Former US President George W. Bush and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a candid account of the chaos inside the White House immediately after the 11 September 2001 attacks, speaking at his presidential library in Dallas as the 25th anniversary of the atrocity was marked. Rice recalled that the FBI and CIA had barely communicated beforehand due to civil liberties restrictions, so the day after the attacks she arranged for FBI director Bob Mueller and CIA director George Tenet to brief Bush in the Oval Office each morning using a combined threat assessment. Bush also lamented that a third of Americans today have no real understanding of the sacrifice and unity shown at the time.

Rice said the joint threat matrix compiled by the two agencies had grown to the size of a phone book by the morning of 12 September, and she recounted overruling Bush's wish to return to Washington immediately, telling him the country was under attack and it was not safe. Bush described his own journey that day, from a Florida school where he first learned of the attacks, via military bases in Louisiana and Nebraska, to a night spent in a White House bunker before addressing the nation. The attacks killed 2,996 people, including 2,977 victims and 19 hijackers, and Bush is due to join former presidents Obama, Biden and Clinton, plus Vice President JD Vance, at a Ground Zero ceremony.