responsibilities. in the back of the cabin, the passengers gathered to devise a strategy. at the moment, america's democracy was under attack. our citizens defied their captors by holding a vote. the choice they many passengers called their loved ones to say goodbye. another said it is up to us, i think we can do it. one of the most stirring accounts, a father of two with a pregnant wife at home in new jersey. prayer.ed the lord's he helped lead the charge to the front of the plane. the men and women who stormed

the cockpit lived out the words, a greater love hath no man than this. they launched the first counter- offensive on the war on terror. we will never know how many innocent people might have been lost. we do know this. americans are alive today because the passengers and crew of flight 93 chose to act. our nation will be forever grateful. the 40 souls who perished on the plane left a great deal behind. they let spouses and children and grandchildren, who missed them dearly. they left successful businesses and promising careers and a lifetime of dreams that they will never have a chance to fulfill. they left something else. a legacy of bravery and

selflessness that will always inspire america. for generations, people will study the story of flight 93. they will learn that individual choices make a difference, that love and sacrifice and triumph over evil and hate. what happened up of this pennsylvania field ranks among one of the most courageous acts in american history. the memorial we dedicate today will ensure that our nation always remembers those lost here on 9/11. we have a duty beyond memory. we had a duty beyond on iran. we have a duty to live our lives in a way -- we have a duty beyond honoring. to build a living memorial to their courage and sacrifice. we have a duty to find common purpose as a nation.

in the days after 9/11, our response came like a single hand over a single heart. members of congress gathered on the steps of the capital and "god blessang america." in the past decade, our country has been tested. there have been debates along with the way. the essence of democracy, but americans have never been defined by our disagreements. whatever challenges we face today and the future, we must never lose faith in our ability to meet them together. we must never allow our differences to harden into divisions. we have a duty to remain engaged in the world. 9/11 proved that the conditions

in the country on the other side of the world can have an impact on our streets. it may be tempting to think it does not matter what happens to a village in afghanistan, or a child in africa, but the temptation of isolation is doubly wrong. -- deadly wrong. a world of dignity and liberty and hope will be better for all. the surest way to move towards that vision is for the united states of america to lead the cause of freedom. finally, we each have a duty to serve because larger than ourselves. the passengers aboard flight 93 sets an example that inspires us all. many followed their path to service by donating blood or mentoring a child or volunteering in desperate corners of the earth. some have devoted their careers

to analyzing intelligence or protecting our borders and securing our skies. others have made the noble choice to defend our nation in battle. for 10 years, our troops have given their lives to bourbon and our enemies from attacking america again. they have kept us safe, they have made us proud, and they had upheld the spirit of service shown by the passengers on flight 93. many years ago, in 1853, another president came to dedicate a memorial site in the state. he told this audience that in the larger sense, we cannot hallowed this ground. the world will long remember what we say here, but we can never forget what they did here. so it is with flight 93.

for as long as this memorial stands, we will remember what the men and women aboard the plane and did. we pay tribute to the courage they showed and a sacrifice they made and the lives they spare. the united states will never forget, may god bless you all. [applause] [applause]

>> before president bush came up to speak, i asked him if he was having a hard time. he said i was doing fine and to let looked at you. -- until i looked at you. last night, hillary came home after spending the day in new york. her eyes bright red -- her eyes were red. 10 years ago, she was the senator representing those firemen. nearly 900 people who died, and all the others. as we remember what happened in the new york, at the pentagon, and year, -- and here, all the

rest of us have to honor those who were lost, to thank those who loved them for keeping their memory alive, raising their children, and finding the strength to go on with your own life. i think we should also thank president bush and those who served with him for keeping us from being attacked again. [applause] i thank them for that. john boehner, i think you and the members of congress that are here, and you have been in the congress for the last 10 years. trying to respond to the findings of the 9/11 commission

that improve our ability to secure our homeland. here, in this place, we honor something more. i was very moved wind president bush recounted the facts of what happened with your loved ones over this field a decade ago. there has always been a special place in the common man marine -- memory for people who certainly it laid down their lives for other people. president bush is from texas.

i grew up in arkansas. that is a more important difference between us and our partisan differences. i was raised on the memory of the alamo, the defining story of texas. those people knew they were going to die. the cause of freedom allowed the whole idea of texas to survive. and those who live there now to enjoy the life they do. the first such great story i had been able to find that reminds me of all of your loved ones, however, occurred almost 2500 years ago. the great king of sparta and facing a massive persian army

took 300 of its finest soldiers. there were thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people. they all knew they were going to die. he told them that when they went. the enemy said, we are going to fill the air with so many arabs that it will be dark. -- arrows that it will be dark. the spartans said, we will fight in the shade. and they all died. the casualties' they took and the time they bought saved the people they loved. this is something different. at the alamo, they were soldiers. they knew what they had to do.

your loved ones just happened to be on a plane. with almost no time to decide, they gave the entire country a gift. they save the capital from attack and they saved god knows how many lives. they saved the terrorist from claiming the symbolic victory of smashing the center of american government. they did it as citizens. this allowed us to survive as a country, still welcomed people from all over the world.

ordinary people, given no time at all to decide, did the right thing. 2500 years to now, i hope that people will still remember. [applause] since i am no longer in office, i can do unpopular things. i told the secretary of the interior that i was aghast to find out that we still need to raise money to finish this. we have already volunteered to do a bipartisan event in the washington. let's get this show on the road. thank you, and god bless you. [applause]

>> president clinton, thank you. it feels a bit like the rabbit who wanders into the territory of the eagles to speak after these folks here. [laughter] the difference is the eagles are friends. they are friends of everyone of us here. thank you. my name is john reynolds. i am the chairman for the federal advisory commission for the flight 93 memorial.

it is my pleasure to represent an incredible partnership and its constant attention and action over the last decade. it is a partnership that is mostly invisible and unknown except to a few. it created a vision coming to fruition here as a result of diversity and commitment. it has created this national memorial, this national park. the partnership consists of five groups. they are the families of flight 93, a family members of the 40 heroes. flight 93 task force composed of family members, local people, and others. they were the original group of citizens who imagined and

national memorial here, worked to consensus, and took action to convince congress and president bush to act. the flight 93 advisory commission is a direct link between everybody else and the department of interior and the national park service. it is made up of 15 people representing the local community, the families, corporate and national interests, and public historians. the national park foundation, at the national fund-raising arm of the partnership, and the national park service. all before we the people to enjoy, to reflect upon, and to learn about our nation. these partners, however, barely

reflect the many people you had given of themselves. they include the flight 93 ambassadors, local people the took it upon themselves to help visitors, starting within days of 9/11. [applause] first responders, the newly formed france of flight 93, all of you please -- the newly formed friends of flight 93. construction workers, government employees, governors, and generals, cabinet members, senators, congressmen, presidents, and first ladies. 75,000 individuals who have donated their money to create this memorial and the over 1000

people who shared their vision in an international design competition. this outpouring continues to be a truly american undertaking. no one asks, who are you? why are you here? how come you care? all that is asked is sincerity. the result stands before us today. the people have done this. they designed what we hear it -- what we see here today. their real genius, though, it is that they joined a chorus of our partnership of people to listen to it and to the land and to the sky and played back their souls

to create this representation of thanks and spirit of the 40 heroes of flight 93, who acted together, fought back,. gave their lives. the heroes live there by that solids down. they stand tall, solid, speaking to us. each name, each equal, individuals, who knowingly chose and took action to avert an even greater american tragedy. they are the courage of free people everywhere. they are our past, they are our

future. this place is the people's gift to america. a national park and a national memorial for as long as this nation shall live. it is my great and humble honor to present this memorial on behalf of the people of this wonderful partnership to all the people of the united states of america. will all of you please follow mr. jarvis? thank you very much. [applause]

[applause] [america the beautiful]

♪ ♪

[applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, i am honored to be standing here today. standing with two former presidents, president clinton, as he said, the passengers on flight 93 knew that our common humidity is what united us most. -- humanity is what united us most. the same can be said for duke, mr. president. -- for you, mr. president. [applause]

we thank you for what you have done and what you continue to do. let me also recognize the man responsible for bringing our country together at a time where it could have been torn apart, for making it clear that america could not be brought to our knees and helping us stand tall and strike back. president george w. bush. [applause] in the darkest hour of our generation, your voice and leadership, mr. president, help us find our way. for that, you deserve our gratitude for a long, long time. [applause] i say now to the families to

gather here today, i know what it is like to receive that call at of the blue. like a bolt out of the blue. i know this is a bittersweet moment for you. i want to tell you, you have a lot more courage than i have. you have a lot more courage just by being here today because i know how hard it is to relive these moments. it brings everything back in stark detail. i also know, like your loved ones, you are literally an inspiration to the thousands of people across this country right now who are feeling of an

intense tragedy that they are suffering. they know, looking at you, watching television today, that there is hope to be found after tragedy. there is a rebirth in the face of death. you are as courageous as your family members were and we owe you all for being here today just the act of being here. [applause] we are here today to remember and honor 40 men and women who gave their lives so that others could live theirs. decent, honorable when it -- women and men that never imagined when they said goodbye to their children and walked

through the door, they were doing it for the very last time. they did not know the horror that awaited them. but they confronted fear and terror with the courage that was summoned by the truest of american heroes. 40 names etched on each of those panels. more than that, their names are going to be etched forever in to american history. they joined an elite list of men and women with a long history, filled with ordinary americans doing extraordinary things. men and women of undaunted courage, and a stubborn perseverance in the face of challenges. we teach our children that these

are qualities ingrained into our national character as americans. i believe they are. they can make our national identity. i believe they will continue to define america because of the example of the men and women that we pay tribute to today. the passengers and crew of flight 93. none of them cast for what happened. they did not go on that plane, they did not board that plane to fight a war. when they heard the news, when the speller but what happened in new york, they knew it -- when they found what happened in new york, they knew they were going through something more than a hijacking. they knew it was the opening shot in a new war. so they opted as citizen patriots had acted since the beginning of our country. they stood up and they stood

their ground. "if they need to have a war, let it began here." as many times as i recall, and all of you who were not family members, recall this incident time and again over the last 10 years. i never fail to be astonished by the courage they demonstrated. and so we stand where it began. we think of our nation, we think of our history, we think of the future. we think of it because of them up with a confidence knowing that ordinary citizens will continue to stare down fear,

overwhelmed evil, and bring forth hope when there seems to be none. it will continue to amaze us, it should not surprise us. that heroism is do we are. that correct lies deepest and beats loudest in the heart of this nation. we know that these 40 men and women were more than ordinary americans. they were more than the passengers and crew. they were already heroes. they were already euros to you. they are the father -- they were already here rose -- heroes to you.

they were the brother who lifted you up and the daughter who made you laugh and the son of a major proud. -- who nmade you proud. they are irreplaceable. no memorial, no words, no acts can fill the void that they left in your hearts. my prayer for you is that 10 years later, their memory is able to bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. i hope you take comfort in knowing that a grateful nation understands that your loved one gave their lives in pursuit of

the noblest of earthly goals, defending their country, defending their family, sacrificing their lives so we could live hours. -- ours. those of us in washington that day, without knowing it for sure at the time, now know that we owed them a personal debt of gratitude. that spirit lives on in you and your country. it lives on in the cross of steel made from the trade center bemis -- beams. [applause]

that cross is an enduring symbol of the spine that of this region and this country. it lives on in the new generation of warriors spread the 9/11 generation. inspired by what happened here, 2.8 million young americans have joined the united states armed forces. thousands giving their lives and tens of thousands to finish the war that began here. "history, despite the pain, cannot be unlived.

however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again." ladies and gentlemen, we are not here to unlive history. we're here to honor those whose courage made history and will inspire generations of americans to come. i say to you, even as we struggle with this tragedy, even as we grapple with a profound loss and devastating grief, we can look up at the heavens and think of those heroes and note -- know that there is not a single tragedy that america cannot overcome. there is not a single moment of hardship that cannot be transformed into one of national strength. the seeds of doubt planted by

those who wish to harm us will grow into flour and metals like this one, where we stand today. -- flowering meadows like this one, where we stand today. we know it with certainty because the history of the journey of this country at every stage of our history. my mother used to say, courage lies in every heart. she would go on to say, the expectation is, one day it will be summoned. courage lies in every heart. one day, it will be summoned. on september 11, 2001, at 9:57, it was summoned.

