BRIAN WILLIAMS: Let's begin at the beginning. It's become a cliché that the morning of September 11th began like any other, but it really did, and I'd like to take you back to the first time you found out something was wrong. Who, who told you, and, and what was the atmosphere like?

ANDREW CARD, WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF: We were in the, the holding room outside of a classroom and the President was getting ready to go in, meet with students to talk about reading, and word came from the Situation Room, that there had been a plane crash into the, one of the World Trade Center towers.

It was first reported to me, by the Situation Room, that it looked like it was a, a twin-engine pro -- prop plane, and so the natural reaction was -- "What a horrible accident. The pilot must have had a heart attack." And the President was informed by Karl Rove. We were standing, just as the President was getting ready to go into the classroom, and the President went into the classroom and I came back into the holding room, and then we received information that there had been a second plane.

And it was clear that the second plane could not have been there as a coincidence, and it turned out that the first plane was a jetliner, the second plane we knew to be a jetliner.

And then I rushed to decide how to inform the President and when to inform him, and the test that I went through is, if I were President would I want to know?, and I felt very strongly the President would want to know. So I gathered my thoughts, tried to be very efficient in the words that I used, took one step into the classroom, looked over to the press pool that was gathered at the back of the room, and I remember looking at one reporter, and she, she kind of, kind of looked at me like, What are you doing here? and I held up two fingers, said a second plane, and then waited for a slight break in the conversation in the classroom, and went up to the President's right ear and said, "A second plane hit the second tower, America is under attack."

And then I pulled away from the President and, and not that many seconds later, the President excused himself from the classroom and we gathered in the holding room and talked about the situation.

WILLIAMS: You had the presence of mind to say "America is under attack," which, in -- instead of saying, "Don't react to what I'm about to tell you," or "Try to keep a straight face and we'll keep the event going," you really did crystallize it. That's exactly what was going on. It's fascinating to then watch the President, who spend the next few seconds, I guess dealing with what must have been the crushing weight of realizing, well, like it or not your presidency was just defined.

CARD: Well, it was a situation where I felt the President -- first of all, I should be very efficient with the President in the words that I would use. I wanted to explain the enormity of the situation without answering questions from him. I didn't want to have a discussion in front of the classroom, or in front of the media. And so I tried to pick words that would succinctly describe the situation and would require no explanation, and so those were the words that I chose to use and I knew the President would look for an opportunity to excuse himself and come in and learn more about the situation.

WILLIAMS: A day, in so many ways, without precedent. At that moment, the wheels were turning to get every commercial airliner in this country back down on the ground.

CARD: One of the unbelievable success stories of September 11th was the way that the FAA, through the leadership of the Department of Transportation, Secretary Mineta, worked with the private sector, all of these airline companies, to bring literally hundreds of planes to the ground safely in a very short period of time.

Not just the planes that were flying over U.S. soil but the plane, planes that were heading across the Atlantic, or across the Pacific to the United States ,and it was a great testament to the work of the FAA and the private sector to bring those planes safely on the ground, not just in the United States but in Canada, for example, where they took an awful lot of planes [down?] on the ground and, and took care of a number of passengers that were there and clearly had their travel plans disrupted.

So it's a great success story.

WILLIAMS: What happens next? The motorcade forms up. WACA, the White House Communications Agency, were they able to bring you live pictures? Were you able to watch what was going on?

CARD: In the holding room outside of the classroom, we brought in a television while the President was in speaking with the students. So by the time the President came into the holding room after I had informed him of the attack, we were able to watch what was happening in Manhattan.

We -- obviously, we hadn't had any word about what had happened at the Pentagon yet, and as the motorcade was working its way toward Air Force One -- and remember, the President actually went into the auditorium, or to the gymnasium where thousands of students and parents, and teachers had gathered to hear an address on the need to educate our children and the importance of reading.

The President went in and informed them that he was gonna have to leave, and leave Secretary Paige to continue on with the activities of the moment and he explained what was happening, to the best of his knowledge, in New York, and the President excused himself and then we got in the limousine and headed off to Air Force One.

I was intent on getting the President to a safe environment where he had good communications and, by definition, that was Air Force One at that particular moment.

