September 1, 2026 • 28 mins
Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, Steve Yates shares a firsthand account from inside the White House complex as America came under attack. Drawing on his experience serving on the vice president’s national security staff, he reflects on the confusion, evacuation, continuity of government, and leadership lessons that emerged in the hours and days that followed. More importantly, he examines what those events still teach America in 2026 about vigilance, resilience, and national security. Listen, share with the next generation, and help preserve the lessons that history can teach before memory fades. Follow Nation States with Yates for clear, common-sense insights where Steve Yates serves as your personal national security advisor, breaking down world events in ways that matter to Main Street, not just Washington. Connect with the show at Feedback@NationStatesYates.com and follow on X @NSWithYates.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Nation States with Yates. The world comes at
you fast, whether you're in the White House or in
your house. We aim to serve as your personal national
security advisor, helping you make sense of this wild and
crazy world, cut through the noise, tell you what actually
matters for this country, your family, and the kind of
nation that we intend to remain. Well, today's a little different.
(00:25):
We're coming up on 25 years since September 11th, 2001.
I wanted to do a special episode to share some
of my personal remembrances. We might frame this one as
a witness to history on 9-11 and what still holds
in 2026. Now, many of you will remember that day,
but we've had a whole generation grow up without a
(00:48):
visceral memory of what America felt like the day before
that morning. They know the footage. They know the dates
and They do not know the country that existed at
8.45 a.m. on a clear Tuesday in September. I do.
I was there. Many of you were probably there, too. Now,
I wasn't at ground zero. I was not at the Pentagon.
(01:09):
I was inside the White House complex, the executive office building,
the West Wing, doing the daily intelligence grind, serving on
the vice president's national security staff. Now, this episode is
not a documentary. You can find those anywhere. This is
a witness account and then a hard look at what
still holds in 2026. Because the people who hit us
(01:32):
that day were not the last people who will try.
And the habits that failed us before 846 a.m. that
day have a way of creeping back in if you
let them. Let that sink in a minute. But I
hope you'll stick with me through this remembrance, a little
bit of the story of what it was like for
one humble person, who went to work in an unusual
(01:53):
place on the most unusual day. Stay with me through
the break. We'll have more Nation States with Yates. Welcome
back to Nation States with Yates. I want to thank
you for joining us for our series of what we
hope are meaningful conversations about issues that can affect the
fate of our nation state. Please continue to download, share, like, subscribe,
(02:17):
all the good things. It helps us grow our audience.
It helps us support the program. As always, free of
charge to the audience. You can always go to the
iHeartRadio app and you can get all your episodes there
or wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. But whatever
way you come to us, I just want to express
personal gratitude for you doing so. Today, as I mentioned
(02:39):
in the introduction, we're going to have a special talk
about remembering a terrible day, but also a very important
day for the fate of our nation state. That was
September 11th, 2001. For me, maybe for like a lot
of you, it started like a lot of Tuesdays. Now,
(03:00):
in the early days of 2001, I was a new
appointee in the Bush administration. I was fairly young, 32
years old, learning my way around. I had grown up
in the Washington, D.C. area, but I didn't know the
White House very well. And at that point, I'd been
on the job for more than half a year, And
(03:21):
I went in, as I usually did, on September 11th,
around six in the morning. I'd go into the executive
office building. That's the big one that's across West Executive
Avenue from the West Wing, where thousands of people who
work for the president go to their typical daily grind.
I had my intelligence briefing, which usually was near the
top of my day. And then I'd go down to
(03:44):
the greasy spoon, as I would call it, the cafe
that was and the ground floor of the executive office
building get sugared up and energied up to go about
the rest of the day preparing for foreign dignitaries to
meet with the vice president, to prepare for interagency meetings
that might be on the schedule that day, the kind
of work that doesn't really make the evening news and
is not supposed to. That's the part that people miss
(04:08):
when they tell the 9-11 story. The attack didn't land
on an empty calendar. It landed on a working government
in the middle of a working day, really smack in
the morning, The first reports out of New York were confusing,
the way first reports almost always are. A plane flew
into the Trade Center. Almost impossible to conceive of. Large, medium, small,
(04:30):
didn't know. Just a plane hit it on a blue
sky morning. There were no obstructions. The first hypotheses in
a lot of the rooms, including the rooms that should
know better, was that it was a small plane. But
when you look at it now in retrospect, it was
obviously not a small plane. Or we thought it was
an accident, a terrible accident. But we also know that
(04:51):
it didn't turn out to be an accident. That hypothesis
lasted as long as there was one tower that was
on fire. We were watching early reports on TV, trying
to gauge out what the homeland security response might be.
How do you conduct a rescue in a building that
high up that's on fire? as we were contemplating these
(05:14):
things about what had happened and what the response was
going to be, how it might affect staffing for things
that day, then live on television, a second tower was hit.
We saw the plane go through. And the air in
our building completely changed. You could feel it. You didn't
(05:36):
need to see a briefing slide. You didn't need a
conference call. The second strike killed the accident theory. Saw
this as coordinated. Word came down from on high, America
is under attack. We saw this as coordinated and somehow
started to worry about a lot of different options. That
(05:58):
one moment, though, is crystal clear. Every assumption you walked
in with at six o'clock that day was left on
the floor. Soon after that second tower was hit, we'd
also gotten word that something had happened at the Pentagon.