40 incredible men and women answered the call. they gave their lives, and in doing so, gave this country a new life. we owe them. we owe you. a dead that we can never repay. thank you -- a debt that we can never repay. may god bless you and may god protect our troops. [applause] ♪

spend all your time waiting for that second chance for a break that would make it ok there is always some reason to feel not good enough and it's hard at the end of the day need some distraction beautiful relief find some peace tonight

in the arms of the angels away from here from the start, -- this dark hotel room and the that you fear you are pulled from the wreckage of your lient -- silent rivalry arms of the angels may you find your comfort here

♪ so tired everywhere you turn vaulters -- vultures at your back keep on building have to make up for all that you lack make no difference escape one last time it is easier to believe in this sweet madness

this glorious sadness knees mae to my in the arms of the angels far away from here from this dark cold hotel room that you fear you are pulled from the wreckage of your silent you are in the arms of the angels

may you find comfort here you're in the arms of the angels may you find some comfort here ♪ [applause]

>> i would ask that you all remained outstanding -- he remained standing. -- you remain standing for the benediction.

>> we bless you and we praise you, lord god. we ask your blessing upon this hallowed place. and all those whose memory we call to mind today by name. grant them eternal rest, and we of the living, thank you and reward them for their sacrifice. grant consolation and confidence in the future to their families and all to mourn their loss today.

bless all of us who gathered here, give us a travel, -- safe travel. as he transformed this land with new growth, the and the commitment of those who want to finish this worked. bless their efforts and bring it to completion. bless our nation, lord, and all of the nations of the earth. that your people may flourish, and that we might enjoy your presence now and forever. amen. >> as we bring this ceremony to

close, i want to thank each and every one of you for being here today. for the family and friends who live with the losses every day, this memorial is a small expression of your nation's gratitude. those suits you love are our heroes. -- those who you love our are heroes. bear with us always to immortalize in this quiet fields. you have my solemn vow that we will be here every day, every year, every future generation, to honor those heroes, your husband and wife, your mothers and fathers, your sons and daughters, to tell their stories, to make sure that america and the world never forgets. we would ask that everyone remain in their space while our dignitaries walked down the

front steps. for the families, the memorial wall is yours for the next half- hour. yours alone. thank you for coming. [applause] ♪

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[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] [captioning performed by national captioning institute]

>> some of the goodbyes as the vice president joe biden is gathered in shanksville, pa., commemorating the memory of those in flight 93. tomorrow morning, we will have more with live coverage from new york, starting at 8:30 a.m. eastern, and the pentagon, started at 9:00, and back here, in shanksville, pa., on c-span

3930. -- c-span 3 at 9:30. >> president obama and first lady michele obama visiting arlington national cemetery earlier, were members of the military killed in the wars in iraq and afghanistan are very, and also talking with the family visiting there. here is a look.

>> the president and the first lady visited the graves of those killed in iraq and afghanistan. the two wars. more, now on the 10th anniversary of the september election attacks with former vice-president dick cheney, who describes his experiences that they, the bush era surveillance and interrogation program, and the iraq war. this is a little over an hour. an hour and 10 minutes.

>> good morning, everybody. welcome to the american >> let me remind everyone m on vibrate. and ask everybody when the session ends, to please remit -- please remain seated in order to allow our speakers to leave the room. a final housekeeping note, booksellers are available with the book in the reception after the d ofhe event. when aei president arthur brooks, who unfortunately could not be here, invited vice president cheney to join us today, it was with a view to remembering get tax of -- remembering the attacks of the 9/11, 10 years later, and considering some of the lessons learned and those that were not. since that day, the person to -- the first thing to recall about 9/11 and about the long war that we are sti fighting is the many who gave their ves.

the families who sacrificed loved ones and the awful loss. first and foremost, now is the time to remember those many brave americans who died at home, are fighting men and women -- our fighting men and women w risked everything so that we can live inreedom and are -- our invaluable allies from two big countries to name who share our cause. as some of you know, vice- president cheney recently published a memoir written with his daughter, liz cheney. we understand it will debut at no. 1 on the new york times best-seller list. [applause] today he joins us with best- selling author steve ahyes for -- hayes conversation about that attack on our nation, abo decisions made since then, and

some reflections on an amazing life and politics, and pretty ch whatever else he and steve tisch -- steve choose to talk about in the hour they have. in the time remaining after that conversation, we will have a question and answer session moderated by steve. dick cheney is a member of our board of trustees. we are so glad to have them as part of our aei family, and we thank them and all of you for joining us here today. [applause] >> thank you. i will not interrupt. >> remember you are a reporter, steve. >> that's right. >> i just wanted to say a word and i will turn it over to mr. hayes. the book i wrote is a memoir.

it covers all 70 years of my life, the early years are short. there was not a lot of good stuff to write about during that time, but the last half of the books fuses on the bush- cheney administration and my years as vice president. the book opens in the prologue with a recounting of events as i saw them on 9/11. much of that last half of the book deals with what we had to do during the course of our subsequent 7.5 years in order to keep the country say, some of the controversies we were involved in on things ke the terror surveillance program, intense interrogation, and so forth. a large part of the book is relevant with respect to 9/11 and the aftermath, although i don't want to mislead anybody.

there is a lot of other subjects as well, going back to the fact that there have been five republican administrations since i was in power. -- since eisenhower. i worked with four of them and work closely with the fifth. i am going to turn it over to steve. >> just give you an idea of what i thought i would try to do this morning, i am going to start some questions about 9/11 specifically and push you i particular about your personal views on these things, because i know you like to put yourself on a couch. public self reflection. [laughter]

then i am going to go and talk about a number of different way in which the policies that emanated from 9/11 that you helped drive, and try to fill in some gaps. i have spent a lot of time looking at the interviews you have done since the bookame out. some questions that i have remaining for you. i think that is how i would like to preed and then we will throw it open to everybody for some additional questions that will probably be much better than mine. i thought the first place we would start is on the morning of 9/11. i would be interested t know when you first knew we were under attack, not when you first heard about it, but when did you know we were under attack, and what were your very first thoughts at that moment? >> i was in my oice in the west wing, working with my speech writer and my secretary called in and reported that a plane had struck the world trade center in new york. we turn on the television and

this was after the first plane had gonin, but before anything else that happened. the immediate reaction was, how is this possible? are really weird accident. perfect for clear weather, there was no way to account for it, and then as we watched and we saw the other plane hit. that immediately triggered the notion that this had to be a terrorist attack. you could not have two airliners flying into the world trade center within minutes of each other and not have it be anything but a terrorist attack. shortly after that, i talked to the president down in florida, and we talked about a statement he was getting ready to issue, whether or not it was proper to talk about terrorism within that context of that statement, and we both agreed it definitely was. i think the words he usedas probably a terrorist attack on

the united states. within a relatively short time, as people began to gather in my office, secretary rice and the national security adviser was there, scooter libby. we probably had seven or eight people in the room, and l of audden the door burst open and my lead secret service agent came in and came over to the desk where i was sitting. he said sir, we have to leave immediately. it was not le, please come with me. he said we have to leave immediately, put one hand on the back of my belt and one hand on my shoulder and literally propelled me out of my office. i d not have the option of not going anywhere. [laughter] the reason he had done that, he explained to me as he was taking me down to the presidential emergency

operations center under the white house was that he had received a report over the secret service radio net that there was a hijacked aircraft out at dulles headed towards crown at 500 miles an hour, crowbeing the code word for the white house. thaturned out to be american 77, which came in anmade a circle and then went into the pentagon. at that point, i was down part way and i immediately use the telephone that was there to place another call to the president. that was our second or third call that morning. to let him know that washington was under attack as well as new york, and the secret service had songly recommended that he not come back. i also recommended tt he not come back, believing it was very important for us to stay

apart so that we did not become a riper target. we did not know at that stage was happening. he did not like that at all, for understandable reasons, but he agreed to it. i think he saw the wisdom of it. u.s. what our reaction was. -- you asked what our reaction was. >> i went from that spot after i talked to the president, and i was presented by the secretary of transportation with a list of six aircraft that they believed had been hijacked -- jacked at that point. that actually had the flight numbers on them. of course it was only for, but for a while we thought it was six. there were to back major drivers -- two major drivers in terms of what i thought about

that morning and as we work through the crisis that way. number one was we had to get all the planes down out of the sky so we could isolate whatever had been hijacked and account for all the aircraft, including the list we had of the ones we thought had been hijacked and that point we had accounted for three of them. two in new york and one at the pentagon. that was a major part of the effort. the other thing that was very important that i focused on was the continuity of government. some of you are probably familiar with over the years, especially during the cold war, we had developed programs and procedures for preserving the continuity of government in the event of an all-out global conflict with the soviet union. that was always the scenario, and we had actually exercise that system on many occasions. it focused on having ways and taking steps to ensure that somebody in the line of

succession survive whatever kind of attack we were under, so that when the dust settled, we would have a president and a govement able to function. that is what we refer to is continuity of government. that day i took the form basically of recommending that the president and i not bunch up. it was very important for us to stay separated. speaker hastert was out at andrews air force base for his security detail had relocated him, and we arranged for him to be moved from there to a secure,nd this goes location -- undisclosed location, because he was next in line for the presidency. if something happened to the president and me, that he would be able to take over as president. those were the two major concerns that occupied most of our time, one being getting all the airplanes down out of the

sky, and guaranteeing there would be someone in the line of succession in a position to take over. >> speaking of your undisclosed location, much of the time when the media was reporting that you were in a secure, undisclosed lotion, you were actually at camp david, and that is where you went the evening of september 11. i remember having a nversation with you much later in which you describe what that was like, being at camp david late that evening. the way you describe it to me was that the family gathered around a television -- use that -- you sat basically in silence for a couple of hours, watching reruns of the planes hitting the towers and of the horror that day. what was that like, how long did you do that, and what were you thinking at that point? >> it was after the president had returned, we had national security council meeting and he addressed the nation. when we finished that,lynn and i got on a helicopter on the

south lawn and were flown to camp david. it is the only time i have ever taken off and a helicopter on the south lawn without being with the president. i have done a lot over the years. you don't fly off the south lawn except in extraordinary circumstances. when we got to camp david, they took us to the aspen lodge, which is the presidential lot of >> the secret service was obviously concerned about the possibility of other attacks, and aspin was the most secure facility at camp david, so we spent a couple of days there at aspen lodge. we sat in the living room, watched the television. i was accompanied by my wife and

daughter. my daughter mary was out of the country. i can remember sitting there, focus like people were all over the country, watching the towers come down and the fires at the pentagon and so forth. i began to think about what we needed to do by way of policy, what steps we might take in order to deal with this new situation, and the thought that came to mind were first and foremost that this was not just a terrorist attack. we have had a lot of terrorist attacks over the years. we would go out and find the bad guys, arrest them, put them on trial and lock them up. this was an act of war. we had 3000 dead americans in a matter of minutes that morning

and we need to treat it as an act of war. that meant obviously you marshall all the resources of the federal government to be able to deal with and prevent a follow-on attack and deal with those who were responsible for what had happened. we had a pretty good afternoon -- we had a pretty good idea the afternoon of the attack that this was al qaeda related. it was not a big mystery about who was behind. by then we had pretty much focused in on osama bin laden but there was a not -- there was a lot we did not know about al qaeda.

