Former President George W. Bush and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said they initially thought the U.S. military had shot down United Airlines Flight 93 before it crashed in Pennsylvania during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Both political figures reflected on where they were on Sept. 11, 2001, ahead of the 25th anniversary, as they sat down for a conversation in remembrance at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Texas.
Bush and Rice recounted how they sat in the White House bunker in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, actively monitoring the national crisis. At one point, they thought the military shot down Flight 93.
“You’d given the order through the vice president that, should a plane not squawk properly, it should be shot down,” Rice told Bush. “Gen. [Dan] Caine, we thought initially, standing in that bunker, that Flight 93 had been shot down by the Americans.”
“Yeah, I thought the same thing,” Bush said.
Flight 93 ultimately crashed at 10:03 a.m. that day in a rural field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The hijacked plane was believed to be en route to Washington, D.C., but its passengers prevented that from happening. The crash resulted in 44 total deaths, including 40 passengers and four hijackers.
At the time, then-Vice President Dick Cheney coordinated the federal response to the attacks from the White House bunker. The Bush administration authorized the military to shoot down any hijacked aircraft and ordered all civilian aircraft to be grounded.
“There was this horrible moment where the vice president kept trying to get confirmation as to what had happened,” Rice added. “And for about 10 minutes, we thought we’d shot down a civilian aircraft. And that always, to me, represented just how hard the decisions were that you had to take under a lot of pressure.”
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After returning to the White House that evening, Bush recalled how one of his Secret Service agents rushed him down to the bunker with his dog, Barney.
“I got back to the White House. I did find [first lady] Laura [Bush],” Bush said. “I gave the speech, and was upstairs asleep. And the Secret Service guy came charging into the bedroom and said, ‘We got to go. We’re under attack.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ I grabbed Barney.”