The 9/11 Speech That Was Never Delivered
William Safire wrote in the introduction to his classic compendium Lend Me Your Ears that “what makes a draft speech a real speech is the speaking of it.” But I’ve found that some of the most interesting speeches written were never delivered at all. I spent years collecting examples of the words that went unspoken because events intervened, or a leader had a change of heart, or history took a sudden turn.
Last year, shortly after leaving my role as a special assistant and senior speechwriter for President Joe Biden, I published them as a book. For 19 of the speeches I wrote about—all historically significant, many previously unseen—I could offer readers the full text of what might have been. The 20th remained elusive.
[From the September 2021 issue: What Bobby McIlvaine left behind]
I first learned of its existence in 2004, from a report in The Washington Post. “Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn’t on Terrorism; Rice Speech Cited Missile Defense,” the front-page headline read. The story by Robin Wright detailed a speech that was to have been delivered by President George W. Bush’s national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, on September 11, 2001. In the excerpts published by the Post, she seemed dismissive of the threat of terrorism: “We need to worry about the suitcase bomb, the car bomb and the vial of sarin released in the subway, [but] why put deadbolt locks on your doors and stock up on cans of mace and then decide to leave your windows open.”
But the hadn’t seen the full speech, and assessing the excerpts without their full context was difficult. In 2019, as I began working on my book in earnest, I filed a FOIA request, which yielded ancillary materials used in the creation of the speech, but not the text itself. I then requested relevant documents from the files of the man who’d drafted the speech. That, too, was denied. I appealed last September. And