now we have heard so much about it for 10 years, there is a bit of a temptation to think we know everything there is to know about al qaeda, but the day of the attack, this was a group of terrorists, but there were a lot of key questions we could not answer. we did not know how big they were, who was finance in them, where all of operating. there was a lot we need to learn. that drove our search for intelligence that generated some of the policies that we put in place. as i recall, i sat and made a series of notes of legal tablet that night as i thought about what we were faced with and how we might begin to deal with it. i went over in my own mind what we need to be doing. ultimately we all met up at camp david that weekend. the attack was on tuesday, and by friday night we had pretty well gathered up at camp david and spent saturday and sunday up there with the president's and began to pull together what ultimately emerged as our strategy for the global war on

terror. >> in the days after the attacks, we saw various public officials in very public displays of emotion. we saw president bush almost come to tears in the oval office. we heard about condoleezza rice going back to the watergate in in breaking down because of the emotional toll this was taking. >> i remember coming back from new york, driving across the roosevelts bridge and hearing "america the beautiful" and i broke down crying. did you ever have a moment like that? >> not really. [laughter] >> you understand that people will find that peculiar. >> well, my wife and daughter were with me that evening. lynn was with me all day.

she had been downtown that morning when the attacks started and the secret service had brought her over to the west wing. she really sat beside me throughout the day. she would probably be the best person to comment on what my mental attitude was. i was focused very much on what we had to do. i was thinking in terms of what this met with respect to policy and our military forces and what the targets were out there we might go after and how we might go after them, and so forth. what kind of intelligence we would need to cope with this. that is what i recall. it was not that it was not a deeply moving event, it clearly was, but the other thing that influenced me from a personal standpoint was that i had spent a good deal of time over the years, continuity of government program, and i had been through exercises where the nature of

the attack on the u.s., in excess of what we actually faced, with hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions killed. i had the benefit of having gone through those exercises over the years and the training just sort of kick then in terms of thinking about what we had to do that morning and the next day. >> let's get to those policies. specifically, let's talk about two that everyone thinks of as the most controversial. can you describe -- i think there is a general sense among the public that you sort of brainstormed these ideas. you came up with them, they were your ideas. you had been the most fierce public advocate of them. can you describe how the terrorist surveillance program came to be?

>> sure. it is important to keep in mind, they were initiated at different times. the terrace surveillance program is something we moved to within days of overtime after 9/11. the enhanced interrogation techniques really came in a year or two later when we were in the business by then of capturing people like khalid sheikh mohammed. it was the capture of certain kinds of individuals that led us to the point where we needed enhanced interrogation. but coming back to the basic question of the terror surveillance program, the origin of the program and relief from mike hayden and his people at the national security agency, and george tenant was involved as well.

there had been a conversation between the two of them within a couple of days of 9/11. as i recall, the two of them had talked, and george mentioned it to me, the basic question being, are there additional things we can do with our capacity to read the mail that would help us deal with the situation we then face. that led to a meeting in my office, as i recall, where mike cavemen, then general hayden, a later the head of the cia, and george tenet. the three of us talked, and there were things that nsa thought they could do if they had additional authority. i took that proposal basically

and went to see the president and sat down and went through it with him. he signed up to it, but with a caveat. he wanted to make certain that he personally approved it each step of the way and that they had to come back in for approval on a regular basis. what emerged out of that was a significantly enhanced capacity for us to be able to intercept communications originating outside the united states, possibly from what we referred to as a dirty number he has a computer or rolodex or whatever it is with a group of numbers on it, and you wanted to know who he was talking to in the united states, for example. the safeguards we built into it at the direction of the

president involved the fact that every 30 or 45 days -- it varied from time to time -- i think the secretary of defense, the director of the cia and nsa all had to sign off on continuing the program. it did not get renewed automatically. they all had a say in writing to the president if they thought we should continue the program from the standpoint of the nation's security, etc. the attorney-general had to sign off on it. all of that then went to the president. the president, once he had received input from his senior advisers, he would sign off and extend the program for another 30 or 45 days. that is the way we operate it for years.

i briefed key members of congress. i had the chairman and ranking member of the house and senate intelligence committees come down every couple of months to my office, and mike hayden would come in and then george tenet. we would brief the key for members of congress who had jurisdiction in this area over what we were doing and what kind of result that was producing, so they were wired in from the beginning. later on, some controversy arose inside the program with the justice department. we expanded that group of four into nine. we added the speaker, majority and minority leaders of the house and senate and had all of them in and briefed them as well. then i went around at that point and ask them all at that point -- nancy pelosi within the

group, jay rockefeller on the democratic side. i ask them if they thought we should continue the program, and they said absolutely. then i said, do you think we ought to go back to the congress and get additional legislative authority to continue to operate the way we are operating? they said absolutely not, and they were unanimous on both points. they were concerned that if we went up and ask confident -- ask congress for a vote on the subject, the fact that we were doing it would leak and we would in effect be telling the enemy how we were reading their mail. there was some controversy later on internally that the president dealt with, but i am convinced it was a key part of our success in terms of preventing further attacks against the united states. i think we saved thousands of

lives by what we are doing. i think is one of the greatest success stories, especially with respect to nsa and how they put the program together and developed the capability, one of the great success stories of american intelligence, and maybe some day it will all be told. >> he made the same argument about enhanced interrogation. let's go beyond that part of the debate and talk about the effects of enhanced interrogations' and the perceptions around the world that it is torture, that the things we did amounted to torture, and the sense that maybe a moral position of the united states has eroded because of the things that we did here in this country. how do you respond to those arguments? >> is that a question, or an invitation to argue? >> i have always offered you an invitation to argue. there are crazy critiques and then there are more paul volcker

critiques. i think that is a more thoughtful critique. >> i do not. i am persuaded that the way we went about seeking the authority to be able to extract more intelligence from a handful of individuals -- we are talking not about your rank-and- file enemy troop. this does not involve the military. this does not involve the department of defense. this is program that was authorized by the president's, by the national security council, carried out with all kinds of safeguards by the central intelligence agency. we had a case where we had a handful of individuals who clearly had knowledge of what was in the works from the standpoint of al qaeda, what

they hoped to be able to do, how they function, who the key members were. it was people like khalid sheikh mohammed. the notion that somehow the united states was wobbly torturing anybody is not true, and anybody who takes the time to look at the program i think will come to the same conclusion. obviously there are people out there who differ with respect to that perspective, but when we get into the whole area, and one of the most controversial techniques was waterboarding. there was a protester this morning who commented on waterboarding. three people work waterboard, not dozens, not hundreds. 3, and the one who was subjected most often to that was khalid sheikh mohammed, and it produced phenomenal results.

there are reports that the intelligence community did -- they were classified marquest and are now available on the internet. they talked about the quality of information we got. we were talking about only a handful of people who were indeed part of the al qaeda organization, and khalid sheikh mohammed was not only the man who we then had reason to believe, correctly, had be headed daniel pearl, but also claim credit for being the architect of 9/11 that killed 3000 americans that morning. another key point that needs to be made was that the techniques

that we used were all previously used on american military personnel. not all of them, but all of them had been used in training for a lot about our own specialists in the military area. so there was not any technique that we used on any of private individuals that had not been used on our own troops first. just to give you some idea of whether or not we were! torturin -- whether or not we weren't torturing the people with captured. george tenant came in and talk to meet and talk to a couple of other people did basically, he wanted to know how far they could go in terms of interrogation of these individuals that recaptured.

he needed two kinds of sign off. one was from the president and the second was the grueling from the justice department as to where that line was that you did not cross. we saw and obtained both of those. the president signed up to it as did the other members of the national security council. some of my colleagues may have forgotten that, but in fact, everybody who was a member of the national security council was informed about the essence of the program and signed up ticket, so you had the proper governmental authorities agreed this was necessary and worth while. we had the key people in the justice department's, people like john yu who has been severely harassed big they were legal opinions from the justice

department that said this is ok and inappropriate and gave us very clear guidance that we could follow. the folks out at the agency insisted on that kind of guidance before they were willing to go forward. one of the things i found most objectionable with respect to the obama administration when they came men was the initial decision by the president and attorney general holder that they were going to investigate and prosecute the people in the intelligence community who had carried out this interrogation program at our direction. i thought that was a terrible precedent to set, the president of the united states had signed up to it. the justice department had

signed up to it. these guys had gone out that our direction and used this authority to collect intelligence that we badly needed to have, and the next thing you know you get a change in administrations and the new crowd coming in says we are going to prosecute those guys who were responsible for carrying out these policies. i came here at one point about two years ago and spoke on the subject. i will say the administration appears to have reversed course. although the activities were investigated by lawyers in the justice department at the tail end of the bush administration. it had all been looked at before to make sure it was copacetic. the obama administration did finally, and i hope the matter is now resolved, back off, and those people that frankly i think did not deserve to be prosecuted.

i think they should be decorated for the work they did for us that saved many, many lives. >> let's john for from that speech of may, 2009, which was in part a critique of penetration on those things you mentioned. it was also a warning, by stepping back from the kinds of things that your administration had done, you were in effect saying we are choosing to put ourselves at greater risk. and yet here we are, some 2.5 years later. we had of course the attack at fort hood, but in spite of all the things you warned against, we have not been attacked again. osama bin laden has been killed. we have had a series of successes on al qaeda central in afghanistan and pakistan

that has by most accounts been decimated, or pretty thoroughly taken apart. were you wrong when you made those warnings in 2009? >> i don't think so, steve. i would argue that the policies we put in place back in those days that were available to us and were utilized over time, and i have seen some comment to this effect from current officials of the government', helped produce the intelligence that allowed us to get osama bin laden. it was out of the enhance interrogation techniques that some of the leaves came that ultimately produced the results, and president obama was able to send in seal team 6 to kill bin laden.

i think it has been a continuum between administrations, focused on the career folks in the intelligence community and in the special ops community in the military that have worked it over time. it was not just that the new administration came in and all of a sudden we got bin laden. they had the benefit of all the work that had been done. >> but at the same time, there are no more enhanced interrogations'. we are broadcasting to al qaeda and others exactly how we will interrogate them. all of these things that you and others have warned against, and yet here we are, we have not been attacked again. we have had these major successes. when the bush administration came to an end, i remember you making the argument that you should be judged by the fact in large part that we had not been attacked again, that was a sign of success. why can we not use that same standard for the obama

administration and say the things they are doing have been successful? >> i guess i would make the case that they have been successful in part because of the capabilities we left them with, the intelligence we left them with because of what we learn from men like khalid sheikh mohammed. i think it is a mistake, for example, not to have an enhanced interrogation program available now. the president, when he canceled our intense interrogation program, said they were going to set up their own for high-value detainees, but as best i can tell, i don't think they ever have. i don't know what they would do today if they captured the equivalent of khalid sheikh mohammed, probably read him his miranda rights. that is not, in my mind -- it is a mistake for us to give up those capabilities. i hope there are no more attacks, but even as we meet here today, everybody drove to work with their car radio on

this morning, heard that there is a threat of sufficient credibility, at least at this stage, that the authorities are saying that this is unconfirmed, but we are taking it very seriously. i do think it was a mistake for them not to stay as actively and aggressively involved. -- >> crowd hammer has written a brilliant piece on the notion that somehow we overreacted. i don't think we did. i think we get exactly what we had to do, and the results speak for themselves. >> you often made the case that iraq was a central front in the war on terror. looking back on iraq, one of the things that people have focused on, in reading your book and the reviews of your book, is that that you don't think a lot of mistakes were made, that there

is not much you would change about the way that the iraq war was conducted. i noticed in my reading of the book that in the criticism of what the state department did, you often focused on secretary powell and later secretary rice. but in the criticism of what the pentagon did, you focused on two generals and not your friend and mentor, don rumsfeld. why is that? >> i thought i wrote a pretty good book. [laughter] i thought it was relatively balanced. i chose not to dwell at length on what transpired in the immediate aftermath of our going into iraq. there have been a lot of books written about the policy in terms of setting up a new

government in iraq. jerry brimmer has written one. several other books have been written. rumsfeld has written pretty extensively about it. i basically took the approach that i could focus on a few things. what i really wanted to focus on was the surge and the counterinsurgency doctrine that accompanied the surge that we put in place at the beginning of 2007. so there is a lot written about that in my book, but i did not spend a lot of time going back over what the state department did with respect to managing the situation in iraq, or what the pentagon did outside normal military activities to >> but i have talked to people on your staff and elsewhere who said that you were asking questions about the u.s. military strategy in iraq during those years that

things obviously were not going well. asking tough questions. what is our strategy? do we know how to win? what are we doing the same thing? is the training effective? i guess i am interested, on a personal level. when did you start asking those questions? >> on a personal level, at some point we will sit down and talk about it. [laughter] >> i think now is as good a time as any. >> you have to make choices. what we wrote about, little less than 600 pages, and as i pointed out in my earlier remarks, i had material for four or five books. what i chose was to focus on the highlights, as i saw them, and what i thought was vital in that regard. obviously i wrote it from my

perspective in terms of what i saw and what i believed. i exercised a certain amount discretion. i did not put down everything i know about what transpired in a whole range of different areas. >> will that be in the second volume? >> i don't know, that depends on how this one does. there are things i did not talk about, not just on iraq, but throughout my 40-year career. when you are chief of staff to the president of the united states, there are things you are involved in where he expects discretion and deserves it. i did not write about those things. that is generally true of lots of things i had connection with. i think it is fair to say in

both cases, there are confidences they had in me in certain issues, and i have honored those and i always will. >> and second term foreign policy, you write in the book what a bit in a chapter that you called "setback" about north korea, iran, nonproliferation issues. you suggested various points in the chapter that the bush administration lost its way, had essentially been away from the bush doctrine that was so well established in the first term. i wonder if you think president bush himself lost some nerve. >> i did not say that in my book. >> that is why i am asking you now. >> i did write a chapter called "set back" and i thought it was important because it was a source of frustration for me.