So we were anxious to get to Air Force One. As we were heading to Air Force One, we did hear about the Pentagon attack, and we also learned what turned out to be a mistake, but we learned that the Air Force One package could in fact be a target. We heard the code word used for Air Force One and there was some fear that Air Force One might be a target.

So we were anxious to get on the plane and get the plane safely in the sky.

WILLIAMS: Once you were in the sky, it is said you took evasive action as an aircraft. Can you describe that?

CARD: Well, the, the plane very quickly climbed to a high altitude and did fly a serpentine route. We also communicated with the Defense Department and, and they scrambled some jets that were able to catch up with us and provide some protection.

But we flew a serpentine route. We did not let anyone know where we were going until literally just before we're getting ready to land, and we landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana where the President was able to get off the plane and allow some of the other people get off the plane, and then he communicated to the world via video conference, cause we did not have a satellite hookup, and then the President also spoke with his adviser, although we had outstanding communications on Air Force One so the President was never out of communication with the command structure of our military, or with the Vice President, or the Situation Room, and Dr. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.

So we had very good communications. But that stop in Barksdale was an important one because it allowed us to get some of the people on the plane off the plane, that didn't need to be on the plane, and he could communicate with the American people through the media and then get back o t he plane, and we flew to, as you know, to Nebraska, and once we got in Nebraska, the President participated in a National Security Council meeting, and by video, secure video teleconference, we had close contact with what was happening in the military chain of command as they were watching the skies with the FAA, to see what planes were flying and where they were flying, where they might be headed, and we were able to determine when the dust was settled in terms of us being able to predict the President's safety, so we could get him back to Washington.

He was very anxious to get back to Washington. He actually wanted to get back to Washington as soon as we left the school in Florida, but I was resistant to that until the dust settled so we could understand the, the nature of the, the attack and I wanted to make sure the President was safe and that he had good communications to be able to exercise his responsibilities as President and commander in chief.

WILLIAMS: You all, meantime, had families. The President had family on the ground; you had family on the ground. Was there any time to call home, to call offices and check on everybody during what was a, a, a terrible day for this country?

CARD: The President was able to, to talk to the first lady. The Secret Service did a wonderful job of making sure the first lady was in a safe place, and the Secret Ser -- Service office did a terrific job with Jenna and Barbara, the President and first lady's children.

The first lady, as you remember, was on Capitol Hill, getting ready to talk to a committee about education and she was with Senator Kennedy when the attack happened, and she was taken from Capitol Hill to a secure location in Washington, D.C., and once she got to that secure location, there was communication from the Secret Service to Air Force One and then the first lady and the President spoke.

They spoke several times when the plane was in the air as we headed towards Louisiana and then to Nebraska. The President did check on the safety of his two daughters and he knew that they were well cared for. So I, unfortunately, did not call my wife, and my wife is a minister, and she was anxious to hear from me but I did not talk with her until after we arrived back in Washington, D.C.

WILLIAMS: It was a long day, Americans were scared, the -- in addition to seeing the President on videotape, the only other physical manifestation of the administration was Karen Hughes over at the FBI briefing room.

Some, that day, voiced, let's call it "a glancing concern," if not criticism. The President was gone too long, too much of that day.

Now we have the beauty of 20/20 hindsight. Would you change anything, if you could?

CARD: No, I would not. It was imperative that we understand that the President has to stay in a safe environment, where he has good communications, and that's what our Constitution requires. I mean, because only the president can make the toughest of decisions, and you know the tough decisions that were put on the president's desk.

Should the military have the authority to shoot down a jet, commercial jetliner? That decision can't be made by surrogates. It's a decision to be made by the president.

I wanted the president to be in a secure, safe environment, where he had good communications. And since we did not know the nature of the attack on Washington, D.C., whether or not there could be other attacks on Washington, D.C., I felt that it was important to make sure that the president was in a place where he had good communications, and could be safe, and could exercise the leadership that the country needs.

He was very anxious to talk to the American people, and I was confident that we would find a venue from which he could speak to the American people, but I wanted the dust to settle a little bit before we brought him back to what was then an environment of unknown safety, Washington, D.C.

