George W. Bush’s Day of the 9/11 Attacks and the 25-Year Commemoration

President George W. Bush was jogging on a Florida golf course when a routine school-reading event at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota began. While he was meeting staff and students, a live television broadcast showed smoke pouring from one of the World Trade Center towers after a plane strike. A second plane hit a moment later, confirming that the United States was under attack. A White House aide whispered the news to Bush inside the classroom, prompting the president’s famously stunned expression.

The Independent

After being escorted to Air Force One, Bush spent the day traveling to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, where he held a teleconference with top national-security aides and Vice President Dick Cheney. In the following days, Bush visited Ground Zero, walking the site with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and declaring that the United States was now at war with Islamic militants.

The Independent

Twenty-five years later, the former president, now 80, plans to attend a ceremony at Ground Zero and will speak at his presidential library in Dallas. Sixteen paintings he created to honor the courage and sacrifice of that day will be displayed.

The Independent

The administration’s immediate response also included heightened security measures at airports and public buildings, and later, the controversial interrogation tactics and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Independent

• “The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger,” — George W. Bush, privacy notice president

The Independent