In their words: Eric Buermann

Take us through the day of 9/11.

Well I should probably give you a little context, because I’m basically a lawyer by trade and I had gotten involved in Republican politics, which led me to ultimately serving in government. I was very involved in the campaigns of Governor Jeb Bush, serving as elections counsel, and prior to that I had been a [member of the] Florida Elections Commission so I learned a lot about the Florida campaign finance and elections law, having been the one who enforced it. So I went to work for Governor Bush in Tallahassee when he was elected. I went up to [Tallahassee] in 1999 when he took office and I was serving at his request as general counsel for the Republican Party of Florida, which I did full time in Tallahassee from about 1998 to 2003. And when his brother decided to run for President, George W. Bush, I was asked to be the general counsel for the Florida Bush campaign, the Bush-Cheney campaign for the state of Florida. I did that in addition to my regular duties at the Republican Party in Tallahassee. So his brother got elected and I went to work for [President Bush] as an outside counsel working on some protocols for judicial appointments, meaning the federal courts, the Supreme Court, and so forth.

I was given a specific assignment which I wrapped up basically in August of 2001, so I always think back that I could have been in Washington on September 11th, but fate took me in a different direction. On September 11th, just in the way of a little more context, my daughter, Caroline, was a Ransom Everglades graduate of 2001. That was her class. She was studying at the Ringling School in Sarasota, studying art. So she was in Sarasota. I was back to serving as the general counsel for the Republican party in Florida. Our chairman at that time — who basically was my client, the chairman of the state party — was in Sarasota the evening of September 10th with President Bush having dinner. . . . The next morning, President Bush went to visit an elementary school there with our chairman and he was reading, as you may know from your history reading, a book called "The Pet Goat" to the elementary school class when he was interrupted and told by an aid, Andrew Card, that the World Trade Center had been attacked.

That's sort of the context. I, that morning of Sept. 11, was in Miami and I was driving out to the Miami airport to [go to our headquarters in Tallahassee]. As I was driving over by the [University of Miami], working my way to MIA, to the airport, I heard on the radio that an airplane had flown into one of the WTC towers. I'm also a pilot — I thought, you know, you've got to be a pretty bad pilot to fly into the WTC, because it's pretty obvious where it is and it's a pretty big building. So unless you are in instrument conditions, meaning fog or something, how could you miss it? So I thought well, that's very odd. So I drove to the airport, I went to our departure gate and people were starting to say, "Something is going in New York, the World Trade Center.'' We were sitting around and the gate agent announced that there was a ground halt on all flights that were leaving. We thought that was highly unusual. You know, why are they holding all the flights? So I called up to the HQ in Tallahassee and I said, "What's going on?" They, of course, had a TV. They were watching TV and they said "the WTC has been attacked and it's got to be terrorism and you're not going anywhere."

A friend of mine who was also a lawyer, he was on the flight; he was going to go to Tallahassee. He said, "This is an outrage; you can't stop us from flying up to Tallahassee because of something going on in NY.” Needless to say, we didn't make the flight, which was probably a good thing because I might have been stuck somewhere in Tallahassee or somewhere else if we had attempted to take off. So anyway, I had no idea what to do. I drove to our [Miami office] at the Dadeland towers. We had cable TV there and CNN was always on. We started watching the TV, and of course the story developed from there. So I called my wife because we had our daughter in school, and she was going to go off to try to rendezvous with our younger daughter. I eventually spoke to our daughter in Sarasota who said, “Dad, the president just drove past my apartment, my dormitory, heading to the airport." So that was President Bush leaving the elementary school; he was leaving for the airport. At any rate, the President took off and spent the day flying from base to base. They didn't want to go to Washington because they didn't feel it was safe.

Now on the flight that flew into the Pentagon, we had a dear friend who was lost on that flight. She was a lawyer; she was the wife of the Solicitor General to President Bush. Her name was Barbara Olson, the wife of Ted Olsen. She was on the phone with her husband as the plane went into the Pentagon. So this has nothing to do with me, where I was that day, but it's a side story that is very tragic to know someone who was actually killed because of the episodes that day.