WILLIAMS: The quote -- the quote that became famous was that it was a failure not so much of intelligence, but of imagination. Is this government, can you assure the people of this country, is this government thinking as imaginatively now as possible?

CARD: I am confident that we have the best minds, not just in government, but in the private sector as well, working to help protect America from another attack. Can you be 100-percent certain that there won't be another attack? No, but we are ever-vigilant, we have a new sense of mission, thanks to the direction the president gave.

In fact, it was quite telling to me that he gave a new direction, a new mission to a bureaucracy that needed a new mission, and that was the FBI. When the president had his first briefings from the FBI after September 11th, it was very telling to him that the briefings focused on kind of what happened yesterday, how did the terrorist get on the plane, what were they doing on the plane?

They were building a case for prosecution, and the president said that's very interesting, but I want you to go back to the FBI and tell them to do everything they can to prevent the next terrorist attack. What are you finding? Where is the next attack likely to come from? How are we going to prevent it from happening? And that was a change in mission that went to a bureaucracy that was very difficult to accept change, and he drove the change down through the system.

And remember, Director Mueller had only been on the job a few days before the attack of September 11th, but he did take the new mission from the president and drive it into the bureaucracy at the FBI. So, today, they have as their top mission preventing the next attack.

WILLIAMS: Pearl Harbor, arguably, really did change everything, and despite predictions that September 11th would do the same thing, Americans seemed very anxious to hold onto their coveted lifestyle. The war has been a different war. It's probably been a different sell for this White House. We're not rationing oil, and gasoline, and rubber as we did during World War II, and yet as you and I sit here, American servicemen and women are fighting --

CARD: That's right.

WILLIAMS: -- a war. Has it been a challenge to keep that front and center?

CARD: Well, the attack of September 11th, was unlike any other attack on the United States. We have been attacked before as a country, and we've even been attacked from within. We had obviously the Civil War, where there were attacks from within, and we've had a handful of kind of domestic terrorist attacks that had nothing to do with kind of a change in philosophy.

We had the attack from the Japanese in World War II, but the attack on September 11th was really an attack, looking not to invite a different style of government for the American people or a different philosophy for the American people, it was an attack looking to invite anarchy, and the enemy did not have a real home. They were parasites living on others, and so very different from what we had expected, and what we were used to, and what we thought of as an attack on this country.

During the Cold War, the enemy was a philosophy and a system of government, and we knew where that philosophy and system of government housed itself. This was an attack of cowardly people not looking to make things better for anyone, just to invite anarchy, and it was an attack more than on the United States. It was really an attack on civilization, and we have a civilized society in most of the world, and that attack on September 11th was an attack on those civilized societies that exist in other countries as well.

So, yes, it requires a change in thinking. It also requires the American people to understand that this is not a war that will be fought in one-on one battlefield. The battlefields may not even have full definition and may exist all around the world. The most obvious battlefield was in Afghanistan, but the war will not end with victory in Afghanistan.

The war will have to be fought on battlefields and banks, in other deserts, or in hideaways, and so we -- we've got a lot to do to win this war, and the president has a resolve to see it through and make sure we do win.

WILLIAMS: The Bush presidency was changed that day. Arguably, it was defined that day. Your job changed that day. This became a wartime White House, something no one could have anticipated when George W. Bush was sworn in. How has that been?

CARD: It's been an appropriate challenge because we elect presidents to be able to lead the unknown, and when this president took office, I had every confidence, every confidence, that he had the capacity to lead this nation through the unforeseen challenges that the nation would face.

America did change on September 11th. I think the world changed on September 11th, and all of us changed, but the truth is the president had the character, and the discipline, and the decisiveness to be a good leader well before September 11th. He was recognized by the American people of having those qualities when he won the presidency, and I think now more people understand the kind of leader he is because the spotlight shined so brightly on September 11th, and he performed so well.

WILLIAMS: Is time more meaningful now? Is there a crispness to interactions with him because of the seriousness of purpose that didn't exist? Does he get the unvarnished truth in very short order from anyone in this building?

CARD: Yes, I speak very candidly with the president every day, and my job is to have a relationship with him that is unvarnished. He tells me what he thinks I should be doing, and I tell him what I think he should be doing, and we speak very, very candidly, and as long as I'm chief of staff, it's imperative that that be the way we function.