Didn't know exactly what. Information didn't move efficiently that day,
even in the White House. Because there was such high
(06:19):
demand on cell phones, signals were down. And there was
just a lot of panic when you're in an emergency zone.
You're not getting accurate, up-to-date reports on what's happening. Those
go to those who truly need it. And that's a
small number of people. Very, very soon, the Secret Service
went into action doing what the Secret Service does. Now,
(06:40):
I'd been at the White House for about a half
a year. I had a fancy pants badge. I could
go almost anywhere on the compound. I had a pin
that said I could be within arm's reach of the president,
the vice president, other protectees. All the privileges, I didn't
know I really had all those privileges, but I had
several of them. They don't mean a whole lot when
(07:03):
true emergency occurs. I'd seen security around the White House,
but never quite like what we saw on September 11th.
There was a large swath of security people that came
up from the basement of the executive office building and
elsewhere that were filling through the compound, telling people to evacuate.
(07:25):
One simple word. Do not pass go. Do not collect $ 200.
No time for conversation. We're allegedly educated people. In an emergency,
being told to evacuate, we tried to secure our offices.
We were in national security suites, so we had computers
and safes and things that needed to be taken care of,
but we quickly then moved to evacuate. Went out of
(07:48):
the hallway, weren't quite sure where to go. Asked because
you ask security by instinct where to go. They didn't speak.
They just sort of said evacuate and pushed us along
pretty swiftly. Total exit. Not a polite suggestion, an order.
Get out. Thousands of people spilled into 17th Street that
day from the executive office building. When you're riding around
(08:11):
town and even working in the buildings, you don't think
about it, but there are that many people who work
in that great big building to support the operations of
the president, the broader White House, and those who serve.
These are not all political appointees. There's a lot of
people who just do a lot of the support work
for the facilities and the operations of those staffs. Thousands
(08:34):
made their way out, got their suits, their badges, trying
to make phone calls, not really entirely sure where to go.
Folks who an hour earlier were drafting a memo or
debating a meeting, talking about a policy, now they're on
the pavement. Then we sort of looked south as smoke
was starting to be noticeable above the area where the
(08:57):
Pentagon was. I have a colleague from the vice president's
staff whose husband was in the area that we later
learned was part of what was hit. He was not affected,
but he was not affected in the sense he was
not injured. Obviously everyone was affected. Now, we saw the
smoke rising from the Pentagon. We heard a boom that
(09:18):
came from the direction of the State Department. We thought
that an explosion had occurred. It was not an explosion.
But before too long, we arrived at the decision that
all the staff really should get out of the street
and make their way towards home, and probably couldn't go
home the way they came into work that day. So
we gathered in different groups and went in different directions.
(09:42):
There was an image that sits with me, and it's
not the television footage in New York. We have that,
of course. That smoke from our own side of the river,
the seat of American military power on fire, and a
crowd of government workers standing in the street, not really
knowing which way they're supposed to go, suddenly realizing the
(10:05):
street is no longer routine. I want you to sit
with that for a second because this is where mythology
and memory part ways. Hollywood wants a bunker and a
war room and a president on a headset. Some of
that happened. A lot of it did not happen that
way for most of the people who work in that complex.
(10:25):
Most of us were just told to leave. A few
went down to an emergency evacuation, emergency operations center, I
should say. Inside the complex that morning, there was a
split that I still think about. I wrote it down
and later talk about it from time to time in
the media. There was a fry zone. The people who
(10:46):
pulled into the continuity of government And though there was
the no-fry zone, those were the people who got pulled
into continuity of government, went down to the presidency emergency
operations center, the bunker, and the vice president was among
them that day because the president was outside of Washington, D.C.
A handful of others whose job in that hour was
(11:09):
to keep the constitutional chain in contact while nobody knew
how many more planes were still in the air. Everybody
else was in the fry zone. You could go ahead
and get fried. Go walk home. It's a crude way
of talking about it, but sometimes dark humor is how
you process times of terrible things happening, whether it's even
(11:31):
terrible uncertainty about what's coming in that very day and
what would come soon after. I don't say these things
out of bitterness. I actually think it was very important
that you are humbled by realizing there's really only very,
very few people who are genuinely essential for continuity of
(11:51):
this republic. And most of the people who think they're
high and mighty actually are replaceable or expendable in an
absolute crisis. I was one of those. And it's really
how a republic actually functions when it's hit. You cannot
put 10,000 people in a bunker. You protect the office,
you protect succession, you empty the buildings, and then thousands
(12:14):
of Americans who happen to work for the government in
a highfalutin place put one foot in front of the other,
and go home. Continuity of government is not a slogan.
On that morning, it was a physical fact. Some people
went down. Most people went out. Both groups were doing
their duty. Here is the other thing the anniversary specials
(12:36):
tend to flatten. 9-11 didn't arrive in a vacuum. The
inbox that morning was already had real work in it.
There was tax bills going through Congress. New administration had
come in talking about the economy, about growth, what government
should and should not take out of a paycheck. Earlier
in the year, there'd been an EP3 incident. April, April
(12:58):
Fool's Day of 2001, a Chinese fighter clips a U.S.
Navy reconnaissance aircraft in the South China Sea. A crew
is detained, the aircraft is held. That was the first
real foreign policy test of the Bush administration in some ways,
and it was with Beijing, not Baghdad. China was teed
up to enter the World Trade Organization. That was not
(13:19):
a side note. It was a strategic bet the United
States had been making for years, that bringing China into
the trading system would change China more than it would
change us. We're still paying the invoice on that bet.
