A Day of Remembrance and Resolve

President Bush made a solemn pilgrimage Wednesday to the three sites where hijacked planes crashed last Sept. 11 and called on Americans to support a long and possibly wider war against “terrorists and dictators [who] plot against our lives and our liberty.”

“What happened to our nation on a September day set in motion the first great struggle of a new century,” Bush said at a ceremony at the Pentagon on Wednesday morning. “The enemies who struck us are determined and they are resourceful. They will not be stopped by a sense of decency or a hint of conscience--but they will be stopped.”

Later, in an evening speech to the nation from New York Harbor, with the floodlit Statue of Liberty behind him, the president noted: “Our generation has now heard history’s call, and we will answer it.”

“We will not allow any terrorist or tyrant to threaten civilization with weapons of mass murder,” he said, in an implicit reference to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whom Bush has accused of seeking nuclear weapons.

“Now and in the future, Americans will live as free people, not in fear, and never at the mercy of any foreign plot or power,” Bush said.

“We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history’s latest gang of fanatics trying to murder their way to power,” the president added.

“They are discovering, as others before them, the resolve of a great democracy. In the ruins of two towers, under a flag unfurled at the Pentagon, at the funerals of the lost, we have made a sacred promise to ourselves and the world: We will not relent until justice is done and our nation is secure. What our enemies have begun, we will finish.”

In his two speeches, Bush did not mention Iraq by name; aides said he will talk directly about Hussein in a speech to the U.N.’s General Assembly at 10:30 a.m. today.

But his stark and martial language--which aides said reflected a passion he also expresses in private--made it clear that Bush believes that Hussein ranks alongside Al Qaeda as a major threat to the United States, and that the struggle against terrorism is far from over.

The president made time for mourning, too, and for praise of the heroes who raced into the burning World Trade Center and Pentagon to save others after terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the buildings.

But amid tears and commemoration, Bush consistently pressed his central theme: that the outrage of Sept. 11 must not be forgotten--and should now be turned into a lasting resolve to defeat America’s adversaries.

“Though they died in tragedy, they did not die in vain,” Bush said of the 184 victims at the Pentagon. “Their loss has moved a nation to action, in a cause to defend other innocent lives across the world. This war is waged on many fronts. We’ve captured more than 2,000 terrorists; a larger number of killers have met their end in combat.... Yet there’s a great deal left to do.”

Aides say the president and his advisors are worried by signs that Americans, yearning for a return to normal life, are losing some of their zeal for a long-lasting, multi-front war like the one Bush described. Polls show that large majorities support military intervention against Iraq, for example, but increasing numbers also express concern over the possible costs of such a war.

“It’s important for people ... to keep their eye on the ball,” one Bush aide said.

As part of the more explicit diplomatic campaign getting underway today, the White House plans to release a 22-page report charging the Iraqi president with multiple violations of U.N. resolutions.

In today’s speech, Bush will argue that the U.N. must act soon to enforce its existing resolutions that call on Hussein to disarm--and that any such effort “will require a credible threat of military force,” one aide said.

“He’s going to ask the question: ‘What more does the world need to know about this regime to know that it poses a real threat to peace and stability in the world?’ ” another official said. “[He] will remind U.N. members that the United Nations acted forcefully in 1991, has been ignored, and that that is a problem for the United Nations.”

Bush has not decided what specific course of action to take against Iraq, the official said.

“But what he does believe, and I think a growing number of leaders are echoing that, is that we can’t wait any longer to take some kind of action against Saddam Hussein.”

In a sense, Wednesday’s commemorations required the president to walk a fine line: to lead the nation in rites of mourning at a moment when he hopes, without apology, to turn from sorrow to resolve.

Aides said that as they prepared for this day, Bush’s speechwriters consulted the Gettysburg Address, which President Lincoln gave at a commemoration of Union dead during the then-unfinished Civil War.

But Lincoln spoke at a time when the Union was winning the war and public support was growing, not waning.

“This is not Gettysburg,” said Fred Greenstein, a scholar of the presidency at Princeton University.

“It may be more like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s hundred days, in the great national disaster of the Depression, when he needed to rally the nation,” Greenstein said.

After the terrorist attacks last year, Bush succeeded in rallying the nation and saw his stature rise rapidly, but much of that momentum seems to have been lost in recent months, Greenstein said.

“The Bush presidency is now in its third stage--after a lackluster start and the tailwinds that followed Sept. 11,” he said. “It’s a complex, choppy stage with a disheveled foreign policy process.... But it seems to be coming to a head, and we may now be on the cusp of a fourth stage, if all the pieces come together into a clearer policy.”

Bush began a marathon day of ceremonies by attending a private 8 a.m. service at St. John’s Episcopal Church, just across Lafayette Park from the White House.

The program had called for Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, to join the Bushes in a candle-lighting ceremony.

However, the Cheneys were absent, closeted at a “secure, undisclosed location” after the federal government declared a state of high danger of terrorist attacks--an “orange alert.”

After the church service, the president and his wife, Laura, stood on the edge of the South Lawn of the White House, along with hundreds of administration officials and staffers, in a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., the time that the first hijacked jetliner slammed into the World Trade Center a year before.

Then they drove across the Potomac to the Pentagon for the dedication of the building’s damaged wing, largely rebuilt in less than a year.

From the Pentagon, the Bushes flew to western Pennsylvania and laid a wreath on a field near the village of Shanksville, where United Flight 93 crashed after passengers attempted to wrest control of the plane from hijackers. The president did not speak publicly, but talked privately with crash victims’ family members who had gathered at the site.

In midafternoon, the Bushes flew to New York, where they walked hand-in-hand down a long concrete construction ramp onto the floor of ground zero in Lower Manhattan.

There the president laid another wreath and a plaque reading: “Every life taken here, every act of valor performed, the nation holds in honored memory.”

Again, Bush made no public remarks.

But he lingered for almost two hours with the surviving spouses, children, parents and other loved ones of the 2,801 victims--initially shaking hands, then kissing and finally embracing those who sought his embrace. Some came to the president in tears, whispering in his ear, and he could be seen blinking rapidly against what looked like incipient tears of his own.

In his pocket, a spokesman said, Bush carried the Port Authority Police Department badge that belonged to George Howard, an officer who died after he joined rescue crews at the World Trade Center a year ago even though it was his day off.

Howard’s mother gave the badge to Bush last September, when he first met with relatives of the victims.

Aides say the president has carried it ever since, as a tangible reminder of the attack he has promised to redress.