Former President George W. Bush hails heroism of first-responders in 9/11 remarks in Dallas

UNIVERSITY PARK — Speaking at his namesake presidential center Saturday evening, former President George W. Bush recognized the first-responders who rushed into the flaming World Trade Center buildings — many to their deaths — after back-to-back plane attacks exactly 20 years ago.

“One of the remarkable things about 9/11 were the first-responders … many of whom rushed into the burning buildings uncertain of what their future would be,” Bush said.

The tower collapses killed 412 first-responders in New York City, including 343 firefighters. In all, the suicide plane crashes at the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pa., killed nearly 3,000 people and injured thousands more.

Bush delivered his remarks, which were among his first in public since the end of war in Afghanistan, to several hundred people at the George W. Bush Presidential Center on the campus of Southern Methodist University.

‘Feeling the resolve’

The audience included retired FDNY firefighters Ron Parker, who interrupted Bush’s bullhorn speech on the rubble of the World Trade Center days after the attacks, and Bob Beckwith, who stood next to Bush as he delivered the speech.

“I hear this voice behind me and it goes ‘Louder!’” Bush recalled as the audience laughed. “It was Parker. I turned to him and said, ‘This is as loud as it goes.’”

In that moment, he told the audience, “I was just feeling the resolve down there in the pit. New York City was not going to allow a bunch of thugs to bring the city to its knees.”

After his brief comments, Bush took a seat by his wife, Laura, near the front of the auditorium and joined the audience in watching the Apple and BBC produced documentary 9/11: Inside the President’s War Room.

Bush was interviewed for the documentary last February and had not yet seen it. “I hope it’s good,” he joked. “Otherwise, it’s kind of a weird invitation.”

The 90-minute documentary is a minute-by-minute recounting of Sept. 11 as told by Bush administration officials, Cabinet members and journalists who were with them that day — beginning with his early-morning jog with a Bloomberg News reporter and his visit to Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., where White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered to Bush the news that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. The president would later learn that a third plane had crashed into the Pentagon.

“”It was at that moment that I realized we were at war,” Bush said in the documentary, describing his realization that the first crash at the World Trade Center wasn’t a tragic accident, as had initially been thought.

“You know, the first plane was an accident, the second one was an attack, and the third one was a declaration of war,” Bush said in the film.

The documentary followed Bush and his advisers aboard Air Force One as it scrambled to different military bases across the country, not knowing whether the president himself was a target that day. Bush wanted to return to the White House, prompting a tense argument with his Secret Service detail, who told the 43rd president that he could still be a target and was not safe in Washington.

The president eventually returned to the White House that night and addressed the nation from the Oval Office, vowing retribution for the attacks.

“We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts, and those who harbor them,” he said

The documentary features interviews with former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, whose wife, Barbara, was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.

Difficult decisions

Bush and other interviewees discussed the many decisions they made that day, including that made by Bush and Cheney to authorize fighter jets to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93, a hijacked jet that was flying toward Washington, D.C. The terrorists deliberately crashed the plane near Shanksville, Pa., as passengers were battling to regain control of the aircraft.

“Was I happy about it? No,” Bush said about giving the military the go-ahead to shoot down the plane. “But was I comfortable in making the decision? Yes.”

In the film, Bush also defended his administration against criticism that it didn’t act on prior intelligence that al-Qaeda was planning an attack on the U.S.

“If there’s something more we could have done, I’d like someone to point it out to me,” Bush said. “You can only act on the intelligence you’ve got.”

Earlier Saturday, Bush visited the Flight 93 crash site in Shanksville, Pa., for observances in which he was joined by Cheney and Vice President Kamala Harris. During a 10-minute speech, Bush seemed to make a veiled reference to the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building

“There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home,” Bush said. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols — they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

Bush spoke of the difficulty of describing “the mix of feelings” everyone experienced that day 20 years ago.

“There was horror at the scale of destruction and at the bravery and kindness that rose to meet it,” he said. “There was shock at the audacity — audacity of evil — and gratitude for the heroism and decency that opposed it. In the sacrifice of the first responders, in the mutual aid of strangers, in the solidarity of grief and grace. The actions of an enemy revealed the spirit of a people. And we were proud of our wounded nation.”

A call to close the divide

Bush called on the nation to once again hold fast to its best qualities and shared strengths, to come together as many Americans felt the country had in the days after 9/11. Left unspoken — but alluded to plenty of times Saturday — was that the nation felt as divided as ever, and that former President Donald Trump was continuing to stoke those divisions.

“In the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks, I was proud to lead an amazing, resilient, united people,” Bush said. “When it comes to the unity of America, those days seem distant from our own.

“Malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures,” he said. “So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.”