it also demonstrated pretty clearly that i did not win all the arguments. i thought that was important to convey that. this was an area that had to do with north korea's nuclear aspirations and activities, building a nuclear reactor for the syrians that would allow them ultimately to produce nuclear weapons and so forth. it was one where there were significant differences inside the administration. i think many of those were known, but part of my interest was in putting down the history of that period. we were not the first administration that had trouble figuring out how you get the north koreans not to go nuclear. the clinton administration faced similar problems. i think the obama administration will have similar problems as well, but i thought was important to put down the record

of how we dealt with that. in the final analysis, the president made the decision. he had to make choices. that is why he got the big bucks and lived in the big house. it is the responsibility of the president of the united states. obviously he did not always agree with my advice, and in this particular case, he opted pretty much for the state department view of how we should proceed, rather than what i was recommending. it is not the first time i have lost an argument with the president. >> do you think we are less safe because of those decisions? >> well, i think this is the way to put it. i gave an interview before 9/11, in april or may of 2001. we had only been in office a couple of months.

i think it was the new yorker, where i cited as the biggest threat the nation faced the possibility of a terrorist organization acquiring weapons of mass destruction. that i believed deeply, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, and i think it is important on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 to remind ourselves that that threat is still out there, still very great. one of the things i thought we did well, up to a point, was when we went in and we took down saddam hussein. obviously, we eliminated one of the guys who had been a prime source of weapons of mass destruction previously. he clearly was a potential

proliferators. we got rid of saddam hussein as a threat. we went and captured saddam, muammar gaddafi fell. he had centrifuges for enriching uranium. he had uranium feedstock. he had been the he surrendered all of those and they are now in our possession, so we took him out of the nuclear business pretty good, given what has happened since in libya. it would not have been good to have the difficulties that had over there if muammar gaddafi had still been in office. we took down the mastermind of the pakistani nuclear program. then he went into business for himself in a black market

operation, building nuclear materials. his biggest customer was libya, but he also was dealing with north korea and to some extent with iraq. they were all put out of business from the standpoint of having to worry about them producing and or proliferating, using those materials. the ones we did not get a handle on was north korea, and the chapter you referred to is basically the story of how we did not deal effectively with the north korean threats. keeping score, three out of four is not bad. the problem is, that threat is very real. north korea is especially real, because they have not tested two weapons. we got the redheaded with respect to their providing a plutonium reactor to one of the

worst terror sponsored regimes on the face of the earth, syria. fortunately, the israelis took that out, so we did not have to worry about that anymore, but the north koreans clearly establish that they will proliferate nuclear materials to terrorist sponsoring regimes, and the problems we are faced with is still very much there. we do not yet have a handle on north korea. the other problem is still iran, and we have not even talked about that. we have to be front and center as well as the north koreans in terms of our concerns about that threat. i do believe still today as we meet that that is the most dangerous threat the united states bases reduc-- faces. then nuclear weapons will no

longer be a deterrent, that will be an incentive. >> maybe we will take of a few questions. when you are calling on, wait for the microphone, give your name and affiliation and ask a question, rather than making a long statement. >> were you surprised when you found out [unintelligible] in terms of talking about the cooperation between both countries? did you have any fear that the pakistani authorities had been hiding something from the bush administration? >> i never had reason to believe that president musharraf was involved in anything like that. i think it was a general view that bin laden was in remote -- some remote section of pakistan.

what was startling was to find he was living where he was. he was not hiding in a cave someplace. there was a lot of imagery of how he had gone underground figure to flee. but in my dealings with president musharraf, and i dealt with him quite a bit, i had no reason to question his commitment to the work he was doing with us to help us deal with the threat that emerge from pakistan. i think he came to believe that al qaeda-types threatened him personally as well as his regime as much as it did the united states. i think that was true. there were two or three attempts on his life in a matter of weeks by al qaeda or al qaeda affiliated organizations while

he was still president. >> right down here in the front. >> my name is jason stern i am a graduate student at george washington university. i think is fair to say that no matter who is in the white house, the arab springwood present a challenge to uphold our values. how well has the obama administration responded to the arab spring and how the bush administration have responded if they were still in power? >> it is difficult to judge the quality of the current effort without having to speculate about what is going to come out at the border and of the process. have answers to

a couple of key questions. i don't know who is going to be in charge when the dust settles and new governments are established, whether these regimes -- how they will look at the u.s., what kind of relationships we are going to have. in some cases, some of the regimes have been replaced, like president mubarak in egypt, for example. they have been good friends and allies of the united states for years. we work closely together with them in the first gulf war, for example preview or evaluating the outcome in terms of u.s. interests, i think there is a lot we don't yet know about the outcome. in terms of whether or not we should be supportive, i think that it is important for us to

continue to express our support of certain values that we believe people ought to have the opportunity to live by. we believe in freedom and democracy, and i think that needs to come through. but again, you have to come back and be cautious here. i think in terms of are we promoting that process with respect to islamic fundamentalists, to groups or organizations that may have won election and then shut down the electoral process. we don't know yet. i think it is difficult to make a final judgment until we see how some of those things develop. >> should the united states be taking more out front role in promoting the arab spring? >> i am cautious, steve, partly

because there are things we don't know, but also i think is important for us to be a little cautious about lumping them all together. my experience over the years with that part of the world, it is important to remember these are different countries. in some cases there are linguistic differences. in some cases there are religious differences, splits between shia and sunni. in some cases their governments that are probably viewed as legitimate in the eyes of the government. syria comes to mind where you have or brutal dictator in charge, using violence to try to preserve his hold on power, and most of us could agree that assad ought to go.

when you talk about the arab spring, i think i know what that means, and i think generally it has been welcomed as a fundamental change in reform of the region, but i do think it is important to keep in mind as we evaluate these developments that each and every one of these countries is different and needs to be dealt with accordingly. >> next question. over there in the front. >> i have a question. when do we know we have one of the global war on terror? -- when do we know we have won the global war on terror? >> it is not what we think of as a conventional war, where we

get the battleship missouri and steam into tokyo harbor and get everyone to sign a document saying they will quit. that is not going to happen. i think there is evidence out there that we are making significant progress. i think getting osama bin laden was very important and very useful. i think also it may be the kind of thing that just gradually fades over time. but i don't think there is likely to be a kind of aha moment where you say there, it is done. >> we will take a couple more. >> if i could take you back to your earlier comments about the middle east and bring it back in

history, the great controversy at the close of the bush 41 administration was the assertion that had we continue the march, there might have been a different outcome. what do you think that outcome would have been had his advice it been pursued? how would it have changed the course of events? >> he was talking about when he and i were in charge of the pentagon. i was the secretary and he was the comptroller. as i think back on that, i am careful here not to challenge my colleagues from that era because i think they all did good work. my recollection of the close of the gulf war was there was unanimity on the part of the president's, of his senior

civilian and military advisers, that we gathered around the desk in the oval office. we had the secure line open to general schwarzkopf. you could look back on that later and say we should have done this or we should not have let them have helicopters. there were things we did not know at the time. but there was the general sense that we had done what we set out to do. we said we were going to liberate kuwait. that is what we told the coalition. that is what we told our troops we were going to do, and i promised when i had gone over there initially to get permission to put u.s. forces into saudi, i also promised them as soon as we completed the mission, we would go home. we were not looking for permanent bases in saudi arabia.

so there was a general sense. should we have got all the way to baghdad then? circumstances were pretty dramatically different 10 years later, after we had the events of 9/11, after we had seen saddam by late 16 at 17 un security council resolutions and choose to use weapons of mass destruction against his own people. the world had shifted 10 years later, and if we had gone in -- if there was a way -- one thing i can think of our like to have changed, it would have been to have saddam at the table so signing -- signing a surrender document. one of the things that emerged out of the way it was dealt with was, he was very creative and

did not have any qualms about misrepresenting the situation, but for years afterwards, he peddled himself as somebody who had successfully defied the great satan, the united states of america. after all we had done to him, he was still standing. it was the fact that he was still standing that he used to demonstrate our validate the notion that he had one. of course, he had not, but he was able to peddle that in that part of the world. i could think of one thing i would like to think differently, it would not have been going to baghdad at that point, it would have been to have him sit his fanny down in the chair and signed the surrender document.

>> i serve in iraq for five years as a united nations spokesman, and i can tell you that iraq is a bit disaster zone with very little chance to recover for decades to come. the united states is about to cut and run. in retrospect, was a mistake to hit iraq? >> i think it would be a mistake to cut and run. i don't think we should turn our back on iraq at this stage and the efforts that we have mounted their over the years. i think it is very important for us to complete the mission, and my own personal view is that there is a danger here to rush for the exits under the current administration, and that would be really unfortunate. >> one more quick one.

