Best Little Stories from the White House, including First Ladies in Review - Softcover

Kelly, C Brian

3.56

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9780962487545: Best Little Stories from the White House, including First Ladies in Review

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0962487546 ISBN 13: 9780962487545

Publisher: MONTPELIER PUBLISHING, 1992

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Historical snapshots recalling dramatic, poignant, sometimes startling moments in the lifetime of America's most famous home. Not only the Presidents, not only their First Ladies, but so many others, great and "small", who have worked there, visited there, married there, even died there. Who was the elderly ex-slaveowner who passed his last days as a resident of the White House...AFTER the Civil War? And no, it wasn't Zachary Taylor, who did have slaves IN the White House and who DID die there. But that was BEFORE the Civil War, and he certainly wasn't elderly. The right answer would have been, ironically enough, U.S. Grant's father-in-law!. The "caretaker" President's stunning suggestion late in the 19th century? Why, he said, tear the place down and start all over again---replace that old White House with an office building and a brand new residence. They came to appreciate former Vice President Chester Arthur's "caretaking" tenure anyway.On the morning of his inauguration, this President danced before his wife in their hotel room and chanted in sing-song voice: We're going to the White House today; we're going to the White House today!" Would you believe this was the usually dour, stern-visaged Woodrow Wilson? And that naked man in a guest room---naked most of the day, in fact--and yet quite ready to plot war strategy with his host, Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Who else but that British bulldog, Winston Churchill. These and many more are our stories---101 vignettes from the life and times of the most famous home in America. Plus biographical sketches of all the First Ladies who have lived in the 'President's House'. .The first occupant, by the way? In 1800 it would be, but it wasn't John Adams, first President to reside in Washington, D.C. And it of course wasn't the late George Washington, the only man to precede John Adams as President...back at the former capital city of Philadelphia. No, none of the above---it instead was John Marshall, future Chief Justice, who merely needed a place to sleep in the new city rising on the Potomac while he served as Secretary of State. So, he ignored the workmen still preparing the President's House for a real president and simply moved in for a spell before John Adams arrived in town.

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About the Author:

C. BRIAN KELLY, a prize-winning journalist, is cofounder of Montpelier Publishing and a former editor for Military History magazine. He is also a lecturer in newswriting at the University of Virginia. Kelly's articles have appeared in Reader's Digest, Friends, Yankee, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, and other magazines. He is the author of several books on American history and resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Prologue:
White House Under the Gun
2001

WHEN TERRORISTS TOOK DOWN THE World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, and even more hijacked airliners still could be headed for the White House itself, President George W. Bush wasn’t “home” in Washington, D.C., but Vice President Dick Cheney was. He had hardly learned of the horrifying events in New York City before a Secret Service agent burst into his office in the West Wing, took hold of him and, without ceremony, “propelled” him out of his office and down the hallway.

Special Agent Jimmy Scott rushed Cheney to a stairway leading to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), a strictly functional bunker below the wedding-cake facades of the Executive Mansion.

It was a moment Cheney never would forget.

“We stopped at the bottom of the stairs in a tunnel outside the PEOC,” Cheney related in his 2011 book In My Time (written with his daughter Liz Cheney). “I watched as Secret Service agents positioned themselves at the top, middle, and bottom of the staircase, creating layers of defense in case the White House itself should be invaded.”

The White House was safe, but in the next few minutes, Cheney would learn of at least one hijacked airliner that appeared to be on a direct path to the White House. Just then, Cheney would be cut off from communication with President Bush. As a result, it fell to him as the highest available authority in the U.S. government to order the Air Force to shoot down the airliner if it clearly did become a threat.

Agent Scott, already handing out guns, gas masks and flashlights to the personnel gathered in the underground shelter, explained that “He’d gotten word over his radio that an inbound, unidentified aircraft was headed for ‘Crown,’ code name for the White House.”

And minutes later, a heart-stopping follow-up: “Sir,” Scott said, “the plane headed for us just hit the Pentagon.”

On hearing that grim news, Cheney knew “for certain” that Washington itself was under attack. President Bush, who had been visiting an elementary school in Florida, must stay away.

With reports of other airliner hijackings still unresolved, the White House and everybody in it—or below it—were still under the gun

Cheney finally reached Bush to tell him he should stay away. Actually, it was Cheney’s second call to the president since two hijacked airliners flew into the World Trade Center’s twin towers about 9 o’clock that Tuesday morning. Unaccountably, a “communications glitch” had interrupted Cheney’s first call to Bush, thus cutting off a vital communications link between the two leaders of the most powerful nation in the world. For a time, each was trying to reach the other.

Waiting for his latest call to go through, Cheney had watched the dire scene unfolding in New York on “an old television set that had been set up on the tunnel.”

Finally, Bush came on the line. “I told him the Pentagon had been hit and urged him to stay away from Washington. The city was under attack, and the White House was a target. I understood that he didn’t want to appear to be on the run, but he shouldn’t be here until we knew more about what was going on.”

Meanwhile, Cheney’s wife Lynne appeared in the tunnel. It now was shortly before 10 o’clock. She had been in downtown Washington when the World Trade Center was struck. “Her Secret Service detail brought her to the White House.”

