A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (165 page)

More ominous overtones emerged from the election, which revealed a division in America identified by the colors of a countrywide county map. The counties Bush carried were colored red and Gore’s blue. Gore carried only 677 counties in the United States, whereas Bush won 2,434, encompassing more than 2.4 million square miles to the blue states’ 580,000 square miles. Most striking, with few exceptions, from New York to California, the entire map is red: Gore won some border areas, the coasts, and a thin line stretching from Minnesota down the Mississippi River. The visual representation of the election was stunning, with virtually all of the interior United States (or what elites often derisively refer to as “flyover country”) voting for Bush. Symbolically, it appeared that the Democrats had been isolated into a few urban coastal cities, increasingly divorced from middle America.

Grand Corruption and Petty Larceny

Had Clinton chosen to view it in such a manner, Gore’s defeat would not have meant a rebuke for his own presidency. After all, it could be reasoned, Gore had won a majority of the popular vote. But Clinton took the election as a plebiscite on his two terms and fumed that Gore had bungled a gift-wrapped package. But America had not seen the last of the Clintons.

In 1999, Hillary had already decided to run for the U.S. Senate seat held by the retiring Patrick Moynihan of New York. Along with Massachusetts and, perhaps, California, New York is one of the safest Democratic states in the United States. Having never lived in the state, and with little understanding of issues important to New Yorkers, Hillary donned a New York Yankees cap and purchased a mansion in Chappaqua, a posh New York City suburb that would permit her to claim residency. She faced a tough campaign against New York City Mayor Rudolph “Rudy” Giuliani, but he developed prostate cancer and, at the same time, his failing marriage was being splashed across tabloid pages. He handed over the nomination to Congressman Rick Lazio, who lost to Hillary heavily (53 percent to 45 percent).

With Hillary’s November 2000 victory, the Clintons had a house. To furnish it, Hillary—who had just signed a massive, controversial $8 million book deal for her memoirs—registered with major stores in New York and Washington, almost as a newlywed couple would. Friends were asked by party loyalists to furnish the house as an appreciation of the eight years of service.
¹³

An avalanche of gifts rolled in from the Clintons’ registries (many, it was noted, from individuals or companies that still stood to gain from Senator Clinton’s access to power): Glen Eden Carpets in Georgia gave two $6,000 carpets; Lynn Forester of New York City gave Hillary a $1,300 cashmere sweater; Arthur Athis in Los Angeles provided $2,400 in dining chairs; Walter Kaye of New York City donated more than $9,000 in gifts; and the Georgetown alumni, class of 1968, gave a designer $38,000 basket set.
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Other presidents, especially the Reagans, had refurbished the presidential mansion and received gifts for redecorating, but all the gifts stayed at the White House, becoming gifts to the nation. Not with the Clintons. In January 2001, Hillary Clinton began shipping furniture from the White House to her New York home. These items had all been donated as part of the $396,000 redecoration undertaken by the Clintons in 1993 and were not private, but public, property. Under intense criticism, the Clintons returned four items clearly marked “National Park Service,” and in another return, sent back a “truckload of couches, lamps and other furnishings.”
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That was fairly insignificant next to some of the other actions by the departing president, most notably an orgy of pardons and commutations. Every president has an unlimited pardon power: there is no review, and it is absolute. On his last day alone, Clinton issued 140 pardons and 36 sentence commutations. One television commentator said, “Not since the opening of the gates of the Bastille have so many criminals been liberated on a single day.”
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Among those pardoned was a group of Puerto Rican terrorists responsible for 130 bombing attacks in Chicago, New York, and other locations. Perhaps more offensive was the pardon of Marc Rich, an international arms runner indicted in the United States for tax evasion and counts of fraud. Rich had fled to Europe, where he peddled (illegal) Libyan oil past embargoes and paid for the oil with grain (again illegal because it was embargoed).
¹⁷

When he boarded the marine helicopter for the last time on January 20, 2001, to leave for his new life, Bill Clinton was departing as only the second president to be impeached; the first ever to have been charged with lying to a grand jury; the first ever to be disbarred; the first judged guilty of perjury against a federal court and forced to pay a fine; and the first sued in a civil suit for sexual harassment. His failure to earn the respect of the military could be seen in a small detail when the marine guards who stood by the presidential helicopter failed to execute a right face to stand facing the president’s back as he walked away from the chopper. Yet these marine guards managed to relearn the maneuver after George W. Bush took office on January 20.

Clinton’s legacy to his party was no less destructive than his imprint on the presidency. When he came to the office in 1992, the Democrats held both the House and the Senate and the governorship of New York as well as the mayoralities of New York City and Los Angeles. Within a decade, the Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the presidency, and conservative ideals were held by a slim majority of the United States Supreme Court justices. In states with a “pure” two-party legislature after 2002, there were twenty-five Republican chambers, twenty-two Democratic chambers, and two that were tied. Despite the perception that he was good for the party, most of the candidates Clinton personally campaigned for had lost, and few Democrats (except in the absolutely safest seats) could afford to be seen with him.

Team Bush

Although the transition was delayed by the Gore election challenge, Bush had his cabinet lined up even before the election. Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was secretary of state, and a former secretary of defense in the Ford administration. Donald Rumsfeld was tapped to be the secretary of defense. Not only did Bush appoint the highest-ranking African American in American history in the person of Powell, but he also named black Stanford professor Condoleezza Rice as his national security adviser, making her the highest-ranking black woman in the United States and the first woman or black named to the national security post. Rod Paige, Bush’s secretary of education, became the first African American in that post. By the time Bush finished his appointments, he had more African Americans, women, and minorities in positions of power than any other administration.

