As soon as the hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Dick Cheney began to take charge. At first, the role he assumed was related to the circumstances of that particular day: President Bush was not in Washington but in a classroom event in Florida, and then, for the remainder of the day, under protection at U.S. military bases in Louisiana and Nebraska. Cheney was the man on the spot. And almost immediately, a second factor came into play: Cheney not only happened to be present in Washington, but he also knew the drills and the protocols to prepare American leaders for an attack on the United States, having participated in the continuity-of-government exercises during the 1980s.

Inside the White House, the Secret Service rushed Cheney to the Emergency Operations Center, inside a bunker beneath the White House, where he assumed command. One of his first actions was to call Bush and tell him not to return to Washington. Over the next couple of hours, he concentrated on stopping further attacks by hijacked planes. In the confusion that prevailed that morning, it was reported for a time that another passenger plane was getting close to Washington, and Air Force officials wanted to know whether to shoot it down. Cheney told them to go ahead. Later on, both Bush and Cheney would claim that it was the president who made this decision, after Cheney referred it up to him, but close examinations of the evidence have established that Cheney made the shoot-down decision first, on his own, and then cleared it with Bush afterward.

Late that night, after Bush had returned to Washington and met with the National Security Council, Dick and Lynne Cheney flew to what official White House statements called an “undisclosed location.” Here again, Cheney was following the protocols of the continuity- of-government exercises: that the vice president should generally not be in the same place as the president, to avert the possibility of their both being killed in a single attack. It was a guiding principle that the nation should not be deprived of leadership during a crisis.

There was also a third factor at work to explain the powerful role Cheney exerted starting on September 11: He had vastly greater experience than Bush in the workings of the federal government—how policies were made and how they were blocked, how the paper flowed, how Congress could be used or circumvented. Cheney was not alone in having this degree of governmental experience; Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld did, too, but Rumsfeld had his hands full running the Pentagon, and Powell was similarly occupied at the State Department. Cheney had no large bureaucracy to manage, and so it was he who had the time, the energy, and, above all, the intense desire to spearhead the administration’s responses to September 11. And so it was Cheney, more than anyone else, who drove the way toward the post-9/11 world.

The Bush team’s first reaction to the attacks was one of stunned fury. That night, after the immediate threat of further attacks was eliminated, and just before Cheney departed for the “undisclosed location,” all the top officials (including Bush, Cheney, Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Rumsfeld) gathered in the White House bunker for their first meeting to decide how to respond. CIA Director George Tenet, who was also there, wrote in his memoir that there was “more raw emotion in one place than I think I’ve ever experienced in my life: anger that this could have happened, shock that it had, overwhelming sorrow for the dead, a compelling sense of urgency that we had to respond and do so quickly.” Robert Gates, who later conversed privately with others on the Bush team, suggested that there was another, unarticulated emotion: guilt for not having stopped al-Qaeda. “I think there was a huge sense among senior members of the administration of having let the country down, of having allowed a devastating attack on America take place on their watch,” he said.

Everyone on the Bush team agreed on one intellectual proposition: that the event was of historic importance and America had entered a new era.