Bin Laden news brings Hastert, Palmer back to fateful day

The news ripped through the dimly lit Phoenix restaurant like lightning.

Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, in town to speak at an industrial conference Monday morning, was in the middle of dinner when people around him simultaneously scrambled to get their BlackBerries and cellphones from their pockets and purses.

“What in the world?” Hastert, of Plano, thought, patting down his pockets for his own.

He quickly found out: Osama bin Laden — the al-Qaida mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — had been captured and killed in a firefight in Pakistan.

For Hastert, the memories flooded back to 10 years before when bin Laden became America’s Public Enemy No. 1. Hastert, then third in the line of succession behind the president and vice president, was literally pulled by his bulky shoulders from the House floor by his head of security and whisked away from the Capitol in the back of a Chevrolet Suburban to an undisclosed bunker with other government leaders.

Hundreds of miles east of Arizona Sunday night, Hastert’s former chief of staff, Scott Palmer, was beginning to doze in bed at his Aurora home with the TV humming in the background. He snapped to attention as the news bulletin came on.

Like Hastert, his close friend and former Washington, D.C., roommate, Palmer was transported back to the fateful day when things were so chaotic that, at times, he was sure the U.S. Capitol would be reduced to a pile of rubble.

Hastert and Palmer were both in the Capitol early that Tuesday morning of Sept. 11, 2001 — Hastert in his second-floor speaker’s office getting ready to convene a joint session of Congress, and Palmer in the House’s first floor dining room discussing health care with another U.S. representative.

“After breakfast was over, I stuck my head in the majority whip’s (Tom DeLay’s) office,” Palmer said. “Everyone was glued to a television. I saw one of the towers was burning.”

An accident, he thought, at first.

By the time he reached Hastert’s office, he knew something was horribly wrong.

Hastert was making a rare use of a special, secure phone in his office to reach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, to see if he should close down Congress. But he was having some trouble with the line.

“Before the Pentagon was hit, everyone was thinking that this was something contained to New York. We didn’t understand it could be much bigger than that,” Palmer said.

Palmer and the head of Hastert’s security detail decided to bring the House speaker’s staff into the Capitol’s Lincoln room for a debriefing.

“I wanted to sort of calm people, and let them know what we were doing. And I was patting myself on the back thinking I’d done a decent job,” he said.

Until, he said, he looked out the window, which had a view of the Pentagon, where black smoke was now billowing.

So much for that consoling talk, Palmer thought.

“I remember telling people at that point if they wanted to leave, particularly those with families, that they should feel free to do so,” Palmer said.

Palmer then went down to the House floor to find his boss.

When he arrived, Hastert’s chief of security was grabbing the burly former Yorkville wrestling coach by the shoulders, forcefully pulling him through the door in the speaker’s lobby.

“I went running down there,” Palmer said. “There were escape routes that we trained on. He gave me the sign, and we went.”

Heading down the back stairs of the House to an exit tunnel, Hastert and Palmer had to cross a small portion of the corridor on the first floor.

The chaotic scene Palmer witnessed there still haunts him.

“There was screaming,” he said. “Women throwing their high heels off to move out of the building more quickly.”

Hastert and Palmer barreled into the back of a Chevy Suburban, which lurched out of the Capitol to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

Palmer recalls hanging onto the hand grips above the doors for dear life.

It felt a bit like Armageddon. He assumed he would never see his workplace ever again.

After arriving at Andrews, Hastert had the other congressional leaders from both parties brought there so decisions could be made on a bipartisan basis.

“When the third plane went into the Pentagon, I knew we were a sitting target,” Hastert said. “Later we found out that the fourth plane, the target was the Capitol. When I was trying to make that decision (to adjourn Congress), seven or eight or 10 people were bringing down that fourth plane with a couple of pots of hot coffee. Had they not done it (that plane) would have been right on the front door of the Capitol.”

From Andrews, Hastert said, he and the other top congressional leaders and members of their staffs were taken to a secret location, where they spent much of the day until it was deemed safe to return to the Hill.

It was just about sunset, Palmer said, “just about that time of night when the sun is lower on the horizon and that dome of the Capitol, it turns like gold.”

In helicopters, flying down the mall past the Washington Monument, he said, it struck him that they were on same flight path the terrorists likely would have taken to crash into the building.

As they approached the Capitol, he said, “There was that dome. It was there. Just a few hours before, I remember looking back out of that Suburban thinking I’m never going to see that dome again.”

Palmer glanced around their helicopter, the tears streaming down the others’ faces mirroring his own.

He and Hastert disembarked, en route to a news conference to state that Congress would be in session the next day.

As they walked back, on the east side of the Capitol steps, the pair saw a crowd of other members of Congress waiting.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, began spontaneously singing “God Bless America” from the Capitol steps, the chorus growing louder and louder.

Going to work the next day, Palmer said, he got halfway up the grounds, and stopped at a bench on the closely manicured lawn, amazed that the building was just as he’d left it.

“The human mind is an amazing thing. You just can’t live in a state of fear all the time,” he said. “Eventually you just get hardened to it. You learn to live with it.”

Over the next weeks and months, Hastert worked to pass laws to prevent such acts of terror from happening on American soil ever again.

But Monday, it was the military intelligence operations that he praised for bin Laden’s death.

“You know, it’s been a long time and a long hunt and a long fight,” Hastert said. “If we wouldn’t have had the intelligence operations we’d had, if we hadn’t interrogated people at Gitmo, we wouldn’t have had this. We ended up saving lives.”