So anyway, I also had a friend at Merryl Lynch who worked at the WTC. As the day went on, the ML office had a recording that said, "All lines are busy," etc. I tried his cellphone and I couldn't get him on that. He subsequently told me that he was arriving for work at the WTC just as the plane was hitting, the first plane, and he immediately — I guess he got out of a cab or something — but he ran across the street to another office building and escaped all the tragedy going on.

You seem to be connected to the event on several levels — working with Governor Bush, and President Bush. How does that affect the way you saw the event?

It brought it a lot closer to home. You know, I wasn't at the scene of the airplanes. But [knowing] a person who was lost at the Pentagon, knowing someone who worked at the World Trade Center, it brought things closer to home. It really makes you think it could have been you. You could have been on that plane or in that building. So, you feel for those people. You know, watching on TV, the news, people jumping from the buildings, to their deaths, on TV... you feel for them — glad you're not one of the people there but you certainly feel badly.

How was your role as general counsel for the Republican Party affected by 9/11? How did the national mood and outlook change?

The fun thing about working in politics is that every day's headlines shake up the game, constantly changing. Now it's not even a headline, it's whatever is on CNN or Fox or on social media. So it's constantly changing. The parties, whether Democrat or Republican, live off of the fundraising that allows them to do their work. Our fundraising immediately went down because people were not making financial decisions in the aftermath of all this. But also politically it shook everything up. You had a Republican administration which had to deal with the aftermath of the terrorism and what to do about it. You know the history, the United States went to war, invaded primarily Afghanistan because they were the ones that were harboring Bin Laden and his people. You ended up with a war.

The party was trying to be supportive of the president and the Republican Congress who were trying to go after the terrorists. And of course a number of policies were instituted like the TSA and Homeland Security. All these things were brought forth. All the parties, all the state parties, the Republican National Committee were trying to be supportive of the Republican administration doing these things. But I think at that time the nation pulled together. The Congress didn't bicker between Democrat and Republican. The country had been attacked and like the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, politics were really set aside. It wasn't a question of “this is a Republican idea or Democratic idea”; they pulled together what they felt they had to do to protect the country. There was tremendous support for at least the invasion of Afghanistan and capturing these terrorists, taking the war to them, to put them out of business.

And also putting up the defenses necessary so that it wouldn't be repeated here in the United States. And of course a lot of civil liberties were lost because now you go to the airport, you are subjected to a lot more scrutiny than you had been previously. Even things like your driver’s license — it was harder to show the identity for getting the driver's license and things like that. It changed everyday life across the board. People were suspicious and it was very much like after Pearl Harbor. The Muslims came under a lot of scrutiny, as the Japanese did after Pearl Harbor. There are a lot of good Americans who are Muslim, and unfortunately they suffered because they were associated with that faith. I mean they had nothing to do with it. You know it permeated throughout American life.

Do you think most people were open to sacrificing those civil liberties in the name of safety?

Well you hate to see it happen because a lot of people have died defending those civil liberties, so you hate to see any erosion of them. I think the government tries to strike a medium between getting rid of civil liberties and being safe at the same time. You hate to see it happen. I think some of the decisions — I personally think to invade Iraq was a wrong decision. I felt like that was the case at the time. Even [former] President Bush [President George W. Bush’s father] thought it was the wrong decision. But it was done. Afghanistan, I felt you sort of had to do it because that was the HQ for these guys and you had to put them out of business as best you can.

How long did the bipartisanship last?

I think it lasted until the invasion of Iraq. People sensed that Iraq was a different animal and that Saddam was not a terrorist. It was highly questionable that he had weapons of mass destruction. The UN inspector went over and inspected these facilities and said he doesn't have WMDs and then the administration attacked him — it was attacking the messenger. They were hell-bent on invading no matter what the intelligence was. That's where the bipartisanship — people started to get off the bus and say, “Look, invading Afghanistan made sense, you had to do it, but invading Iraq is a really a side show that has nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorism,” and history has proven that to be correct. Frankly, even Jeb Bush has said that with 20/20 hindsight, but I think that people recognize that now. It changed the whole mentality of the country. As in WWII we were suddenly attacked, it changes the mentality: everyone who is Japanese is bad. Even now you see it with the coronavirus. People are attacking Chinese Americans who have nothing to do with it, and it's sad that that happens but that's sort of group mentality.

