He was going to say in that briefing room, as I indicated yesterday, that the federal government would make resources available to New York to help deal with the plane hitting the World Trade Center. Maybe it was later that you could see the fire-but he knew enough to know that the building was on fire and New York City had to fight this.
We talked informally-I guess somebody had wheeled in a TV at that point, so we could see the fire. I received a second page telling me the second tower had been hit, and I instantly knew it was terrorism. She didn't really have any information and he directed her just to monitor it, keep him apprised, and let him know what's going on. He went into the hold that day and Condi was waiting for him on the phone. But if he came here, for ten minutes in this room, you would have a room down the hall, guarded by a Secret Service agent, that would be the hold, where the military would have set up phone lines. In my eight or nine months, I had never seen the president use the hold. He got to the end of shaking hands and Karl was the first one to get to the president and whispered in the president's ear, "The World Trade Center has been hit by an airplane."Įverywhere presidents go, a hold is set up, and inside the hold are two secure phones. We got to the school and the president was shaking hands with people, the superintendent, the principal, along the inside wall of the school. The page said, "World Trade Center has been hit by an airplane." Like everybody, my first reaction was that it must have been some terrible accident there was no indication of the size of the plane. You could respond by saying, "Yes, no, maybe, five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes," and it had these preprogrammed messages.
I thought, These are really sophisticated pagers. We were getting out of the motorcade at the end of Booker Elementary School in Sarasota and I received a page-Back then there were no BlackBerrys, just an old-fashioned pager.
Read Ari Fleischer's complete oral history interview He recorded his oral history on September 29–30, 2010, and was interviewed by the Miller Center's Russell Riley and Barbara Perry, along with Paul Freedman of the UVA Politics Department. Fleischer released his handwritten notes from September 11th in 2016. Ari Fleischer served as White House press secretary from the inauguration of President George W.
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