“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”
“Another plane … the other tower.”
When he got off the train at Union Station, Biden said he saw a smoky brown fog in the sky beyond the Capitol dome. A third plane had just touched the Pentagon.
He headed for the Capitol, which was being evacuated along with all the office buildings of the House and Senate. The then senator had insisted to his daughter (who called him to ask him to leave Washington) that the Capitol was the safest place, even though people thought another plane was heading for the building and that congressional leaders had been flown by helicopter to a bunker.
“Damn, I want to get in,” he told a police officer after climbing the Capitol stairs and trying to get into the building. The officer refused to let him pass. As he recounted in his memoirs, Biden considered it important to “show the country that we were still doing business.”
Linda Douglass, who was a journalist at ABC News at the time, said she saw Biden and then-Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia discussing “who was older, because Biden wanted Congress to meet again in session.”
“I really felt it was important for the government to get back into business,” Douglass said in an interview with CNN.
Biden agreed to appear on ABC News and followed Douglass a few blocks to where they had the camera installed.
Douglass said that when he interviewed Biden, Bush was in Air Force One, then Vice President Dick Cheney was in a safe bunker, and Congress leaders had also been rescued.
“It was extremely important for the country to receive news from a senior government figure,” Douglass said.
According to a transcript of the broadcast, Biden said the United States would track those responsible for the attacks and, in the meantime, urged the public to be “calm, fresh and collected.”
“Terrorism wins when, in fact, they disrupt our civil liberties or shut down our institutions,” Biden said. “We have to prove that none of this has happened.”
He added: “This nation is too big, too strong, too united, it has too much power in terms of cohesion and values to let this separate us. And it will not happen.”
Former Rep. Bob Brady of Philadelphia, a friend of Biden’s, was with the then senator for much of that day. He said he was giving Biden and Biden’s brother a trip home when the president called from Air Force One to thank Biden for the comments he made on television.
“It was important to show the American people that now everyone was safe and that we were all in it together. There were Democrats, Republicans, we were going to give full support to the president. And that’s the message Joe sent, and for that’s what the president called him, “Brady said in an interview with CNN.
During that call, Brady said Biden urged Bush to return to the country’s capital. “Mr. President,” Biden told Bush, “go back to Washington.”
“You don’t want people to see our leader entering a bunker. Get him out of there, return him to the White House,” Brady said. “And he did, to his credit, he did.”
Biden wrote about the call with Bush in his book, “Promises to Keep: About Life and Politics,” saying Bush told him he was heading to an undisclosed location in the Midwest for the intelligence community to ‘had advised him not to return to DC.
“I then remembered a story about the leader of the French resistance, Charles de Gaulle, at the end of World War II. When France was liberated, there was a celebratory parade through the Champs Elysees in Paris: dignitaries, generals, and the officers, led by Gaulle himself. As they walked towards the Hôtel de Ville, the shots came out from the head and everyone touched the ground except Gaulle. He continued to walk straight, “Biden wrote.
After telling Bush to come back, Biden wrote, “I hung up the phone and there was silence in the van until Jimmy spoke.”
Biden wrote that his brother told him, “Everything the staff suggests he calls you has just been fired.”
CNN’s Kevin Liptak and Jeff Zeleny contributed to this report.