And there was a Taiwan arms package that was announced
earlier in that year. The question of what we sell
and what we withheld and what signal that sends across
(13:41):
the strait, that was still in the air. These questions
did not start on September 10th, 11th, or 12th. They
were already on the table prior to this event. I
list those not to be clever. I list them just
because the temptation 25 years later is to talk as
if history is one hinge and everything before it was
(14:02):
a prologue. That is not how nation states work. The
attack changed the presidency. It changed the budget. It changed
the legal authorities. It launched what we called the global
war on terror. It put the Taliban accountability at the
center of American policy in a way no campaign speech
ever had or could. But China did not disappear. Taiwan
(14:26):
did not disappear. Trade did not disappear. The competition we're
living through in 2026 was already seeded in the months
before the towers fell. 9-11 postponed some of that competition.
It didn't cancel it. If you want one strategic lesson
from that morning that still pays rent, it's this. The
surprise attack will dominate the next decade of your policy.
(14:47):
It will not retire the decade that was already underway.
Think on that. I want to pivot from that fateful day.
There's so much more that could be said, but we
have a limited time. I'd like to talk a little
bit about some personal observations of September 12th. In many ways,
it stays with me more intensely than September 11th did,
(15:10):
partly because September 11th was so dark. And there were
some beginnings of light and recovery on September 12th that
I absolutely treasure and I'm happy to share with you.
That next day, I got up just as I had
the previous day. Went into the office around 6, had
my intelligence briefing, and went downstairs to get fueled up
(15:33):
for the rest of the business day. As I went
down the stairs, I noticed a line forming at that
same greasy spoon. It turned out that day, September 12th,
that morning, the president came to the executive office building cafeteria.
Not the residence, not the Oval, not the White House mess,
(15:56):
the workers' cafeteria in the basement level of the executive
office building. I want to be careful here. I'm not
going to address this up as some kind of a
stained glass window exercise. The man had the weight of
the country on him. The dead were still being counted.
The Pentagon was still smoking. Nobody knew if this was
(16:16):
the first day of a campaign or the first day
of a war that would last a generation. What I saw,
what I wrote down to try to remember, was simpler
than speeches. As the president stood there, he was shaking
hands with, hugging, praying with each individual person everyday ordinary
(16:42):
staffer who went down to the cafeteria that morning. In
a way, he was drawing energy and strength from the staff.
He recognized that carrying a burden like he was for
our nation and this response required standing on the shoulders
of thousands. That's not a press line. That is how
(17:04):
a building actually feels when the person at the top
understands he cannot do the job alone. A lot of
leadership talk since then has been about the lone decider,
man in the arena. That's fine. There's a place for that.
But the honest picture from inside the complex is different.
The Republic works when the person with the title knows
(17:26):
he's standing on other people's backs. Analysts who slept two hours,
agents who emptied a building, officers who stayed at their posts,
clerks who kept the paper moving when phones were a mess.
If you want a 2026 application, here it is. We
have spent a lot of years arguing about personalities, who's strong,
who's weak, who looked good on television. The test after
(17:48):
a shock is not to look. The test is whether
the person in the chair knows he is borrowing strength
from thousands of people he'll never really meet and know
and treats that loan with respect. That's what I felt
from the President of the United States on September the 12th,
that morning after the fateful day before. A generation... now
(18:12):
has emerged with no visceral memory of pre-911 America. That
sentence is not nostalgia. I'm asking anyone to miss airport
lines that were shorter or a foreign policy debate that
was smaller. I'm saying something more serious. If you do
(18:33):
not feel that morning in your body, it's easier to
treat 9-11 as content, a documentary, a unit in a
history class, a date that gets a flag on social
media and then disappears until next year. The people who
lived it in real time learned a different lesson. The
United States can be hit at home, not in theory,
(18:54):
in downtown New York at the Pentagon, in a field
in Pennsylvania, because ordinary passengers decided they were not going
to let the fourth plane finish the job. Two things
from that morning still govern how I look at 2026. First,
vigilance against theocratic movements remains essential to the survival of
(19:16):
this republic. I will say that plainly because a lot
of people get tired of saying it. The men who
flew those planes were not confused about their purpose. They
were not driven by a trade dispute. They were not underemployed.
They were animated by a religious political project that cannot
tolerate a free society, a sovereign Jewish state, or an
(19:37):
America that refuses to submit. You can argue tactics. You
can argue how long we stayed in this country or
that one. You can argue whether we confused the war
of necessity with wars of choice. Those are fair arguments.
We have time for that. I have made some of
them myself on this very program. What is not fair
(19:59):
argument is the idea that the underlying current dried up
because we got tired of talking about it. We've got
to make sure that this memory holds. Look at a
map in 2026. Look at who still chants for the
destruction of the United States and our allies. Look at
who still uses shrines, militias, missiles in a single system.
(20:22):
Look at Iran. Look at the networks that answer to
the same family of ideas, even when the logos change.
Fatigue is not a strategy. Memory is. Second, America's status
as an exceptional nation inherently makes it an exceptional target.
It's not a bumper sticker. It's just a security fact.
(20:43):
If you are the country that still sets the terms
of the open ocean, the reserve currency, the alliance system,
the idea that people who do not belong to the state,
that the idea is that the state belongs to the people,
you will be hated for these ideas by people who
need the opposite to be true. You'll be studied by
(21:04):
rivals who would rather replace you than live beside you.
