“Andy Card comes up behind me and says, ‘Second plane has hit the second tower. America’s under attack’…and I’m watching a child read,” Bush recalled in the BBC documentary 9/11: Inside the President’s War Room.
“I could see the horror etched on the face of the news people who had just gotten the same news.”
Card later reflected on the difficulty of his task. “I had to deliver a message that the President didn’t expect to hear, and that was almost unbelievable,” he said. “But it also, literally, was the message that he had to hear. Whether he wanted to or not.”
