A Winthrop Iowa native was a Navy rear admiral and the number two person in the Defense Department’s Public Affairs Office when the hijacked plane hit the Pentagon on September 11th 2001.
Craig Quigley says his office was not damaged and he and others evacuated, and he then tried to contact Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who was still inside. His cellphone didn’t work, so he went to a nearby gas station. “I walked in there and I said, of course, I’m in uniform. And I said, I need to speak to the manager. And she came out and I introduced myself and I said, I need to take over your gas station. And she said, it’s yours,” he says.
Quigley says he used the gas station’s land line to first call his wife. “I very quick. I’m fine. I can’t talk, but I’m fine. More later. And the second call was to Secretary Rumsfeld. And I told him where I was that I had a lot of the Pentagon press corps with me. And I said, what do you want me to say?,” Quigley says. Quigley says the message was simple. “He said, you tell them that we’ve had gotten a bloody nose that the president is still very much firmly in control of the American military and we will bounce back from this,” he says.
Quigley says he then held the first of two or three press briefings with surreal sight of the Pentagon burning in the background. He says he didn’t have a lot of information in the early going. “People legitimately wanted to understand how many people were killed, how many injured, what is the status of the fires, but that just wasn’t very clear yet in the early going. Eventually, I shut down that gas station press center and we went back into the Pentagon,” Quigley says. Secretary Rumsfeld then held briefings in the regular media room there.
Quigley got home that morning around 3:00 a.m. and says it wasn’t until later that he learned how many people had died in New York, the extent of the casualties in the Pentagon, and what had happened Shanksville. He says that first briefing was key. “That one message about reassuring the American people and really indeed the world that the president was still firmly in charge, we felt that was very important,” Quigley says. Quigley now lives in Goodyear, Arizona.
(By Janelle Tucker, KMCH, Manchester)