DAVID GREGORY: Let's go back to 9/11 of last year. Tell me what that day was supposed to be like for you.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS: That day was supposed to be like a normal day at the NSC, which is of course, very busy. The President was out of town on a short trip, and I normally travel with him or Steve Hadley, the Deputy National Security Adviser, but it was such a short trip that we decided not to do that.

I was supposed to give a speech that day about American foreign policy to the -- a think tank here in Washington, a speech that I ended up giving several months later. It was to be a normal day, foreign visitors, several meetings. It turned out not to be a normal day at all of course.

GREGORY: The horror of 9/11 happened. Take me through where you were, how you learned about it, and what you did initially?

RICE: I was standing at my desk, and my executive assistant came in and said, "Do you know a plane has hit the World Trade Center?" And I thought what a strange accident. And my mind immediately went to a small plane of some kind, and in fact, the first reports were that they were small -- there was some sort of small plane or maybe a twin-engine plane of some kind.

And I picked up the phone and I called the President, who was in Florida for an education event, and he had just heard. And I said, "Yes, Mr. President, a plane has hit the World Trade Center." And he also said, "What a strange accident." And I said I would get back in touch with him later.

I then went downstairs to be daily senior staff meeting, in which I can go around and ask all of the senior staff what's going on in their area of responsibility. And I got about three people in, and the executive assistant handed me a note and it said a second plane has hit the World Trade Center. And I thought, "My God, this is a terrorist attack."

GREGORY: You knew right away.

RICE: I knew right away, right away, because that -- that couldn't be coincidence that two planes had hit the World Trade Center that morning.

And I went into the operational part of the Situation Room to try and gather the National Security Council principles together. Now that I think about it, it would have been of course the worse possible thing to do, to bring them all to some place, but at that moment I thought it was important to talk to everybody.

And I suddenly remembered Colin Powell was in Peru, not Colombia, as I had first feared, a place that had a lot of problems in terrorism. And I couldn't reach Don Rumsfeld, and several minutes later I realized -- I looked behind me on the TV screen, and a plane had hit the Pentagon.

And then there were incoming reports that there had been a car bomb at the State Department, that there was a large fire on the Mall near the Washington Monument, and just trying to sort through the information when a Secret Service agent came and said, "You have to go to the bunker. The Vice President is already there. There may be planes heading for the White House."

And I stopped for one moment. I called the President, and I said, "Mr. President, here's what's going on. The Pentagon has been hit." And he said, "I'm -- I'm getting ready to come back." He had already made his way to the airport. And I said, "Sir, you can't come back here. Washington's under attack." And then I left for the bunker.

GREGORY: What goes on inside of you when one thing after another -- I mean go back to you were told or you actually saw the second plane hit?

RICE: I saw the picture as the plane had just -- the picture had just come up on television of the plane lodged in the side of the Pentagon. And no one had told me. I literally turned and looked at the picture and saw it.

GREGORY: And what about the World Trade Center, when the second plane hit?

RICE: The second -- the plane, I had been told about that.

GREGORY: What goes on inside of you? You're the National Security Adviser of the United States. Did you gasp? Did you -- did you have any sort of moment of pause?

RICE: Almost immediately I started trying to do what I could do, which was to begin to gather people to talk about what needed to be done. You just start to react. You don't react so much to the events as to almost a checklist in your head.

I've taught many simulations, war and crisis simulations, as a professor of international politics. I've participated in many simulations when I worked for the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, when I was on the National Security Council staff before.

And you, at some level, know what to do. When I go to the bunker, for instance, the first thing that occurred to me was that it was important to get a cable out to all posts around the world, diplomatic posts around the world, to say "The United States Government is still functioning. We have not been decapitated by this attack." So you sort of respond.

GREGORY: You actually felt the need to make it clear that the Government was still operating?

RICE: Yes.

GREGORY: It was that serious.

RICE: It was that serious. Just think of sitting in London or in Paris or in Moscow for that matter, and looking at the pictures that must have been coming in on their televisions as well. I thought to myself, we need to let everybody know that we're still up and running.

GREGORY: Were you scared?

RICE: I don't remember a sense of fear, either personal or cosmic. I was really more concerned to -- to do the things that we needed to do at that moment.

GREGORY: Give us some sense of what the president's mood was like, what his words were like, his command of that moment.

RICE: I remember the president as being almost matter of fact. The first call, in which he expressed disbelief that something like that this had happened, a weird accident, which is how we both thought about the first plane, was, of course, a bit of consternation.

