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ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, the Secret Service rushed President Bush to Air Force One from a school in Sarasota, Florida, where he was reading to children in a classroom. Usually a Boeing 747 known as the doomsday plane accompanies Air Force One and is parked nearby when the president lands. Packed with ultrasensitive communications gear and military hardware, it is designed as a mobile command post in case of a devastating attack, such as a nuclear one. Consideration was given to transferring Bush to the doomsday plane after the 9/11 attack. The idea was rejected because just the sight of him entering the plane could have created panic.
“I spoke to him about not going back to Washington,” recalls Brian Stafford, the Secret Service director at the time. “The first time he was agreeable. Later when I spoke with him, he wasn’t as agreeable. By that time, we owned the skies. Even though we didn’t have all the answers we wanted, we were more comfortable about his going back than [we had been] earlier in the day.”
After landing at Andrews Air Force Base, Bush rode on Marine One to the White House.
Agents took Laura Bush from Capitol Hill to the basement of Secret Service headquarters. During such national emergencies, the Secret Service works with the military to ensure continuity of government and coordinates protection of those in the line of succession to the presidency. Because of that coordination function, even if officials in the line of succession receive protection from the State Department, as is usually the case with the secretary of state, or from the Capitol Police, as is the case with the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate, they receive a Secret Service code name. The secretary of labor, for example, was code-named Firebird after Elaine Chao objected to her assigned code name, Fireplug.
At the time of the attack, Laura traveled with only two cars and four agents. Before driving her to headquarters, the agents called for additional cars and backup. After 9/11, the number of agents on Laura’s detail was more than doubled.
Bush entered the White House at six fifty-four P.M. to find it surrounded by agents in black carrying submachine guns. Laura met him in the Emergency Operations Center, a bunker of rooms deep underground. That night, they were sleeping in their bedroom on the second floor at eleven-thirty when a Secret Service agent, breathing heavily from running, woke them up.
“Mr. President! Mr. President!” the agent said. “There’s an unidentified aircraft heading toward the White House!”
In their bathrobes, the Bushes returned to the underground bunker, where an aide pointed out a roll-out bed. Then word came that it had been a false alarm. The plane was friendly.
“George had to literally lead her to go downstairs,” Nancy Weiss, a close friend of the Bushes, says. “She can’t even find the bathroom without her contacts. She is very, very blind. She wears hard lenses because the correction is so much better.”
More than a month after 9/11, Laura Bush was at the Crawford ranch with her close friend Debbie Francis while Bush was in China. Laura’s Secret Service detail informed them of a threat they had picked up.
“They had me move from the guesthouse into the main house in case we had to evacuate quickly” Debbie Francis recalls. “I stayed in one of the girls’ rooms. For that one night, they didn’t want us to have any lights on in the house. So we closed all the curtains and just had a little candle burning.” Throughout the ordeal, Laura remained “totally calm,” Francis says.
Because of the extensive Secret Service preparations that precede his trips outside the White House, Bush preferred not to go out to restaurants. At one point, he told Laura he didn’t like to be stared at while he was eating. Laura laughed and said, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have run for president.”
In contrast to her husband, Laura regularly slipped out of the White House to have lunch with friends at places such as Cafe Deluxe, Zola, or Old Ebbitt Grill. Her Secret Service detail would sit at nearby tables.
Presidents are required to pay for the incremental cost of their personal meals and personal parties—the cost of a lamb chop, for example. The White House or the State Department pays for official entertaining. The political party in power pays for Christmas events and cards. In all, twelve thousand people typically attend White House Christmas events. During a recent Christmas season, guests invited by the Bushes consumed a thousand pounds of shrimp, three hundred twenty gallons of eggnog, ten thousand tamales, and seven hundred cakes. That does not include the display-only three-hundred-pound gingerbread White House painted in white chocolate.
A buffet dinner for the press included roast lamb chops, chicken-fried steak with gravy, fruitwood smoked salmon, cocktail shrimp, Maryland crab cakes, bourbon-glazed Virginia ham, cheesy stone-ground grits, and tamales with roasted poblanos and Vidalia onions. Not to mention chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream frosting, chocolate truffles, apple and cherry cobblers, and countless glazed sugar cookies shaped like woodland creatures.
The government’s real annual cost of running the White House is anybody’s guess. The president receives a salary of $450,000 a year plus an expense allowance of $50,000 and $100,000 for travel. The White House and the Executive Office of the President receive $202 million a year. But these figures are a mere token of what the White House costs. The real costs—totaling more than a billion dollars—are unknown even to Congress and the Government Accountability Office, the audit arm of Congress, because dozens of other agencies help support the White House and detail employees to it.
“The total cost of the White House isn’t in any records,” says John Cronin, Jr., who directed the GAO’s audits of the White House for twelve years. “The navy runs the mess and Camp David, the army provides the cars and drivers, the Defense Department provides communications, the air force provides airplanes, the marine corps provides the helicopters. The State Department pays for state functions, the National Park Service maintains the grounds, the Secret Service provides protection, and the General Services Administration [GSA] maintains the East and West Wings and the Old Executive Office Building and provides heat.”