From our perspective, in our lifetime there hasn’t really been any show of unity on the level there seems to be after 9/11. It’s pretty amazing to me that the country was able to come together.

Yeah, it’s too bad. The bipartisanship, I think it was lost when the extremists of either party took over the party. When the Republican extremists took over, and the Democrats’ far left took over, that’s where the divide occurred because you've lost a lot of the moderate members of the party who were run out of town because they would work across party lines to work together. But they were viewed as turncoats, if you will. I think the country itself is basically a moderate country. We’re not an extremist country, and the parties now have been taken over by the extremist elements. I don't think you’ll ever get back to bipartisanship until you get more moderates elected. It used to be you'd have an election, people were elected, and then they went in to govern and they represented everybody. Now, people stay in political attack mode even after they’re elected. So you don’t have governance; you have this political campaign mode that's attack and attack and you can’t work together when you're attacking your loyal opponents. A lot of that changed after 9/11, but I think mainly that was Iraq more than 9/11. Chronologically it happened after 9/11, but it started really before that. From what I was seeing, I think in the late ’90s it started.

You mentioned earlier on that day seeing CNN and all these other news outlets. How do you think the 24-hour news cycle affected people’s reaction to the event, or at least the country’s reaction?

Well, as you see right now with this virus, you can’t get away from it. It's on a 24-hour loop. There’s no other news. It totally sucks the air out of the newsroom. Everybody’s focused on it, and of course 9/11 was a big event. I don't think you were going to put comedy shows on while people were jumping out of buildings to escape planes. It certainly sucks all the air out of the room. As you are seeing right now, you’re going through a 9/11 episode that's an invisible enemy attacking us, a natural enemy, but it’s similar in that you're probably afraid to turn on the TV. Like what’s going to happen next? What other calamity? That’s enough bad news for today, you want to go out and walk around and get away from it.

It’s interesting because we actually started talking a bit about that, the similarities between the initial reaction to 9/11 and the initial reaction to the coronavirus. What other similarities do you see that make you think, maybe this is this generation’s 9/11?

I think it’s an event unlike 9/11 in that you're not going to say, “Where was I the day that the virus hit?” because it’s really happening over a period of time rather than a single-day event. You’ll certainly remember these times for the rest of your lives. It's going to change the way you view the government and the world. And you're probably going to wash your hands more than you ever thought you would, and be concerned about public health more than you ever thought you’d be. It'll change, I think, your lifestyle, and also when you look at the government response, which I think everyone agrees has not been the best, it's clear that the country is not prepared for this kind of an event. I mean if we had a nuclear attack today how would the government respond? The infrastructure for this kind of an event is just not there. I think coming out of this the government has got to take a different tack organizationally about how to respond to these global episodes.

It’s like how before 9/11 we hadn’t conceived of an attack of that kind occurring on American soil.

That was... because you know, the United States had always been protected by the oceans, from invasions and attacks, but here on 9/11 you had an attack killing as many people as Pearl Harbor, more really. Three thousand people on our soil and it was very low tech. I mean this wasn't done with cruise missiles and tanks; this was a half dozen guys getting on an airplane and causing a tremendous amount of damage. That was scary. You didn't know where the enemy was gonna pop up next. People got a little paranoid because you didn't know what the next attack was going to be and where it was going to be.

What do you think the most lasting impacts of 9/11 are today, for how this country has developed? What have you taken away from the whole thing?

I think it’s taken away a lot of innocence. I was born at the turn of the 1950s, and during the ’50s until the ’60s, American life was very safe and secure. We would watch Roy Rogers and some of these shows that you've probably seen on Netflix or such, but you know life was simple, life was good. And 9/11 really shattered that innocence about the world and how safe we are in our country. And our foreign policy — not a lot of people talk about, “Why 9/11?” I traveled in the Middle East, I was involved in the United Arab Emirates and Dubai, so I've talked to the other side of the equation. These terrorists didn't just wake up one morning and go, “Oh let’s attack America.” There was very little discussion about why they did it. You really have to look at that part of the world to understand they didn't just wake up and say, “Let's hate America. Let's go fly planes into the World Trade Center.” So that gets back to our foreign policies and whether they are appropriate in the first place and how we’re treating other people.

