Attacks redefined President Bush

September 10, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN, Texa

The event that changed the nation changed a president.

When he visits the wounded now at military hospitals, George W. Bush sometimes finds young warriors who were in middle school when the wars started so many years ago.

The wounded warriors are a legacy of war, something that has stayed with him from two White House terms that started with a focus on domestic policy but took a sharp turn once terrorists struck the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

“He realizes what it cost some of the guys,” said Cliff Johnson, a friend and former gubernatorial aide. “Bush got emotionally committed and involved in their suffering. I think it’s affected him deeply.”

Bush ran for president in 2000 talking about education, tax cuts and humility in foreign policy, and his first eight months in office, those were the focus. But it wasn’t just his administration and its policies that were different after Sept. 11, colleagues say. Bush himself was altered when the twin towers fell.

“He was focused before, but with 9/11, that focus became more intense and laserlike with everything,” said Joe Allbaugh, his former chief of staff as governor and director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency when Bush was in the White House.

“For myself, I can say it made me more serious. And I viewed him much the same way,” said Allbaugh. “It was a day that sears not just the mind, but the heart, and you never get away from it.”

Karen Hughes, a longtime Bush aide in Austin and counselor to the president, said the fall of 2001 was shaping up for more work on Bush’s domestic agenda.

“We were working on No Child Left Behind; we were working on the economy; we had passed the tax cuts. Congress was getting ready to come back for the fall, and most of the outlook was domestic policy,” she said.

“Obviously, as of that morning, the entire focus changed.”

The transformation to a wartime presidency presented Bush with an overriding purpose, however unwanted, that would redefine the man and his legacy. And it led him into areas that marred the public’s view of him when he left office, including the Iraq war, surveillance policies that many felt went beyond the bounds of the Constitution and a tough approach to the world that soured even some U.S. allies.

Bush is famously reluctant to reveal himself, and his memoir, “Decision Points,” largely avoids introspection. His book is mostly a vigorous telling of events and a defense of his decisions. In the days after Sept. 11, he felt it was important for the country to see a president who was steady, confident and in charge, he says.

In his book, Bush says he could not sleep. He says he saw images of the towers falling, frightened faces and people jumping to their death. When he first visited ground zero on Sept. 14, he saw the colossal rubble and raw emotions.

In his public appearances now, he exudes the certitude of a man reconciled in the belief that he did his best amid tumultuous circumstances. Privately, friends say, in his often unannounced visits to military hospitals, he is a man deeply affected by the events of Sept. 11 and its aftermath.

In his final White House address to the nation in 2009, Bush said, “Most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11.”

Then he added: “I never did.”