Eleven Minutes — Bartlet Clears the Mission
Plot Beats
The narrative micro-steps within this event
Bartlet and Leo walk through the basement hallway, reminiscing about their childhood pets, setting a casual yet intimate tone before the high-stakes meeting.
Bartlet humorously compares the Swiss to cats bringing mice, subtly expressing his frustration with their indirect approach to the crisis.
Bartlet and Leo enter the Situation Room, where the team briefs them on the urgent logistics of transporting the organs and the patient.
Bartlet questions the urgency and location of the meeting, displaying his impatience with bureaucratic formalities during a humanitarian crisis.
The team discusses the logistics of the organ transport, with Bartlet interjecting humor about the organs being in Zurich, lightening the tense mood momentarily.
The NSC staff debates the political implications of the mission, with Bartlet cutting through the rhetoric by focusing on the boy's age and the humanitarian imperative.
Bartlet decisively orders the mission to proceed, emphasizing the boy's youth and the moral necessity of the operation, overruling political objections.
Bartlet and Leo exit the Situation Room, with Bartlet recalling the cats' names, subtly underscoring the personal weight of his decision.
Who Was There
Characters present in this moment
Focused and matter-of-fact — intent on communicating tight constraints without dramatizing them.
Provides the crucial medical-logistical data: organs are staged in Zurich, will travel on Swissair to Paris, and can remain viable roughly 40 hours, anchoring the timeline for the team's decision.
- • Convey the realistic medical time window and transport routing
- • Ensure decision-makers understand the constraints of organ viability
- • Highlight places where delays could imperil the mission
- • Accurate timing is mission-critical
- • Logistics determine the possible outcomes
- • Bureaucratic delay is the biggest practical threat to success
Anxious and insistent — focused on the long-term political consequences and clearly uncomfortable with rush decisions that lack messaging control.
Voices the principal political caution: warns that leaks will provoke clerics and argues timing and messaging should temper action, surfacing the risk calculus competing with humanitarian urgency.
- • Avoid inflaming clerical opposition or destabilizing political factions
- • Preserve broader strategic interests and political capital
- • Delay or control actions until messaging and timing are secure
- • Leaks will produce real political damage
- • Timing and narrative control trump rushed humanitarian gestures
- • Political fallout can undermine other policy goals
Calmly professional — focused on facts and reducing uncertainty around the extraction timeline.
Delivers operational facts: confirms the boy and guardian have crossed into Kandahar and that a U.N. cargo plane is on the ground ready for extraction; reassures the room about that element of the transport chain.
- • Confirm readiness of the on-ground extraction asset
- • Provide reliable timing so decision-makers can act
- • Reduce anxiety about the immediate tactical element of the mission
- • Clear, verifiable facts enable decision-making under pressure
- • The extraction is feasible if authorized promptly
- • Operational readiness is separate from political considerations
Resolute and impatient — a paternal, moral irritation at procedural delay that briefly surfaces as light amusement before hardening into command.
Leads the charge from hallway into the Situation Room, asks direct questions about the patient, laughs briefly to defuse tension, and decisively orders immediate pre-op and pressure on the Swiss to stop delaying the organ transport.
- • Authorize and accelerate the transplant operation
- • Protect the patient's life by prioritizing medical urgency over political hedging
- • Prevent bureaucratic delay and force Swiss cooperation
- • Re-center the team's thinking on the boy rather than political optics
- • Humanitarian duty should trump political caution in life-or-death cases
- • The youth and vulnerability of the patient make inaction morally unacceptable
- • Institutional secrecy and secure rooms are insufficient excuses for delaying care
- • Public/political fallout is secondary to saving a life
Concerned and practically relieved — worried about leaks and optics but aligned with the President's decision once reassured.
Accompanies Bartlet from hallway; frames the Situation Room as secure, prompts logistics questions, asks directly about organs and leaks, and offers a pragmatic voice that both supports and checks the President's impulse.
- • Ensure operational security and minimize leak risk
- • Clarify logistics so the President can make an informed decision
- • Protect the administration from unnecessary political damage
- • Coordinate staff and move the team to action once Bartlet decides
- • Leaks are a serious operational and political risk
- • The President must be shielded from avoidable distractions
- • Practical logistics must be solved before execution
- • Humanitarian action can and should be pursued within secure procedures
Not depicted; implied as neutral/logistical.