>> president bush in his memoir, which does not purport to cover his whole administration, does not really mentioned iraq from spring of 2003 to spring of 2006. what do you say to the criticism that the president was insufficiently monitoring his generals and not be listening early enough, or as early as desirable, something on the order of the surge strategy which was ultimately developed at the end of 2006 and early 2007? could that have been done earlier? >> i am inclined -- first of all, what i remember is that the president was heavily engaged during that time. he was not by any means ignoring what was going on in the operations in iraq. we had fairly regular sessions

where he would get on the secure hookup to baghdad, not only with our own senior people but also with senior iraqis. there is a picture i put in my book of rumsfeld and rice and i up at camp david. it does not show the president, because he is on the other end in baghdad with a secure hookup. he has gone into baghdad and is over there visiting and having an important session with then prime minister lee ki --maliki. i would challenge that he was not engaged. >> one last question, bringing this back to 9/11. you made the case that 9/11

change the government, and i think that is obvious to everyone. in many respects, it changed the country and clearly change the world. did it change you? >> did 911 change me? me int think it changed the sense that some have suggested. i have friends out there, or used to be friends that say i knew the cheney when he was a nice guy, when he was warm and fuzzy. the other night i did jay leno. i don't know if anyone here saw it. the program begins with jay reading his guest for that evening. he is wearing blue jeans and did not have his suit on yet. he asked me if i am going to

wear the suit that is there on a hanger on the show that night. that point, i open the door and come out of the dressing room and i am dressed as darth vader. he was part of the joke, but it did not help my image. i suppose i cannot say it did not change me. it is part of my life, and it was an important milestone for all of us. obviously i spent the next seven and a half years working with the president and our colleagues to try to make absolutely certain that that never happen again on our watch. that meant we had to take steps and to enact policies that would guarantee the safety and security of the american people.

i see it as here is the problem, this is what we are going to do about it, and then we did. the notion of change mainly came to focus in my own mind to say i thought before about this problem of a new 9/11 style terrorist attack with deadlier weapons, something other than box cutters and airline tickets, but the events of 9/11 really brought that home. i think it heightened my concern. that would be a fair way to put it, about the potentially devastating consequences. we had anthrax attacks at the same time. it turned out those were domestically initiated. i remember being in new york month after 9/11 and as we

landed that day, to go down to the wall or where i was to be speaker for the evening, we received word there had been a botulism attack at the white house. suggesting the president and i had been involved in a botulism attack, which was deadly. we did not know for several hours whether not that was true. it turned out to be a false reading, fortunately. so there was a level of heightened concern in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that we had to deal with. it was like on 9/11 you get a report there are six planes hijacked and it turns out there were only four. a report there was a car bomb at the state department. turned out there was not a car bomb at the state department. it turned out there was a report of a plane that had gone down on the ohio-west virginia border.

that was american 77 that suddenly dropped off the radar and hit the pentagon. there was a report of a plane down in pennsylvania. turned out that was true, it was united 93. as we went through that process in the immediate aftermath, as we were putting together policies and so forth, there is no question but what there was a significantly elevated level of concern. i felt that part of my job was to make certain that we never again got hit the way we did on 9/11. >> with that, i would like to thank mr. vice-president and thank the american enterprise institute for hosting. [applause]

>> tomorrow will mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by showing portions of the oral histories compiled by our american history tv staff. we'll also take calls from viewers reflecting on the impact of the day in their lives. "washington journal," live at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. next, a discussion on how the media covered the 9/11 attacks with former news anchors charles gibson, dan rather and brit hume. they commemorate the 10th anniversary of the september 11 attacks. this is, hosted by george washington university, harvard university, and the national press club. this is about an hour. [applause]

>> hello, and welcome to the national press club and to another edition of "the kalb report." a pole from the pew research center says that 97% of american people can tell you where they were and what they were doing when they first heard of the september 11 terrorist attacks on the united states. people my age, of a certain vintage, can even remember it december 7, 1941, the day that the japanese attacked pearl harbor. the assassination of president john f. kennedy is another one of those clear, critical moments in american history. it is often said that 9/11 changed everything. maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it changed a lot.

was a defining moment in american history. most of you learn about 9/11 from television, radio, or perhaps a telephone call alerting you to the fact that something dreadful had just happened in new york's, and to turn on your tv set. when you get, you probably saw an anchor importing some of the information and telling you what has been happening. in a moment of national crisis or importance, the anchor helps knit the country together, creating a moment of shared experience. dan rather once said the one who sourced through this hurricane of fact, rumor, misinformation, rumors, and new reports, a huge responsibility. we all accept that. tonight, we meet a number of the anchors who held and needed the

country together on 9/11 and helped introduce us to the world of global terrorism. to my right, a geographical distinction, charlie gibson, who returned in 1999 to share anchoring responsibilities with diane sawyer. he was on the air when the planes flew into the twin towers. to my left, franke sesno, who ws then washington bureau chief for cnn. on 9/11, he was looking out at the pentagon and seeing what he called the gigantic black billowing clouds of smoke. a plane had just crashed into the pentagon. to my immediate right, brit hume, now a senior political

analyst for fox news. he has been in the business 43 years. 1 9/11, he was responsible for fox news coverage in washington on air. he spoke about the capital being evacuated, warplanes patrolling the skies, warships dispatched towards the potomac river. washington, he said, or not even the president of the united states was considered safe. and to my immediate left, my old colleague, dan rather, for 44 years with cbs. on 9/11, he was on air 16 hours in a row, the first of four days of such a saturation coverage, at one point band sang this is so unbelievable, out we have to -- and said that that is so unbelievable we have to double and triple checked that.

are you absolutely sure that a second plane just hit? brit hume, let me start with you, when did you first hear about the attacks of the ninth was 11? >> i was sitting in a restaurant on the ground floor of the fox news building, the hall of states. i was having breakfast with a washington reporter who was looking to come to fox to work. there is a television set in there and the news came over the tv set. we got up from the table and went over and watched. in the early going, it was thought possible this was an accident. then when the second plane hit, we knew. before that, they had called me from upstairs and said you have to get up here, you have to get in the anchor chair. that was before the pentagon. we did not know whether washington would be a major center of news on this or not. >> frank, same questions, where

were you, what was your first reaction? that i was with my wife and son. my son was supposed to have minor surgery at the time and i was in the waiting room and was a television on. same thing, saw the picture, the first plane went in, sunny sky, clear blue, accident? then the second airplane went and and i realized something terrible is happening. the most horrible thing was as i drove in, i was coming in from the virginia suburbs of the 14th street bridge. i've been listening to the radio and i was on the phone with the bureau of the way, some talk of moving some of our reporters to new york. i said, no, not yet, let's sit tight for a bit. i came up on the 14th street bridge, and as i did, i see this black smoke. it was coming out of the pentagon.

i did not actually know what to think, except this is huge. i recall to this day trying to call into the bureau to explain what i had seen it. i thought about stop in my car on the bridge and getting out to report it. i realize that would be stupid to do, but my hand was trembling as i tried to dial the number. we just went from there. >> charlie gibson, you were on there when the planes attacked the world trade center. how did that work? >> the first plane hit at 8:46: 56. we were in a commercial break. we had run over on the previous estimate. "good morning america" got off the air at 8:55, and we had just a few minutes and we needed another commercial break and we were discussing what we needed

to do. the stage manager had just yelled at one minute. the producer and the control room said, something has happened at the world trade center, there is fire coming out of the side of the building. we have a wabc traffic camera poised on the building. you are on the air, go. you at that moment have to acknowledge to yourself you do not know what the hell is happening. i knew from the size of it this was not some small plane that had hit the world trade center, as occurred with the empire state building back in the 1940's, i guess. we began to fill. the pictures went to the wabc traffic camera. we knew immediately we had a good a special report, so we brought to the rest of the nation. we said, we don't know what is going on, and we were filling and talking with one of our

reporters who lived in the shadow of the world trade centers in an apartment and he called in. he heard a high wind before he heard something that the building. he was questioning whether it could be a shoulder fired missile, but it looked too big for that. >> was he saying that on there? >> he said that on air. we were writing notes, how many people work in the world trade center, we have people running trying to get information. the second plane hit at 9:00 to, and it is amazing how fast your brain works. i saw it coming to frame. my first thought was this is forest fire season in california. i thought maybe it is one of those airplanes with a fire retardant bucket, and i thought, where did he get that in the art. my second thought was it was a traffic helicopter. those thoughts went through my head, and then it hit.

it then you saw the fire come out the other side. i will forever think to myself, my reaction on the air, diahann was the first to react. she said, oh my god. i said, now we know what is going on. we are under attack. we were in the chair until peter got in place in new york. >> peter jennings. >> peter jennings. >> diane ran to get as close to the building as she could. i was told to go to 72nd street to get a boat to go up the river. we got as far as 50th street and in the police stopped us. we cannot get there. i remember going back to the studio and the president of abc news said to stand by, you how to fill in for peter because we will be on the air six, eight hours, this is big. i remember telling him, david, we will be on the air on theto 8

-- on the air 6 to 8 days. >> dan rather, you were just getting out of the shower when you heard the news. but did you do, i assume after you got dressed? [laughter] >> that is true, and just cut out of the shower and the radio was on. the people on wcbs radio were haggling what they had which was not much. cautiously. my recollection was i heard an airplane possibly has hit one of the world trade centers. but when you are a news, something like this happens, alarm bells go off in your head. frequently, alarm bells are not necessary, turn out to be unjustified, but charlie mentioned something. i thought immediately of the airplane that hit the empire

state building in the 1940's. i was a child when that happened, but even in texas, that was huge news. immediately, went on the upper seaside at -- upper east side of new york, we have a small balcony that faces south and west. i could see smoke coming out of the world trade center. i told my wife, jean, with whom i have been married 55 years, she said, i will help you get dressed. she threw me my shirt and shoes, addressed in the elevator going down. fortunately, we are on the 26th floor. [laughter] raced out of the building, to the cab. what an incredible time. 10 years later, it is hard to put my head around it, but the time at bat to the broadcast

building, but i jumped out of the cab, i could see way down on 10th avenue what looked like people already in the streets, with smoke coming out of the towers, people the streets. it almost took the hinges off the doors of the cbs broadcast center to get in. the morning news had been on the air, but they don't broadcast from the broadcast center, were all of the news programs. they have 59th and 50th ave. so they were waiting to throw to me, if you will, for the coverage. i remember, i think it is about 45 minutes, one airplane hit the first tower, another plane hit the second tower, and the pentagon was hit, the pentagon? how could that be? and then another airplane is rumored, report, definitely

hijacked, may be headed to the capital. it goes down in pennsylvania. at the first hour begins coming down and the second tower begins coming down. all of that happening, correct me if i am wrong, but in less than an hour. about 45 minutes. as soon as i got in the broadcast center, they began hooking me up to go to the anchor chair, which is a raised area in the cbs newsroom. i remember three thingsone, said a short prayer. two, the late ed morrow, the room is named for him, always reported -- repeated the word "steady." the thought it was the most heard word when he was covering great britain when it was under attack by the germans. he would say to himself steady. the third thing was to dial quickly home to my wife because

she was worried. she said it only took about 12, 15 seconds. she said, have everything covered, the kids, everything covered, do what you have to do. do it well. click. what an incredible time. there was within me a certain disbelief. we had the pictures of this happening, but this cannot be happening. there is something wrong with this story as it is developing. babies -- maybe reporter's instinct to say what is is not, but it was unfortunately the reality. >> it was an extraordinary kind of broadcasting, or something huge has happened, your in the middle of your reporting, you are not absolutely sure that what you are saying is right. yet you were aware of the

immensity of the story. what is going through your gut as a journalist? >> you have to level with audience you do not know any more than they do, we are experiencing this together. that was in my head weeks afterwards. before we went on, "good morning america" would handle the network from 6:00 in the morning until noon. we went on an hour early and we stayed on until we were off on the west coast. oon to 1:00 a.m. i remember taking 20 minutes before the show and thinking to myself, it does not really make a difference, these guests, everybody has unbelievable experiences. what matters is the tone we adopt on the air. i never thought about it before

in terms of coverage. you do not really think about totally how i will respond. i remember thinking to myself we need to be reassuring. we will get through this as a country and as individuals. as horrible as what so many people have experienced, there were 4000 airplanes in the air that day and they got four. we are stronger nation and you need to be reassuring. i went and and i said to diane, if one of us starts to cry, the other has to pick it up. we cannot do that. it is not going to be right. we need to be strong. >> brit, your view? >> i second that completely. i remember thinking at the time, the minute the second airplane had, it was clear we were under attack, then the pentagon.

then the story was enormous. and the proper meaning of that word, how we measure rep with our coverage in that? you think about whether you have the right picture on the air, whether you won the right piece of the story. you were also thinking at the time about -- i remember thinking to myself the country will not be the same again, maybe ever, after this. this changes everything. this is the biggest thing i have ever been involved in as a journalist. but i felt, as charlie did, this country will get through this. we will not be broken down by this. and we also have the need it -- there is so much information coming at you, you don't know whether there will be for airplanes or 44. you don't know any of that. but you do have the feeling that you need to be calm and reassuring.

