[Austin-ghetto-list] Cheney article

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ptember 17, 2001, Monday


You have to buy it to read it, so here it is.

AFTER THE ATTACKS: THE VICE PRESIDENT; Cheney
Describes His Nerve-Center Role in First Hours of Crisis


By ERIC SCHMITT

Within an hour after the first passenger jet hit the World Trade Center,
Vice President Dick
Cheney told President Bush to stay away from Washington, ordered the
Congressional
leadership evacuated, dispersed cabinet members to emergency shelters
and urged Mr. Bush
to direct fighter jets to shoot down any rogue airliner that threatened
the Capitol or White
House.

As he recounted on television today how he was in constant contact with
Mr. Bush on Air Force
One, Mr. Cheney, who was in the White House when the attacks occurred,
said he also
marshaled top administration aides in a secure underground bunker linked
to the Central
Intelligence Agency and the Defense, State and Justice Departments, and
effectively ran the
government in Mr. Bush's absence. The president was in Florida on
Tuesday and returned to the
White House that evening.

''I was in a position to be able to see all the stuff coming in, receive
reports and then make
decisions in terms of acting with it,'' Mr. Cheney said on NBC's ''Meet
the Press'' in his first
public remarks since the attacks.

When Secret Service agents urged Mr. Cheney to evacuate the White House
bunker, he refused
to budge. ''I didn't want to leave the node we'd established there,''
Mr. Cheney said. ''If I'd have
left, gotten on a helicopter and launched out of the White House, all of
that would have been
broken down.''

Mr. Cheney's performance under pressure underscores why Mr. Bush picked
the 60-year-old
former White House chief of staff, secretary of defense and House
Republican leader to be his
political partner.

But in permitting Mr. Cheney to describe his role at the forefront of
the crisis, the
administration walked a fine line between reaffirming the vice
president's stature and having
him overshadow the president.

Since taking office, Mr. Cheney has established himself as more
influential than any vice
president before him. But recently, some officials questioned whether
Mr. Cheney's influence
had waned after he underwent his third cardiac procedure since November,
and the national
energy plan he supervised was criticized for giving short shrift to
conservation measures.

Mr. Cheney had also increased his more mundane vice-presidential duties.
The day before the
attacks, for instance, he appeared at two Republican fund-raising events
in Lexington, Ky.,
that raised a total of $540,000.

All that changed on Tuesday. ''As soon as that second plane showed up,''
Mr. Cheney said,
''that's what triggered the thought: terrorism, that this was an
attack.''

Mr. Cheney said he convened top White House aides, including the
president's national security
adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and discussed a statement Mr. Bush might make
from Florida. ''The
first statement he made describing this as an act of apparent terrorism
flowed out of those
conversations,'' Mr. Cheney said.

When administration officials were told American Airlines Flight 77 was
headed toward the
White House, Secret Service agents hustled Mr. Cheney to the bunker,
known as the
Presidential Emergency Operations Center.

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Cheney said, Representative J. Dennis Hastert,
the speaker of the
House and next in line to the presidency after Mr. Cheney, was flown to
a secure facility
outside Washington. So were three cabinet members, Tommy G. Thompson,
Ann M. Veneman
and Gale A. Norton, the secretaries of health and human services,
agriculture and the interior.

Mr. Cheney said his most difficult decision was recommending to Mr. Bush
that he authorize
F-16 fighter jets to destroy any hijacked passenger jets that imperiled
Washington. ''The
president made the decision, on my recommendation,'' Mr. Cheney said.