were unsheathed. This was surreal – how many times did we all feel that sense of hyper-reality mixed with disbelief?
We were escorted into the East Wing and taken along a route I was asked to never describe in detail. We entered the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the bunker.
In a conference room, the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, and the Transportation Secretary were evenly but urgently discussing the possibility that our skies weren’t completely clear.
In those low-ceiling rooms, where phones and computers were scarce, I helped the President’s top communications aide Karen Hughes prepare to make a statement on camera. I went with her under heavily armed guard to FBI Headquarters, where she became the first senior official to speak from Washington. She listed the crisis responses of the government and took no questions. We didn’t have answers.
Back in the bunker, I expressed concern about how vacant the White House looked to the world.
In the communication business – thankfully, unlike the soul saving business, Oran — first impressions matter. The WH looked barren to the world and our president looked out of place everywhere he went. I began to stir for his early return. Mary Matalin pulled me aside and hinted at the threats to Air Force One that had emerged — inaccurately, we learned later — from the fog of war. Still, I pressed the case. The world, our enemies, all of us needed to see the leader of the free world land on the south lawn, reestablish his command in this citadel of democracy and, in a way, restore some of the stability that had wobbled within all of us.
It turned out, not surprisingly to me, that President Bush wanted to get back himself and he wanted to address the nation.
I helped with the drafting of his speech. I’d been reviewing some of the research dug up that morning. My sheaf of papers included President Roosevelt’s declaration of war speech from December 8, 1941. I wanted President Bush, in his own way, to mark this date of infamy.
The President’s speech had some stern words, but he sought foremost on that night to comfort.
Personally, I also found a measure of it in news from Lisa: she’d been on the phone that day with a close friend, Kara Kennedy, who had gone into labor and given birth that day to Clare, their first child.
I took comfort in the strength I saw in the President’s eyes as we prepared the Oval Office for his address to the nation.
And I felt it especially as he gained his footing over the next few days. Such as when he called the governor and mayor of New York from the Oval Office. We allowed the networks to broadcast the call, in which he announced his plans to come to ground zero the next day, the 14th. He showed us tears and resolve.
Most Americans took heart when they saw his command and his compassion as he spent hours at the New York crash site.
That day, I arrived at the National Cathedral for the nation’s prayer service just three days after the attacks.
I was among the last to arrive and was asked to move up from the seats reserved for WH staff. I was asked to be a seat-filler. And I sat in the chair, toward the front, that had been marked for the Mayor of Shanksville, PA.
It was only just dawning on us all what had really happened in the skies over Pennsylvania. We came to learn that bin Laden wanted the attackers to hit the WH, and that others in al Qaida wanted to hit the Capitol. We’ll probably never know for sure which was the target. But all of us who started the day at desks in either building will always feel kinship and gratitude and humility for the unimaginable courage of the Americans aboard United Flight 93.
Working in communications at the White House for any president, you learn the true power and impact of what Teddy Roosevelt called the ‘bully pulpit.’ To me, one of the purest and most heartening expressions of that power came a few days later. News broke of the murders of a Muslim storekeeper in California and a Sikh gas station owner in Arizona. President Bush called Muslims and Sikhs to his side and urged Americans to look out for their neighbors, no matter their skin color, their garb, their faith. Along with the voices of many faith and civic leaders, this quelled a surge of hatred.
I was affected in other ways.
Shortly after we went into Afghanistan, the President sent me to London, to work at No. 10 Downing Street on international communications. Taking Lisa and 1 year old Thompson, I came to appreciate Tony Blair’s strength and deep faith, amid a political climate even more toxic than ours.
On that note, over the decade since, I’ve found myself searching for evidence that some of our post-9/11 unity endures.
I know much of what we had is lost, for now. But I took heart from the words spoken by one of our leaders recently about the sacrifices of our military. This leader saluted, quote, “the extraordinary decade of service rendered by … the more than 5 million Americans who’ve worn the uniform over the past 10 years.” He went on to cite the “extraordinary burden” of the “more than 2 million of our service members deployed to the war zones. …our remarkable wounded warriors… our extraordinary military families who serve here at home…and…Most profoundly, we see the wages of war in those patriots who … gave their all, their last full measure of devotion ….”
These words came from our President, Barack Obama.
We all look for signs – amidst all the evil and pain – signs of our humanity, of goodness, of strength. And of unity.
With 2,693 killed at the World Trade Center, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 in Shanksville, and 19 hijackers, the remembering is painful for many. The daughter of a woman aboard the plane that slammed into the Pentagon wrote a moving plea in the Post this week. She asked us to move on from remembrance into acceptance and renewal. She feels as though she has to go to her mother’s funeral over and over every year.
None of us would argue with the feelings of a person carrying that burden, but I think we can remember …and rejoice in the heroism and goodwill that arose out of the ashes.
I’m one who believes that we are united by so much more than our culture chooses to accept, that our differences are not always as stark as they are rendered by the cruel lenses that come into focus only when capturing conflict. I’m no Pollyanna, but I do have hope.
How can we have hope in the face of such devastation? How can we have faith?
One friend pointed me to the words of the Rev. Tim Keller, the New York City Presbyterian who spoke at the national prayer service on the 5th anniversary of the attacks.
Keller talked about trying to help people who struggle with the biggest question – the WHY question — in the face of tragedy and injustice like the attacks.
Keller quoted that day from the last book of The Lord of the Rings. The character Sam Gamgee wakes up, thinking everything is lost and discovering instead that all his friends were around him, he cries out: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead! Is everything sad going to come untrue?”
The answer, Keller said to the assembled, quote “the answer we all hold onto is YES. Everything sad is going to come untrue.”
Keller tied this literary moment back to the Resurrection. And that is the story told and taught us here at St. Paul’s. The community we have here is all about the common bonds and that story.
That was brought home in some small way this summer when we were doing some kindergarten preparation with our 5 year old Lizzie, at the kitchen table. Lisa asked her to name some words that start with ‘p.’ I think 8 year old Alex piped up first with “Police” and “pizza,” but then Lizzie jumped in. “Parable!” she cried.
Parable! Lisa and I were agog. Somebody’s listening on Sunday.
Our lives, our faith, our common bonds are all about story – parable. And the way suffering and joy, injustice and forgiveness, evil and the protection from it are all foretold and explained by the Resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
In His name, Amen.
Tucker Eskew served as Deputy Assistant to the President for Media Affairs and Global Communications under President George W. Bush.
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