On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. Where was George W. Bush?
by 
lurker
ANSWERS: 5
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President Bush was reading 'My Pet Goat' to schoolchildren in a Sarasota, Florida classroom, and when Andrew Card whispered to him that the second World Trade Center tower had been hit, and 'The Nation is under attack', George Walker Bush kept sitting there for over twenty minutes with a baffled look, a 'what-the-hell-should-I-do' expression on his face -- It's all on tape. Then, instead of performing his ostensible duties as Commander-in-Chief and taking the quickest route back to Washington D.C. and immediately going on the air to reassure the panicked American people, he decided it wasn't safe to return to the White House -- He basically went into hiding for the day and told Vice President Dick Cheney to stay put in his bunker.
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Yep, Kedar is correct. Bush made one quick stop on the ground (in New Orleans, I think) to address the press and then hit the skies again. In essence - he ran and hid.
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It's a shame he wasn't in one of those towers along with his administration!
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In a Booker Elementary School second-grader classroom, and accounts given by George W. Bush himself on how he learned about the WTC crash, have changed radically over the following months. Less than two months after the attacks, President Bush made the preposterous claim that he had watched the first attack as it happened on live television. This was the seventh different account of how Bush learned about the first crash (in his limousine, from Loewer, from Card, from Rove, from Gottesman, from Rice, from television). On December 4, 2001, Bush was asked: “How did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attack?” Bush replied, “I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on. Unfortunately, Bush has never been asked, not even once, to explain these statements. His memory not only contradicts every single media report, it also contradicts what he said that evening.
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I suspect he was rehearsing his lines for the due speech.
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