But when I talked to him the second time, and he said he was headed back, and we said, no, you can't come back, already there was a sense of determination. He was in charge of it. He needed to know what was happening. And by the time I got to the bunker, and he stayed on an open line with the vice president throughout this entire period, it was very clear that he, too, was just thinking about what needed to get done.

GREGORY: It's well-documented by now that you and others on the National Security team were no strangers to the general threat posed by terror groups, specifically al Qaida, and that this administration, the new administration was preparing to confront that threat.

When it was clear that this was terrorism and an attack against the United States, did you have a sense of, "Oh, dear God. I know who and what this is"?

RICE: It was not very long before I think anyone who knew the MO of al Qaida had exactly the thought, this is al Qaida. It smelled like al Qaida. It felt like al Qaida, the kind of grandiose character of it, the attention-getting character of it. I think we knew pretty early on, and of course a little bit later on in the day, George Tenet, the CIA director, confirmed that the CIA's assessment was that it was al Qaida.

But standing in the bunker only a few minutes after I had gotten there, I was pretty clear, in my own mind, that it was al Qaida.

GREGORY: Did you have a sinking feeling, saying to yourself, "Here I was, I was putting together a plan of action to take this threat on, just, just too late"?

RICE: Well, of course, you think we should have got them before they got us, but the fact of the matter is that everything that we were looking at, and, frankly, that the Clinton administration had looked at, was a 3- to 5-year plan to try to bring down al Qaida. They were hiding in Afghanistan. You had to bring down the Taliban in order to get to them. You needed stronger and better relations with Pakistan, a country with which we've had fractured relations for a number of years.

And in the final analysis, the way that we are really getting them is to use military force to get them, American military force to get them, and it's not obvious that you would have been able to do that prior to 9/11.

GREGORY: There is, to me, a very memorable photograph of you, presumably in the bunker, with the vice president, and his counselor, Mary Matalin, and the president's counselor, Karen Hughes. It's one of those photos that we'll always look at as we memorialize that day.

How can you sum up for people what it was like in that room and what was the priority for all of you working together in that room?

RICE: The room was oddly calm because everybody in there was a veteran, in one way or another, and there wasn't a lot of chaos in the room, but there was a very clear sense of what had happened to us and the need to deal with the consequences.

Some of the concerns were making sure that there was a forum for the president to speak to the American people. And since he was flying around the country, one of the major concerns was how would he do that, and how would he do that in a way that he could reassure the American people.

There were decisions that had to be made. The most difficult thing that was, was happening there was Norm Mineta, the Transportation secretary, the vice president and I actually found ourselves trying to track tail numbers of civilian aircraft because they were trying to ground civil aviation.

You have an incident like that, you want all planes on the ground, and yet finding, as the various air traffic controllers, who by the way, to my mind, are some of the unsung heroes of that day, air traffic controllers in the United States, and Canada, and Mexico, that were finding appropriate airfields for aircraft to land so that you could clear the skies.

Decisions had to be made, and a decision had to be made, probably the toughest decision that if an aircraft was not responding, an American jet fighter had the, had an obligation to shoot it down.

GREGORY: What a heart-wrenching decision to have to make.

RICE: For the president, I think a very difficult decision, but a decision that, at some level, he had no choice but to make that decision. And so while it was difficult, in one sense, I'm sure that, in another sense, it must have seemed to him that he had no choice, but to do that.

GREGORY: Talk a little about, you know, in the midst of making the decisions and taking the actions that you and others had to do to protect the country, when did you take time out for -- when did Dr. Rice take time out for Condy Rice and to absorb this, to talk to family, to let people know you were okay?

RICE: Well, in fact, I stopped, for one moment, on the way to the bunker, to call my aunt and uncle in Birmingham and to say, "I'm fine. Tell everybody I'm all right." We're a very close-knit family, and I knew that there would be panic among the Rays and the Rices, and so I wanted them to know that I was all right.

I didn't think about anything personal, again, for quite a long time. In fact, it was that Thursday night -- this, of course, happened on a Tuesday -- it was Thursday night, when I got home about midnight, and I turned on the television for the first time. I had not watched television during that entire period. We'd been too busy. I turned on the television, and the Brits were playing the American National Anthem at Buckingham Palace, and I finally let go and broke down, but before that I didn't have the time.

GREGORY: It all hit you then.

RICE: It did. It only hit me, the enormity of it, what the country had gone through, and there was something in that National Anthem being played in Britain that said that, as difficult as it was, we were not alone.

