history of overreaching during war. John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which banned public dissent. Abraham Lincoln suspended
The immediate task after 9/11 was to harden our nation’s defenses against a second attack. The undertaking was daunting. To stop the enemy, we had to be right 100 percent of the time. To harm us, they had to succeed only once.
We implemented a flurry of new security measures. I approved the deployment of National Guard forces to airports, put more air marshals on planes, required airlines to harden cockpit doors, and tightened procedures for granting visas and screening passengers. Working with state and local governments and the private sector, we increased security at seaports, bridges, nuclear power plants, and other vulnerable infrastructure.
Shortly after 9/11, I appointed Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania to a new senior White House position overseeing our homeland security effort. Tom brought valuable management experience, but by early 2002, it had become clear that the task was too large to be coordinated out of a small White House office. Dozens of different federal agencies shared responsibility for securing the homeland. The patchwork approach was inefficient, and there was too much risk that something would slip through the seams. One egregious example came in March 2002, when the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) mailed a letter notifying a Florida flight school that it had granted student visas to Mohamed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi. The person opening the letter must have been shocked. Those were the two pilots who had flown airplanes into the Twin Towers on 9/11.
I was shocked, too. As I told the press at the time, “I could barely get my coffee down.” The sloppy error exemplified the need for broader reform. INS, a branch of the Justice Department, wasn’t the only agency struggling with its new homeland security responsibilities. The Customs Service, reporting to the Treasury Department, faced the enormous task of securing the nation’s ports. They shared that responsibility with the Coast Guard, which was part of the Transportation Department.
Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut had been making the strong case for creating a new federal department that unified our homeland security efforts. I liked and respected Joe. He was a solid legislator who had put the bitterness of the 2000 election behind him and understood the urgency of the war on terror. Initially I was wary of his idea for a new department. A big bureaucracy would be cumbersome. I was also anxious about a massive reorganization in the midst of crisis. As J.D. Crouch, later my deputy national security adviser, put it: “When you are in the process of beating swords into plowshares, you can’t fight and you can’t plow.”
Over time, I changed my mind. I recognized that having one department focused on homeland security would align authority and responsibility. With the agencies accountable for protecting the country under one roof, there would be fewer gaps and less redundancy. I also knew there was a successful precedent for restructuring the government in wartime. At the dawn of the Cold War in 1947, President Harry Truman had consolidated the Navy and War departments into a new Department of Defense. His reforms strengthened the military for decades to come.
I decided the reorganization was worth the risk. In June 2002, I addressed the nation from the White House to call on Congress to create a new Department of Homeland Security.
Despite support from many lawmakers, the bill faced rough sledding. Democrats held up the legislation by insisting that the new department grant its employees extensive collective bargaining rights that did not apply in any other government agency. I was frustrated that Democrats would delay an urgent security measure to placate labor unions.
Republican candidates took the issue to the voters in the 2002 midterm elections, and I joined them. On election day, our party picked up six seats in the House and two in the Senate. Karl Rove reminded me that the only other president to pick up seats in both the House and Senate in his first midterm election was Franklin Roosevelt.
Within weeks of the election, the homeland security bill passed. I didn’t have to search long for my first secretary of the new department. I nominated Tom Ridge.
With Tom Ridge.
On October 2, 2001, a tabloid photo editor named Bob Stevens was admitted to a Florida hospital with a high fever and vomiting. When doctors examined him, they discovered that he had inhaled a lethal bacteria, anthrax. Three days later, he was dead.
More employees at the tabloid turned up sick, along with people who opened the mail at NBC, ABC, and CBS News. Envelopes laced with white powder arrived at the Senate office of Tom Daschle. Several Capitol Hill staffers and postal workers got sick. So did a New York City hospital worker and a ninety-four-year-old woman in Connecticut. Ultimately, seventeen people were infected. Tragically, five died.
One of the letters containing anthrax read:
I was struck by a sickening thought: Was this the second wave, a biological attack?
I had been briefed on the horrifying consequences of a bioweapons attack. One assessment concluded that a “well-executed smallpox attack by a state actor on the New York City metropolitan area” could infect 630,000 people immediately and 2 to 3 million people before the outbreak was contained. Another scenario contemplated the release of bioweapons on subway lines in four major cities during rush hour. Some 200,000 could be infected initially, with 1 million victims overall. The economic costs could “range from $60 billion to several hundred billion or more, depending on the circumstances of the attack.”
As the anthrax news broke, panic spread across the country. Millions of Americans were afraid to open their mailboxes. Office mailrooms shut down. Mothers rushed to the hospital to order anthrax tests for children suffering from a common cold. Deranged hoaxsters mailed packages laced with talcum powder or flour, which exacerbated people’s fears.
The Postal Service tested samples of mail for anthrax at more than two hundred sites across the country. Mail at the White House was re-routed and irradiated for the rest of my presidency. Thousands of government personnel, including Laura and me, were advised to take Cipro, a powerful antibiotic.
The biggest question during the anthrax attack was where it was coming from. One of the best intelligence services in Europe told us it suspected Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s regime was one of few in the world with a record of using weapons of mass destruction, and it had acknowledged possession of anthrax in 1995. Others suspected that al Qaeda was involved. Frustratingly, we had no concrete evidence and few good leads.*
One month after 9/11, I held a primetime televised press conference from the White House. Earlier that day, we had raised the terror alert level in response to reports about a senior Taliban official warning of another major attack on America.
“You talk about the general threat toward Americans,” Ann Compton of ABC News said. “… What are Americans supposed to look for?”
A CIA briefing on the threat of terrorists spraying anthrax over a city from a small plane was fresh in my mind. “Ann,” I said, “if you find a person that you’ve never seen before getting in a crop duster that doesn’t belong to [him], report it.”
My line got a laugh, but behind the humor was a maddening reality: We believed more attacks were coming, but we didn’t know when, where, or from whom. Striking the right balance between alerting and alarming the public remained a challenge for the rest of the administration. As time passed, some critics charged that we inflated the threat or manipulated alert levels for political benefit. They were flat wrong. We took the intelligence seriously and did the best we could to keep the American people informed and safe.
“This is the worst we’ve seen since 9/11,” George Tenet said in a grave voice as he pulled out his half- chewed cigar at a late October intelligence briefing. He cited a highly reliable source warning that there would be an attack on either October 30 or 31 that was bigger than the World Trade Center attack.
After several false alarms, we believed this could be the real deal. Dick Cheney and I agreed that he should
