"I think the President was trying to keep us from finding out, so we all wouldn't freak out."

Chantal Guerrero, one of the children in the classroom where President Bush was reading "My Pet Goat" on September 11, 2001. Guerrero was 7 at the time and is now 16.

Another girl from the class, Mariah Williams, says:

"I don't remember the story we were reading — was it about pigs? But I'll always remember watching his face turn red. He got really serious all of a sudden. But I was clueless. I was just 7. I'm just glad he didn't get up and leave, because then I would have been more scared and confused."

Do these kids know how much people have abused Bush over the years for what, to them, was the care he took? Yes.

One thing the students would like to tell Bush's critics — like liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, whose 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 911 disparaged Bush for lingering almost 10 minutes with the students after getting word that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center — is that they think the President did the right thing. "I think he was trying to keep everybody calm, starting with us," says Guerrero. Dubrocq agrees: "I think he was trying to protect us." Booker Principal Gwendolyn Tose-Rigell, who died in 2007, later insisted, "I don't think anyone could have handled it better. What would it have served if [Bush] had jumped out of his chair and ran out of the room?