A Black woman, Air Force One and the day America changed
It wasn’t even my turn to travel.
I had just come back from a trip to Texas with President George W. Bush when The Associated Press sent me right back out with him on a Sunday-to-Tuesday jaunt to Florida.
As presidential trips go, this one was pedestrian. Bush was going to deliver a speech about education, link up with his brother the governor for some family time, and return at midday Tuesday to sojourn at Camp David.
Fate had other plans.
Of all the history made during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there is one significant first that must be noted for posterity: the U.S. government used its longstanding, secret plan for protecting the president during a catastrophic national emergency.
The pool of journalists who took that protective journey with him reflected the very racial and gender diversity that the current president spurns today.
I began hearing rumors about a “nuclear bunker” plan for the press pool after I joined the White House press corps in 1995. They said the plan dated back to the Cold War.
The rumors went like this: if nuclear war popped off with the Soviet Union, the president would be taken to his location of choice for his safety. A tight pool of journalists would go with him. Some versions of the rumor said the wire service correspondent in that pool was supposed to join the president in the bunker.
In 1998, President Bill Clinton updated the bunker plan through several classified directives. One of them, PDD-67, Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations, expanded its focus past the Soviet Union, which had dissolved by then, to include cyberattacks, weapons of mass destruction and large-scale terrorism.
The first time the secret Cold War plan was put to use, Cold War nukes weren’t a factor at all.
In the midst of doing my job that day, I didn’t consider that I might be part of a national security experiment. I simply knew I could not fail.
I was the first Black woman formally assigned to the AP’s White House reporting team; I refused to let that newly opened door slam shut on every Black woman coming through it after me. I steeled my determination to succeed by staying busy.
I took copious notes, compiled a timeline with my fellow poolers and started writing a story on my laptop.
Roughly a dozen journalists were aboard Air Force One when President Bush took off from Sarasota, Florida.
Seven men, five women. Black, white, Asian. We circled in the sky for hours while the carnage continued to unfold on the ground. I kept questions flowing to press secretary Ari Fleischer, even though the answers were scarce.
Eventually, we landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana so the president could tape a message to the nation for the networks to air later. They allowed us to use our mobile phones for a few minutes just before Bush entered the room.
I called the AP’s Washington desk and kept the line open so my colleagues could catch what the president had to say.
After Bush spoke, they gave us 10 minutes to file. We raced to the small office where they’d set up a few landline phones for us. I pushed the first phone I could reach into my purse and used it to file the notes I’d compiled on my laptop. Then we were escorted outside to a blue school bus to wait.
We chatted among ourselves about which one of us would go with Bush if the gossip that he might go to a bunker was true.
I did NOT want to have to tell my boss, or anyone else for that matter, how I let some other reporter beat me out of staying in the pool with the president.
That would be humiliating. So I began strategizing in my head how to keep my seat on Air Force One. I figured I could power past the other reporters if I took my denim slingbacks off and made a barefoot run for it.
Then deputy press secretary Gordon Johndroe stepped onto the bus.
“The following people come with me,” Johndroe said. “AP photographer. AP reporter. ABC radio. CBS camera crew. Let’s go.”
Everybody else on the bus would go back to Washington on a support plane, he said.
A ruckus erupted in the back of the bus. Jay Carney and Judy Keen, in the pool for Time and USA Today, respectively, were making a noisy case to fly back on Air Force One too.
I didn’t stick around for the fight. I realized those bunker plan rumors were, in fact, true.
This time, there was no circling. The president went directly from Louisiana to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, where U.S. Strategic Command had a bunker.
When we landed, I noticed how peaceful the grounds were, how blue the sky was. I also noticed tanks on the tarmac and the machine guns held by the soldiers who met us there.
What a contrast, I thought.
After a short ride across the base, the president’s motorcade pulled up the driveway of a brick building that had what looked like a cinderblock elevator shaft across from it. Flanked by a tight ring of Secret Service agents, President Bush walked over to that small cinderblock structure and went inside.
I blinked.
Wait a minute.
Is he going to the bunker?
According to the rumors, I’m supposed to go to the bunker too.
But I and the rest of the bunker pool were outside standing under a tree.
I asked Fleischer about this.
No, he assured, the president is only going to a secure room for a national security briefing.
“Ari,” I said, “there’s nowhere for him to go in that little building but down.”
I turned to my pool mate Ann Compton.
“So much for the press going to the bunker,” I said.
They took us to a nearby building to wait.
They told us they didn’t know when we were going back to D.C., but they would make hotel arrangements for us if necessary.
I thought to myself, “Wow, we might be out here for a week.”
I plugged up my laptop and phone to charge the batteries, worked on the first-person account I’d been asked to write, and waited.
Two hours later, they gathered us up to head back to Air Force One.
The flight home was quiet. I looked out the window and saw a fighter jet off the wing, so close that I could make out the pilot’s face. In that moment, I thought about the prayer for traveling mercy uttered by my sister, a minister who inexplicably got through on my cellphone just before I left Sarasota that morning.
She asked God to mobilize His angels to protect all of us who were about to fly on Air Force One and bring us home safely.
There it was, outside my window. An angel on the wings in an F-16.
We landed at Andrews Air Force Base outside D.C. around sunset. Because the base was locked down, they took us to the White House by helicopter.
I could see smoke from the still-burning Pentagon in the distance.
I worked until nearly 2 a.m. On my way home, I saw tanks in the streets of the nation’s capital.
Before I went to bed, I sent an email to the friends who had blown up my inbox all day.
“I am fine. America is not,” I wrote, and shared a fact I felt needed to be preserved for posterity.
Three of the five journalists who comprised the United States’ first-ever “nuclear bunker pool” were African American: the late George Christian, a CBS cameraman; Erick Washington, also with CBS; and me.
But in that moment, the colors that truly mattered were red, white and blue.
I asked my friends to pray that we, as a country, would understand 9/11 better by and by.
Twenty-five years on, I am still waiting for the by and by.
About the Author
Atlanta native Sonya Ross is a former reporter for The Associated Press. She was first Black woman formally assigned to the AP’s White House reporting team. She lives in Washington, D.C.