Peggy Noonan

“The Justice Department and the FBI plan to ask for the public’s help today in locating several suspected terrorist sympathizers, including some whose names have not been made public before. The bureau probably plans another public push to find Aafia Siddiqui, 32, a Pakistani woman who has a doctorate in neurological science and has studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University in the Boston area, as well as in Houston. The FBI also could seek help locating a man Siddiqui has been linked to, Adnan G. El Shukrijumah. He is a suspected al Qaeda member who spent time in Florida, and his name has come up in interrogations of captured al Qaeda lieutenant Khalid Sheik Mohammed.”
—Washington Post, May 26

“The FBI has apologized to a man it arrested in connection with the Madrid train bombings, hours after he was cleared of any wrongdoing. The Federal Bureau of Investigation detained Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield for two weeks after investigators thought they had matched his fingerprint to one found on a bag of detonators in Madrid. Last week, US officials released the 37 year old Mayfield after Spanish police said the fingerprints belonged to an Algerian man.”
—Voice of America, May 27

“In April, an FBI bulletin to law enforcement agencies warned of possible truck bombs. A source familiar with the government’s threat discussions said yesterday that truck bombs are a primary concern. ‘I’m more worried than I was at Christmastime,’ said one senior U.S. intelligence official, comparing the ‘election threat’ to the canceling of specific airline flights around the holidays. He said the U.S. government is convinced there are as yet unidentified al Qaeda operatives residing in the United States, waiting for the word to launch plots.”
—Washington Post, May 27

“The so-called ‘War on Terror’ started by U.S. President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington has led to a ‘new wave’ of human rights abuses, campaign group Amnesty International said.”
—Bloomberg News, May 26

*   *   *

It’s kind of crazy out there. So this might be a good time to say: Let’s do our best as a people to catch and imprison terrorists. Let’s get ‘em. Let’s make it our highest national priority. Let’s find those who mean to end the lives of hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of innocent people. Then, once it looks like all or most of the bad guys are captured, let’s turn our national attention to studying how we could have done it better, more gently, more justly, more competently. But first the capture, then the criticism.

It is terrible for Mr. Mayfield that he was mistaken for a Madrid bomber. It’s awful that he was arrested. He’ll probably sue the government and win damages. But whatever he does, he’s still alive, and the U.S. government has cleared him and apologized to him in front of the world. It is better to be alive and free after a false arrest than it is to be dead and maimed and the victim of a terror bomb. When you are dead it doesn’t matter who apologizes. When you’re dead you can sue nobody, though the trial lawyers association will probably change that eventually.

It is too bad Amnesty International is worried about possible U.S. insensitivity in apprehending potential terrorists. No doubt there has been and will be roughness. But mostly Amnesty is talking about this because they don’t really like us, they don’t know what time it is, they have to do something for a living, they think we’re more competent than we are, and they still don’t understand Sept. 11.

They will understand terrorism better after the next attack. But Americans don’t have to wait. We were there. We can cut to the chase. Let’s aggressively, passionately and with no ambivalence pursue bad guys. Let’s give as much respect, assistance and credit to the searchers as we can. And if we have to hold symposiums and commissions to criticize them for overexuberance and unnecessary roughness, let’s do it later, like in 2016, when this is over and our children have been allowed to grow up.

*   *   *

In New York right now we are planning our Memorial Day weekends. We know we are in a difficult historical time, but we do not dwell on it. We don’t always even think. We free-associate, like this: I should get a new dress for the graduation at the Saks sale. They could blow up the Lincoln Tunnel. Meg would love one of those little Chanel knockoffs from the street vender. If New York is bombed while we’re in Boston, where will we stay? If Boston is bombed while we’re at the graduation, how will we get home? Bring cousin Holly’s number in northern Connecticut. Pick up mascara.

From the dire to the banal. No, not from one to another but both interweaved. Having the jits and planning the party. People are dieting because summer’s coming and wondering if an al Qaeda hit on New York would trigger a food shortage.

My general sense is that New Yorkers don’t really think anything bad is going to happen right now. The government gives a lot of warnings, it’s not as if they’re shocking. And they always issue the warnings in a sort of helpful but not helpful way. They don’t know precisely what to fear but they’re somewhat alarmed; they don’t know what precisely to tell you but they’d like you to share their alarm, so that if something bad happens, they told you. In New York we don’t really expect the Next Big Bad Thing to happen when we’ve been warned it will happen. We expect it to happen when it isn’t expected. We assume that increased levels of chatter means increased levels of surveillance, which means increased levels of safety. Al Qaeda likes to surprise us. They don’t move when we expect. It’s all head-fakes.

This should mean that New Yorkers expect trouble when we are not being told by the government to expect trouble. But that’s not true either. Because when we’re not being warned about trouble, we forget to think about trouble. We’re thinking about the school meeting or the car or the price of steak.

When I go through the Lincoln Tunnel at a relatively quiet time in terms of government warnings I think, “Nothing will probably happen today, it’s quiet.” When I go through the Lincoln Tunnel at a terror alert time I think, “Nothing will probably happen today, there’s security all over and the terror-cell guys in Jersey City are probably playing cards.”

Then I emerge from the tunnel and realize I’ve been thinking about nothing but terrorism.

It is a weird time in American history. Someday someone will capture it, in a great novel. Maybe in 2016, when we’ve caught all the terrorists, and we’re at our children’s and grandchildren’s graduations.

Did you hear about the college commencement speaker who was almost booed off the stage Sunday because his commencement address was an anti-Bush rant? The speaker was E.L. Doctorow. The college, God bless it forever, was Hofstra University on New York’s Long Island.

Newsday reported that Mr. Doctorow—or, as Newsday put it in the first paragraph, “E.L. Doctorow, one of the most celebrated writers in America”—gave a 20-minute address “lambasting President George W. Bush and effectively calling him a liar.” It didn’t go over too well. Mr. Doctorow announced to the crowd that he himself is a storyteller. But the president too, he said in a flight of dazzling cleverness, is a storyteller. The president’s stories are not so good thought “because they are not true.”

This is where the booing began.

“One story he told was that the country of Iraq had nuclear and biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction and was intending shortly to use them on us,” Mr. Doctorow continued. “That was an exciting story all right, it was designed to send shivers up our spines. But it was not true.” Mr. Bush told stories about Saddam Hussein, that he “was in league with the terrorists of al Qaeda. And that turned out to be not true. But anyway we went off to war on the basis of these stories.”

