employing the word problematic in a complete sentence, selling a rationale for preemptive war, and presciently laying out American foreign policy for the next eighteen months. “We start with bin Laden,” Bush (played by Timothy Bottoms) tells his cabinet. “That’s what the American people expect … So let’s build a coalition for that job. Later, we can shape different coalitions for different tasks.”
Scheduled for cablecast on September 7, DC 9/11 inaugurates Bush’s re-election campaign fifty weeks before the 9/11 Memorial Republican National Convention opens in Madison Square Garden. DC 9/11 also marks a new stage in the American cult of personality: the actual president as fictional protagonist.4
That Bottoms is reconfiguring his role in the Comedy Central series That’s My Bush! (a gross-out sitcom canceled a month before 9/11) provides a uniquely American twist. In the aftermath of the first Iraq war, Bush the elder was brought down in part by Dana Carvey’s devastating campaign of ridicule on Saturday Night Live. Drafting the clownish Bottoms effectively preempts that strategy. Indeed, casting a former Bush travesty in the role of the serious Bush only reinforces the telefilm’s agenda, namely that the events of September 11 served to render divine Bush’s dubious mandate.
A movie that attempted to reconstruct Bush’s actual activities on 9/11 would be fascinating, if not entirely heroic. A detailed attempt to account for the president’s movements and actions on what he later termed that “interesting day” may be found at the Center for Cooperative Research website (cooperativeresearch.org): Bush had just arrived at a Florida elementary school for a pre-planned 9 a.m. photo op when he was informed that a plane had crashed into the WTC fifteen minutes before. Bush would later make the impossible claim that he saw the event televised live. (In early December, the president told an Orlando audience he’d been watching TV that morning and saw “an airplane hit the tower of a—of a—you know … and I said, ‘Well, there’s one terrible pilot.’ ”)
As Secret Service men evidently were watching TV in another classroom, however, news of the second crash reached him almost immediately. Bush’s startled response, documented on video for all eternity and seen by millions, is restaged in the movie: As Chief of Staff Andrew Card appears beside Bush and whispers in his ear, the president responds with visible shock and panic (the real Bush was more expressive than Bottoms). Missing from DC 9/11 is the president’s next move—picking up a children’s book called The Pet Goat.
By then, back in the real DC, Secret Service men had already burst into Dick Cheney’s office and bodily carried the vice president to a secure location in the White House basement. Meanwhile, responding to Press Secretary Ari Fleischer’s hastily scrawled instructions (“DON’T SAY ANYTHING YET”), Bush actually remained in the classroom for almost ten minutes, taking his time thanking the kids and the teachers (“Hoo! These are great readers …”) shortly before boarding Air Force One, where he was informed that his plane was the next terrorist target.
DC 9/11 subtly re-jiggered these events so that Cheney was hustled into the White House basement only after Bush is aloft—the inference being that the entire leadership was equally dazed and confused, and that relocating Bush was part of the solution rather than one of the problems.
According to The Washington Post, Cheney, seconded by Condoleezza Rice, instructed Bush not to return to Washington. Nevertheless, the movie does attempt to deal with the circumstances that had the president largely incommunicado for the rest of the day. According to the Post account, there was little debate on Air Force One—the plane banked sharply and flew south to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where Bush’s first official statement was made at 12:36 p.m. He appeared hesitant and nervous—as does Bottoms in the movie. Within the hour, Air Force One had taken off for another base, and not until that evening, after eight hours flying from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska to Washington, did the president address the nation.
The threat to the president’s plane was soon recognized as bogus, although it took weeks for the White House to acknowledge it. By September 13, however, presidential image-maker Karl Rove had released his script: “I’m not going to let some tinhorn terrorist keep the president of the United States away from the nation’s capital,” Bush had supposedly complained, a line further improved in DC 9/11 as “If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me! I’ll be at home, waiting for the bastard!” Simultaneously, the real Rice was detailing Bush’s instant grasp of the situation, explaining that he was the first in his administration to understand the meaning of the events.
This is the story of DC 9/11. Screenwriter and co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd had access to top officials and staffers, including Bush, Fleischer, Card, Rove, and Rumsfeld—all of whom are played by look-alike actors in the movie (as are Cheney and Rice, John Ashcroft, Karen Hughes, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and Paul Wolfowitz). The script was subsequently vetted by right-wing pundits Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, and Morton Kondracke. Chetwynd, whose vita includes such politically charged movies and telefilms as The Hanoi Hilton, The Heroes of Desert Storm, The Siege at Ruby Ridge, Kissinger and Nixon, and Varian’s War, is a prominent Hollywood conservative—a veteran of the 1980 Reagan campaign who, after Bill Clinton’s election twelve years later, was recruited by right-wing pop culture ideologue David Horowitz to set up the Wednesday Morning Club (“a platform in the entertainment community where a Henry Hyde can come and get a warm welcome and respectful hearing,” as Chetwynd later told The Nation).
Chetwynd bonded with Dubya in March 2001 when, at Rove’s suggestion, Varian’s War was screened at the White House; Chetwynd was subsequently involved in various post-9/11 Hollywood–Washington conclaves and currently serves Bush as part of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Shot largely in Toronto, DC 9/11 was eligible for Canadian film subsidies, but it is, in nearly every other sense, an official production.5
Would JFK have had the audacity to promote a docudramatization of the Cuban Missile Crisis as part of his bid for reelection? As political as PT 109, DC 9/11 models Bush on Kennedy’s appearances in the 1974 telefilm The Missiles of October, the 1983 miniseries featuring telepresident-to-be Martin Sheen as Kennedy, and particularly, on the 2000 feature Thirteen Days—selected for the first official Bush White House screening, with Senator Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy in attendance. But however hagiographic, these were period pieces memorializing a dead leader.
The turgid DC 9/11 would doubtless have been more entertaining with Harrison Ford or Arnold Schwarzenegger or even Ronald Reagan in the role of the president. DC 9/11 is instead the spectacle of Reagan in reverse: rather than being a professional actor who entered politics, Bush is a politician who has been reconfigured, packaged, and sold as a media star—dialog included. Indeed, that metamorphosis is the movie’s true subject.
The basic Dubya narrative is the transformation of a roistering Prince Hal into a heroic Henry V. In DC 9/11, the young Bush—spoiled frat boy and drunken prankster—is subsumed in the image of the initially powerless president. The movie is thus the story of Bush assuming command, first of his staffers (who attest to his new aura with numerous admiring reaction shots) and then the situation. He is the one who declares that “we are at war,” who firmly places Cheney (Lawrence Pressman) in his secure location—not once but twice. (To further make the point, Chetwynd has Scott Alan Smith’s Fleischer muse that the press refuses to get it: “The Cheney-runs-the-show myth is always going to be with some of them.”) Rudy Giuliani, who eclipsed Bush in the days following the attack, is conspicuously absent—or, rather, glimpsed only as a figure on television.
Rumsfeld (impersonated with frightening veracity by Broadway vet John Cunningham) emerges as the Soviet-style positive hero, embodying the logic of history. In the very first scene, he is seen hosting a congressional breakfast, invoking the 1993 attack on the WTC, and warning the dim-witted legislators that that was only the beginning. Rumsfeld is the first to utter the name “Saddam Hussein” and, over the pooh-poohs of Colin Powell (David Fonteno), goes on to detail Iraq’s awesome stockpile of WMDs.