You will probably be be probed by theocratic movements and
by great power competitors at the same time. China watched 9-11.
They watched where we put our troops, where we put
our attention, where we took our eye off the West Pacific.
We are living inside that observation now. So in 2026,
(21:27):
the lesson is not remember the fallen, although that's very,
very important. Honor and respect to all who fell and
all who lost loved ones. We can do those lessons,
but the real lesson is exceptional nations do not get
to choose whether they're targets. They only get to choose
(21:48):
whether they stay awake. Ultimately, that's my takeaway as I
look at 25 years. I lament that for far too many,
the feeling of shock and resurrection, frankly, that came after
has been overshadowed by retribution and divides and debates over wars,
(22:11):
debates over policies and some of the holdover issues that
were put in place in a panic at that time
when we were a nation in crisis. Instead, we need
to make sure that we have this vigilance because we
can't have that 8.46 a.m., September 11th mindset. We have
(22:34):
to basically take in the hard lesson that was served
to us as a nation. Now, my experience wasn't better
or worse than anybody else's. Definitely there are people who
sacrificed more. Definitely there are people who suffered more. And
definitely there are more important people that were in this drama.
(22:56):
But I just want you to know, as the great
audience that we're privileged to have in this program, that
We did have a front row seat to some of
that history. We're going to share the lessons that were
learned in the years that followed. That experience changed my
life irreparably. In some ways, very, very good. In some ways, challenging.
(23:17):
There's a lot of stress that comes with national security
jobs in the years that followed were not the easiest,
but they were important. They were meaningful. I honor everyone
who served. I honor everyone who was evacuated and those
who went to the Emergency Operations Center, and I'm deeply
grateful that we had the leaders we had at that
time who knew that if they were going to carry
(23:40):
this burden, if they were going to stand on the
shoulders of the thousands who came to work, that they
also needed to be on bended knee asking for a
God in heaven to give them strength and lift them up,
that this is not a burden that an individual can
carry on their own. This is not the job of
a human. This requires extra help. And I was grateful
(24:05):
that we had a president who was there to pray
with staff, have staff pray with him, and recognizing that
as a republic, we were on bended knee asking for
help to come out of that terrible day. And if
we look at these 25 years hence, regardless of what
we think we're going through by way of hardship now,
we've done very well. And we should give thanks for
(24:27):
that in our prayer this evening. So we're going to
take a brief break. We'll come back with some parting
thoughts on this special episode. taking a look back at
my remembrances about 9-11 and some of the lessons for 2026.
Stick with us after the break for some parting thoughts.
Welcome back to Nation States with Yates. Thank you for
(24:47):
joining me today for this special edition, talking about the
anniversary of September 11th, 2001. 25 years later, what are
some of the takeaways that are still relevant today? As always,
I want to thank you for joining the program. Please
continue to like, download, share, subscribe. Helps us keep the
(25:09):
conversation going. Hopefully when we're dealing with heavy subjects like this,
it's something that is meaningful to you, that helps stir
some ideas in your family, your church congregation, and especially
every one of our episodes, we hope gives you some
thoughts and ideas and motivation for conversations today. with those
you elect to represent you. So for today, we're talking
(25:33):
about 9-11 and the lessons from that day and since.
I want to leave you with a few things to
carry from the episode, not Washington things, kitchen table things. One,
don't outsource memory. If you were alive that morning, tell
someone younger what it actually felt like. Not the movie version.
(25:54):
Some of them were not alive yet. If you weren't
alive yet, Ask someone who was, and then go read
the names. All of them. Go to New York. Go
to the Pentagon. Go to Shanksville. The first responders who
ran in. These were the heroes of the moment and
(26:14):
of our time. Take those in. Don't outsource memory. Number two,
don't confuse a long war's mistakes with the original crime.
We can be honest about Iraq, about Afghanistan, about surveillance.
about the ways government used the emergency to grow itself.
Honesty is not the same thing as amnesia. The people
(26:36):
who murdered three thousands of our neighbors were not a misunderstanding.
This is very real. I think it needs to be
taken in and respected, the good and the bad. Three,
watch the inbox. The next shock will not look like
the last one. It may be a port, a grid,
a city water system, a campaign against shipping, A strike
(26:59):
designed to look like an accident until the second one lands,
like that fateful day. The muscle we need is the
muscle we used after the second tower. Drop the comfortable
theory and move. Basically what the Secret Service were telling
us when we were being told to evacuate. Allegedly educated people,
couldn't speak English, couldn't understand, but we understood the word
(27:22):
evacuate and a shove in the back. We need to
be prepared for that to happen again at some point. Four.
Demand leaders who know they stand on other people's shoulders,
not performers, stewards. I was a young man in that building.
I'm not a young man now. Republic does not need
me to stay angry. It needs me and you to
(27:46):
stay clear. Clear that we were hit because of who
we are, not because of a memo we forgot to send.
Clear that theocratic violence and great power rivalry can run
on the same calendar. Clear that continuity of government is
a duty, and so is walking home and showing up
the next morning to work, doing it anyway. 25 years
(28:10):
is long enough for a country to forget. It's not
long enough for the people who want to test us again.
I will not forget. I do not think you will either.
