He was there in the motorcade, driving to Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, when press secretary Ari Fleischer first got a "page" on his pager -- "Back then, we didn't have BlackBerrys, " said Draper -- alerting the White House that a single plane had hit the World Trade Center.
In a sign of the heated public debate on the issue, a group of about two dozen protesters standing across the street from the Las Vegas high school waved signs opposing amnesty for undocument immigrants as Obama's motorcade drove past.