00:00You could get a sense of what happened there, and just the drama of it all.
00:05I was an associate counsel to the president at that time, and after the first plane hit,
00:14we gathered the counsel's office team. That seemed sufficiently unusual. We gathered in
00:20the counsel's office, second floor of the West Wing. Al Gonzalez was the counsel to the president.
00:25He was giving a speech in Virginia that day, and we gathered there, and then the second
00:34plane hit, and we were told to go down to the basement of the White House, the White House
00:40mess, and then we were only there for a brief time until the Secret Service came. A bunch
00:46of us were there, the West Wing staff, and said, you got to run. We got to run. We got
00:54to get out, and we got out of the West Wing on the West Executive Drive, and kind of seared
01:04in my memory. Don't forget much from that day. Seared in my memory is the Secret Service
01:10agents saying, you know, run, sprint. Ladies, take off your heels and sprint, and we were
01:16all kind of sprinting out the gate toward Lafayette Park, and we kind of keep going past Lafayette
01:23Park, a bunch of us. And chaotic scene. I think they were hearing about Flight 93, presumably,
01:35which was, we still don't know, but that was the plane that was targeting the Capitol or the
01:41White House, and the brave people on that flight took it down in Pennsylvania. You know, when
01:51he left office on January 20, 2009, at that point, I was out of the White House. I'd worked
01:56there five and a half years and then became a judge, but he had succeeded in his number
02:00one mission, and that was something all of us on that team were working in so many different
02:07ways. But he was the one responsible. If another attack had happened, you know what they would
02:11say, Bush, why didn't you stop it? And he carried that responsibility. That thing he said on September
02:1712, this will never happen again. He carried that responsibility on his shoulders for the
02:22next seven-plus years. I was staff secretary for three of those years, where I traveled everywhere
02:27with him around the world. It's a huge responsibility for one person to carry.
02:32Justice?
02:33I think after September 11, my religious faith was strengthened. I was already religious and
02:41faithful. The president talked about a woman who went to St. Patrick's Cathedral in the day
02:48of September 11 to see if God is still there. He talked about that. And God's purposes are not
02:57always our own purposes. And the only way to make sense of the tragedy and the death was
03:06to go back to my religious faith. And then the lessons of faith, translating that into action.
03:14Well, I think the Iraq war was distinct from September 11. September 11, the response was in
03:21Afghanistan. That's where Al-Qaeda had trained. That's where Al-Qaeda was. I think it's a mistake to
03:29blur Afghanistan and Iraq, a pretty large mistake to do those two things. That said, the mindset of
03:38America changed after September 11 in the sense that the mindset was to confront threats abroad
03:46before they can hit us here at home. And that mindset was behind the large bipartisan congressional
03:54approval of the Iraq war because of the distinct threat posed by Saddam Hussein and the potential
04:02for weapons of mass destruction that people thought you might have. So I think that is going to happen
04:17when wars are difficult and you're losing life, that popularity is going to diminish somewhat.
04:25But I don't think...
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