‘No one ever asked him ... about al-Qaida’

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A senator watches helplessly
Like the rest of his colleagues in Congress, John McCain was hustled out the doors of the U.S. Capitol as the last plane, United Airlines Flight 93, flew toward its target, which authorities concluded was probably Washington.

“One of the things that might have been next was Flight 93 coming down to either hit the Capitol or the White House,” he said. “Thank God for those brave young Americans who prevented it” by storming the cockpit and forcing the jet to crash in Pennsylvania.

“I couldn’t get very far from the Capitol, so a staffer of mine has an apartment near here, and we went over to her apartment because there was just no way of getting off of Capitol Hill. Everything was stopped,” McCain said. “I spent the day on the phone and in front of the television set, just like most Americans.”

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‘I want a hamburger’
And what about the man at the top, the inexperienced new president whose intelligence and judgment had been widely questioned in the heat of the campaign just a few months before?

“[There were] a lot of things we were going to have to do — rescue efforts in New York, rescue efforts in the Pentagon, rebuilding international coalitions, making sure we knew who had done this to us and how do we go after them,” Powell said. “But the president was calm; all my other colleagues were calm. There were no histrionics. Everybody knew that there was work to be done.”

For Hughes, one special moment of bizarre normalcy crystallized her confidence in Bush.

“I remember once the Secret Service thought they had another threat and tried to get the president to leave,” Hughes said. “And he insisted that he wasn’t leaving. I'll never forget, he said: ‘In fact, I’m hungry. I want a hamburger.’

“And I said, ‘Well, you might as well have cheese.’ He’d been trying to diet, and so I thought, well, if we’re all going to die here in the next few minutes, you might as well have a hamburger with cheese on it.”

By MSNBC.com’s Alex Johnson with MSNBC-TV’s Chris Matthews and Jeremy Bronson.

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