Mentioned by Bartlet as a potentially non-secure outsider whose presence (as Swissair pilot) creates leak risk; not physically active in the scene but narratively invoked as operationally significant.
- • (Implied) Transport organs as scheduled
- • Avoid becoming embroiled in political controversy
- • Operational tasks should be kept separate from political theater
- • Neutral carriers aim to perform their mission while minimizing exposure
N/A for the cat; the invocation produces mild amusement in Bartlet.
Referenced in Bartlet's hallway anecdote as one of his childhood cats (Mr. Finch), used to humanize Bartlet briefly before the decision — not present as an actor in the operation.
- • Serve as a humanizing detail for Bartlet
- • Diffuse tension momentarily
- • Personal anecdotes can relieve tension in high-pressure environments
- • Small domestic details reveal the President's humanity
N/A for the cat; the mention adds levity used by Bartlet.
Referenced alongside Mr. Finch in Bartlet's hallway anecdote (Ms. Wilburforce / Mrs. Wilberforce), a domestic touch that lightens Bartlet's tone before the briefing.
- • Humanize the President
- • Break tension briefly before high-stakes business
- • A touch of levity helps leaders reset before hard decisions
- • Personal history grounds public responsibility
Slightly self-conscious but professional — trying to deliver facts while navigating senior staff pressure and light teasing.
Named directly by Leo and addressed about Shiite political risks; supplies specific details when prompted (age = fifteen, timing), and is gently teased, indicating familiarity and frontline knowledge.
- • Provide accurate situational facts (timing, age, corridors)
- • Manage political risk information for senior leaders
- • Be seen as reliable and competent under pressure
- • Precise details (age, time) shape moral and political choices
- • Political sensitivity (Shiite/reformist dynamics) matters to messaging
- • Operational corridors (Silk Route, Shehab program) are relevant to execution
Objects Involved
Significant items in this scene
The U.N. cargo plane is cited as the on-site extraction asset in Kandahar, already on the ground and poised to move the boy and his guardian if the President gives the go-ahead — a tangible, time-sensitive link in the evacuation chain.
The Swissair flight is described as the carrier moving the organs from Zurich to Paris; its schedule and cooperation are central to the timeline, and Bartlet explicitly targets Swiss stalling behavior, making the airline's flight a lever to be pressed.
Location Details
Places and their significance in this event
Paris is referenced as the waypoint where Swissair will land en route to Tehran, a logistical hub tying the European leg to the long Tehran flight.
Tehran is the ultimate political and medical destination context — the origin of the request and the final air leg; its distance (15 hours) is cited to underscore organ viability constraints.
Kandahar is invoked as the immediate pickup location where the boy and his guardian have arrived and where the U.N. cargo plane sits — it is the operational point of vulnerability that anchors the timeline.
Zurich is cited as the organ staging point — the origin of the critical medical cargo whose release and timely movement determine the mission's feasibility.
The Silk Route is named as a transport corridor reference, invoked to remind staff of the complex logistical corridors and vulnerabilities involved in moving people and material across regions.
Organizations Involved
Institutional presence and influence
The United States government is the active decision-making body in the room: the President, Chief of Staff, and aides weigh technical feasibility against political fallout and ultimately direct humanitarian action, using state resources to attempt an urgent medical rescue.
Swissair appears as the commercial carrier responsible for moving the donor organs from Zurich to Paris; its cooperation (or hesitation) is a tactical chokepoint that the White House seeks to overcome through pressure.
Narrative Connections
How this event relates to others in the story
"Bartlet's decision to proceed with the mission immediately leads to the high-stakes briefing in the Situation Room."
"Bartlet's insistence on humanitarian principles during the Situation Room briefing is echoed when he rejects Leo's suggestion to link the transplant to political demands."
"Bartlet's insistence on humanitarian principles during the Situation Room briefing is echoed when he rejects Leo's suggestion to link the transplant to political demands."
Key Dialogue
"BARTLET: Tell me about the boy."
"MAN 2ND: He and a guardian have crossed the border into Kandahar. A U.N. cargo plane is on the ground. It's gonna leave at 11:45 Zulu, if you say okay."
"BARTLET: How old is he? MAN 2ND: Fifteen. BARTLET: Fifteen. The Shiites, Manny, that's what you want me to take back to my thoracic-surgeon wife? Get this boy in preop. Somebody tell the Swiss to stop standing in the damn doorway with a mouse in their mouth. If they're coming in, come in."