This is where the crowd began to boo most lustily. Mr. Doctorow stopped his speech. There is the suggestion he was surprised. (By the way if he were a conservative, Newsday would have described him as “conservative writer Ed Doctorow, who had a bestseller in ‘Ragtime’ in 1974,” not “one of the most celebrated writers in America.”)

The president of the university called for calm. “We value open discussion and debate,” he said. “For the sake of your graduates, please let him finish.” The response to this was telling. Most of the faculty—the faculty, not the students—responded with a standing ovation. Mr. Doctorow finished his speech, attacking Mr. Bush on taxes and terrorism, and accusing him of wanting to subpoena libraries “to see what books you’ve been taking out.”

Newsday said many parents and relatives of the more than 1,300 undergraduates were “livid” over the address. Frank Mallafre, who had traveled from Miami for his granddaughter’s graduation, said, “If this would have happened in Florida, we would have taken him out” of the stadium. Bill Schmidt, 51, of North Bellmore, N.Y., shared the outrage. “To ruin my daughter’s graduation with politics is pathetic,” the retired New York police captain told the paper.

On Sunday night a Hofstra official said that while Mr. Doctorow had the right to his views, he violated the unwritten code that college commencement speeches should inspire and unite a student body. But a Hofstra faculty member came to the fore, defending Mr. Doctorow. “I thought this was a totally appropriate place to talk about politics because that’s the world our students are entering,” sociology professor Cynthia Bogard told Newsday. “I only wish their parents had provided them a better role model.”

Wow. Think of what a role model Prof. Bogard is. What a fool. What a snob.

*   *   *

I want to explain to Ed Doctorow why he was booed. It was not, as he no doubt creamily recounted in a storytelling session over drinks that night in Sag Harbor, that those barbarians in Long Island’s lesser ZIP codes don’t want to hear the truth. It is not that they oppose free speech. It is not that the poor boobs of Long Island have an unaccountable affection for George W. Bush.
It is that they have class.

The poor stupid people of Long Island are courteous, and have respect for the views and feelings of others, and would not dream of imposing their particular views on a captive audience that has gathered to celebrate—to be happy about, to officially mark with their presence—the rather remarkable fact that one of their family studied and worked for four years, completed his courses, met all demands, and became a graduate of an American university.

This indeed is something to be proud of.

Did Eddy Doctorow know that? Did he care? I don’t think so. Did he understand that what the students needed from him—after all, he has lasted a long time, has been a member of a profession, has won the favor of the elite media for lo these many years, and manages to produce many books nobody reads in the computer age while still using a quill—was perhaps a sense of . . .

All right, I give up. I don’t know what they needed from him. America hasn’t been the same since the dream of socialism so rudely ended? What will we do for a sense of communitarian ideals now that Marx is gone? “God may not exist but we need to tell stories about him nonetheless?”

Fast Eddy Doctorow told a story at the commencement all right, and it is a story about the boorishness of the aging liberal. An old ’60s radical who feels he is entitled to impose his views on this audience on this day because he’s so gifted, so smart, so insightful, so very above the normal rules, agreements and traditions. And for this he will get to call himself besieged and heroic—a hero about whom stories are told!—when in fact all he did was guarantee positive personal press in the elite media, at the cost of the long suffering patience of normal people who wanted to move the tassel and throw the hat in the air.

I am a conservative. I have spoken at three college commencements. Each time I spoke I talked about the students, and the life ahead of them, and the nature of their achievement. I spoke to them about them. I didn’t tell them Jimmy Carter is a retard or Bill Clinton is a pig. It would have been wrong to do that. It would have been boorish. It would have deserved boos.

I’m glad that’s what Eddy Doctorow got this Sunday from what appear to be his intellectual and moral superiors on Long Island. Go Hofstra.

I notice lately everyone I talk to has a new insight or a big theory. In the past week I bumped into two journalists who with cool eyes watch the national scene. The first was in Washington. She told me she’d just been taken aside by a savvy Democratic operative who told her, “It’s going to be a landslide. It’s feeling like 1980 out there.”

I wasn’t sure what this meant, so I asked, “A landslide for whom?”

“He said Kerry,” she said. Oh. Interesting if true, meaning interesting if he’s seeing something most of the rest of us aren’t.

The second journalist, in Manhattan, told me she’s hearing that in focus groups, voters are lately consistently expressing broad and deep affection for President Bush. Even when the leader of the focus group tries to draw them out on Mr. Bush’s negatives, she said, they don’t go there. The leaders says something like, “What about Iraq?” and they’ll say, “That’s not Bush, it’s his advisers.” That’s interesting if true, too.

Lots of swirls of information and misinformation out there. The political class is more fully engaged than ever in the big drama. It’s odd: they have never been so obsessed with who the president is, and at the same time so fundamentally disrespectful of presidents.

*   *   *

I don’t have a Big Theory to share, but I’ve been thinking a lot about someone who’s more important than pundits, and that’s a woman I spent a few hours with last week. She’s a middle-aged, middle-class, suburban middle-of-the-roader.

Some of the things she said surprised me. For one thing, she often votes Republican but isn’t sure she’ll vote for Mr. Bush. Also, she brings no crusading temperament to it, but she is very much against the Iraq war.

I will call her Anna, because that is not her real name. I can’t quote her because it wasn’t an interview but a conversation, and I wasn’t taking notes. But the meaning of what she said, if not her exact words, is in italics.

Anna lives in a $250,000 three-bedroom house in a neighborhood that never quite jelled aesthetically (the highway is 200 yards away, and the whoosh sound the traffic makes when it isn’t drowned out by birds gives you a feeling not of movement forward but of hubbub and rush) and never quite jelled in human terms either, at least for her.

She told me the neighbors seem nice but she doesn’t really know them. Which is odd, as she’s lived there 22 years. But people move in and out—this is the great move-in-and-out nation. Years ago she still stopped by with a Pyrex dish of baked ziti when new people moved in, but not so much anymore. In their old neighborhood, when the kids were young (they have three, all college-educated, grown and living on their own), they got to know the neighbors, but not now. You get quieter. Your family grows. Your grandchildren become everything.

In the house now are just Anna and her husband, who’s semiretired. They’re in their late ‘60s, getting a little achy, thinking about full retirement.