GREGORY: What does it take for someone who's in leadership to deal with this kind of horror? I mean, what do you need to have? What's the equipment? What are the skills? What was your faith? What role did that play? How did you bring all of that to the next hours and days?

RICE: The first thing that you have to have is an ability to think clearly, even under the most difficult circumstances, and I have just enormous admiration for the president's ability to get to the essence of everything, and that was one of the things that attracted me to him as Candidate Bush, all the way back when I first signed on with him.

And as President Bush, that ability to get to the essence of what we needed to do, the clarity, the moral clarity about what had happened to us, I think served him really well and steadied all of us.

Everybody talked about how experienced this team, this National Security team was. We'd all been in these positions before, but it was the president who steadied this team, not the other way around.

It was also the case that for those of us who are people of faith, it was a time to draw on that faith. I can remember just praying every day, maybe several times a day, to, to be steady, to have my feet walk in a path that was the Lord's, not my own. I did rely on family and friends who would just call in to say I hope you're doing okay. They didn't want to talk about the policy, they didn't want to know what was going on, they just wanted to know that I was okay, a need that was important too.

And, finally, you have to have great faith in this country. And every moment that we went through, from September 11th and in the following days, just affirmed and affirmed the strength of this democracy, and that was really heartening.

GREGORY: Could you tell me a little bit about the sort of early portrait in time, when the earliest stages of planning the U.S. and allied response to this horror, what those interactions with the president, and others on the National Security team, were like, what was driving you, what were the priorities, what was talked and thought about most.

RICE: What was talked and thought about most in the first day or so was, was really trying to get the country back on track. There was a time when the National Security team, along with the economic team, and with several people from the domestic side, were worrying about when could we reopen airports, when could we reopen Reagan airport.

We had to go through a rather hurried exercise to try to do what we could to button up the country. This country had not been under attack, its territory had not been under attack, for almost 200 years, and to think that you had to worry about the physical territory of the United States, how could you secure airports, how could you secure nuclear power plants, that -- those issues were also foremost.

So, on one track, we were worrying about the physical security of the United States, on the other track, we were preparing to try to take out al Qaida, and ultimately the Taliban, and --

GREGORY: In an accelerated way.

RICE: In an accelerated way. The fact is that many of the things that we ended up doing, we would have done over a longer period of time, but you could not imagine getting bases in Uzbekistan or running the kinds of operations that we ran in Central Asia prior to the events of 9/11, but in an accelerated way, yes, to try to bring al Qaida down as fast as possible.

GREGORY: That morning everything changed. This administration changed, the presidency changed, and a lot of people say that this president himself evolved or changed. Describe how any of those things changed, in your mind.

RICE: Well, of course, the American view of itself and its own vulnerability changed immediately. We had been protected by shores, by great oceans. We'd not had to worry about an attack on the homeland in a long, long time. We got a sense that our vulnerability was linked to our very openness, and our generosity, and our willingness to have people here. It was our borders were not that secure. I mean, our concept of our own vulnerability clearly changed.

In a positive way, new opportunities started to, to appear. One of the most important and interesting conversations I had on that first day was with President Putin of Russia, who called to say that he knew that we were increasing the defense condition of the American Armed Forces, we were changing their defense condition. The Russians can see those things.

And he said, "We have a military exercise underway, and we're going to stand down so there's no confusion."

Well, for an old Soviet specialist like myself, who had worried about the spiral of alerts between American and Soviet forces, as we changed our defense condition, they would change theirs, and we would go up this ladder, this was, this was a tremendous breakthrough. And the U.S.-Russian relationship has been strengthened by the joint war on terror, as have relationships and intelligence relationships around the world.

In personal terms, this president has simply been more of what he is. He is a determined, resolute person who thinks and acts from a deep inner well of moral belief and moral clarity, and he has been more of that, in response to this crisis, but it's not a different George W. Bush.

GREGORY: But what's it like when you, you know, you come into, into office, all of you, with an agenda, with priorities, with goals, a need then after one morning, your destiny, your administration, the destiny of this presidential term is unalterably changed?

RICE: It's the way history is. It's true for probably every major historical earthquake of this kind; that the people who find themselves dealing with the implications of it didn't really expect to be the agents of, of such a tremendous change. The truth is that we knew that terrorism was a major threat. We even knew that there was potential terrorist threat to the American homeland. But of course the implications of something like 9/11 are not really clear until it happens.

GREGORY: How should Americans mark this anniversary? It's a painful day. It's -- maybe there's too much coverage of all of this. Is it -- what do you think? What should people really take away from this day?