and i tried in my tone of voice, and you said earlier, really what you saw among most news channels, all channels that had any news capacity, you were seeing the pictures. bankers were just disembodied voices on the air. but i was conscious of trying to be called, assuring, and leveling with the audience about things we knew and did not know. on the other hand, you want to pass things along. i cannot resist telling this story, give you an idea how pompous at least sometimes i can get. i had the broadcast in one ear and a telephone briefing line where reporters come in and tell us what they've got in the other ear. brian wilson was covering capitol hill and said the capitol police were evacuating the capital because the pentagon had been hit. there was an airplane coming at the potomac river at work speed

and were not sure what was and it might be heading for the capital. i reported that with all of the surrounding caveat about this is a report from the police, they do not know, it is not definite, this is what is going on. my wife, kim, who was the bureau chief at fox news comes in and says, we are moving you. i sit in the studio and fox. the capital is out the window. i started this speech about -- it is embarrassing to tell us about this is the work i saw that to do and i should be here, this is my purpose. she said, at that airplane it's the capital, we need to have the shot. -- if that airplane hits the capital, we need to have the shot. [laughter] mortified, i move to put it -- i moved. >> frank? >> in that seat, in that story,

you are not only thinking about the story but the context of the impact on the story on the united states of america, that we will survive this. you are already thinking that thought. >> i anchored several years on cnn. cnn you go on the air at pretty much the drop of a hat and did not come off hours on end. if you have to deal with information you cannot confirm. it is coming through the producer, coming through a reporter. it is what i called the language of live that you have to speak. there was no time that was more acute for the people who spoke the language of alive. this day. you have to abolish what you do not know, which is pretty much anything beyond what you could see. -- you have to the knowledge what you do not know, which is pretty much anything beyond what you could see.

it was the human emotion colliding with the journalistic duty. we had people crying. many people in our newsroom were from new york or do people at the pentagon. when the pentagon was first hit, we did not hear from our correspondent for a long time, what seemed like a long time. we did not know where the airplane had hit precisely at first. when that plan was unaccounted for, we had been talking to the faa. to do this, you have dispatchers, sources like cannot believe that track this real- time. we initially had seven airplanes, when they were all ground, that were unaccounted for. we moved the camera to the roof of our building, framed on the capitol dome, fearful that we were about to see the capitol building hit. you have all of this swirling around, and then you have to talk as if you know something,

with no commercials, no brakes, and managing the information and the emotion. i don't know about you, but we were broadcasting internationally. we were speaking to the planet. it is a remarkable, very humbling and scary thing. >> i remember that not on cbs news, but a couple days later on at the david letterman program, if i am not mistaken, you were asked about what we are going through right now, discussing. at that time, on air, the tears began to flow. can you talk about that? >> that is true. the week afterward, look, however it may seem when you are entering, you are not a robot. the same kind of emotional

sledgehammer to the heart, when the country realized what had happened, it struck me as it struck every other person in our newsroom. it is that battle, particularly right in the beginning, to suppress your own emotions. this is the mark of a pro. wants to cryn ne you out in grief, moaned with the country, and be so angry that you curse at the perpetrators, but you push that down deep inside. there is a nanosecond in your head, cannot do that, have to get focused. everything is focused. you want to get zeroed in, with the tennis players call zoned on the story. very shortly after i got to the

broadcast center, i thought this is maybe the biggest rival have in my lifetime. then thoughts of the kennedy assassination in dallas. you suppress these feelings. on air, once you get zoned, i will speak for myself, but i think this is widely shared by everybody who has been in his work, what is my role here? my role is to be an honest broker of information. that means being totally candid with the audience. this is what we know, and be certain that you know it. this is what we know, but, folks, what we don't know is so much greater than what we know. we want to remind you of that. i was on the air almost constantly, and there are no excuses, none necessary, that david letterman was coming back

on the air of the following monday. somebody on his staff called my staff and said, david once you on the air, and i agree about it. and then the time came to do it, to do letterman, christopher, that in the chair just before the broadcast. we were trying to discuss 9/11. i was trying to repeat several lines from one of the stanzas of the " america the beautiful." and everything just a surprise to me. i do not apologize for it. one does not apologize for grief. it was a delayed reaction. once i left the broadcast center and on other turf, i broke down. >> i remember seeing that. i appreciated that. >> i know in my time, thinking

back as a reporter, the kennedy assassination, which you covered, i was at the state department and, listening to radio broadcast by alan jackson, who did newscasts at that time, and he spoke about president kennedy having been shot, but he did not say killed. but in my gut i felt that he was probably dead. i knew that my bureau chief would be calling. i could not broadcast that, and i knew it. i walked around. the building around. -- i walked around the building twice. by the time i got back, i could do just about anything, but i cannot do it at that moment. my hat's off to you guys who were doing it live. charlie, the question about patriotism, individual american patriotism, with your reporter or not. the reporter is supposed to be

totally objective and detached about the story being covered, yet you said before and all of you are saying, that really was impossible. >> sure. you react as an american whose country is under attack, but you have to, as we have all alluded to, you have to stay as objective as you can be. david brinkley used to say, there is no such thing as a up to activity. there are only lesser degrees of subjectivity. say there is no such thing as objectivity, there on the lesser degrees of subjectivity. but you have to strive towards that. we all had suspicions. i was thinking about the fact my first reaction after oklahoma city was this was overseas terrorism. of course, it turned out to be domestic.

but you are quick to think this has to be in overseas act directed at the united states. but you don't know, and you have to -- i remember the morning before went on the air of the 12th, i said let's be rid of the desk. let's put a round table in the middle of the studio, and we will stay there through the broadcast. i thought that because we're basically in the same position everybody is in at home. we are sitting around the breakfast table and we're learning along with the what is going on. >> they're dependent on you to tell them what is going on. >> i know, and strangely enough, and i have thought about this and a lot cents, and maybe it is hubris on my part, but i suppose in some people there would be a tendency to think to yourself, i am not up to this. and yet i remember thinking, essentially, my entire.

burt -- my entire professional life has been in preparation for this moment, and i felt honored -- it is strange to say, but i felt honored to be there and i wanted to be there. i wanted to be there. >> this sense of the balance between patriotism and professionalism? >> this is an experience we shared as americans. in the aftermath, the question about fairness and objectivity became a much sharper issues in the weeks and months that followed 9/11 than on that day. this was a hideous thing. it is often called a tragedy. i don't it was a tragedy. i think it was a monstrous act of evil. i thought it on that day, and i still feel that way about it. in the aftermath, there was a lot of discussion, "newsweek" had a cover, "why do they? hate they? " -- why do they hate us?" i thought that was way out of

sync with what the country thought. i don't think that was the story. my thought was, who did it, where are they, and what are we going to do about it. some people said you were supposed to be objective. i said, yes, perhaps. i remember saying at the time, fox news is not based in switzerland. most of us are not neutral about this. we are not neutral as a country or as people. as journalists, we need to be fair, but there is a line to be drawn. >> it leads to one of the most of coat issues at the time, and some ways since. several of the sets went red white and blue. anchors started wearing lapel pins. i remember being asked at a speech in san diego some time later, why didn't all anchors

wear an american flag lapel pins. you are americans, should be making a state and about where you are. is that our job? i have no problem with people wearing their lapel pins. we were reporting to the world. were we marcion's looking down on the earth, completely objective? or we americans grieving for our country? or were we trying to talk to the whole audience? it led to some very difficult questions about who the "we" were. >> i want to take a moment to reintroduce ourselves. this is the kalb report. cartelists are dan rather, brit hume, charlie gibson, and frank sesno. >> i am an american. it i take a backseat to no one

in my patriotism. in texas, we have a saying, he questioned my patriotism, you don't do it sitting down. i don't have a dilemma about who i am or what my country is. to wear a lapel flag. i will argue with anyone who does. it football coaches say you are what your record says it is. and i have been around long enough, i think people know what my record is. my record is what it says it is. i did not have this dilemma. i was an american reporting to an american audience, cbs, nothing compared with a worldwide audience of cnn, but remember i don't lecturing myself. it is just bred in over the

years and experience that the patriotic journalist tries to be that honest broker of information. this is my role, this is my duty. it compared with first responders that day, it is minuscule, but i had a role, and my role was to be as candid with the audience as possible about what we know and what we did not know. but there was no argument with myself about what my country is. i had no doubt we would rebound from this. >> and we did not need to do that, people on the air. people were doing that around the country. at the pictures told the story. remember the construction workers at the pentagon, draping the flags. flags were everywhere. the immediately appeared on cars around the country. there was conversing in "america the beautiful" of the steps of the capital. >> the nationalism and

patriotism. it at all of that spoke about where the country was. we did not need to do that. what is needed to show the pictures. >> you have all marvelously described where you were at the time and your feelings, but professional and personal, but let me say for a moment, god forbid, 9/11 were to happen again, next weekend we where to be hit again, how would the journalism, the coverage of the second 9/11 be different from the coverage of the first 9/11? i asked you to take into account not only the immensity of the story, but the technological changes that have taken place in the last 10 years. frank? >> the first thing that would happen, we would have the technology and the participation

of the audience in a much more profound way. i would hate to think, because we heard some of the cell phones, the desperate cell phone calls people made as the war in the burning tower, but we are now connected with texts, tweets, facebook pages. first of all we would have to contend with that. we would have the public as our correspondents. >> is it in opposition to what you are doing? >> it is a challenge, what is real, what is not, what is an invasion of privacy, what is public, how quickly do you sheriff, what tone do use with that. -- how quickly do you share it, what tone do you use with that. and what they don't know and what they are potentially communicating. we would have to contend with that, first and foremost.

if, god forbid, there were something else today, we would also have to contend with it. >> the country is much better prepared. we americans, and i don't set myself apart from this criticism, we felt a certain and vulnerability, insulation and our country. we were complacent in many ways. if in your hypothetical we got hit tomorrow, we're much better prepared. we are tougher than we were. >> is journalism tougher? >> yes, journalism is tougher. that is it better equipped to handle the news story? >> no, because resources are way down. there are few or professional, experienced journalists working today than there were hurt in 2001. -- then there were in to test

one. and i think there are fewer, but because of this, this remain are prepared.nd better pared >> the iron core of journalism is smaller, but technologically light years away. there was no twitter, there was no facebook. every cell phone not only has a camera, capture video. the u imagine inside the tower is, if it happened today, people would be transmitting pictures of what was happening on their floor. >> let me give a real-world example. it is one of the reasons i was happy to retire. because what happens now scares me. >> what happens now? >> it scares me in terms of the way that we report things. when that muslim shot up fort

hood, as you remember, and he started shooting, i ran upstairs anchoring. i talked about what we do, and i had the military's first reactions to what we're going on. there were two shooters, nobody was dead, i forgot fully, but the first reaction to thing is almost always wrong. then young kids on our staff began running up to me and handed me twitter messages from inside the room at fort hood. and i had no clue whether those were correct or not. they were diametrically different from what we were getting from the military. you go on the air and say this is what we are hearing from the military and what we're getting from twitter, and what we were getting from twitter turned out to be much more accurate. but i am on the air talking to the country, and i don't have a clue as to whether what i am

saying came from howard stern or inside that room. that is frightening to me. yet the pressures that have come from a 24-hour cable, of where we do not have time to absorb this, it is more immediate, and we know less and less as we go one. >> that was a day when we all might as well have been cable channels that first day. you wore on the air, you don't have commercial breaks to collect your thoughts. i certainly share your sensibility about there is no worse feeling as an anchor to be about to report something truly major when you have some doubt about it. and if you do, it is the most uncomfortable, agonizing feeling that you can have. i remember being the first to report that bush had won ohio in 2004, and we were all alone on

that. i remember thinking, i hope we are right. i sat on the air, the decision desk call that. i went to michael barone, and he delivers this unbelievable disposition on the ohio. it was the assurance that something that you have said it that is very big and potentially controversial is correct. it is a wonderful feeling. >> let me share some new polling information commissioned by politico and george washington university. it asked, in a time of crisis, such as what we are talking about now, where is the first place to turn for information? answer, according to this poll, television was still 40%. no. 2 was the computer on your desk, 23% -- television was 48%.

radio was 11%. at the iphone and blackberry, 9%. information for family or friends, 5%. newspapers, 1%. >> that high? >> you are not surprised? >> it is not immediate anymore. >> washingtonpost.com, that goes into the computer, so you picked it up in that way. but what it suggests is that people still depend, almost went out of two, on television. --. one out of two. >> i am not surprised, but don't forget, almost all of television

is on a computer map. most college freshmen did not bring a tv anymore, they bring their computer. >> they don't even bring their computer. >> there is my point. those will merge. increasingly, people will get their television on the computer. >> the big change in that number, if we took it today, would be the movement of the mobile applications, the iphone and the i pad, the smart tablets, and the students we have in my class and elsewhere, myself to some extent, my first thought is my device. it is not, in many cases, cbs news or cnn. it is twitter or facebook. there were tens of thousands of people who learned about the earthquake in washington by twitter all over the world. that is what is changing.

