Robert Draper - To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq

At first Paul Wolfowitz mistook the tremors in the Pentagon for an earthquake. Such an event would have been rare in the nations capital, but far more fathomable than what had in fact occurred at the opposite end of the building. It took a few bewildered seconds for him to connect the sudden pandemonium just outside his doorway with the events in New York he had seen on his office television less than a half hour earlier.

Uniformed officers entered the deputy secretary of defenses office and instructed him to evacuate immediately. Wolfowitz and his staffers hurried down the E Ring corridor. The entire Pentagon work force, thousands of them, assembled outside on the parade grounds. Black smoke swirled over the western side of the building where American Airlines Flight 77 had completed its path of destruction a few minutes before, at 9:37 on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Even when he was intended to be the center of attention, Wolfowitz cut an indistinct presence. He was fifty-seven and a father of three, recently divorced, a slight, fast-graying academic for whom certain big thoughts were all-consuming and everything elsemanner of dress, posture, hair care, time of the next appointment, sleepwere relegated to afterthought. His default expression was one of mildly skeptical consideration, as if perusing the menu at an overpriced restaurant.

For the past three decades, he had been a sort of backstage eminence in the Washington hierarchy, an important man to more important men. That was about to change. But at this moment, Paul Dundes Wolfowitz was just another vulnerable federal employee standing under an empty blue sky with the ruins of his office building before him.

A half hour before, he had just concluded a breakfast in the Pentagon with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and nine Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee. At some point during the breakfast, Rumsfeld had predicted that, while Americans were currently luxuriating in peacetime, an event somewhere in the world will be sufficiently shocking that it will remind the American people and their representatives in Washington how important it is for us to have a strong national defense.

Eventually, after several helpless minutes on the parade grounds, Wolfowitz insisted to his aides that he be allowed to return inside. They escorted him to the National Military Command Center, in the basement. Rumsfeld was already there, along with Richard Myers, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. They were discussing United Flight 93, which had just crashed somewhere northeast of Camp David, according to the Air Forces Northeast Air Defense Sector. At issue was whether to elevate the nations threat level to DEFCON 3.