The Finish Page 3

  “Who do you think did this?” the president asked him.

  Morell had been on the phone to Langley, but so far no one had been able to give him a definite answer.

  “There are two terror states capable, Iran and Iraq,” Morell told the president, “but both have everything to lose and nothing to gain. If I had to guess I’d put a lot of money on the table that it was al Qaeda.”

  “So, when will we know?” Bush asked.

  Morell couldn’t say. He explained how long it had taken the agency to affix blame with certainty in earlier attacks—the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, the bombing of the USS Cole in waters off Yemen in 2000. In the first case it had taken ten days; in the latter ones, a few months.

  “We could know it soon, or it could take a while,” he said.

  In fact, the news came fast. An analyst at Langley had checked the flight manifests of the doomed aircrafts and linked some of the hijackers directly to al Qaeda. The information had been known for about an hour, but it had not been passed to Morell. Instead, Bush got the news by videophone from CIA Director George Tenet after they had landed in Omaha. The president at that point overruled his own security team, directing them to fly him back to Washington. He was going to address the nation that night, and he wanted to do it from the White House.

  On the way back to Washington, Morell briefed Bush again, this time on a foreign intelligence report that there were sleeper cells in the United States prepared to launch a second wave of attacks. One of Morell’s briefings had warned Bush in August about al Qaeda’s desire to attack, but it had been very low key. No special sense of urgency was felt or had been conveyed, despite the alarming title of the actual report: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” Certainly nothing on the scale of what had just happened. With much of the workforce vacationing, Morell had often scrambled for material to present to the president in August. He called them “summer doldrums pieces.” They tended to be broadly strategic, discussions of potential threats with more of a shelf life than most items on the morning agenda, looming problems about which the agency was concerned, but with few details. Bin Laden had been talking about doing something big in the United States, something he said that his followers would “rejoice about,” but this was from a man who had been making such threats for years. The report had noted that the FBI had “seventy full field investigations” under way on bin Laden–related threats. The thrust of the report was that al Qaeda was planning something and that the U.S. government had no idea what, but was nevertheless doing all it could to prevent it.

  Air Force One descended to Andrews Air Force Base at dusk. Many of the people aboard were dozing, having worked a long and difficult day already and knowing that there was a long night ahead. Morell roused himself to look out the window. Two F-16s had maneuvered to escort them down, flying in precise formation off each wingtip so close that on his side he could see the pilot’s face inside the cockpit. In the distance he could see smoke still rising from the Pentagon.

  He was at home later that night to watch the president address the nation on TV. Before Morell went to bed, he checked in on his children, sleeping in piles of stuffed animals. He thought: The world they live in has completely changed, and they have no idea.

  That night, President Bush spoke from the Oval Office.

  “Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom, came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts,” he said. He described the events of the day in detail and lauded those who had responded, at great peril, to the emergencies. He vowed “to find those responsible and bring them to justice.”

  The man ultimately responsible, Osama bin Laden, had not been well known outside national security circles prior to that day, but he would soon be the most famous terrorist in the world. In the coming weeks and months he would acknowledge responsibility for the attacks, praise the murderous hijackers as martyrs to his cause, and be caught on videotape chuckling with delight and praising Allah for their success.

  “There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots,” he would say in a videotape released a few weeks later, wearing a camouflage coat, seated alongside the AK-47 he still carried from his days of jihad against the Soviet Union, his long beard showing streaks of gray. “Its great buildings were destroyed, thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that. What America tastes now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. Our Nation [he meant Muslims everywhere] has tasted this humiliation and this degradation for more than eighty years [since the demise of the Ottoman Empire during World War I].”

  From 9/11 onward, every day that bin Laden eluded America’s grasp was a victory for him. It would be hard to overstate the significance of that. No matter what else the country did to avenge 9/11, no matter how many regimes it overturned, no matter how much it hammered and crippled al Qaeda, every day that man remained at large was an affront. It meant he had done this and gotten away with it, and might well do something like it again.

  The two men who would lead the United States in the next decade of warfare had markedly different immediate responses to the attacks. Bush would record his feelings in his book Decision Points. Obama would describe his in speeches and writings in coming years, and he spoke to me about it in the Oval Office.

  Bush felt outrage and an urgent desire for revenge. “Someone had dared attack America,” he wrote. “They were going to pay.”

  When they had landed at Barksdale Air Force Base that day, the row upon row of parked bombers had reminded Bush of the frightening power at his command. Another man witnessing this display might have reflected on the pointlessness of a Cold War–era arsenal against a stateless enemy with no fixed address, but Bush would later write, “I knew it was only a matter of time before I put that power to use against whoever ordered this attack.”

