Homeland Insecurity

Monday, Oct. 29, 2001 By NANCY GIBBS REPORTED BY JOHN F. DICKERSON, ANDREW GOLDSTEIN, VIVECA NOVAK, ELAINE SHANNON, KAREN TUMULTY AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON, WITH OTHER BUREAUS
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The standards by which we judge public servants changed on Sept. 11, and maybe the guys in the Congress just never got the word. When buildings in New York City were targeted and ablaze, the fire fighters ran into them. Last week, when buildings in Washington were targeted, the House members left town. While Senators camped in cubby holes and went about their business, Congressmen called it a day and adjourned. They forgot that in wartime, symbols have substance: no war--not World War II, not World War I, not the Civil War, not even the War of 1812, when British forces burned the White House--has forced the U.S. Congress to evacuate. But that has happened twice in the past five weeks: after the Sept. 11 attack and then again last Thursday, after Senate majority leader Tom Daschle's office joined the newspapers and networks as an anthrax hot zone. Is it possible our enemies may have tried to do with an envelope what they failed to do with a 757?

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For leaving, of course, House members came under fire. WIMPS, shouted the New York Post. "Another chapter in Profiles in Courage," snarked Senator John McCain--proud that his chamber hadn't closed up shop--who had headed to New York to do Letterman. All the House did, embattled legislators insisted, was adjourn a day early to get out of the way of the guys in the haz-mat suits who would be sweeping for spores in the halls of power. It would have been irresponsible and dumb to do otherwise, they said. And they could claim some vindication on Saturday when investigators found anthrax in the mail area of the Ford Office Building, on the House side of the Capitol.

But the Senate had managed to find somewhere to stay in session and keep working, and it would have helped if the House had done the same, instead of sending members home. In a week when events were conspiring to make people wonder what we were getting into and whether we were up to the job, the timing of the House hiatus could not have been worse. The very idea of Congress adjourning at all was breathtaking, when everything from airline security to the stimulus package to smallpox vaccine demanded immediate attention, and the new Director of Homeland Security barely had a job description, much less a budget to fulfill it.