This is Nation States with Yates. If you think this
was a useful conversation, please send it to someone who
was in grade school in 2001. They're the ones who
(28:31):
need this memory the most. As always, you can reach
the show at feedback at nationstatesyates.com and you can follow
us on X at NS with Yates. The world will
still come at you tomorrow and we'll be here to
help you sort it out. God bless the people we lost.
God bless the ones who ran into the fire. And
(28:52):
God bless the United States of America. Till next time,
stay strong, America.
Welcome to Nation States with Yates. The world comes at
you fast, whether you're in the White House or in
your house. We aim to serve as your personal national
security advisor, helping you make sense of this wild and
crazy world, cut through the noise, tell you what actually
matters for this country, your family, and the kind of
nation that we intend to remain. Well, today's a little different.
(00:25):
We're coming up on 25 years since September 11th, 2001.
I wanted to do a special episode to share some
of my personal remembrances. We might frame this one as
a witness to history on 9-11 and what still holds
in 2026. Now, many of you will remember that day,
but we've had a whole generation grow up without a
(00:48):
visceral memory of what America felt like the day before
that morning. They know the footage. They know the dates
and They do not know the country that existed at
8.45 a.m. on a clear Tuesday in September. I do.
I was there. Many of you were probably there, too. Now,
I wasn't at ground zero. I was not at the Pentagon.
(01:09):
I was inside the White House complex, the executive office building,
the West Wing, doing the daily intelligence grind, serving on
the vice president's national security staff. Now, this episode is
not a documentary. You can find those anywhere. This is
a witness account and then a hard look at what
still holds in 2026. Because the people who hit us
(01:32):
that day were not the last people who will try.
And the habits that failed us before 846 a.m. that
day have a way of creeping back in if you
let them. Let that sink in a minute. But I
hope you'll stick with me through this remembrance, a little
bit of the story of what it was like for
one humble person, who went to work in an unusual
(01:53):
place on the most unusual day. Stay with me through
the break. We'll have more Nation States with Yates. Welcome
back to Nation States with Yates. I want to thank
you for joining us for our series of what we
hope are meaningful conversations about issues that can affect the
fate of our nation state. Please continue to download, share, like, subscribe,
(02:17):
all the good things. It helps us grow our audience.
It helps us support the program. As always, free of
charge to the audience. You can always go to the
iHeartRadio app and you can get all your episodes there
or wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. But whatever
way you come to us, I just want to express
personal gratitude for you doing so. Today, as I mentioned
(02:39):
in the introduction, we're going to have a special talk
about remembering a terrible day, but also a very important
day for the fate of our nation state. That was
September 11th, 2001. For me, maybe for like a lot
of you, it started like a lot of Tuesdays. Now,
(03:00):
in the early days of 2001, I was a new
appointee in the Bush administration. I was fairly young, 32
years old, learning my way around. I had grown up
in the Washington, D.C. area, but I didn't know the
White House very well. And at that point, I'd been
on the job for more than half a year, And
(03:21):
I went in, as I usually did, on September 11th,
around six in the morning. I'd go into the executive
office building. That's the big one that's across West Executive
Avenue from the West Wing, where thousands of people who
work for the president go to their typical daily grind.
I had my intelligence briefing, which usually was near the
top of my day. And then I'd go down to
(03:44):
the greasy spoon, as I would call it, the cafe
that was and the ground floor of the executive office
building get sugared up and energied up to go about
the rest of the day preparing for foreign dignitaries to
meet with the vice president, to prepare for interagency meetings
that might be on the schedule that day, the kind
of work that doesn't really make the evening news and
is not supposed to. That's the part that people miss
(04:08):
when they tell the 9-11 story. The attack didn't land
on an empty calendar. It landed on a working government
in the middle of a working day, really smack in
the morning, The first reports out of New York were confusing,
the way first reports almost always are. A plane flew
into the Trade Center. Almost impossible to conceive of. Large, medium, small,
(04:30):
didn't know. Just a plane hit it on a blue
sky morning. There were no obstructions. The first hypotheses in
a lot of the rooms, including the rooms that should
know better, was that it was a small plane. But
when you look at it now in retrospect, it was
obviously not a small plane. Or we thought it was
an accident, a terrible accident. But we also know that
(04:51):
it didn't turn out to be an accident. That hypothesis
lasted as long as there was one tower that was
on fire. We were watching early reports on TV, trying
to gauge out what the homeland security response might be.
How do you conduct a rescue in a building that
high up that's on fire? as we were contemplating these
(05:14):
things about what had happened and what the response was
going to be, how it might affect staffing for things
that day, then live on television, a second tower was hit.
We saw the plane go through. And the air in
our building completely changed. You could feel it. You didn't
(05:36):
need to see a briefing slide. You didn't need a
conference call. The second strike killed the accident theory. Saw
this as coordinated. Word came down from on high, America
is under attack. We saw this as coordinated and somehow
started to worry about a lot of different options. That
(05:58):
one moment, though, is crystal clear. Every assumption you walked
in with at six o'clock that day was left on
the floor. Soon after that second tower was hit, we'd
also gotten word that something had happened at the Pentagon.
Didn't know exactly what. Information didn't move efficiently that day,
even in the White House. Because there was such high
(06:19):
demand on cell phones, signals were down. And there was
just a lot of panic when you're in an emergency zone.
