DEFENDER IN CHIEF
An inside look at how George Bush—facing anthrax at home and elusive enemies abroad—is trying to rally his team

Everyone talks about the two-front war, but last week it was a little hard to tell where one front stopped and the other started. President Bush was in the Oval Office Wednesday afternoon being briefed on the bombing campaign: we were running out of targets in Afghanistan and struggling to take out the Taliban's command-and-control capabilities. But the same could not be said for the war at home. With each new anthrax report, the targets here were multiplying, and our command-and-control facilities were shutting down one by one. For a President who likes his facts straight and his decisions clean, the advice George W. Bush got from his top aides was no help at all. Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge had spent the day wrestling with health czar Tommy Thompson over the science of the anthrax in question, including whether it was the fluffy, airborne, superdeadly kind, as Thompson believed—or something slightly less terrifying, as Ridge thought might be possible. Each had experts to back his conclusion. Their conflict wrapped the President in the true fog of war, when a leader must make decisions with only half the necessary information, and all the initial reports turn out to be wrong. "Tom, get these people together," Bush told Ridge. "We need to get to the bottom of this."

But the bottom kept falling out before they could get there. Health officials were confounded by a germ weapon never before unleashed on a civilian population; law-enforcement officials were stymied by bioterrorists who were either linked to the September 11 attacks or merely pretending to be. Military officials faced a Taliban army whose tanks they could blow up but whose will was much harder to degrade. And while the public continued to show great support for the President, each new setback would test that faith. "The American people are going to have to be patient," the President declared Friday, "just like we are."

This is how battles will be lost and won in the 21st century, when everybody finds himself caught on the front lines. The Commander in Chief alternated between private briefings on the progress in Kandahar and public statements that "I don't have anthrax." Vice President Dick Cheney was coordinating the battle and learning that his key staff members were on Cipro. When two postal workers died, Bush privately told people that he considered them casualties of war, just like the Rangers who had perished in Pakistan a few days before. Both wars became simultaneously more difficult and more disturbing, as the generals acknowledged that the Taliban was a tougher enemy than they had thought and the anthrax threat proved more diabolical than anyone imagined only a week ago.

Just days after the White House accused the press corps of overplaying the anthrax story, the deadly germ had penetrated every branch of government, from the Vice President's mechanical letter opener to the postal facilities serving the CIA, the Supreme Court, the State Department and, of course, the White House and Congress. When D.C. mail clerk Joseph Curseen arrived at the hospital on Sunday with "the flu," he was sent home with stomach medicine and died the next day. Investigators who had swabbed down his post office hadn't told anybody to get tested or treated and hadn't even warned them about the symptoms. By week's end, 35 postal facilities had been tested, and the U.S. Capitol police had announced that anthrax had been found in three more congressional offices, all in the Longworth House Office Building. Privately, Bush advisers in the Capitol were using words like "fiasco" and "failure" to describe the White House handling of the anthrax crisis. Even Republican Congressmen were shaking their heads. "I think people are much more supportive of the Administration's handling of the terrorism abroad than they are of the public-health response," said a veteran G.O.P. lawmaker from the Midwest. "So we've got some catching up to do."

Not that the Pentagon sounded as if it had everything under control either. Just a week after officials boasted that the Taliban had been "eviscerated" by the allied air war, U.S. military officials acknowledged that the war was going slowly at best. Rumsfeld on several occasions tried to crank back public expectations of a quick kill of Osama bin Laden. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," he said. And the Taliban had begun to melt into Afghan cities, mixing into schools and mosques to evade detection from the air and threaten heavy civilian casualties if targeted.

U.S. officials admitted privately that they would soon be running out of things to bomb—and running short of the videos that help keep public support for the war afloat. That was one message delivered by Rumsfeld last Friday when he invited a dozen top Republican Party advisers to the Pentagon to discuss ways to keep the public behind a long, drawn-out conflict. Most important, the group agreed, was to repair the confused U.S. response to the anthrax outbreak at home. An adviser told Rumsfeld that Americans trust only four officials at the moment—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell—and that other Cabinet officials only gum up the message.

And then there is the basic problem that the moment we are in contradicts itself. We are under attack yet are told not to panic; we sense that everything has changed but are told to do what we did before, as though ignoring the threat is a patriotic duty. The tension embedded in this task is reflected in the White House as it argues about what tone a deeply worried but naturally optimistic President ought to set. Even as the national security team works to confront the new threat, political operative Karl Rove serves as the West Wing's unofficial Secretary of Normalcy. It was Rove who, in the first weeks after September 11, lobbied Major League Baseball to improve safety so it could resume play as soon as possible.

"Some might ask why, in the midst of war, I would come to Dixie Printing," Bush said during a visit to a Maryland box-making plant on Wednesday. "And the answer is because we fight the war on two fronts. We fight a war at home, and part of the war we fight is to make sure that our economy continues to grow."

So far it has fallen to Cheney to merge the messages, to declare that there is "a new normal" now—one that makes room for courage and fear, joy and loss; one in which we attend birthday parties and funerals on the same day. Unlike Bush, Cheney has been warning Americans that life is different now and is probably going to stay that way for the rest of our lives. The question, of course, is how different, and Bush will soon have to begin helping us chart the dimensions of the new normal. The President can't lead us to higher, safer ground without assessing our strength and stamina along with his own. If he's having trouble, maybe it's because he's just asking the same questions about us that we're asking ourselves.

Questions

1. On what two fronts was the U.S. fighting a war?

2. Why did some within the Bush Administration see the handling of the anthrax scare as a "fiasco"?