Bush knew he would need some Democratic support. In the House, Republicans had lost a few seats in 2000, but they still held a slim majority. A number of incumbent Republican senators had lost close races, leaving the Republicans only the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Cheney (as Senate president) to retain their majority. This portended difficulty for Bush’s program, which included a tax cut, partial privatization of Social Security, education reform, and deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Pressing ahead with his agenda, Bush advanced a broad tax-cut plan to revive the economy, which had begun to turn down even before the election. The tax cuts involved a popular tax rebate for every American as well as longer-term tax reductions. With support from several Senate Democrats, the package passed. An education reform bill also emerged from Congress, emphasizing teacher accountability and test scores.

But then a surprise defection handed the Senate back to the Democrats. Vermont senator Jim Jeffords, a long-time liberal Republican, in May 2001 suddenly caucused with the Democrats, making South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle the majority leader. Jeffords’s defection essentially blocked all further legislation for the rest of the year. The Democrats stalled Bush’s judicial nominations, effectively blocked any discussion of Social Security privatization, and nipped at the edges of the tax cut (without publicly favoring a tax increase). American politics seemed bogged in a morass of obstructionism and delay, with Bush’s popularity hovering in the low 50 percent range and the public nearly evenly split on policy prescriptions. No American had a clue that the world was about to change as surely as it had on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor.

9/11

On the morning of September 10, 2001, the Washington
Times
carried the latest criticism by the National Academy of Sciences on the Bush administration’s directives for controversial stem-cell research, and the New York
Post
carried the latest news about California Congressman Gary Condit, who was under investigation in the disappearance of a Washington intern, Chandra Levy, with whom he had a sexual relationship. CBS reported that pressure was mounting on Bush to do something about the deepening economic gloom. The Republicans in Congress had delayed immigration reform legislation until the White House plan to fix the Immigration and Naturalization Service had been submitted. Concerned groups had been warning that immigration policies were too liberal and immigrants too poorly screened. New doubts had surfaced about a controversial study of early American gun ownership (a thinly disguised attack on the National Rifle Association), leading to an investigation of the scholar who had produced it, and jury selection was proceeding in the murder case of Andrea Yates, who was accused of drowning her five children. All in all, September tenth seemed like just another day in America. Everything would change in less than twenty-four hours.

On September 11, 2001, President Bush was in Florida for an event in which he would read to a group of elementary school children to push his No Child Left Behind education proposal. As White House staffers left for the school at 8:42
a.m.
, their pagers and cell phones went wild. An aircraft had hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC). Early reports indicated that it had been a small twin-engine plane, and the only explanation was, as the president later recalled, that the pilot “must have had a heart attack.”
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Air traffic controllers in Newark, New Jersey, knew differently. Just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, they had followed the radar screens tracing American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 en route from Boston to Los Angeles. Then through the windows to the outside, they had watched as the aircraft descended, its transponder off. Controller Rick Tepper said, “One of the towers, one of the trade towers, is on fire.”
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In fact, only minutes earlier, a radio signal from Flight 11 was heard in the Boston regional air traffic control center—an ominous voice saying, “We have some planes.” Expecting a hostage situation from the first aircraft, FAA officials treated it according to protocol, not realizing that the hijackers had something far more deadly in mind than landing in Cuba. Hijacked Flight 11, with eighty-one passengers and eleven crew members, flew a straight path into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, erupting into an inferno sending temperatures soaring to 1,800 degrees and engulfing the 110-story building in a ball of flame and smoke above the hundredth floor. As the emergency rescue teams raced to the site of the crash, most people still thought they were dealing with pilot error or a massive accident, not a deliberate act of terror. Glass, steel, and charred human remains rained down on the police and fire personnel who had rushed into the building, even as masses of frantic people streamed out. Many, trapped on the floors above the explosion, quickly realized they had no hope. Some jumped more than a hundred floors to their deaths. Others chose to remain, overcome by smoke inhalation or seared by the flames. Those on lower floors evacuated, efficiently and quickly, but surprisingly few doubted what had happened. “I knew it was a terrorist attack the moment I looked up and saw the smoke,” said one survivor. “I saw the face of evil.”
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By that time, the attention of news cameras and crowds was focused on the North Tower when a second jumbo jet, United Flight 175 from Boston to Los Angeles with fifty-six passengers and nine crew members, hurtled through the skyline, performing a sharp turn and crashing into the South Tower, generating a second massive fireball. In Florida, President Bush had just begun to read to second-graders when his chief of staff, Andrew Card, entered the classroom and whispered in his ear, “A second plane has hit the second tower. America is under attack.”
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Bush later remembered thinking, “They had declared war on us, and I made up my mind at that moment we were going to war.”
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CIA director George Tenet received the news in Washington. “This has bin Laden all over it,” referring to the renegade terrorist Osama bin Laden.
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He immediately recalled that the FBI had detained Zacarias Massoui in August after suspicions had been raised when he sought training at a Minnesota flight school. Tenet speculated that he might have a connection to the attack.

A shaken Bush appeared on television before the twin towers collapsed, informing the American public of “an apparent terrorist attack,” promising (in “oddly informal” language) to chase down “those folks who committed this act.”
²⁴
Already, he was being urged to stay away from Washington and to board Air Force One as soon as possible. The FAA knew that more than 4,200 planes still filled the skies—thousands of potential bombs in the hands of terrorists—and officials had already decided to ground any remaining airborne planes when, at 9:03, they saw United Flight 175 fly into the South Tower. A conference call to other air traffic controllers confirmed what they dreaded. A third plane was in the hands of hijackers—American Flight 77, bound for Los Angeles from Washington with 58 passengers and 8 crew members. Shortly after Bush delivered his terse address to the nation at 9:41, Flight 77 reappeared over Washington, D.C., and crashed into the Pentagon, killing all aboard and 125 people inside the building.