You're not getting accurate, up-to-date reports on what's happening. Those
go to those who truly need it. And that's a
small number of people. Very, very soon, the Secret Service
went into action doing what the Secret Service does. Now,
(06:40):
I'd been at the White House for about a half
a year. I had a fancy pants badge. I could
go almost anywhere on the compound. I had a pin
that said I could be within arm's reach of the president,
the vice president, other protectees. All the privileges, I didn't
know I really had all those privileges, but I had
several of them. They don't mean a whole lot when
(07:03):
true emergency occurs. I'd seen security around the White House,
but never quite like what we saw on September 11th.
There was a large swath of security people that came
up from the basement of the executive office building and
elsewhere that were filling through the compound, telling people to evacuate.
(07:25):
One simple word. Do not pass go. Do not collect $ 200.
No time for conversation. We're allegedly educated people. In an emergency,
being told to evacuate, we tried to secure our offices.
We were in national security suites, so we had computers
and safes and things that needed to be taken care of,
but we quickly then moved to evacuate. Went out of
(07:48):
the hallway, weren't quite sure where to go. Asked because
you ask security by instinct where to go. They didn't speak.
They just sort of said evacuate and pushed us along
pretty swiftly. Total exit. Not a polite suggestion, an order.
Get out. Thousands of people spilled into 17th Street that
day from the executive office building. When you're riding around
(08:11):
town and even working in the buildings, you don't think
about it, but there are that many people who work
in that great big building to support the operations of
the president, the broader White House, and those who serve.
These are not all political appointees. There's a lot of
people who just do a lot of the support work
for the facilities and the operations of those staffs. Thousands
(08:34):
made their way out, got their suits, their badges, trying
to make phone calls, not really entirely sure where to go.
Folks who an hour earlier were drafting a memo or
debating a meeting, talking about a policy, now they're on
the pavement. Then we sort of looked south as smoke
was starting to be noticeable above the area where the
(08:57):
Pentagon was. I have a colleague from the vice president's
staff whose husband was in the area that we later
learned was part of what was hit. He was not affected,
but he was not affected in the sense he was
not injured. Obviously everyone was affected. Now, we saw the
smoke rising from the Pentagon. We heard a boom that
(09:18):
came from the direction of the State Department. We thought
that an explosion had occurred. It was not an explosion.
But before too long, we arrived at the decision that
all the staff really should get out of the street
and make their way towards home, and probably couldn't go
home the way they came into work that day. So
we gathered in different groups and went in different directions.
(09:42):
There was an image that sits with me, and it's
not the television footage in New York. We have that,
of course. That smoke from our own side of the river,
the seat of American military power on fire, and a
crowd of government workers standing in the street, not really
knowing which way they're supposed to go, suddenly realizing the
(10:05):
street is no longer routine. I want you to sit
with that for a second because this is where mythology
and memory part ways. Hollywood wants a bunker and a
war room and a president on a headset. Some of
that happened. A lot of it did not happen that
way for most of the people who work in that complex.
(10:25):
Most of us were just told to leave. A few
went down to an emergency evacuation, emergency operations center, I
should say. Inside the complex that morning, there was a
split that I still think about. I wrote it down
and later talk about it from time to time in
the media. There was a fry zone. The people who
(10:46):
pulled into the continuity of government And though there was
the no-fry zone, those were the people who got pulled
into continuity of government, went down to the presidency emergency
operations center, the bunker, and the vice president was among
them that day because the president was outside of Washington, D.C.
A handful of others whose job in that hour was
(11:09):
to keep the constitutional chain in contact while nobody knew
how many more planes were still in the air. Everybody
else was in the fry zone. You could go ahead
and get fried. Go walk home. It's a crude way
of talking about it, but sometimes dark humor is how
you process times of terrible things happening, whether it's even
(11:31):
terrible uncertainty about what's coming in that very day and
what would come soon after. I don't say these things
out of bitterness. I actually think it was very important
that you are humbled by realizing there's really only very,
very few people who are genuinely essential for continuity of
(11:51):
this republic. And most of the people who think they're
high and mighty actually are replaceable or expendable in an
absolute crisis. I was one of those. And it's really
how a republic actually functions when it's hit. You cannot
put 10,000 people in a bunker. You protect the office,
you protect succession, you empty the buildings, and then thousands
(12:14):
of Americans who happen to work for the government in
a highfalutin place put one foot in front of the other,
and go home. Continuity of government is not a slogan.
On that morning, it was a physical fact. Some people
went down. Most people went out. Both groups were doing
their duty. Here is the other thing the anniversary specials
(12:36):
tend to flatten. 9-11 didn't arrive in a vacuum. The
inbox that morning was already had real work in it.
There was tax bills going through Congress. New administration had
come in talking about the economy, about growth, what government
should and should not take out of a paycheck. Earlier
in the year, there'd been an EP3 incident. April, April
(12:58):
Fool's Day of 2001, a Chinese fighter clips a U.S.
Navy reconnaissance aircraft in the South China Sea. A crew
is detained, the aircraft is held. That was the first
real foreign policy test of the Bush administration in some ways,
and it was with Beijing, not Baghdad. China was teed
up to enter the World Trade Organization. That was not
(13:19):
a side note. It was a strategic bet the United
States had been making for years, that bringing China into
the trading system would change China more than it would
change us. We're still paying the invoice on that bet.