>> i think once they learn, they good two-way video source. i would bet you the high numbers of computers are going to video sources. when you want immediacy, you want video. >> and that is the 48%. with all of the rise of the new technology, what effect does that have on our journalism? is it making it better? >> in some respects it is making it better because we have bait access to a larger set of raw materials. >> the gadget that frank uses first thing and the morning, and that type, they walk or run with these things. you walk around and you are looking at that. what is that based on? >> if it is video, it is what it is. we'll have every reason to remain as vigilant and skeptical

as we always have been or should be about the sources of our information. charlie is right, it turned out that the people who were feeding information to his teammates at abc on twitter or right and military officials had it wrong. but you have to be careful about that. you have to report with the officials say as part of the story. it is true, we will be receiving a wealth of information that we dealt no whether to trust or not. we all have to get good it that. we also have to present it in a way that would convey to the audience what we can and our purpose is skepticism about it. that has been the job of anchor as long as there has been such a thing. >> dan, do you believe that the journalism that you were imparting today to the american people is better journalism, is a more reliable form of journalism, more enriching form

of journalism that you were doing 10, 20, 30 years ago? >> it is hard to generalize. there is a lot and me that wants to say, no. the old order is gone. the new order is not yet in place. we don't know how things will shake out. i think we have to be and we have to teach to be very skeptical, not cynical, but skeptical about things such as twitter reports. the potential is there to manipulate the media, to a degree we have not had before. if somebody wants to flood twitter with misinformation, it comes down to having an experienced person who has walked the ground, who knows what happens in the police station after midnight on saturday night, who knows what the emergency room looks like in

the wee hours of the night, who has an experienced person who has a record and reputation of being the honest broker of inflation. the correct answer, is the journalism better? there is more of it. the definition of journalism has expanded. but you have to be more selective now. the audience has been fractured. there was a time when cbs, nbc, and abc were considered the national heart. that is part of what happened with two dozen one. now it is much smaller. it is hard to tell. i am optimistic about the future. i am an optimist by nature and by experience. it we will get through this. the internet will be a huge part of the future. i trust the audience.

my more than 60 years as a reporter has taught me to trust audience. the audience will find people believe they can trust and in demand will be trustworthy people. >> that is the central point, we have one thing to sell, and that is trust. what scares me, with all of this information coming in that you have to process so fast, it is very hard to win trust, but you can lose it very fast. but i don't know how you teach people to be discriminating and to be able to sift through that. >> if you get sick, the first thing you may do today is go online and try to learn everything that you can, but ultimately go back to your doctor to help the south through it. if we think through the amount of information that hit us on 9/11, we went from airplanes to the people in them, al qaeda.

the amount of learning and affirmation, so twitter and that business, by distinction between reporting and journalism, the twitter stream is great, and all the video on people's phone is great as reporting. here is the picture, here is what i bring. third journalism, the explanation, the explanation, the exploration, it takes time to investigate. >> we are talking about this minute to minute immediate reaction. there is one thing that really helps, and that his experience, of the kind that dan was talking about. you have covered the beat, you've been on the street, you know how things work. if you have a long tour of duty as a street reporter and you are in the anchor chair and to explain something that is happening out there, there are

things that you know will not ring true to you. you will not be able to vote exploited, but your antenna will go up and you will shy away from going with it. there is no substitute for that, and you cannot teach it to the school, you cannot get it sitting in the anchor chair. there is no substitute for street experience. in my view, all of the really good at bankers have had it over the years. -- all of the really good anchors have had it. >> i remember reporting that law enforcement was looking for two men of apparent arab descent. that was wrong. i reported that because i was told that by exceptionally senior officials. they were following a bomb lead. i report what i was told. we have always had to sift

through and risk being wrong with our sources. i think and i hope that if we handle it right and professionally the social media that are now one of our sources will be handled in the same way. >> one of the things that is interesting about this particular case that dan alluded to, there were some of things are experience could not. paris for. nobody i know of had imagined that you could use their plan as a weapon against a building. i cannot believe that people would jump from 100 stories. when i first heard that, i thought, i cannot believe that. when i was in the car and they said in might year the second trade power has gone down, that was beyond credulity. i cannot believe it. it the next morning, -- the next morning, when we had all the people at the hospitals, they said there are no injured here.

when we covered tragedy is, there are injured. there was no injured, it was just different. >> we have been talking about how journalism may have changed. i think i am listening to all of you say that technology changes, but the responsibilities remain essentially the same. has america changed in the last 10 years? are we a different place now? dan seemed to suggest earlier in this discussion that we have changed, a more sophisticated country, we are more aware of things. do you share that, charlie? >> yes. we lost our innocence in that. >> we lost our innocence in

9/11. >> dick cheney gave a speech shortly after that in which he said it -- and i thought it was very profound -- he said this is a war that for the first time we americans will lose more on domestic soyoil then we will lose overseas. we have always been protected by our oceans. of course, that turned out to be not true, because we lost more people in iraq and afghanistan, and he did ignore the civil war, but that is okay. [laughter] but i thought the statement was profound. but whenever you drive through the lincoln tunnel, whenever you get on an airplane, whenever you put your kid on a school bus, whenever you kiss your kid it goodnight, there is a little act of courage there. that is something i don't think we thought prior to that day 10 years ago. >> what has been striking about this, and this is something i

don't think any of us would have imagined that date or the weeks and months immediately after, that we have come to this day 10 years later without having been hit by another major attack on our homeland. it has not happened. i don't think it was an accident. i think we are better prepared, better equipped, better fortified and all of that. i think we have also killed a lot of enemies. that is a major contributing factor. what is remarkable to me, despite the inconvenience as we all know this and our lives,. distillate air travel, -- particularly air travel, where it is so inconvenient -- >> hellish. [laughter] >> we have not had a great retrenchment of civil liberties. we hear complaints about it. but most people still living their lives. we have gotten closer to back to normal that i thought we ever could. >> dan?

>> i think the country has changed tremendously. among the ways we have changed is we have always been a resilient people, but we are more resilient now than we have ever been. in terms of dealing with this type of catastrophe, attack or otherwise, we are more confident. i also think we are more courageous because of it 9/11. >> thank you. i would agree with all of that. i think we live in an era of vulnerability. we understand that a new and scary ways. i got a text the other day for my son. after hearing the terror other, living in new york, he said it should i do something differently? i said, no, be vigilant, but do what you need to do. i think that is what the country has done. it has been vigilant, it has spent a lot of money trying to make sure it does not happen again, but we do what we need to do. >> we have just about run out of

time. i want to think this wonderful audience for being with us at the national press club, around the world by our website, and we think are terrific panel of anchors who have been so helpful to all the bus on a terrific time of it 9/11. and let me thank all of you who believe an independent media as the best guarantor of a free and open society. that is it for now. in marvin kalb. kalb.am marvin la good night and good luck. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] [captioning performed by national captioning institute]

>> ladies and gentlemen, this is the second half of the program, which involves questions from you. there are microphones on both sides. there is one there and one of their. those of you who would like to ask a question, go over to the microphones. when you ask a question, please make it a question. if it is a speech, i will cut you off. i did not want to be impolite. tell me your name and if your at the university. eve.tve i am a producer in the city. anchor is also the sum of its parts. brian wilson, brit hume, the late great ed bradley, don

baylor and john miller, could you guys give it an assessment of the value had as correspondence that morning and the mornings after 9/11? >> i have always thought that people personalize newscasts, even before the age of the shows, which are all about one person, but even in the days when it was hotly and brinkley or the cbs evening ruse what walter cronkite. -- the cbs evening news with walter cronkite. people tend to think of the anchor. but i always thought whoever is in the anchor chair benefited from the fine work that was being done by everyone, including the correspondents. everybody admirers walter cronkite, and i am not disputing that, but walter cronkite was backed out by marvin kalb, and

ps ofnd a cor correspondence to up until that moment had no equal. that is what made it will cronkite what he was. he was good at his work, but what a cast. what i would say about any news organization, if your an anchor and you have a lick of sense, you are very appreciative of the work done by your correspondence. >> dan, i have a feeling you agree? >> absolutely. cbs news, and keep in mind that edward r. murrow is the founding st. of electronic journalism as we now know it, television. murrow tried to hire, and with incredible success did hire, a string of the scholar

correspondents. he wanted to hire the smartest people that he could crawl into this fledgling radio -- he wanted to hire those into this fledgling radio. i think the tremendous growth of electronic journalism, the cbs evening news, whether it was as it started or your narrator, it was built on the foundation of correspondents and the quality. taking nothing away from the man in the chair, but the reputation at cbs news, that they had and may still have, was built on having it not be -- it was a scholar correspondents who were well known for their experience in being the best at what they did. >> thank you. i am a former broadcast journalist.

my question has to do with, how do you handle the influx of new information when it comes to admitting there has been an error? i was in austria conducting media training for the state department on 9/11. we got a report, and there were people from around the world in the trade towers, we got a report on cnn that a car bomb had exploded at the state department. that was never corrected. friends of mine said we were too busy reporting what was happening to report what did not. with more and more information coming in, how the get back to letting people know there has been an error? >> i am quite sure it was direct -- it was corrected. >> last tuesday. twice. it [laughter] >> i remember there were a lot of bad reports. we had a flat out policy that

if we put that information on the air, we had an obligation to correct it. we had conversations, should we go back the precise minute 24 hours later to make sure. the audience turns, so you cannot be sure that everybody who saw the bad information will know that he corrected it. it should be corrected. i think that all networks should pat out ombudsmen, the equivalent of public editors, and that is controversial. but i think that we owe as much transparency to the public as we demand of other institutions, and i am afraid we are still not doing that. that one i know was corrected. >> hi, i am a g.w. alumni. i love the show. i wanted to ask all of you, but has been your favorite positive story that you have covered in your careers? >> positive story, charlie

gibson. >> let me defer to the others. [laughter] boy, there are many. we tried, when i was at anchor at abc world days, to try to end each day with something that basically reflected the strength and resiliency and the wonder of the human spirit. there are so many stories, and i love that we tried every day to find something that really would be. in some respects, this story, as horrible as it was, again, the resiliency of this country and the public was as inspiring to me as almost anything i have ever covered. >> the story that moved me more than any story i ever covered up until that time was the 50th anniversary of d-day. what the allied military and especially the u.s. military

accomplished on that day, under withering fire, at a time when the history of the world was at a critical juncture was a remarkable story, and to go back and stand at that u.s. military cemetery overlooking the point where that invasion occurred and to see those rows and rows of american gravestones and recognize that the immelt -- american military in no case with their for the purpose of conquest, and every case for the purpose of liberation. the liberation of europe by allied forces was an enormous triumphal the world and for humankind. that critical moment on that beach in which the allied commander almost call them back, and yet they fought their way in, is a great, great story. i urge anybody who ever has a chance to go there to go there.

it will bring tears to your eyes, as it did mine. it was the most moving story i ever covered. >> i am a recently qualified journalists from the uk he touched on social media. the problem is, in the u.k. especially, i have come into an era where there aren't jobs out there. i have to work for years or longer to get a job at all. i am having to turn like many others to social media. the problem social media is, where do you draw the line between what makes a journalist and what does not? where would you say the line is drawn? >> i would draw the line right around you. in fact, you would draw that line. you will decide how you want to define yourself. what is interesting about social media is to become your own brand. you will create your name.