But this president has always been a very disciplined individual. He's disciplined about every aspect of his life, and I think that discipline has helped him lead this country toward time of great turmoil. He's disciplined about his faith, he's disciplined about his family, he's disciplined about the job of being president. He does his homework. He takes his homework with him every night, and he shows up with the homework having been done in the morning.

He's efficient about the use of time, his time and our time on his staff, and he is very disciplined about making decisions. He understands that the toughest decisions are the decisions that have to be made in the Oval Office, and he accepts responsibility. He does his homework so that he can meet that responsibility well, but he does have the courage to make decisions and allow those decisions to be made in time so they can be executed well.

WILLIAMS: Fast-forward to present day. You fly off on aircraft that say United States of America on the side, but I know you also fly commercially.

CARD: Yes, I do.

WILLIAMS: And so you're aware of the charge that we're not yet applying common sense to the airline security business, that perhaps it's political correctness, perhaps it's something else. We know who did this September 11th, and yet my favorite story is here you have Ohio Senator John Glenn, as much a hero as anyone, being forced to walk through X-ray, repeatedly remove his shoes so they can go through X-ray, probably the least likely man in the United States to carry a device on board an aircraft, because it's right now a very doctrinaire "everybody gets tested" business.

Is it going to change? Is it going to mature? It is the source of great frustration every day for millions of Americans.

CARD: I think it will mature, but most people are understanding that they have to make sacrifices. You talked about the sacrifices made during World War II of saving rubber, and saving metal, and collecting. We're making sacrifices today in our economy for this war, and one of the sacrifices is that we may have to stand in line a little bit longer than we want to or we may have to take our shoes off and have them run through an X-ray machine. Those are sacrifices well worth making to have a secure and safe America.

The president has asked for us to recognize those sacrifices, but he also wants our economy to work, and so he is calling for common sense at the Transportation Security Agency, and I think we're going to get there, but we're still working through the effort of having safe skies so that consumers can feel comfortable about flying and meet the responsibilities of preventing a terrorist attack, and we'll have to make sacrifices.

WILLIAMS: How often do you use the mantra, "Folks, we can do this. You know, we won World War II. We launched successfully operations like D Day. We can put air marshals on aircraft. We can make the skies completely safe"?

CARD: Well, I'm confident that we can do everything to secure the homeland, except giving 100-percent assurance that there won't be a terrorist attack.

I really, unfortunately, believe there will be terrorist attacks against the United States. I hope that we can anticipate them and prevent them from causing the destruction that was caused on September 11th, but the bad guys are out there, and they do want to hurt us, and they are very crafty. The terrorists that did the dastardly deed on September 11th planned it for a long time, burrowed into our economy and to our populace, and then emerged and attacked.

We've got to be ever sensitive that those kinds of attackers could be lurking in our society today. There are evil ones around the world that do not want this government to succeed in bringing democracy to more and more people around the world, and so this is an attack on society, and this president has been called to help prevent the next attack, but more importantly he's been called to help make sure the whole world recognizes our responsibility as a civil society.

WILLIAMS: How much has this circumstance, the Secret Service, their job to protect the president limited his exposure to the American people? Would things have been different about this presidency had there not been a September 11th?

CARD: Well, the Secret Service does a remarkable job, and they're men and women of unselfish sacrifice because they will put themselves in harm's way to protect the president and to protect our Constitution, and the president knows that, and he has great respect for them.

There's always a challenge between a president and the Secret Service because every president wants to be able to touch more people in America, and the people in America want to be able to touch the president. It's the Secret Service job to be ever paranoid, and they are, but the president finds a way to reach the people, and that's one reason he likes to get out of Washington, D.C., and he travels a lot.

He has great sessions where he invites people to sit around the table and speak candidly, and the president has an open-door policy at the White House here, not that the American people can come in any time they want, but if the president needs to see one -- someone, he sees that someone. And if someone needs to see the president, the president will see them.

You do know, though, if people want to see the president in the White House, in the Oval Office, chances are they won't get to see him in the Oval Office, and it's my job to police the needs versus wants.