And there was a Taiwan arms package that was announced
earlier in that year. The question of what we sell
and what we withheld and what signal that sends across
(13:41):
the strait, that was still in the air. These questions
did not start on September 10th, 11th, or 12th. They
were already on the table prior to this event. I
list those not to be clever. I list them just
because the temptation 25 years later is to talk as
if history is one hinge and everything before it was
(14:02):
a prologue. That is not how nation states work. The
attack changed the presidency. It changed the budget. It changed
the legal authorities. It launched what we called the global
war on terror. It put the Taliban accountability at the
center of American policy in a way no campaign speech
ever had or could. But China did not disappear. Taiwan
(14:26):
did not disappear. Trade did not disappear. The competition we're
living through in 2026 was already seeded in the months
before the towers fell. 9-11 postponed some of that competition.
It didn't cancel it. If you want one strategic lesson
from that morning that still pays rent, it's this. The
surprise attack will dominate the next decade of your policy.
(14:47):
It will not retire the decade that was already underway.
Think on that. I want to pivot from that fateful day.
There's so much more that could be said, but we
have a limited time. I'd like to talk a little
bit about some personal observations of September 12th. In many ways,
it stays with me more intensely than September 11th did,
(15:10):
partly because September 11th was so dark. And there were
some beginnings of light and recovery on September 12th that
I absolutely treasure and I'm happy to share with you.
That next day, I got up just as I had
the previous day. Went into the office around 6, had
my intelligence briefing, and went downstairs to get fueled up
(15:33):
for the rest of the business day. As I went
down the stairs, I noticed a line forming at that
same greasy spoon. It turned out that day, September 12th,
that morning, the president came to the executive office building cafeteria.
Not the residence, not the Oval, not the White House mess,
(15:56):
the workers' cafeteria in the basement level of the executive
office building. I want to be careful here. I'm not
going to address this up as some kind of a
stained glass window exercise. The man had the weight of
the country on him. The dead were still being counted.
The Pentagon was still smoking. Nobody knew if this was
(16:16):
the first day of a campaign or the first day
of a war that would last a generation. What I saw,
what I wrote down to try to remember, was simpler
than speeches. As the president stood there, he was shaking
hands with, hugging, praying with each individual person everyday ordinary
(16:42):
staffer who went down to the cafeteria that morning. In
a way, he was drawing energy and strength from the staff.
He recognized that carrying a burden like he was for
our nation and this response required standing on the shoulders
of thousands. That's not a press line. That is how
(17:04):
a building actually feels when the person at the top
understands he cannot do the job alone. A lot of
leadership talk since then has been about the lone decider,
man in the arena. That's fine. There's a place for that.
But the honest picture from inside the complex is different.
The Republic works when the person with the title knows
(17:26):
he's standing on other people's backs. Analysts who slept two hours,
agents who emptied a building, officers who stayed at their posts,
clerks who kept the paper moving when phones were a mess.
If you want a 2026 application, here it is. We
have spent a lot of years arguing about personalities, who's strong,
who's weak, who looked good on television. The test after
(17:48):
a shock is not to look. The test is whether
the person in the chair knows he is borrowing strength
from thousands of people he'll never really meet and know
and treats that loan with respect. That's what I felt
from the President of the United States on September the 12th,
that morning after the fateful day before. A generation... now
(18:12):
has emerged with no visceral memory of pre-911 America. That
sentence is not nostalgia. I'm asking anyone to miss airport
lines that were shorter or a foreign policy debate that
was smaller. I'm saying something more serious. If you do
(18:33):
not feel that morning in your body, it's easier to
treat 9-11 as content, a documentary, a unit in a
history class, a date that gets a flag on social
media and then disappears until next year. The people who
lived it in real time learned a different lesson. The
United States can be hit at home, not in theory,
(18:54):
in downtown New York at the Pentagon, in a field
in Pennsylvania, because ordinary passengers decided they were not going
to let the fourth plane finish the job. Two things
from that morning still govern how I look at 2026. First,
vigilance against theocratic movements remains essential to the survival of
(19:16):
this republic. I will say that plainly because a lot
of people get tired of saying it. The men who
flew those planes were not confused about their purpose. They
were not driven by a trade dispute. They were not underemployed.
They were animated by a religious political project that cannot
tolerate a free society, a sovereign Jewish state, or an
(19:37):
America that refuses to submit. You can argue tactics. You
can argue how long we stayed in this country or
that one. You can argue whether we confused the war
of necessity with wars of choice. Those are fair arguments.
We have time for that. I have made some of
them myself on this very program. What is not fair
(19:59):
argument is the idea that the underlying current dried up
because we got tired of talking about it. We've got
to make sure that this memory holds. Look at a
map in 2026. Look at who still chants for the
destruction of the United States and our allies. Look at
who still uses shrines, militias, missiles in a single system.
(20:22):
Look at Iran. Look at the networks that answer to
the same family of ideas, even when the logos change.
Fatigue is not a strategy. Memory is. Second, America's status
as an exceptional nation inherently makes it an exceptional target.
It's not a bumper sticker. It's just a security fact.
(20:43):
If you are the country that still sets the terms
of the open ocean, the reserve currency, the alliance system,
the idea that people who do not belong to the state,
that the idea is that the state belongs to the people,
you will be hated for these ideas by people who
need the opposite to be true. You'll be studied by
(21:04):
rivals who would rather replace you than live beside you.
You will probably be be probed by theocratic movements and
by great power competitors at the same time. China watched 9-11.
They watched where we put our troops, where we put
our attention, where we took our eye off the West Pacific.