*   *   *

Someone once said, “Show me the headlines when a young man was 20 and I’ll tell you what he thinks.” The headlines when she was in her 20s and 30s were about Vietnam and antiwar demonstrations. She and her husband were young and earnest—he’d been a Marine—and they couldn’t understand the anti-American rhetoric of the kids. They couldn’t understand how anyone would dodge the draft. But now she thinks she thought that way because she was young.

Anna is not romantic about presidents. She figures we hire ‘em and fire ‘em. She thinks politicians are pretty much in it for their own reasons. But it’s also true that if she met the president tomorrow her eyes would dance. This is the modern democratic paradox—”Presidents are nothing. I just met the president!”

As for wars—Vietnam, Nicaragua, anything in Africa, the Mideast, whatever—she has come to believe one thing: None of them were really necessary. War is never good and usually not right. The communists invade Long Island, you have to fight. Otherwise—they rarely have to be fought. You can always sort of put it off. Talk, give a little here and there, make a deal. Don’t have a war. Men have war not because they’re brutal but because they’re romantic, they get all excited. The flags and parades. And they take things very seriously, like oil and geopolitics.

Anna is not a pacifist, she just thinks man likes war too much, and when you look back you think: What was that about? Couldn’t they have avoided that?

She voted for Mr. Bush in 2000. She’s by nature a Republican, which she thinks of as the more boring and mature party. Boring is good in government. Exciting is for “Ryan’s Hope.” But she likes Democrats too. They’re more rascally. But Clinton—he was very smart and he had a great economy but he was a bum. Not just the sex but the money and the pardons and Hillary probably walked out of there with a couch on her head! Bush is a better person. He gets in and 9/11 comes and he handles it. He brought respect back. But he’s always too eager to get involved in things. He pushes too much. He’s pretty impetuous! It was good in Afghanistan, we got rid of those nuts. But Iraq—I don’t know. Iraq is very—who knows? Maybe it was too much. Maybe it was the right thing—but now we’ve got this antiwar mess and it’s 10 troops today and the Israelis and the Gaza strip and fighting and suicide and kids with backpacks and—what a big mess.

*   *   *

Anna is going to vote in November. That’s not in doubt; she always votes. But she isn’t sure who she’s going to vote for.

She’ll make up her mind. It’s not like they say on TV, that there will be some picture and it will crystallize for her “Yes Bush” or “No Bush.” It’s more like she’ll be imagining “more Bush” and the world that brings, or “let’s hire Kerry” and the world that brings. And she’ll vote for the better world she imagines.

And oddly enough she’s starting to feel a little like Mr. Bush can be let go because maybe he has already done the job he was meant to do. He did what we hired him for. He got us through 9/11, he led us through, he got the Homeland Security Department. He cleaned out Afghanistan. Then he moved into Iraq, he fought hard. And maybe that’s the job he was supposed to do. And maybe now we can let him go. Maybe Kerry’s supposed to handle it the next few years. He’ll get us out of Iraq as soon as possible because he’s a Democrat and they don’t want to be there. He didn’t put us in there, so he has no personal issues in getting us out. He’ll work better with other countries because he’s kind of their type—he’s like Chirac, he probably kisses ladies’ hands. He won’t raise taxes too much, because the Republicans in Congress won’t let him. He won’t do anything radical, because the country won’t let him. We could hire him for a few years, let him get things more stable, and then fire him. Put the Democrats in charge of the war; they don’t like war. Put them in charge of the economy; Wall Street seems to bounce when they’re in, funny thing.

Anna knows the world of her children and grandchildren is going to be tough. She wishes everyone were preparing for it, though she isn’t sure there’s anything you can do to prepare. But it would be good, she feels, if Mr. Bush were trying to get the suburbs safer. What do we do if New York is hit? Besides have a lot of water, which is down in the basement waiting. (Does bottled water turn bad after a while? She intends to check this.)

She’s leaning Kerry. But she’s not sure. And she has some issues with him, too.

*   *   *

It’s a mistake to make too much of chance conversations with likely voters, especially ones who are a little older than the average. But our conversation suggested a few things to me. One is that it could be a surprising year. That’s always true of course, but one does have the sense no one has a lock on almost any group in this cycle. Everything feels fluid.

If I were George W. Bush I might be thinking that down the road but not too far down, it might be a good idea to start making clear two things. One, why I am indispensable—a delicate thing to communicate, but something re-elected incumbents always have to get across sooner or later. “I am leading us in the right direction and my work is just begun.” And the other is to make the case that a Kerry presidency would not be a lunge toward greater stability, that it would not be a “return to normalcy,” that Mr. Kerry wouldn’t right things but make them worse, bringing more trouble.

A one-two punch: If you stand with me, I’ll get the peace and prosperity we seek; and if you go for him it will make the world less safe and the country less healthy.

I share an obsession with Tony Soprano. This startles me and makes me unhappy because it has been my experience that once my inner fears are echoed in the outer culture, some kind of grim critical mass has been achieved, and trouble ensues. (Does this sound oddly egocentric, even for a pundit? I think it may. Yet it’s true.)

On Sunday’s “The Sopranos,” Tony stayed up one night channel-surfing. This is not unusual for Tony. His sins keep him awake. Or rather a perplexing question about his sins: Why has the committing of them become so joyless? Why don’t they yield happiness?
He comes across a documentary about the potential use by terrorists of the nearby Port of Newark. The Port of Newark, the biggest port on the eastern seaboard, receives millions of ship containers each year; the feds say they can check only 2%; terrorists could easily smuggle in a dirty nuke.

Tony becomes alarmed. He knows Port Newark. The mob is there, his people are there. It is corrupt, lazy, badly run. Suddenly he realizes there’s nothing between his home and kaboom but a chain-link fence and a mall.

He shares his new anxiety with everyone, sounding like a crank. When a bartender doesn’t respond with the appropriate anxiety Tony becomes enraged and beats him up. Tony has anger problems. So does al Qaeda.

*   *   *

Here’s the obsession I share with Tony Soprano. The Port of Newark is my big fear. When I send out my intellectual radar screen to see what anxiety pings present themselves each day, Newark always comes up first. For Tony’s reasons and others.
Port Newark is just beyond the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. A hit on Newark would cause panic in al Qaeda’s great target, New York—stock market crash, terror in the streets. A hit on Port Newark would deal a blow rich in practical and symbolic terms.

We know that members of al Qaeda are familiar with the Newark area. Many of the terrorists who hit the World Trade Center in 1993 lived in northern New Jersey.