The mythology often conveyed by the press was that Bush was a puppet of Dick Cheney or, alternatively, that he was so stubborn he listened to no one. In fact, he made his own decisions and would let aides go if they were too timid to disagree with him. Thus, according to former chief of staff Andy Card, it was Bush who came up with the idea of paying a surprise visit to troops in Baghdad for Thanksgiving in 2003. Card says the first thing Bush wanted to know was whether the Secret Service thought it could be done safely. More than a month before the trip, Card met at the White House with Director Mark Sullivan and other Secret Service officials to begin planning the trip. The White House informed the Defense Department of the plans later.
To be sure, as Bush himself joked, he often did not speak English. His close friend Clay Johnson was in the Oval Office a few days before Bush was to speak at a radio and television correspondents dinner.
“I’m going to give the funniest speech you’ve ever heard,” Bush told “Big Man,” as he called Johnson. “They have this tape of ridiculous phrases I used in the [2001] campaign. I can’t believe that a candidate for president said those things.”
Bush recited some of the examples:
“Africa is a nation that…”
“Dick Cheney and I do not want this nation to be in a recession. We want anybody who can find work to be able to find work.”
“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”
“The woman who knew that I had dyslexia—I never interviewed her.”
“I’ve never seen him laugh that hard,” Johnson says.
Secret Service agents appreciate the fact that Bush is punctual.
“Bush is down to earth, caring,” an agent says. The Bushes offer food to agents. “They are always thinking of people around them.”
But agents were always amazed at the difference between Bush in person and the way he came across at press conferences.
“He does not look comfortable in front of a microphone,” an agent who was on his detail says. “With us, he doesn’t talk like that, doesn’t sound like that. He’s funny as hell. Incredible sense of humor, and he’ll joke around. He’s two different personalities.”
Agents loved to run with Bush—code-named Trailblazer—and chop wood with him. The agency tried to assign its best runners to his detail so they could keep up with him. Because of bad knees, Bush later gave up running and took up biking, which he often did at the Secret Service training facility in Laurel, Maryland.
“He had this group of agents that were kind of jocks that he liked to associate with on the detail,” an agent says. “The guy is in phenomenal shape. He had guys on his detail that would push him, and they’d feed off each other. It was funny, though, because when he was diagnosed with bad knees and he switched to mountain bikes from running, he was out of control on that mountain bike. He would go too fast, and he’d have a wreck. He would just go full out on a trail, hit a log, and go flying off the bike. And he’d get off, dust himself off, and hop right back on and do it again.”
“You pretty much knew that you’re not supposed to pass him when biking,” another agent says. “He’s supposed to be in front. I was there when Lance Armstrong was at the ranch. The president was actually trying to compete with Lance Armstrong, to keep up with him. And I think Lance let him win.”
If agents thought highly of Bush, it was nothing compared to their feelings about his wife. “Laura has the undying admiration of almost every agent,” an agent says. “I’ve never ever heard a negative thing about Laura Bush. Nothing. Everybody loves her to death and respects the hell out of her.”
An agent who was assigned to the Bushes one Christmas remembers how caring Laura—code-named Tempo—is. She talked to him for thirty minutes and seemed apologetic about having to take him away from his family during Christmas.
“With Laura, what you see on TV is what you get in person,” another agent says. “She’s always smiling, and she actually gave my mother a compliment, which I’ll never forget. We were invited to the White House Christmas party, and my mother actually studied the type of dresses that Laura Bush wears and tried to get something similar. She walked in, and after my mother was announced by a military escort, Mrs. Bush called her by her first name and said, ‘Boy you look absolutely lovely this evening.’ My mother was on cloud nine.”
As an example of Laura’s positive approach to life, when Teresa Heinz Kerry said just before the 2004 election, “I don’t know that she’s [Laura’s] ever had a real job,” Laura brushed it off. After Heinz—who dropped the name Kerry after the election—apologized, Laura told reporters there was no need for her to do so.
“I know how tough it is, and actually I know those trick questions,” she said.
At the dinner table that night in the pale green family dining room, Laura took the same positive approach. As a butler passed cheese and chicken enchiladas, daughters Jenna and Barbara Bush expressed outrage at Teresa’s comment. Typically, Jenna was the most vocal.
“You know, Mom, she put down every woman who raised their children,” Jenna said. “She was saying that’s not a real job. That was what was so bad about it. Not that she forgot you had a teaching job, but that she was putting down raising children.”
As Pamela Nelson, a high school friend of Laura’s from Midland, selected an enchilada from a platter offered by a butler, Laura talked about how easy it was for words to be twisted and taken out of context.
“You know that comment, ‘Bring them on,’” Laura said, referring to Bush’s July 2003 statement challenging those who would attack American forces in Iraq. “It had so many political repercussions. Everything can be used a million times against you.”
“This has to be the meanest campaign ever,” Nelson said, referring to the 2004 reelection campaign.
“No, the leaflets they dropped when Lincoln was running that disparaged him and his family were horrible,” Laura said. “People blame everything that happens on this office.”