  In his remarks on the night of the attacks he expanded the range of this anticipated retribution: “We will make no distinction between those who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” The president’s eagerness to hit back would continue to pick up speed. It would result in the mobilization of vast armies, the invasion and occupation of two nations, and the launching of smaller military and intelligence missions all over the globe. These missions would consume the next seven and a half years of Bush’s presidency, kill and maim untold thousands, and do more than anything else to shape America’s first decade of the twenty-first century. The war in Afghanistan, the first country attacked, would prove to be the longest in American history. In Iraq, an even bloodier and costlier war would be launched in the mistaken belief that dictator Saddam Hussein bore some tangential responsibility for the attacks and was harboring weapons that could do worse. However misguided much of this would prove to be, Bush’s response accurately reflected the public mood, and satisfied, to some extent, the nation’s need to flex its muscles and lash back at its enemies.

  If Bush’s response on 9/11 was to start looking for somebody to bomb, Barack Obama sounded ready to launch some kind of global antipoverty campaign.

  Few people were all that interested in the thoughts of the Illinois state senator, but in the days after the attacks his local newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, solicited his reaction along with that of other local representatives. Obama gave an answer you might expect from a former community organizer with a distinctly international background—his father was Kenyan, and Obama had spent the early years of his childhood living with his mother in Indonesia (he could still speak some Bahasa Indonesia, a language he learned as a child). At Columbia University, living in uptown Manhattan, he had devoted much of his studies to international relations, and he had traveled widely. Certainly more so than any previous president, Obama had grown up globally, a fact that, along with his mixed race and African name, would fuel stubborn suspicions that he was no
t authentically American. He had firsthand experience with the resentment and anger directed at the United States by many of those living in less fortunate parts of the world, as well as by many blacks growing up in this country. Anti-Americanism was not just an abstraction for him. He had consciously wrestled throughout his life with his own multicultural, multiracial identity, a process he had described movingly in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father. In his response for the Hyde Park Herald, he called for an examination of the root causes of terrorism. “It grows from a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair,” he said. He called for America “to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and within our own shores.” It read like left-wing boilerplate and, right or wrong, was clearly out of step with the nation’s anger.

  In fairness, the might of America’s armed forces was not yet his to command, and he was not yet responsible for protecting the nation. Nor were his political instincts that good. Obama had a hard time fitting in politically anywhere. In that run for Congress, he was trounced by former sixties activist Bobby Rush, who had cofounded the Black Panther party in Chicago and had once served six months in prison on a firearms charge. Rush’s First Congressional District was one of the few in America where a résumé like his would lead to Congress. It was home to Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. Obama’s mixed race and international background, along with his Harvard credentials, had worked against him. In the coming years, his message would broaden with his horizons. He had already begun aggressively laying the foundation for his next campaign, a successful effort to unseat Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald in 2005. But for the moment his response to 9/11 was strictly mundane.

  It was from a template that went back to Vietnam. Most liberal Democrats, and many black Americans, had never gotten over that conflict. A quarter century later they still tended to be antiwar and even antimilitary—another of Rush’s curious countercredentials was that he had gone AWOL from the army. But the broad political pattern set in the 1960s and early 1970s—hawkish Republicans vs. dovish Democrats—had begun to show cracks. The old hawk vs. dove dynamic had grown a lot more complex, with liberals pushing for humanitarian interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and elsewhere over the objections of conservatives, who inveighed against the folly of “nation building,” and “becoming the world’s policeman,” and cooperating with the UN.

  Obama is a cautious man, and in the days after the attacks his caution showed. He seemed more interested than provoked. He said he hoped America would “draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy.” He sounded more inclined to study the attack than to avenge it. Here was a man whose blood had a higher boiling point than most. He saw himself as someone skilled at navigating between implacable extremes, be they cultural or, as with his work with the Harvard Law Review, intellectual. But in this instance, the forces he imagined had shaped the 9/11 attackers, ignorance and poverty, did not apply. The suicidal killers would turn out to be neither embittered sons of poverty nor especially hopeless or ignorant. Most were well-to-do young Saudis whose families had shipped them overseas for expensive college educations. They were religious fanatics, led by a man who had inherited a fortune. Their grievances were not economic—they were political and religious.

  Obama did call for some martial response, but even in that he was careful. “We must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction,” he said. Not “find them and arrest or kill them,” but dismantle their organizations. If Bush’s response to the attacks started big and would keep getting bigger, his eventual successor’s response was at the opposite end of the spectrum. Any thoughts about war for Obama were deeply couched in restraint. He would eventually wage war fiercely, but the restraint would remain. He was not a pacifist. He saw violence as a necessary resort, albeit a last one. But as long as he was not bearing the responsibility of defending the nation, he could afford to let the shocking events of the day sink in more slowly.