But there’s more and for me it’s more central, and the reason my pings began. New Jersey is becoming the center, in America, of the movement for cloning. Its governor just signed the most liberal cloning bill in the United States. There is money in cloning research, and status: We’re the coming intellectual center of science! We’re not just the Meadowlands and the mob, we’re Princeton and Einstein! There is greater suburban affluence to be gained, and higher tax revenues for politicians to spend on community centers built through no-bid contracts by big contributors. The Robert Torricelli Psychotherapy Institute for the Differently Abled. The Jim McGreevey Carpal Tunnel Trauma Research Facility.

Whenever I think of cloning, I think of Sam Ervin during the Watergate hearings. He quoted the Bible to Richard Nixon’s malefactors: “God is not mocked.” Indeed he is not. Once we can have cloning, we will have cloning. Once we can have cloning we’ll be cloning replacement-part humans to make new hearts for aging baby boomers. We’ll throw the rest away, or mine these beings for other organs and elixirs. Once we have cloning, we’ll start growing cloned armies. Why shouldn’t they fight for us? Once we have cloning, a lot of things will happen, including that we’ll be opening the mouth of hell.

New Jersey is now so confused about what is important, what is needed, and what time it is in history, that they are not only bravely and quite mindlessly going forward on cloning; their political figures are in the news because they feel this is a helpful time to go head to head with the Roman Catholic Church. The Democratic leader of the state Senate has announced he’ll leave the church because of its unfortunate stand against abortion. The governor, criticized by the church for his position on abortion, has announced he won’t receive communion anymore. The church is in a hard place. American cardinals and bishops, afflicted by the sex-abuse scandals they allowed to fester, seem to have lost their standing to persuasively instruct Catholics on moral matters. Rome doesn’t quite believe this, but it’s true. And if Rome directly involves itself—no one challenges John Paul’s moral standing—it will look like the Vatican is meddling in American politics. Which won’t play well in America, for about 28 reasons. In Kerry vs. the Vatican, Kerry would win.

But back to Jersey. Let us posit that its politicians are in politics; let us posit that they are not showily doing all this on the front page of the Newark Star-Ledger because they are deeply principled men in spiritual anguish; let us posit that they are pols who know the plays. Meaning they know the people of Jersey will approve of their stand, or at least not disapprove.

And they are, I believe, correct. Poor Jersey! When I was in high school and college there, it was, I believe, a more soulful place.

*   *   *

On “The Sopranos,” one sees a plot twist being signaled: Tony and Carmella will stay together, and Tony will attempt to extricate himself from his life, removing himself and his family to the Hudson River Valley farm where he spent some happy boyhood summers. On the farm, in the last scene, he is smoking his cigar, full face to the camera. We are left to wonder if it will work. Will Tony find out that sin is a trap, that, as someone once said, happiness is a cat? (Chase it and it will run from you, sit quietly and do your work and it will come and curl itself at your feet.) We will be left to debate it the next day, at the HBO water cooler.

This being “The Sopranos,” signaled plot twists are usually head fakes—we haven’t seen the Essex County prosecutor in a while—but it makes sense. Because Tony wants to get away from Port Newark. He thinks the world has reached some terrible critical mass. He’ll probably soon start talking about cloning. Being a mobster he would be a particular kind of conservative—aware of the bottom line, free of illusions about who human beings are, open in his own sick way to the idea of God, or at least the practical benefits to society of others believing in God—and would immediately intuit what cloning is. At least until A.J. needs a new kidney.

Here’s the point: Bad things are coming, and we all know it. But most of us can’t afford to buy a farm in the Hudson River Valley. Most of us can’t afford to buy the safety of being far, far away on a lake in the mists. Many of us are stuck living near Port Newark.

What are we to do? This is the great domestic policy question of our time. Why doesn’t our government provide us all with the means to survive an expected nuclear, biological or chemical attack? Why doesn’t our government provide us with what I think of as a “get out of Dodge” kit—a protective suit, a regulation gas mask, information on which direction to walk in, or rather run in, and how soon, after Port Newark, or Times Square, or the Sears Tower, or the Shrine Auditorium, is hit? Why aren’t they doing this?

More on that soon.

Are reports of abuse by Americans at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison hyped and sensationalized? Probably. The world media are in the sensation-making business and it’s a world-wide story. Did the abuses occur? Obviously. There are pictures, testimony, an apology Wednesday from the U.S. general who now runs the prisons and denunciations of the abuse as “un-American,” (Donald Rumsfeld) and “not the America I know” (George W. Bush). Is the scandal an inspiration to our enemies? Most assuredly. Were the acts acceptable? Of course not. Must they be investigated and justice meted out? Yes, and surely will be.

It was necessary that President Bush go on Arab TV, announce the investigations, and swear that justice would be pursued. But there is no getting around that this is all good news for our foes in a time of war. Violent Islamic extremists will be happy at the propaganda boon and delighted to see their convictions of American depravity illustrated and seemingly legitimized before the world.

*   *   *

How disheartening is it for those who are not our foes? Let us count the ways. 1. It is what it is on the face of it—cruel and unusual treatment of enemy combatants or detainees by those who represent and fight for our country. 2. It forces us to think that some Americans are capable of this. This is demoralizing. 3. The scandal can and will be used by the mischievous and malicious at home and abroad to attempt to tarnish the character of the troops we’ve so come to respect and feel grateful for. This is most unjust. These men and women have enough troubles. We already ask them to be warrior/peacekeeper/cop/doctor/diplomat, and they shouldn’t have to worry about this. 4. The scandal suggests to the world that there are a (small) number of U.S. troops who are capable of these actions, which is mortifying, and which gives rise to a defensive, “That is not who we are.” As indeed it is not. The humiliators could hardly have more heavily humiliated their country.

Because we are a free-press, free-expression nation in the media age, we tell the world our sins. Many will not receive the latest in a way that involves jumping up and down and exclaiming, “See the fruits of free inquiry, what a country!” Publication of the photos and reports we’ve seen so far inflames our enemies in a time of active war. This is a danger to us. At some point down the road some terrorist will testify that it was the picture of his masked and naked countrymen posing behind them that sealed his commitment to jihad. And yet there is no way around this. In fact this scandal is like a little metaphor for the Iraq experience itself: Whatever your opinion was, there’s now no way round it but through it.

The best we can do is what we’ve done and had no choice but to do: Reveal these things for all the world to see. Redress, reform, repair, reprimand and remove.

