Vice President Dick Cheney was in a bunker beneath the White House on the morning of September 11, 2001, when an unidentified aircraft was located 80 miles away from Washington, D.C.: “A military aide asked Cheney for authorization to take out the aircraft. Cheney gave it without hesitating. The military aide seemed surprised that the answer came so quickly. He asked again, and Cheney once again gave the authorization. The military aide seemed to think that because Cheney had answered so quickly, he must have misunderstood the question. So he asked the vice president a third time. ‘I said yes,’ Cheney said, not angrily but with authority. ‘He was very steady, very calm,’ says Josh Bolten, then deputy White House chief of staff, who was standing at Cheney’s side. ‘He clearly had been through crises before and did not appear to be in shock like many of us.’ ”
– Stephen F. Hayes, Cheney, Pages 338-339