ANDREW CARD
Chief of Staff
The man who told the president, then had to oversee a White House at war
WASHINGTON – It was supposed to be a routine stop for President Bush – a back-to-school chat about reading with adorable second-graders in Sarasota, Fla., on Sept. 11, 2001.
A blackboard proclaimed in cheery script: “Reading makes a country great.”
The 16 second graders, neatly scrubbed for Bush’s visit, sat in two rows of chairs in Sandra Kay Daniels’ class, waiting to show off their reading skills to the commander-in-chief.
But at 9:05 a.m. as Bush sat with the kids, White House chief-of-staff Andy Card came in and leaned over to whisper in the president’s ear: “A second plane hit the other tower and America is under attack.”
“It was a surreal moment,” Card would say later. “It was immediately obvious that it was neither an accident nor a coincidence.”
The color drained from Bush’s face. He looked at the kids, at the TV cameras recording his reaction for the world, then back at the kids and then picked up a textbook, struggling to act normal for the little ones.
He listened as the class kept reading and when they were done, he came up with praise for the kids who’d so carefully prepared for his visit: “Really good readers. Whoo! This must be sixth-graders.”
The reading included the phrase “more to come” and Bush asked them, “What does that mean, ‘more to come’?”
One of kids replied: “Something else is going to happen” and the president told him: “That’s exactly right.”
Card’s taut face is captured in photos of that unthinkable instant as he leans over Bush – a rare moment in the spotlight for the most discreet, circumspect White House chief-of-staff in memory.
Card decided to interrupt Bush by asking himself if he would want to know and the answer was ‘yes’ so “I made a conscious decision to interrupt and be very efficient in what I said.”
Card, 55, is a Bush family loyalist for nearly 25 years and a veteran of the first Bush and Reagan White Houses, an even-keeled man who gets to work at 6 a.m. and sees his job as making all the details work.
Within months that meant rethinking all of homeland security – when Tom Ridge got nowhere trying to tinker around the edges, it was Card who led a secret rush-rush effort to come up with a whole new concept.
He did it with a few trusted aides in his usual leak-proof fashion and caught everyone by surprise with plans for a new Homeland Security Department, the biggest government remake in over 50 years.
Now, since Ridge says he doesn’t want to head the new agency – and has gotten mixed reviews in any case – many wonder if the low-key Card rather than, say, high-profile Rudy Giuliani, will be Bush’s choice.
Asked about it in a TV interview he replied in typically discreet fashion: “I am perfectly happy being the chief of staff to the president and I will do that job as long as he has confidence in me and I can give him 100 percent effort.”