*   *   *

I find that I cannot shake a memory of something I read years ago in one of Shirley MacLaine’s memoirs. The work of Ms. MacLaine might seem an odd thing to reference here, but bear with me. I write from memory. She was a young movie star. It was the 1950s. She had appeared in a film that was at least implicitly critical of the United States. She came under fire from some critics: Why can’t you people in Hollywood be more positive? Your work encourages anti-American propaganda. She didn’t think this was true, but she wasn’t exactly a world-class thinker so it didn’t matter. What did matter is what she threw away at the end of her story. She went to an international film festival and talked with an anti-American intellectual. He told her something like, “The first time I ever thought maybe your country was something special was when I saw your movie and saw how critical Hollywood is allowed to be. You must really have some kind of freedom.”

When I read this I believed it, and still do. You do reveal something about yourself by telling uncomfortable truths. You reveal good faith. You reveal that you’re trying to get it right. This is not so terrible. It is something the dim might miss, but the intelligent are likely to get. And God bless this earth, there are a lot of intelligent people.

The president said of the U.S. on Arab TV that “we have nothing to hide.” He no doubt meant there are things that we would wish to hide, but that we refuse to.

*   *   *

But let’s not get too optimistic. The most distressing of the scandal photos is, to me, the one of an American woman, a GI, who is laughing, holding a cigarette and aiming her fingers as if comically shooting or aiming at a group of prisoners, presumably Iraqi. They are naked and hooded. She looks coarse, cruel, perhaps drunk. And as I looked at her I thought Oh, no. This is not equality but mutual degradation. Can anyone imagine a WAC of 1945, or a WAVE of 1965, acting in this manner? I can’t. Because WACs and WAVEs were not only members of the American armed forces, which responsibility brought its own demands in terms of dignity and bearing; they were women. They apparently did not think they had to prove they were men, or men at their worst. I’ve never seen evidence to suggest the old-time WACs and WAVEs had to delve down into some coarse and vulgar part of their nature to fit in, to show they were one of the guys, as tough as the guys, as ugly at their ugliest.

But the young woman soldier in the scandal photo—she looked, shall we say, confused about these issues. It was chilling. Perhaps we should be worrying about that, too.

Every now and then you witness a small moment that is actually a big moment. Maybe it alerts you to something surprising that’s going on, or maybe it illustrates what you already know but in a new way, one that can’t be dodged or avoided.

It happened to me the other day at a play, a press preview of the Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansbury’s “Raisin in the Sun.” I love this play. I’ve seen it several times, but I hadn’t seen it in years when I settled into my seat.

It has gotten more attention than most shows, mostly because it features the Broadway debut of rap mogul P. Diddy, the former Puff Daddy, who apparently has decided to go by his birth name, Sean Combs. That’s how he’s listed in the playbill.

The play was wonderful. I urge you to go. It’s an important piece of work, and I left moved and excited. I hadn’t realized when I first saw it, decades ago, and saw the movie, also decades ago, that “Raisin” was a landmark play. But it is. It captures with wit and heart a great moment in time. It tells of a black family living on the cusp of cultural liberation in 1950s America. We see them face questions of daily life—what is it to be a man, what is familial loyalty?—as they wrestle with great cultural questions. Shall we, as black Americans, assimilate and become like white Americans? Can we turn back to our African roots to find the truth of our people? Does the older generation have a clue what kind of changes are sweeping the young, or are they too busy surviving to feel the winds of change? Are they in the habit of second-class citizenship?

These ideas were new then. It was all untried. Young people would do, and in time history itself would decide if they’d done right.

The family whose story is told is an intact nuclear family. It is clear they are not special because they are intact and functioning—they’re average, like everyone else. Everyone works hard—cleaning woman, chauffer—and everyone has dreams. Phylicia Rashad as the mother is transcendent. She is going to make you cry. She’s a great actress, and I didn’t know it. I thought she was just a persona with a particular kind of dignity, but she is an artist.

Audra McDonald as a young woman married to a ne’er-do-well son is equally brilliant. Sean Combs on the other hand is not a person of artistic talent. The problem is not that he acts like a high school sophomore, though he does—he registers surprise by bulging his eyes and making an O with his mouth. It’s that the thing for which he has become famous—strutting and rapping with a jaded slack-jawed look—is not a facet of his talent but the whole of it. When he sings a snatch of song you realize, Oh my God, he can’t even sing. I thought rappers could sing but choose not to. Who knew?

But here’s a funny thing: there’s something moving in it when you realize that he made it as a star in America through sheer will, through a bulldozer’s determination. That also is something you get from God, and he got a lot. It took guts for him to do Broadway and bring new people into the theater for the first time, so I suspect he’ll get a pass from the critics. This play is going to be a hit because he’s in it. (At the curtain call he gallantly kissed Ms. Rashad and then Ms. McDonald—and Ms. McDonald got this look on her face that said, “Don’t gallantly bend to kiss my little cheek when I just carried your sorry ass for three hours.”)

*   *   *

I was so moved by the show in part because the audience was full of people who were not your basic Broadway theatergoing types. They had come for P. Diddy and found themselves enthralled by a play. They were so responsive that in a scene where a mother slaps her daughter the whole audience went “Oh!” So did I. When the character based on Lorraine Hansbury breaks out in a tribal dance we didn’t just laugh with delight, we hooted and hollered. The audience was alive. It was so moving and got me kind of choked. I thought, Maybe this is like what it was like when Shakespeare wrote, “You tell him, Romeo—Juliet no, don’t!”

But I must tell you of the small moment that was actually a big moment. (There’s a possible spoiler coming up, so if you don’t know the story and mean to see the play, stop here.) An important moment in the plot is when a character announces she is pregnant, and considering having an abortion. In fact, she tells her mother-in-law, she’s already put $5 down with the local abortionist. It is a dramatic moment. And you know as you watch it that when this play came out in 1960 it was received by the audience as a painful moment—a cry of pain from a woman who’s tired of hoping that life will turn out well.

But this is the thing: Our audience didn’t know that. They didn’t understand it was tragic. They heard the young woman say she was about to end the life of her child, and they applauded. Some of them cheered. It was stunning. The reaction seemed to startle the actors on stage, and shake their concentration. I was startled. I turned to my friend. “We have just witnessed a terrible cultural moment,” I said. “Don’t I know it,” he responded.

And I can’t tell you how much that moment hurt. To know that the members of our audience didn’t know that the taking of a baby’s life is tragic—that the taking of your own baby’s life is beyond tragic, is almost operatic in its wailing woe.