We are living inside that observation now. So in 2026,
(21:27):
the lesson is not remember the fallen, although that's very,
very important. Honor and respect to all who fell and
all who lost loved ones. We can do those lessons,
but the real lesson is exceptional nations do not get
to choose whether they're targets. They only get to choose
(21:48):
whether they stay awake. Ultimately, that's my takeaway as I
look at 25 years. I lament that for far too many,
the feeling of shock and resurrection, frankly, that came after
has been overshadowed by retribution and divides and debates over wars,
(22:11):
debates over policies and some of the holdover issues that
were put in place in a panic at that time
when we were a nation in crisis. Instead, we need
to make sure that we have this vigilance because we
can't have that 8.46 a.m., September 11th mindset. We have
(22:34):
to basically take in the hard lesson that was served
to us as a nation. Now, my experience wasn't better
or worse than anybody else's. Definitely there are people who
sacrificed more. Definitely there are people who suffered more. And
definitely there are more important people that were in this drama.
(22:56):
But I just want you to know, as the great
audience that we're privileged to have in this program, that
We did have a front row seat to some of
that history. We're going to share the lessons that were
learned in the years that followed. That experience changed my
life irreparably. In some ways, very, very good. In some ways, challenging.
(23:17):
There's a lot of stress that comes with national security
jobs in the years that followed were not the easiest,
but they were important. They were meaningful. I honor everyone
who served. I honor everyone who was evacuated and those
who went to the Emergency Operations Center, and I'm deeply
grateful that we had the leaders we had at that
time who knew that if they were going to carry
(23:40):
this burden, if they were going to stand on the
shoulders of the thousands who came to work, that they
also needed to be on bended knee asking for a
God in heaven to give them strength and lift them up,
that this is not a burden that an individual can
carry on their own. This is not the job of
a human. This requires extra help. And I was grateful
(24:05):
that we had a president who was there to pray
with staff, have staff pray with him, and recognizing that
as a republic, we were on bended knee asking for
help to come out of that terrible day. And if
we look at these 25 years hence, regardless of what
we think we're going through by way of hardship now,
we've done very well. And we should give thanks for
(24:27):
that in our prayer this evening. So we're going to
take a brief break. We'll come back with some parting
thoughts on this special episode. taking a look back at
my remembrances about 9-11 and some of the lessons for 2026.
Stick with us after the break for some parting thoughts.
Welcome back to Nation States with Yates. Thank you for
(24:47):
joining me today for this special edition, talking about the
anniversary of September 11th, 2001. 25 years later, what are
some of the takeaways that are still relevant today? As always,
I want to thank you for joining the program. Please
continue to like, download, share, subscribe. Helps us keep the
(25:09):
conversation going. Hopefully when we're dealing with heavy subjects like this,
it's something that is meaningful to you, that helps stir
some ideas in your family, your church congregation, and especially
every one of our episodes, we hope gives you some
thoughts and ideas and motivation for conversations today. with those
you elect to represent you. So for today, we're talking
(25:33):
about 9-11 and the lessons from that day and since.
I want to leave you with a few things to
carry from the episode, not Washington things, kitchen table things. One,
don't outsource memory. If you were alive that morning, tell
someone younger what it actually felt like. Not the movie version.
(25:54):
Some of them were not alive yet. If you weren't
alive yet, Ask someone who was, and then go read
the names. All of them. Go to New York. Go
to the Pentagon. Go to Shanksville. The first responders who
ran in. These were the heroes of the moment and
(26:14):
of our time. Take those in. Don't outsource memory. Number two,
don't confuse a long war's mistakes with the original crime.
We can be honest about Iraq, about Afghanistan, about surveillance.
about the ways government used the emergency to grow itself.
Honesty is not the same thing as amnesia. The people
(26:36):
who murdered three thousands of our neighbors were not a misunderstanding.
This is very real. I think it needs to be
taken in and respected, the good and the bad. Three,
watch the inbox. The next shock will not look like
the last one. It may be a port, a grid,
a city water system, a campaign against shipping, A strike
(26:59):
designed to look like an accident until the second one lands,
like that fateful day. The muscle we need is the
muscle we used after the second tower. Drop the comfortable
theory and move. Basically what the Secret Service were telling
us when we were being told to evacuate. Allegedly educated people,
couldn't speak English, couldn't understand, but we understood the word
(27:22):
evacuate and a shove in the back. We need to
be prepared for that to happen again at some point. Four.
Demand leaders who know they stand on other people's shoulders,
not performers, stewards. I was a young man in that building.
I'm not a young man now. Republic does not need
me to stay angry. It needs me and you to
(27:46):
stay clear. Clear that we were hit because of who
we are, not because of a memo we forgot to send.
Clear that theocratic violence and great power rivalry can run
on the same calendar. Clear that continuity of government is
a duty, and so is walking home and showing up
the next morning to work, doing it anyway. 25 years
(28:10):
is long enough for a country to forget. It's not
long enough for the people who want to test us again.
I will not forget. I do not think you will either.
This is Nation States with Yates. If you think this
was a useful conversation, please send it to someone who
was in grade school in 2001. They're the ones who
(28:31):
need this memory the most. As always, you can reach
the show at feedback at nationstatesyates.com and you can follow
us on X at NS with Yates. The world will
still come at you tomorrow and we'll be here to
help you sort it out. God bless the people we lost.
God bless the ones who ran into the fire. And
(28:52):
God bless the United States of America. Till next time,
stay strong, America.
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