During a visit to Notre Dame on Friday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh recalled his experience working in the White House on 9/11. Justice Kavanaugh said he was sent to the White House basement after the second plane hit, before Secret Service agents directed him to run from the building a short time later.
During Friday’s panel discussion, Kavanaugh said President George W. Bush succeeded in his goal of making sure a similar attack never happened again. He pointed to Bush’s speech at Ground Zero where he vowed that "the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon."
“That rally that he did, I think, was very important for the country,” Kavanaugh said.
Jennie Bradley Lichter is a senior advisor to the March for Life Education and Defense Fund. She recalled watching the attacks unfold on TV from the common room of her dorm at Lyons Hall, during her sophomore year at Notre Dame.
She said the War on Terror came to mark her generation. “My generation’s military service has, I think, deep reverberations that we’re still feeling and will continue to feel in American politics and American policy-making, the way we think about America’s place in the world,” she said.
Justice Kavanaugh said that the mindset of confronting threats abroad led to support for the Iraq War, but he argued that war’s unpopularity now shouldn’t change our understanding of the U.S. response to 9/11. “I think it’s a mistake to blur Afghanistan and Iraq, a pretty large mistake to do those two things,” Kavanaugh said.
Jimmy Dunne, a Notre Dame trustee, was a co-founder of Sandler O'Neill & Partners, which lost more than a third of its staff and the two other senior executives in the attack on the World Trade Center. He urged today’s students not to wait for a crisis to be prepared.
"You’re going to have serious and significant challenges," Dunne said. "It may not be planes flying into a building, but bad things are going to happen — a hundred percent."
Friday’s discussion was framed as a way to help students who weren’t alive 25 years ago understand and remember the attacks of 9/11. Panelists stressed how unexpected they were for those who lived through them. They also highlighted the sense of unity that followed – something that may be hard to grasp in today’s political climate.
The University of Notre Dame is a financial supporter of WVPE.