Yeah, for us, we’ve seen that obviously Bin Laden was very extreme and illogical, but it was based off of things we actually had done, like our involvement in Israel or the Gulf War and our relationship with Saudi Arabia. It's interesting to see how these very concrete things that did cause that sentiment led to one very small but impactful group doing something like this.

Well, you have the Israeli-Arab conflict, which has been going on for thousands of years. But also, the other part of the equation is you have the Shia and the Sunni Muslims, who fight like cats and dogs, and it's basically the Hatfields and the McCoys [referring to a famously violent rivalry between two families from the 1800s], and we’ve gotten right in the middle of that too. You have to remember, Saddam was an ally of the U.S. when Iraq was fighting Iran. During the Iraq-Iran war, he was on our payroll for practical purposes. The Taliban were our allies in Afghanistan, fighting the Soviets when they invaded Afghanistan. We trained them, we armed them. So one point they’re our best buddies now, fast-forward, they're the worst people in the world.

And the foreign policy really leaves a lot to be desired. But for the United States to inject itself into these, I would say regional conflicts, we always seem to mess it up for one reason or another, and then we end up being the worst person in the world. Because we’re there trying to do something that we think is good and right, but it's really not. And why are we there, you know? We got involved a lot because of the oil, to protect the oil interests there, but at the same time we got involved in the local politics, which is not a good thing. You know the Europeans, they go there, they buy the oil, they pay their bill, and they say “have a nice day.” We hang around and get involved in the religious and political conflicts, we stick our nose into it and we end up with these problems.

So, the big backstory in 9/11 is these guys flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but you really have to go back and trace, “why did they do that?” They didn't wake up one morning and suddenly say, “We hate America. Out of all the other countries in the world, we decided to hate America this morning.” To me, it causes a whole retrospective look at our foreign policy and why we’re there and what we’re doing. And there's always two sides of the story. When you go back and look at American history, George Washington was called a terrorist by the British. So, one man’s terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And you really have to look at both sides of the story. But that’s tangential to what you really want to know about.

No, it’s all important, I think it’s all related. This is all stuff we talk about, we’ve talked about foreign policy before and after, and if some of the stuff we did with foreign policy in the aftermath helped or exacerbated some of the problems that were already in that region — whether our attempts to create democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq were worth it or just made the problems worse.

Well, I think Afghanistan you had to do it. Because that's where the bad guys — meaning Bin Laden — that's where they lived. So you had to do it. Iraq, I think, was a complete mistake and a waste of time, and look at all the aftermath from that. We completely destabilized that entire area. It should have been left alone. So, you've always got to understand the context that these events are occurring. Even Pearl Harbor had a context, had a history, had a foreign policy that was at work. And there's a reason for it. The Japanese didn't just wake up on the morning of December 7th saying, “Let’s go attack Pearl Harbor.” I think they were wrong to attack. [laughs] I think the terrorists were wrong to attack, but you also have to look at the other side. I’m not saying they’re right or justified in any way by it, but when you're looking at doing a history project, you're wanting to understand history, you have to put it all in the context of what was happening in the world at that time.

None of it exists in a vacuum, yeah.

Exactly. So anyway, I didn’t have anything to do with the foreign policy other than helping to put the politicians who decided the foreign policy in office. And working with the party we were always in a supportive role, trying to support the policies and so forth, and internally trying to guide them, from a political standpoint.

But it was scary times, and you've got scary times right now.

Yeah.

The whole difference is it’s a microbial enemy that you’re dealing with that doesn’t have a brain — that just attacks. It's doing what viruses do, you know. With great devastation.

Well, I’ve given you some facts and some pontificating mixed in.

It’s all very helpful. I think it was all related. Thank you for talking to us, it was a really great conversation.

I’m delighted and honored that you would reach out. And also I'm glad to hear you're talking about the background and the context. Because it’s more than just airplanes and people and buildings.