But this president is, he has a lot of ways to reach outside of the bubble to find out what America cares about, and he uses the telephone a lot, he's got great friends, and they are not all working in the White House, and he talks to them, he reaches out to the people when he goes to Crawford and likes to travel around the country.

I don't feel that this president is isolated at all, but he does understand that the Secret Service has a job to do, and the job is to protect not him, but the president of the United States, and the president has a huge job to protect all of us.

WILLIAMS: What would people be most surprised to learn about this president's daily routine that is not readily apparent from the outside?

CARD: Well, he's -- he's very early to rise, and he's early to the office. The good news is he's also early to bed. He generally shows up in the Oval Office about a quarter of seven in the morning, which means I usually show up at about a quarter of six in the morning. I mentioned that he does do his homework. He is very good about reading his briefing papers and challenging his policy advisers.

He's very efficient in having meetings. He has a good mix of meetings, those meetings of people who work in the government and people who are outside of the government who bring concerns and suggestions. He also understands the need to have a balance in your life. He's very disciplined about his diet and exercise.

He knows that if you're going to make tough decisions, you have to have a frame of mind that allows you to make those tough decisions with clarity, and so he, he does discipline himself, in terms of his diet and his exercise, and I like to call it the merry part of life.

You know, my job is to make sure the president, in addition to having a chance to handle policy, and marketing challenges, and communication challenges, he also has to have time to eat, sleep and be merry, and so I try to schedule the president so that he has time to be merry, and he is merry when he is talking to his wife, and his daughters. He likes to read a book, he enjoys watching an occasional movie, and he likes to be able to think, and so I try to give him time to do those things as well.

WILLIAMS: For the prior occupant of this house, sometimes it was late-night channel surfing, sometimes it was late-night phone calls to friends who were not expecting to hear from him at 2 o'clock in the morning. He was the antithesis. He was a night owl.

Both men seem to get pure enjoyment from physical activity outside. Can he remove himself from the bubble often enough?

CARD: That's one reason he really enjoys going to his ranch in Crawford, Texas. He's got 1,600 acres of land in Crawford, Texas, and it's very, very interesting land. It's very hot, and he enjoys the hot weather, but he also likes the manual labor on the ranch. He goes down, and he helped to clear some of his property, and he's always fixing things up, and not afraid to carry a chainsaw around, challenge the Secret Service to dangle him over a cliff while he pulls a weed out. He's a, he's a manual laborer as well, and I think he gets a lot of enjoyment from that.

When he goes to Camp David, he gets a lot of outdoor exercise. He usually takes a long run, and he takes long walks, but he enjoys being outside.

The confines of the White House complex are a challenge, and the president does try to get out and exercise every day when he's here, but it's not quite the same as being at his ranch in Texas.

WILLIAMS: The -- the president had a huge bubble of good will after September 11th. No president wouldn't. America had been attacked, after all. We have seen a diminution in his popularity numbers. It is said now, if you watch the TV shows and read the Op-Ed pages, he's going to have to sell everything from now -- the economy, if this nation goes to war against Iraq.

Is he prepared, in the bully-pulpit part of this job?

CARD: Yes, he is. And, first of all, his popularity is still unbelievably high. He's got record popularity for a president, and his popularity has been sustained for a long time, and I think it's because of his outstanding leadership and the fact that people respect the tough decisions he has to make, and they like how he has been making those decisions.

He also has to work with Congress, and Congress is divided, both branches, the House and the Senate have roughly equal Republicans and Democrats, so it's always a challenge to deal with Congress. Even if you were to control Congress, it would be a challenge to deal with them, but this president certainly doesn't, quote, "control Congress."

And he'll have to communicate with Congress so that they adopt the policies that are important to the American people. He also has to communicate with the American people and to world leaders around the globe, and he understands that.

This president knows what the job of being president is, and he meets the responsibilities well. He's a good communicator because he speaks candidly. He is not one who likes to be poured on with rhetoric. He likes to pour out with candor, and that's how he, he communicates with the American people, and he tells it like it is. When he says he's going to get 'em, he's going to get 'em.

WILLIAMS: No further questions, Your Honor.

CARD: Thank you, Brian.

WILLIAMS: Thank you very much.