RICE: I think it is important to have a day in which we remember, in which we remember those who lost their lives, both those who lost their lives as being in the -- because they were in the towers at the wrong time, or the people who went in to save them, to remember the lives of those who have already given their lives in places like Afghanistan, to try and root out the threat.

Days of remembrance are important, and we shouldn't shirk from that. I don't intend to. I intend to take at least moments to pray for and to think about the lives that were lost.

And then I think we can reflect on the great strength the country showed, the fact that in each -- for each and every one of us, we have all been changed. We've all been reminded of what it means to be American. We've all been reminded of how important it is to defend freedom. We've all been reminded that we are vulnerable, but not in the way that the terrorists thought.

They must have thought a cacophonous, chaotic, democratic multi-ethnic country would just shatter if something like this happened to it. And quite the opposite, we've all been reminded what it is to be American.

So I would hope that people would take time to remember, but that they would also reflect on what an amazing country this is, and the responsibility that each and every one of us has to -- to make it even more so through our devotion to our ideals, to our devotion to our fellow Americans, and to our role in the world, which is unlike any other country in the history of the world.

GREGORY: Just a couple of questions about Iraq. The Vice President has warned that -- that Saddam Hussein will soon acquire nuclear weapons. Does the Administration plan to lay out the evidence that supports that charge and also the -- the link between, if one exists, Saddam Hussein, Iraq and al Qaida?

RICE: This President believes in open debate in a democratic society, and as he said several days ago, he welcomes now the debate and discussion that is going on about our obligations as Americans who sit in the position of really the fundamental force of stability in the world, our obligations to deal with the problems that we see. We can't sweep them aside. We can't do nothing. But we -- we want to -- to debate it, and the Administration will let the American people, the American Congress, our allies, our friends, everyone, understand how we see the threat and why we see a need in one way or another to deal with the threat.

The President has made really clear that he remains open in thinking about what his options are, but we have begun to talk about the problem that Iraq poses, and will continue to do that.

GREGORY: Saudi Arabia's foreign affairs adviser yesterday, told me that no one in the world supports war against Iraq at this time. Do you believe that that's true, and if it's true, why do you think it's true?

RICE: Well, first of all, we have not actually asked anyone to support war against Iraq. The President has made clear that he has a lot of thoughts about how this might happen. What he's asked is that we all accept the responsibility for dealing with threats that sooner or later will come back to haunt us if we do not deal with those -- with those threats.

There is a road ahead here of consultation and discussion as we, the international community and the United States as a part of that international community, decide how to deal with the threats.

I assume that as we make this case and consult, people will decide where they stand, but it is far premature to start talking about camps for and against this or that kind of action. We're not there yet.

GREGORY: It's been written that -- that nowhere in the Constitution is the word "nation" actually used, and a lot of people who have chronicled the Civil War made the case that it took the bloodshed of those four horrific years of war to really give birth to the concept of a nation. Warts and all, we were still a nation.

As you reflect on September 11th, has there been a similar rebirth?

RICE: There has been a rebirth of America as a nation. We are a complicated place, and it's hard for people who are not Americans I think sometimes to understand what it is like to truly be a multi-ethnic society, where African-Americans or Mexican-Americans or German-Americans or Italian-Americans are all proud of their heritage and want to keep part of that heritage, but have a common purpose and a common -- a common place in being Americans. And it's not because we're all of the same blood. It's because we are all a part of a common ideal.

And sometimes because we are sometimes a little bit loud in how we debate it and we have so many different ideas and people get the wrong view, that that means that we aren't all of a common place and a common ideal.

When something like September 11th happens it reminds you that we really are. I've had so many people say to me, young -- young kids to elderly people, "I've never felt so American as that day." And that is something that maybe most of the world needs to -- the rest of the world needs to understand, that this was a horrific experience, but it was also a unifying experience.

It's not our obligation and our challenge as a country to use this horrific unifying experience to the betterment of the country. The President has called in people to find ways to serve, to tutor a child, to -- to help an elderly person, to serve something greater than yourself, because what America has always been about is serving something greater than yourself.

It's also a time when as Americans we have to reflect on the fact that we are in a special position in history in terms of our great power and influence in the world, and we have to make the world safer. We have to deal with the threats that are before us. This Administration, this President, this America, will have shirked its responsibility to history if we do not deal with the threats before us and make the world safer.

But we will also have shirked the responsibility if we don't make the world better, and this President is determined to -- to leave office, to leave this presidency having left the world safer and better, more democratic and more stable.

GREGORY: Dr. Rice, thank you.

RICE: Thank you.