What was bush reading to kids on 9 11

Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla. Bush learned America was under attack on Sept. On Sept. Shown here, is President Bush shaking hands with student Lazaro Dubrocq, 7 years old at the time. That day's reading lesson was focused on the short story, "The Pet Goat. The students were just 7 years old at the time, but they could see on the president's face that something had happened.

Mentally he was gone. One year later, the students returned to their former second grade classroom, where their teacher greeted them with hugs. The students wrote their signatures inside the book President Bush had held on Sept. One person who did take command of the situation, meanwhile, was then-vice president Dick Cheney.

In recent years, research has shown that Mr Cheney spent the day of the attacks in a bunker below the White House, making calls and telling other officials what to do. The Atlantic has reported that one of his first calls was to Mr Bush, who he told not to return to Washington in order to avoid leaving both leaders vulnerable to the same attack.

He also, astonishingly, ordered the Air Force to shoot down a suspicious passenger plane headed toward DC. Mr Cheney has said he cleared this order with Mr Bush first, but according to The Atlantic , evidence shows the order came before the permission.

That order, fortunately, never made its way to any fighter pilots. Three days later, with more time to prepare, Mr Bush famously spoke through a bullhorn atop the rubble of the World Trade Center. Standing in plainclothes among firefighters and first responders, the president projected the kind of take-charge machismo he had lacked on the day of the attacks. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. In the years since then, despite all the efforts at historical revision, the image of this commander-in-chief that sticks out in many American minds is of him sitting in that Florida classroom, reading with children about a goat.

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