• The President remained seated “only a matter of seconds,” Card told the San Francisco Chronicle, and then “excused himself very politely to the teacher and to the students and he left.” [2]
• The President “didn’t want to alarm the children,” Karl Rove told NBC. Knowing that “the drill was coming to a close … he waited for a few moments … not very long at all … and he came into the staff room.” [3]
• Sandra Kay Daniels, the teacher of the second grade class that Bush visited, told the Los Angeles Times: “I knew something was up when President Bush didn’t pick up the book and participate in the lesson … . He said, ‘Mrs. Daniels, I have to leave now. I am going to leave Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan here to do the speech for me.’ Looking at his face, you knew something was wrong. … He shook my hand and left.” [4]

• In a Tampa Tribune article published September 1, 2002, reporter Jennifer Barrs said that after Card whispered in the President’s ear, Bush remained silent for about 30 seconds and then picked up his book and read with the children “for eight or nine minutes.” [5]
• The Tampa Tribune article, which came out 10 days before the article by Sandra Kay Daniels quoted above, had indicated that Daniels herself had read with the students “for eight or nine minutes.” It added that Daniels, having observed that Bush was so “lost in thought” that he “forgot about the book in his lap,” had been confronted with a difficult problem: “I couldn’t gently kick him. … I couldn’t say, ‘OK, Mr. President. Pick up your book, sir. The whole world is watching.’ ” [6]
• Various reports indicated that after the reading lesson was over, Bush continued to talk. [7] Bush was “openly stretching out the moment” and even “lingered until the press was gone,” wrote Bill Sammon (the White House correspondent for the Washington Times), who referred to Bush as “the dawdler in chief.” [8]

The fact that Bush had not left the room quickly was confirmed by a videotape of the classroom visit, which had been shot by the local cable-TV director and which became available on the Internet in June 2003. [9]

• The Wall Street Journal reported in March 2004 that this videotape showed that Bush “followed along for five minutes as children read aloud a story about a pet goat.” [10]
• This tape became more widely known when Michael Moore’s film “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which included it, appeared in June 2004.
• When the White House was contacted by the Wall Street Journal for its March 2004 article, spokesperson Dan Bartlett admitted that the President had remained in the classroom for at least seven minutes, explaining that Bush had not left immediately because his “instinct was not to frighten the children by rushing out of the room.” [11]
• However, even if this explanation were accepted, the real question, which the WSJ did not ask, was why, on the first anniversary of 9/11, the Bush White House started telling a lie about how long Bush had remained in the classroom.

Was this because the White House, having successfully portrayed Bush as a strong leader in response to the 9/11 attacks, wanted to conceal the fact that he had continued listening to children reading a story rather than taking immediate action as president and commander-in-chief? Was it because the Secret Service knew (as suggested in the Point about the President’s not being hustled away) that the country was not really “under attack” by foreign terrorists?

Whatever the motive, the Bush White House used the national media on the first anniversary of 9/11 to circulate a false story about the President.