But our audience didn’t know. They reacted as if abortion were a political question. They thought that the fact that the young woman was considering abortion was a sign of liberation. They thought this cry of pain was in fact a moment of self-actualizing growth.

Afterwards, thinking about it, I said to my friend, “When that play opened that plot point was understood—they knew it was tragic. And that was only what, 40 years ago.” He said, “They would have known it was tragic even 25 years ago.”

And it gave me a shiver because I knew it was true.

*   *   *

Lorraine Hansbury died in the mid-1960s when she was only 35 years old. She didn’t know how things would turn out. She didn’t know that a poor family that is also a nuclear family would seem exceptional, that a young black intellectual could indeed become a person of substance and respect, a doctor, and that this, 35 years later, would not seem unusual. That the struggle for racial equality would also be a long one, with many twists and turns.

She would be surprised perhaps by how some of the dramatic themes she introduced played out. The whole play is about moral choices—taking chances to make things better. She had a moral mind. She thought the great question of her time was whether the different races in America could learn to treat each other with justice and grace. I can’t imagine she’d guess that members of an eager audience in the year 2004 would have become such moral dullards that we wouldn’t understand something as basic as an abortion, and what it is. If she were alive now I wonder if she would be surprised, or shocked, that that moment no longer worked as a dramatic plot point because the audience had changed so much in its understanding of the basics.

So much progress followed the 1960s, in so many ways, but applauding abortion isn’t progress. It’s ugly. And I’m writing this with an odd little hope. That you might go see this great play, and when the moment comes that the young woman announces she might end the life of the child she is carrying, that you would sit quietly and think about what that moment means. And if anyone cheers or hoots or hollers, give them a look. Let them see your silence. Lead with it. Help the people around you realize: Something big is being spoken of here. And we know what it is. And it is nothing good.

(Editor’s note: This column appeared on July 12, 2002. Pat Tillman died in combat in Afghanistan yesterday.)

Maybe he was thinking Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Maybe it was visceral, not so much thought as felt, and acted upon. We don’t know because he won’t say, at least not in public. Which is itself unusual. Silence is the refuge of celebrities caught in scandal, not the usual response of those caught red-handed doing good.

All we know is that 25-year-old Pat Tillman, a rising pro football player (224 tackles in 2000 as a defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals, a team record) came back from his honeymoon seven weeks ago and told his coaches he would turn down a three-year, $3.6 million contract and instead join the U.S. Army. For a pay cut of roughly $3.54 million dollars over three years.

On Monday morning, Pat Tillman “came in like everyone else, on a bus from a processing station,” according to a public information officer at Fort Benning, Ga., and received the outward signs of the leveling anonymity of the armed forces: a bad haircut, a good uniform and physical testing to see if he is up to the rigors of being a soldier. Soon he begins basic training. And whatever else happened this week—Wall Street news, speeches on the economy—nothing seems bigger, more important and more suggestive of change than what Pat Tillman did.

Those who know him say it’s typical Tillman, a surprise decision based on his vision of what would be a good thing to do. When he was in college he sometimes climbed to the top of a stadium light tower to think and meditate. After his great 2000 season he was offered a $9 million, five-year contract with the St. Louis Rams and said thanks but no, he was happy with the Cardinals.

But it was clear to those who knew Mr. Tillman that after September 11 something changed. The attack on America had prompted a rethinking. Len Pasquarelli of ESPN reported last May that the “free-spirited but consummately disciplined” starting strong safety told friends and relatives that, in Mr. Pasquarelli’s words, “his conscience would not allow him to tackle opposition fullbacks where there is still a bigger enemy that needs to be stopped in its tracks.” Mr. Tillman’s agent and friend Frank Bauer: “This is something he feels he has to do. For him, it’s a mindset, a duty.”

*   *   *

“I’m sorry, but he is not taking inquiries,” said the spokeswoman at Fort Benning. She laughed when I pressed to speak to someone who might have seen Mr. Tillman or talked to him. Men entering basic training don’t break for interviews, she said. Besides, “he has asked not to have any coverage. We’ve been respecting his wishes. And kinda hoping he’d change his mind.” Mr. Tillman would, of course, be a mighty recruiting device. The Army might have enjoyed inviting television cameras to record his haircut, as they did with Elvis. But Mr. Tillman, the Fort Benning spokesman says, “wants to be anonymous like everyone else.”

Right now he has 13 weeks of basic training ahead of him, then three weeks of Airborne School, and then, if he makes it, Ranger School, where only about a third of the candidates are accepted. “It’s a long row,” said the Fort Benning spokesman, who seemed to suggest it would be all right to call again around Christmas. Until then he’ll be working hard trying to become what he wants to become.

Which I guess says it all.

Except for this. We are making a lot of Tillmans in America, and one wonders if this has been sufficiently noted. The other day friends, a conservative intellectual and his activist wife, sent a picture of their son Gabe, a proud and newly minted Marine. And there is Abe, son of a former high aide to Al Gore, who is a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy, flying SH-60 Seahawk helicopters. A network journalist and his wife, also friends, speak with anguished pride of their son, in harm’s way as a full corporal in the Marines. The son of a noted historian has joined up; the son of a conservative columnist has just finished his hitch in the Marines; and the son of a bureau chief of a famous magazine was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army last month, on the day he graduated from Princeton.

As the Vietnam-era song said, “Something’s happening here.” And what it is may be exactly clear. Some very talented young men, and women, are joining the armed forces in order to help their country because, apparently, they love it. After what our society and culture have been through and become the past 30 years or so, you wouldn’t be sure that we would still be making their kind, but we are. As for their spirit, Abe’s mother reports, “Last New Year’s, Abe and his roommate [another young officer] were home and the topic came up about how little they are paid [compared with] the kids who graduated from college at the same time they did and went into business.

“Without missing a beat the two of them said, ‘Yeah—but we get to get shot at!’ and raised their beer bottles. No resentment. No anger. Just pure . . . testosterone-laden bravado.”

*   *   *

The Abes and Gabes join a long old line of elders dressed in green, blue, gray, white, gold and black. Pat Tillman joins a similar line, of stars who decided they had work to do, and must leave their careers to do it. They include, among others, the actors Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable and Tyrone Power in World War II; sports stars Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio in the same war; and quarterback Roger Staubach in Vietnam. It is good to see their style return, and be considered noble again.