  The events were unprecedented. America has had its share of bloodshed, invasion, and surprise attack. Pearl Harbor was a living memory for millions. But because of television, nothing in American history compared with the impact of 9/11. Pearl Harbor was over two thousand miles from the mainland, at a time when the Hawaiian islands were just an American territory. Reports of the Japanese attack arrived via radio and newspaper stories. The attacks on 9/11 happened on live TV and were broadcast worldwide, the key moments replayed in slow motion and in a constant loop. There was nothing indirect about this. Here was heedless slaughter of fellow citizens right before our eyes.

  The debates over conflicts in Obama’s lifetime—Panama, El Salvador, Kuwait, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, etc.—had all involved abstract questions about the use of American power. What was the country’s moral obligation? How broadly should “national interest” be defined? What were the costs of intervention? Would it make things better or worse? How would the rest of the world perceive the decision? There was nothing abstract about 9/11.

  Some persistent critics of the United States would argue that the country had brought this on itself. They would blame, among other things, self-serving Middle East policies, attitudes of cultural supremacy, and a steadfast disregard for growing global disparities in wealth and opportunity. Obama’s own statements hinted at this. But it was apparent to most that the attacks were rooted in something darker. Washington’s global strategies, intrigues, and alliances stirred anger in many parts of the world, particularly the Middle East. Anti-Americanism was real and dangerous. But this… this went to some deep well of hatred. The death of innocents has always been a tragic consequence of war, but this was random murder as strategy. It was something new, or, perhaps, something very old.

  Obama sat up late on the night of 9/11 watching TV while he cared for infant Sasha, changing her and then giving her a bottle. By then the links with al Qaeda were being widely reported, and screens flashed pictures of bin Laden, a tall, thin, lordly man with a prophet’s beard and flowing robes. His picture conjured up wrathful images of the fanatical abolitionist John Brown, or even Jehovah. Obama already knew more about this Saudi Arabian renegade and his extremist movement than did most Americans. The explosions at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 had killed 223 people, mostly Africans. Thousands more had been wounded. Obama had family in Kenya. He had visited that Nairobi embassy. His tendency to search for answers through mutual understanding would be sorely tested here.

  It would end up mattering a great deal how the events of this day affected Barack Obama. Few of us are asked to make life and death decisions, or to order someone killed. It is doubtful that Obama, on that night, imagined that he ever would. His personal and intellectual inclination was to bridge the gaps between people, to empathize. He tended to see conflict as something that arose exclusively out of injustice and misunderstanding. He was the son of a Luo tribesman from Kenya and a white girl from Kansas. He was different wherever he went, as a boy making the transition to life and school in Jakarta, as a young interracial man with black skin in a primarily white world. Even internally, negotiating differences was his life story. As he would tell biographer David Maraniss years later, “The only way my life makes sense is if, regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there is this commonality, precepts that are universal. And that we can reach out beyond our differences. If that is not the case, then it is pretty hard for me to make sense of my life. So that’s the core of who I am.” Empathy was his milieu. It’s a generous worldview, and often the correct one.

  But on September 11 he confronted something that challenged that hopeful insight. Search as he might for some logic to justify or mitigate these attacks, no reach of empathy or reason got him there. Bin Laden’s hateful beliefs could not be reconciled. Despite the soft tone of his remarks to the Hy
de Park newspaper, Obama also spoke of “a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others.”

  There is little evidence that George W. Bush was given to this sort of reflection, at least not openly, about himself or his responsibility. He had been born into a family that wielded power as if it were part of its birthright, and when the attacks came he was more than ready to play his role. Obama came from an opposite place. His roots were among the powerless. But even in his wide experience there was no way to comprehend Osama bin Laden.

  Four years after the attacks, after his election to the U.S. Senate sparked a wave of electoral enthusiasm that would eventually carry him to the White House, Obama wrote a new prologue to his memoir. In it, he returned briefly to 9/11: “It’s beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day and the days that would follow. The planes like specters vanishing into steel and glass, the slow-motion cascade of towers crumbling into themselves. The ash-covered figures wandering the streets. The anguish and fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove terrorists that day and drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another’s heart cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.”

  He noted that the murderous swath of al Qaeda in the previous decade hewed oddly close to his own life path—Nairobi, Bali, Manhattan. He spoke more harshly of the attackers than he had years earlier. He condemned anyone “who would seek under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us.”

  Obama had spent a lifetime, no matter where he looked, being not like others. The attacks had crystallized something for him.

  When Sasha emptied her bottle that night in 2001 he lifted her to his shoulder and patted her back gently. The terrible images of the day replayed before him on the screen. He wondered what the future would hold for her and her older sister Malia. He felt the attacks personally, as a civilized man, as an American, and as a father. He was working his way toward a personal definition of evil.