As the vice president wound up his conversation with Bush, he and his wife went on into the wood-paneled PEOC proper. There, he sat at a conference table loaded with telephones in drawers underneath the tabletop. “On the wall across from me were two large television screens and a camera for video-conferencing. A side wall contained another video camera and two TV screens. The wall behind me was blank except for a large presidential seal.”

All too soon the television screens showed the collapse of the South Tower at the World Trade Center. “Both Lynne and I knew we had just watched hundreds, maybe thousands, of innocent people die.” Still unresolved, of course, were unconfirmed reports of more airliner hijackings by the terrorists.

Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, also sequestered in the underground bunker by now, “was making lists of airline flight numbers, trying to figure out which planes were confirmed hijacked and crashed, and which might still be threatening us in the air.”

Using two phones, Secretary Mineta was in touch with both the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and his chief of staff, “trying to get the skies cleared until we knew just what we were dealing with.” In this emergency, no pilot discretion on if and when to land would be tolerated. “I heard him say in no uncertain terms that pilot discretion would not be the rule today.

‘Get those planes down now,’ he ordered.”

Cheney, himself a former defense secretary, likened the first hours on 9/11 to “living in the fog of war.” Although it later turned out the al-Qaeda terrorists had hijacked four airliners, at that point, “We had reports of six domestic flights that were possibly hijacked.” To further confuse the emergency situation that fateful morning, “We had conflicting reports about whether the Pentagon had been hit by a plane, a helicopter, or a car bomb.”

Other alarming reports, all of them unfounded, kept coming in. Explosions at the Lincoln Memorial, at the Capitol, at the State Department, even unidentified aircraft allegedly headed for Camp David and for the Bush ranch at Crawford, Texas.

Then at about 10:15, “a uniformed military aide came into the room to tell me that a plane, believed hijacked, was eighty miles out and headed for D.C.”

And now came the really crucial question of the morning for Vice President Dick Cheney. Should they shoot the plane down, crew, passengers and all?

The aide asked and Cheney said yes, “without hesitation.”

Nor, with the clock ticking on, was that the end of it.

“A moment later he was back. ‘Mr. Vice President, it’s sixty miles out. Do they [Air Force fighter aircraft[ have authorization to engage?’ Again, yes.”

As Cheney wrote, there could be no other answer. “As the last hour and a half had made brutally clear, once a plane was hijacked it was a weapon in the hands of the enemy.”

By now, Cheney said, he and the president had discussed the issue. “He had approved my recommendation that they [the fighter jets] be authorized to fire on a civilian airliner if it had been hijacked and would not divert. Thousands of Americans had already been killed, and there was no question about taking action to save thousands more.”

Even so, struck by the “enormity of the order,” all in the bunker with Cheney fell silent.

Soon after, with every moment for those in the White House bunker still full of tension, came word that an aircraft had crashed south of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Some relief, yes, but still, so many questions. “Had it been forced down? Had it been shot down by one of our pilots following the authorization I’d conveyed? Eventually we learned that an act of heroism had brought United Airlines Flight 93 down in the fields near Shanksville. Aware of the fates of the other planes hijacked that morning, the passengers on Flight 93 stormed the cockpit. By sacrificing their own lives, those brave men and women saved the lives of many others, possibly including those of us in the White House that morning.”

Meanwhile, there still could be more hijacked airliners winging their way to Washington, but Cheney flatly refused the suggestion by Steve Hadley, deputy national security advisor to the president, that Cheney should evacuate the White House. Cheney said no, he wasn’t about to leave. “I knew the president was safe. And I knew I had to maintain my ability to communicate, as frustrating as our communications challenges were that day.”

In fact, leaving the White House by helicopter could mean a 45-minute gap in communications before he would be back in touch, Cheney later wrote. That would be valuable time he and the rest of the nation’s top officials couldn’t afford to lose.

He would stay put.

At 10:28, more bad news. The second of the World Trade Center towers came down. “Mothers and fathers were in that building, and wives and husbands, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters. They weren’t combatants in a war, but people going about their lives. They had been killed, and their families would be plunged into grief by terrorists who had no regards for innocent lives.”

Minutes later, came word that “another plane headed in the direction of Washington has hit the ground on the border of Ohio and Kentucky.” Soon after, even more alarming, came the report that still another hijacked airliner was just five miles out from the White House.

“Take it out,” Cheney ordered. “If it looks threatening, take it out.”

Little did he know then that his own “shootdown order” had NOT been passed along by NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector to the fighter pilots scrambling aloft from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia—and yet their counterparts at Andrews AFB in nearby Maryland did have that permission. Another potentially disastrous glitch.

In actual fact, too, only one hijacked airliner had “hit the ground”—United’s Flight 93, thanks to its heroic passengers. And that plane reported down near the Ohio-Kentucky border was not Flight 93 nor a fifth hijacked airliner, but rather American’s Flight 77. It at one point was flying in the direction of Washington and the White House, true, but it “circled away from us, then back toward the White House.” Thus, it was the very plane that “prompted” Cheney’s evacuation that morning—it also was the fuel-laden airliner that then crashed into the walls of the Pentagon just across the Potomac River from the Executiv...

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