We Should Have Seen It Coming by Gerald F. Seib

Author:Gerald F. Seib
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

The High Price of Terror

September 11, 2001, dawned bright and crystal clear in Washington—not just a beautiful day but a spectacular one, the kind that makes it worth having endured the miserably hot and humid preceding month of August in the nation’s capital.

Pete Wehner went to work that morning at the White House, as he had done since the outset of the still young Bush administration. Wehner was a veteran of the Reagan and first Bush administrations, and now was the deputy speechwriter to George W. Bush. On that morning, as it happened, Wehner attended the 7:30 A.M. senior staff meeting, the daily gathering of the president’s top aides. Normally that seat was filled by Mike Gerson, the president’s chief speechwriter, but on September 11 Gerson had figured it was a safe day to stay at home and work on a big upcoming speech.

Wehner was an intellectual, and very much on board with the idea that George W. Bush could modernize the notion of what it meant to be a conservative in the twenty-first century. Wehner was born in Texas but had moved to Washington State when he was six years old. As he grew up there, he came to realize he was more instinctively conservative than many of his compatriots. In a grade school debate, he spoke in favor of Richard Nixon’s bid for reelection in 1972.

Yet he also was enraptured by the idealism and soaring rhetoric of John and Bobby Kennedy, and spent time in the university library listening to their speeches. He was taken with their talk of the common good, social concerns, and compassion for one’s fellow man. In those college years, Wehner also grew increasingly religious.

All those impulses would combine in his political career. He worked for a time in the Washington State legislature, then moved to that other Washington—D.C.—to work for a conservative think tank and at the State Department. Thanks to an article Wehner wrote for The Washington Post, he caught the eye of a man who would be a kind of mentor and guide, the conservative social thinker William Bennett. The two came together in one of those odd ways in which alliances are born in Washington, when personal and political lives intersect. Bennett invited Wehner to join his touch football team. On one game day, when their squad was playing a team that included several former pro football players, Wehner went up for a pass against some bulky defenders, got knocked to the ground, and came up with a bloody lip. If the guy was that tough, Bennett decided, he was worth hiring.

Wehner worked for Bennett at the Department of Education in the first Bush administration and, after that, at Empower America, a think tank Bennett launched with Jack Kemp to advance conservative ideas and the belief that conservative social policies could help minorities and the poor as much as the wealthy. That was the gospel that Kemp preached fervently. Wehner embraced it.

Wehner worked alongside Gerson at Empower America, and they grew close.

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