And good to see what appears to be part of, or the beginning of, a change in armed forces volunteering. In the Vietnam era of my youth it was poor and working-class boys whom I saw drafted or eagerly volunteering. Now more and more I see the sons and daughters of the privileged joining up.

That is a bigger and better story than usually makes the front page. Markets rise and fall, politicians come and go, but that we still make Tillmans is headline news.

I do not know precisely why President Bush’s popularity continues high despite a month of the most relentless pounding from partisans, the press, the 9/11 commission and history itself (Fallujah, etc.) No one else knows either. Professionals will read the polls through the prism of their own expertise. Media people will say it’s the cumulative effect of Mr. Bush’s stirring ads. Those who agree with the president’s stand on Iraq will say it’s Iraq. Others may argue it’s because he put tax cuts at the heart of his economic policy and the economy has begun to rebound. There is probably some truth in all of this. But my guess would be something else.

I think Mr. Bush is admired and liked after three years of war, terror, strife and recession because people have eyes.

They look at him, listen to him, and watch him every day. They can tell that George W. Bush is looking out for America. They can tell he means it. They can see his sincerity. They can tell he is doing his best. They understand his thinking because he tells them his thinking. They think he may be right. They’re not sure, but at least they understand his thinking.

They are not shocked that our intelligence system wasn’t working very well before 9/11. They would like our intelligence system to be first-rate and the best in the world, and they like to say they expect it to be best in the world. But they also think it comes from Washington, it’s government, and so by definition flawed. Mr. Bush has survived not finding of the weapons of mass destruction for two reasons. One is that Americans have come to be sure that Saddam was an unusually bad man and a threat to whatever stability the Mideast enjoys. The other is that Americans believe Mr. Bush himself honestly believed Saddam was a threat. If Bill Clinton, who thought Iraq had WMDs, had invaded Iraq post-9/11 and not found them, he would have been thrown out of office. That’s because no one ever believed what Mr. Clinton said, and they wouldn’t have believed his explanations. They assumed most of what he did had a cynical and self-serving basis. Mr. Bush doesn’t have that problem, because regular people don’t think he’s a habitual liar. (This is why in presidential elections character trumps everything. It’s not some abstraction, it has practical and daily presidential applications.)

Americans do not think Mr. Bush has a persona to dazzle history, they think he is the average American man, but the average American man as they understand the term: straight shooter, hard worker, decent, America-loving, God-loving.

*   *   *

They can tell he is not doing it all by polls and focus groups. If he were doing it by polls and focus groups he wouldn’t have defied the U.N., invaded Iraq, and pursued its democracy. He would have talked instead about nuance, multilateral negotiations and the need for child safety seats in SUVs. He moved on Iraq because he thought it was right and it would make the world safer. You can agree or disagree with him, but it is hard to doubt his guts, his seriousness and his commitment. And Americans respect guts, seriousness and commitment.

That does not mean Americans will give him a blank check and say: Go do what you want. It means they’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and stand by him with cool eyes as long as they feel it’s right for them and the country.

Mr. Bush’s critics say he sees things too much in black and white, but he is addressing the central issues of life and death. He isn’t dithering or dodging and he isn’t spending all his time trying to maintain his viability within the system. He’s calling the shots, bearing the burden and taking the heat. He reminds me of a man I know who was imprisoned in Vietnam. We went to lunch in a place with short candles on the table. I was asking about the Hanoi Hilton. A waiter walked by and bumped the table, which made a candle tilt against a wicker basket full of bread. The basket was lined with paper napkins, which went up in flames. The man didn’t change his tone of voice as he continued his story, quietly picked up the flaming basket, placed it on the floor and softly stepped on it with his large right shoe. The flames went out. He continued his narrative as he eyed a waiter, handed him the smoking basket and asked for more bread. President Bush reminds me of that guy. He would not offer sensitive or witty commentary on how odd it is to be surprised by fire on a spring day, but he would put the fire out.

Mr. Bush has the calm and anxious face of an American man who believes in God but just read the raw threat file. He knows what trouble we’re in and he knows what time it is. He is alert and determined but ultimately trusting and hopeful, because there really is a God and he really is watching. This is very American.

*   *   *

The implications for the election? We all know a presidential campaign involving an incumbent is in good part a referendum on that incumbent. Which sounds like a one-part process, but it’s a two-part process.

If you want to fire the incumbent, you have to have someone to hire in his place. The guy who opposes the incumbent has to seem like a credible president. He has to be a real alternative, a possible president. So far, roughly four months into his national fame, John Kerry has not made the sale. There are people who have Bush-fatigue, but they do not have Kerry-hunger.

So far he doesn’t seem like a possible president. He seems somewhat shifty, somewhat cold, an operator. He has a good voice but he seems to use it most to slither out of this former statement or that erstwhile position. It’s OK that he looks like a sad tree, but you can’t look like a sad, hollow tree. And it looks a little hollow in there. As if Iraq is an issue Kerry feels he has to handle deftly, and not a brutal question we have to solve, together. As if homeland security is an issue, or civil defense, or preparedness. They’re not issues. They’re life and death. Mr. Kerry doesn’t seem to know.

Which is why he isn’t gaining traction, or gaining purchase on the president. The Democrats and their nominee say on one day that Mr. Bush ignored terrorism, and on the next that he exaggerated the threat. They say his administration didn’t give enough time to planning Iraq, then they say he was obsessed with Iraq. They say he’s dimwitted and gullible, then they say he’s evil and calculating—he cooked Iraq up in Texas, in Ted Kennedy’s phrase.

You know why they can’t define what’s wrong with Mr. Bush? Because they don’t even know what’s wrong with him beyond that he is not them, not Mr. Kerry, not a Democrat.

Can the Democrats win this way? No.

It is a modern political cliché that how the public perceives an event is everything. People who say this forget that reality is important too, and only in part because public opinion tends in its rough way to follow it. But as regards President Bush’s press conference Tuesday night, his third in three years, public perception will decide all. (Not press perception, which has been negative and will grow more so with time.)

What do I think public opinion of the president’s news conference will be? Generally positive. Here’s why: The president spoke uninterrupted for the first 17 minutes, when most people were tuning in to see what he had to say. His speech/announcement hit every point that had to be covered, crisply and yet somberly. Yes, things are tough in Iraq now; yes, we are going to stick to the plan to turn sovereignty over to the Iraqis; yes, we will stay as long as our presence makes the difference between success and failure, stability and chaos. Yes, we will increase troop strength if needed; yes, we have faith that Iraq will ultimately choose democracy and civic health. It was a measured and logical layout of U.S. plans and positions. (Read the opening statement here. It tells you everything you need to know about what Mr. Bush thinks and where he stands.) It will have made a positive impression while people were watching with wide-awake eyes.

