Bush staring off into space on 9/11 for over 7 minutes dreaming about his pet goat

The Pet Goat” (sometimes erroneously referred to as “My Pet Goat”) is a children’s story contained in the book Reading Mastery II: Storybook 1 by Siegfried Engelmann and Elaine C. Bruner. The book is part of the thirty-one volume Reading Mastery series published by the SRA Macmillan early-childhood education division of McGraw-Hill. It uses the direct instruction teaching style. The story gained notoriety in 2001 after U.S. President George W. Bush read the book with an elementary school class when he was informed of the September 11 attacks.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, George Bush was about to begin reading the story along with a group of schoolchildren at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota County, Florida when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card informed him that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. Bush remained seated and followed along as the children read the book, for over seven minutes. After spending about twenty minutes with the children, Bush was scheduled to give a short press conference at about 9:30 a.m. At the conference inside the school, Bush made his first speech about the attacks and was later taken to a secure location by the Secret Service aboard Air Force One before returning to the White House later that evening.

THE PET GOAT

A girl got a pet goat. She liked to go running with her pet goat. She played with her pet goat in her house. She played with her pet goat in her yard.

But the goat did some things that made the girl’s dad mad. The goat ate things. He ate cans and he ate canes. He ate pans and he ate panes. He even ate capes and caps.

One day her dad said, “That goat must go. He eats too many things.”

The girl said, “Dad, if you let the goat stay with us, I will see that he stops eating all those things.”

The dad said, “We will try it.”

So the goat stayed and the girl made him stop eating cans and canes and caps and capes.

But one day a car robber came to the girl’s house. He saw a big red car near the house and said, “I will steal that car.”

He ran to the car and started to open the door.

The girl and the goat were playing in the backyard. They did not see the car robber.