Bush: Today, our nation saw evil

Bush spoke from the Oval Office just hours after bouncing between Florida and air bases in Louisiana and Nebraska for security reasons. Fighter jets and decoy helicopters accompanied his evening flight to Washington and the White House, where his Marine One helicopter briefly stood vigil on the South Lawn in the event of another evacuation. The helicopter took off about 10 p.m. EDT.

With smoke still pouring out of rubble in Washington and New York, Bush declared: "These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve."

He spoke for less than five minutes from the desk that Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy used before him. Beside the door, a TelePrompTer operator fed Bush the words that he and his speechwriters hastened to pen just an hour earlier.

He stumbled a couple of times even as he strove to maintain a commanding air. Aides pushed an American flag and one with the presidential seal behind him for the somber occasion.

Immediately afterward, Bush joined a late-night meeting of his National Security Council and planned to remain overnight at the White House. He asked the nation to pray for the families of the victims and quoted the Book of Psalms, "And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us spoken through the ages in Psalm 23. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for you are with me."

The United States received no warning of the attacks on the Pentagon and New York's World Trade Center towers, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said.

U.S. officials privately said they suspected terrorism Osama bin Laden, protected by Afghan government, was behind the tragedies. The Afghan government has rejected the accusations.

"We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them," Bush said. "Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom, came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts."

The Oval Office address was his third statement on the tragedy that, being unaware of any hijackings, he first took as a single plane "that went off course," Fleischer said.

He began his day in Sarasota, Fla., where he intended to talk about education. The remarks were scrapped. At the first reports of attacks on New York's World Trade Center, Bush told his Sarasota elementary school audience that he was hastening back to Washington. All of that immediately changed — and he was diverted to Louisiana — when a plane slammed into the Pentagon, and Washington, too, was under attack.

On Capitol Hill, first lady Laura Bush, who was to have made her debut testifying before the Senate on education, tried to soothe a horrified nation. "Parents need to reassure their children everywhere in our country that they're safe," she said, grim-faced, as she and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., announced their hearing was postponed. Mrs. Bush and a handful of aides were whisked by motorcade to a secret location away from the White House, which had been evacuated but for the small corps of foreign policy advisers who staffed the basement Situation Room.