“Jill, what is it?”: How Joe Biden, the Senator, reacted to the 9/11 attacks

Biden, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was on the 8:35 am train from Wilmington to Washington – as he was most mornings – on September 11, 2001, when two planes flew over the Twin Towers of the World Center New York commercial. Current President Biden will mark two decades since those terrorist attacks on Saturday by visiting the three sites where hijacked planes have crashed – Ground Zero in New York; Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

When he got off the train at Union Station, Biden said he saw a brown haze of smoke in the sky beyond the Capitol Dome. A third plane had just crashed into the Pentagon.

He made his way to Capitol Hill, which was being evacuated along with all House and Senate office buildings. The then senator had insisted to his daughter – who had called him begging him to leave Washington – that the Capitol was the safest place, even though people thought another plane was heading for the building, and congressional leaders had been taken by helicopter to a bunker.

“Damn, I want to come in,” he told a police officer after walking up the Capitol steps and trying to enter the building. The officer refused to let him pass. As he recounted in his memoir, Biden felt it was important to “show the country that we are still doing business.”

Linda Douglass, who was an ABC News reporter at the time, said she saw Biden and then Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia discuss “who was more senior because Biden wanted Congress to be called back to session “.

“He really felt it was important that the government get back to business immediately,” Douglass said in an interview with CNN.

Biden agreed to appear on ABC News and followed Douglass a few blocks to where they had set up their camera.

Douglass said when interviewing Biden that Bush was on Air Force One, that then Vice President Dick Cheney was in a secure bunker, and the leaders of Congress were also taken to safety.

“It was extremely important for the country to hear from a senior government official,” said Douglass.

According to a transcript of the show, Biden said the United States would track down those responsible for the attacks and, in the meantime, urged the public to be “calm, calm and collected.”

“Terrorism wins when, in fact, it alters our civil liberties or shuts down our institutions,” Biden said. “We have to demonstrate that none of these things have happened.”

He added: “This nation is too big, too strong, too united, too powerful in terms of cohesion and our values ​​for this to separate us. And it will not happen.”

Former Rep. Bob Brady of Philadelphia, a longtime friend of Biden’s, was with the then senator for much of the day. He said he was driving Biden and Biden’s brother Jim back home when the president called from Air Force One to thank Biden for the comments he made on television.

“It was important to show the American people that everyone was now safe and that we were all together in this project. There were the Democrats, the Republicans – we were going to fully support the president. And that’s the message that Joe sent, and that’s why the president called him, “Brady said in an interview with CNN.

During that call, Brady said Biden urged Bush to return to the nation’s capital. “Mr. President,” Biden told Bush, “come back to Washington.”

“You don’t want people to see our boss walk into a bunker. Get him out of there, hand him over to the White House,” Brady said. “And he did, to his credit, he did.”

Biden wrote of the call with Bush in his book, “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics,” saying Bush told him he was heading to an undisclosed location in the Midwest because the intelligence had advised him not to return to DC.

“I remembered back then a story about the leader of the French resistance, Charles de Gaulle, towards the end of World War II. When France was liberated, there was a celebratory parade on the Champs-Elysées in Paris – dignitaries, generals, and officers – led by Gaulle himself. As they made their way towards the Hotel de Ville, gunshots rang out over their heads and everyone world touched the ground except de Gaulle. He continued to walk straight like a stick, “Biden wrote.

After telling Bush he should come back, Biden wrote, “I hung up the phone and there was silence in the van until Jimmy spoke.”

Biden wrote that his brother told him, “Whichever staff member suggested he call you, you’ve just been fired.”