it depends on the kind of persona and the kind of fact -- if you want to be all about opinions and rant and rave, are you a journalist? you certainly will be an opinion player, but you may not be a journalist. if you are going to be reliable and credible, others will pick you up and patch you around. you will become your own brand until and unless you join forces with an existing news organization. >> but are there in endless number of brands that can still legitimately be defined as journalists? >> no, there are not, and you are going to have another real problem. how are you going to pay the rent? we talked about the need to have jobs for people like you. you can only do this as a hobby for a while. tina brown said we may be in a time of gigs, not jobs.

that works for a while, but not for very long. >> my conscience bothers me. when we were talking about the strength of correspondents a moment ago, i should have pointed out, there were at least two of the best correspondents of their generation in our audience tonight. bernard kalb is in the audience. [applause] >> thank you very much. >> next question. >> my question concerns the media that has emerged as a result of the attacks. there have been various documentaries, movies, and books written about the attacks. i was wondering if those forms of media that have emerged after the fact have captured the event of the day as they happen

to live? do you think as journalists those after the fact reporting and analysis, have they really captured the heat of the moment? the don't really know answer to that. i am sorry, i cannot help it. >> i think the single most viable thing to do is to read the 9/11 commission report. it is a fascinating document to read. one of the things that impressed me was that there is not a whole lot that was in that document that had not been unearthed and reported by documentarians since. you can quibble with documentary's at times. they may come at something and try to make a point that may not be totally objective or reflect the view of the documentarian, but i think a lot was reported

subsequent to 9/11 that did a terrific job. that is borne out by the fact that the 9/11 commission report -- there was not a whole lot in there, even with all the subpoena powers, that had not been previously reported. >> way in which the commission report dealt with 9/11 reflects the concern of the writers of that report. they made a point of saying they were not going to deal with individual blame. they did not deal with individual blame because it would have created a huge political storm, so that the report itself is inadequate in that it did not go far enough, in a way. but let's get another question. >> i have been going to a lot of 9/11 events.

at the end of one program, they said that president obama has been in support of anything the intelligence wants to do. but since 9/11, americans stovepipe their information. when something happens, when barack obama is president, the first thing you are going to year on social media and other things is that obama did not do the right job. there are certain broadcasters, i will not name any, that really would attack obama for not doing the right thing as president even though his own intelligence chiefs said he is doing a great job. >> people like rush limbaugh. my question is, the feeling we

had after 9/11 would not be the same now, so we are stovepipe in our information. >> i am a bit lost on that. >> i really don't understand the thrust of the question. >> americans are stovepipe being their own information. >> what is that? and have no idea. >> you listen to fox news or cnn. you don't get the full information. >> there is a study, maybe that is what you are trying to reflect. there is a study that suggests that people who watch msnbc, watch fox, watch cnn, in the up -- end up with different appreciations of fact, that you see certain things in a different way. maybe that is what you are getting at. >> speaking as someone who has

been with fox news all these years, fox news has two part. it has a set of programs that are very popular and successful that are about the views and interviews of individuals. many of the more conservative. some of them are not. fox news also has a set of news programs and news segments all across its broadcast business that are separate and distinct. people who actually watched fox news can tell the difference. there are a great many people who don't actually watch fox news or want something else to have other ideas about what we do. what i would say is that if you watched the hard news program on blocks, you will find a pretty straight forward reflection of the news, and you'll also find an emphasis at times on stories that other media are ignoring and perhaps a different way of

approaching stories that other media are doing. i don't think we are in a crisis because certain people tune in to these opinion shows and they tend to listen to the opinions they appreciate. people read editorial-page columnist for the same reason, and the nation has surprised that for -- has survived that for many years now. another question that may be our last -- i continue to get word that we are running out of time. >> as reporters, -- i was really young during 9/11, but i remember hearing about the resilience of the american people afterward. my favorite commercial was where you had people all sorts of religions, races, and gender saying i am american. now it seems like everything is so politicized and people are so divisive. was there a point in american

history since then where we sort of fell off the bandwagon of unity, or was a gradual? how did we go from being so united after that to where we are now? >> that is a very interesting question, and a lot of people tend to feel that the u.s. in the last 10 or 50 years has gone on a downward spiral. there is an argument about that, but it is questioned i have heard many, many times. >> i want to tell you the story of maybe the most poignant moment of my experience. i flew the first day the flights had resumed. i took a united flight from washington to boston. boston was one of the places that flights originated from. as i came on the plane, there was a ghastly silence.

two of the flight attendants were quietly weeping. that had to turn away from us as we got on the plane, and there were not very many people there. the captain got on just before we took off and said may i have your attention, please? we are flying again, and we are doing it because we believe it will be saved. but i ask you to look around at one another. if someone tries to hijack this plane, tackle them, stop them, throw something on them. remember, we are all in this together, and we are all americans. i took out my notebook and i was writing all this down. [laughter] but it was an incredible thing. you cannot maintain that intensity of emotion out of an experience like that. but i do believe that 10 years later, whether you remember it

brilliantly or not, the world you are growing up in has been affected and shaped by that vulnerability, by that moment, by conversations like this. i do think we are at a more resilient place. but we are america. we yell and scream and debate. i disagree with britain about what he set about fox -- i disagree with brit about what he set about fox. that means we are ok. this is what we do, and democracy is a noisy, messy business, and we should be proud of that, too. >> we have been talking both in this 20-minute segment and in the broadcast part about the way in which this country bounces back and how resilient is. therefore, there is an impression of how strong we are , but in so many other ways we

are quite vulnerable these days, and quite weakened by an economic condition which nobody seems able to master, and a political climate that is probably rougher than we have experienced in a long time. so while we live with the joyous, upbeat sense that we are americans and things can only get better, the fact is, they may not be getting better. that could be the subject for another panel discussion. but at this particular point -- thank you very, very much for being here. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011]

>> sunday and "washington journal," a look back at the september 11 the tax. we'll take your calls and e- mails before joining live coverage of the remembered from ground zero in new york city. in his weekly address, president obama marks the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by paying tribute to the men and women serving in the military. first responders, and those who lost their lives 10 years ago. he is followed by former new york city mayor rudy guiliani, who talks about how counter- terrorism efforts have made the nation saver, but why improved measures are needed.

>> this weekend, we are coming together as one nation to mark the 10th anniversary of the september 11 attacks. we are remembering the lives we lost, nearly 3000 innocent men, women, and children. we are reaffirming our commitment to always keep faith with their families. we are honoring the heroism of first responders to risk their lives and gave their lives to save others. and we are giving thanks to all who serve on our behalf, especially our troops and military families, our extraordinary 9/11 generation. at the same time, even as reflect on a difficult decade, we must look forward to the future we will build together. that includes staying strong and confident in the face of any threat. thanks to the tireless efforts of our military personnel and our intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security professionals, there should be no doubt, today america is stronger, and al qaeda is on the path to defeat.

we have taken the fight to al qaeda like never before. over the past two and a half years, more senior al qaeda leaders have been eliminated since any time since 9/11. thanks to the courage and precision of our forces, which finally deliver justice to osama bin laden. restrengthen the partnerships and tools we need to prevail in this war, investing in our special forces of terrorist have no safe haven. we are constantly working to improve the security of our homeland as well, and our airports, ports, and borders, increasing support for perce responders and working closer than ever with states, cities, and communities. a decade after 9/11, it is clear for all the world to seek the terrorists who attacked us that september morning are no match for the character of our people, the resilience of our nation, or the endurance of our values. they want to terrorize us, but

as americans, we refuse to live in fear. yes, we face a determined foe, and make no mistake, that will keep trying to hit us again. but we remain vigilant. we are doing everything in our power to protect our people and a matter what comes our way, we will carry on. they want to draw us into endless wars, sapping our strength and confidence as a nation. but even as we put relentless but even as we put relentless pressure on al qaeda, we are ending the war in iraq and begin to bring our troops home from afghanistan. after a hard decade of war, it is time for nation building here at home. they wanted to deprive us of the unity that defines us as a people. we will not succumb to division or suspicion. we are americans. we are stronger and safer when we stay true to the boundaries that make us a unique among nations. they wanted to undermine our place in the world, but a decade later, we have shown that america does not hunker down and hide behind walls of mistrust.

we have forged new partnerships with nations around the world to meet the global challenges that no nation can face alone. across the middle east and north africa, a new generation of citizens is showing that the future belongs to those who want to build, not destroyed. 10 years ago, ordinary americans showed the true meaning of courage when they rushed up those stairwells into those planes and into that cockpit. a new generation has stepped forward to serve and keep us say. in their memory, in their name, we will never waver. we will protect the country we love and pass it safer, stronger, and more prosperous to the next generation. >> everyone can remember exactly where they were when they first learned that our country had been attacked. as with pearl harbor and the john f. kennedy assassination, the defining events have a big impact on a nation because they are not just a shared experience, they are a shared memory.

on the 10th anniversary of the attacks, we must take stock of what we have learned. the attacks had two purposes. the first was to kill as many americans as possible. the second was to destroy america's spirit. to remember the thousands of lives lost on that day, there is no doubt that the terrorist achieved their first goal and will leave us with a deep would forever. when it comes to destroying our spirit, however, when we consider the rescue and recovery effort we witnessed at the time of and in the aftermath of the attacks, it is clear that the terrorists failed. the country was not broken, but was more united in the days after september 11 than in any time in my lifetime. we displayed heroic spirit in many ways, but perhaps the most heroic was the unity of spirit we share as americans. the american people demonstrated one of most basic values that we share, our love of freedom and the value we

place on individual human life. people often ask me is america safer now than it was before september 11? the answer is yes. but not as safe as we should be. we are safer because we faced a difficult truth. a danger that we allowed to fester and grow without confronting properly was suddenly staring us in the face. the engagement of islamic extremist terrorism in iraq and afghanistan was an important part of having prevented traditional, large-scale attacks. we have made significant improvements in intelligence gathering and airport security, but much work remains. we have not the gift " -- we have not significantly improve port security and our states and local government range from are well prepared to not prepared at all. we have seen some as the breakdowns in security as demonstrated by in the near

attack on christmas morning in 2009 and in the attack on fort hood. perhaps the most dangerous impulse we have developed since september 11 is impatience, demonstrated by the calls to put our armed forces on timetables, and the re-emergence of a dangerous pattern that sometimes afflicts america, the desire to minimize the dangers we face. that has led to catastrophes in the past, including the peace dividend taken in the 1990's as an islamist extremist terrorists were attacking us regularly. american security requires a long-term military presence in long-term military presence in the part of a world where people and organizations are plotting to kill us. the timetable should not be based on a politically expedient calendar, but on when we have eliminated the threat of domestic tax being generated in that particular part of the

world. we must not allow impatience to prevent our military from achieving its objectives in iraq and afghanistan. the objective is the elimination of the threat to our nation. finally, america must take care of those who were harmed during the difficult and dangerous recovery efforts. we must not forget what it meant to the country to watch these brave men and women work toward recovery, and they should not be abandoned now. as they become ill, we are responsible for taking care of them. after all, they took care of us. the lesson of september 11 is that america is truly exceptional. we withstood the worst attack in our history, intended by our enemies to destroy us. instead, it drew us closer and made us more united. our love for freedom and for one another have given us a strength that surprised even ourselves.

at the same time, it is a strength that must be guarded and nurtured. we must rediscover our unity. we must never forget what we witnessed on that day, both the incomprehensible face a pure evil and the depth of love and compassion. today, 10 years later, the fight continues, and the memories remain etched into our national character. >> one day before the 10th anniversary of the september 11 attacks, president obama and first lady michelle obama visited arlington national cemetery, where they paid tribute to members of the military killed in the wars in iraq and afghanistan.

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>> sunday on "washington journal," a look back at the september 11 attacks. we will take your calls and e- mails before joining live coverage of the remembrance from ground zero in new york city. >> tomorrow, the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 on the c- span networks, with live coverage from each of the memorial sites. here is our live schedule. at 8:30, a memorial ceremony from the world trade center site. at 9:00, was president biden from the pentagon, and at 9:30, honoring those who lost their lives on july 93. >> this week on "the communicators," to experience first responders assess the progress made in emergency