*   *   *

It was after the statement that things got more awkward. The president rambled and repeated talking points, playing for time as he tried to remember what he’d decided he was going to say in response to this question or that. Sometimes he remembered and became energized; sometimes he didn’t.

But here the press came to his rescue, and God bless them. They are so clearly carrying water for the left-liberal establishment, they were so clearly carrying water for the preening and partisan hacks who dominate the 9/11 commission, and the Washington Post’s coverage of the news conference yesterday morning was so clearly teeing up Bob Woodward’s next book, that the media nullified their hostility. They could have done some damage to the president with a grave and honest spirit of inquiry.

Instead, they played left-wing Snidely Whiplash. They almost twirled their mustaches, and I don’t mean only the women: Will you apologize, Mr. President? Do you feel personally responsible for Sept. 11? Do you think you’re a loser as a communicator? What was your worst mistake? Do you really like that tie? Do you ever consider hanging yourself from a cornice in the East Room with your tie? When you look in the mirror do you feel mild disgust or just that feeling of shame where you sort of want to tear your face off and run screaming from the room?

Imagine it is April, 1943 and FDR is meeting with the press. Mr. President, why did you fail us on Dec. 7? You call it a day of infamy, but didn’t it reveal your leadership style to be infamous? Why did you let the U.S. fleet sit sleepy and exposed at Pearl Harbor? Do you think your physical infirmity, sir, has an impact on your ability to think about strategic concerns, and will you instruct your doctors to make public your medical records?

But of course they wouldn’t have asked these questions. Our press corps in those days was more like Americans than our press corps is today. They were both less self-hating and more appropriately anxious: Don’t be killing our leaders in the middle of a war, don’t be disheartening the people. Win and do the commentary later.

*   *   *

I noticed once again at the news conference that Mr. Bush has turned garrulous. He has taken to speaking at great length in venues of his choosing, and more and more he chooses. A week ago I took part in a seminar on book writing at a gathering of Republicans in Georgia. The president spoke to the gathering later that night, at an informal dinner for a few hundred, and I stayed on to watch. Everyone knew his remarks would be brief, but they were not. After an hour the governor of Florida, sitting behind him on the small stage, shifted like someone who knew big brother was going on too long, and finally threw a dinner roll at his back to make the point. I made the last part up, but Jeb Bush looked like someone trying to throw his voice: Wrap it up, buddy. Eventually the president did, with what seemed reluctance, after an hour and 20 minutes of a tour of his horizons, a personal and at times startlingly blunt appraisal of other leaders and the realities they face.

When I mentioned to a friend that I’d never heard of Mr. Bush speaking so long, the friend, who sees him often, said the president had recently spoken for more than an hour at a lunch, to the startlement of listeners who wound up furtively checking their watches. Another Washington denizen shared a similar story.

This is unlike our president. I don’t know what it means. I suspect it means his staff, having seen his effectiveness in small groups with this style, is telling him to do it for large groups, as he did at the news conference. This should be re-examined.

The president at the news conference did not seem unprepared or uninformed. He looked to me like someone who had been coached within an inch of his life and who insisted on yet more coaching late in the day, and who began the news conference with the kind of tiredness that first expresses itself not physically but intellectually. A subject is introduced and the smooth ivory dominoes do not begin to click into place one after another, as they do when one is fresh, or lucky. (I hereby retract that unfortunate image.) Instead one furrows his brow and shakes his head. Over-stimulated and wanting to yawn is a bad place to be.

Should a president under crisis go into any venue that does not call on his greatest strengths? No. Get him out there doing speeches, meeting with citizens, taking a few shouted questions, again and again. That’s how Mr. Bush best communicates his convictions, logic and plans, and that is the purpose of presidential communication.

More and more it seems to me Mr. Bush is not only Bill Clinton’s successor but his exact opposite: Mr. Clinton perfectly poised and hollow inside, a man whose lack of compass left him unable to lead within the Oval Office but who gave a compelling public presentation of the presidency, and Mr. Bush a strong president with an obvious soul, decisive at the desk, but with no dazzling edifice. It’s actually amazing that two such different men came so close together. Lucky for us, considering the history, that Mr. Bush was the one who came now.

Peter Jennings: . . . a week so extraordinary, so packed with history that one hardly knows where to begin. An overview from our correspondent Jack McWethy.

McWethy: Peter, what a week it was. On Thursday in Washington riveting testimony. The head of the National Security Council, Condoleezza Rice, live before the 9/11 commission and the country. She was a dramatic witness. In calm tones and over three hours Rice walked through the history of America and al Qaeda, reviewing both the Bush administration’s eight-month leadership before September 11, 2001, and the Clinton administration’s eight years. She came with heavy documentation—memoranda, briefing notes.

Bottom line, she said, the Bush administration removed Saddam Hussein of Iraq for reasons of national and international security. The administration, she said, was deeply concerned about terrorism, aware of the threat of al Qaeda, and moved against it forcefully in Afghanistan and Iraq. The questioning was tough but struck many observers as strikingly nonpartisan.

In a compelling moment, Rice noted that she had previously answered “every single question” now put to her by the commission in private testimony. She told commission members she believed they were wrong to press for public testimony—“You have said that 9/11 was so extraordinary a day that it justifies public testimony from the NSC director, but I ask you to realize that the future will be full of extraordinary days. You have set a precedent that will not be unset, and that will prove unhelpful during the crises of the future.”

She added, however, that she found herself feeling “rather personally and selfishly grateful” to be compelled to give testimony. “The whole world is watching,” she said. “They have a right to know that the American nation moves forward only in good faith, only for the most serious of reasons, and only with the intention of making the world a safer and more decent place.”

Rice challenged the committee to “get your work done,” so that the government can turn undivided attention to what she called “the next big steps”—an extraordinary plan to assist in the invention and manufacture of “anything that can help the people of the world make their way through the coming difficult decades.” She referred to what the president will soon announce as “an on-the-ground strategic defense initiative.” She said it will begin in the U.S. with the giving out of gas masks and state-of-the-art suits to protect against chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, along with a renewal of the national civil defense system, more intelligence funding and measures, and a surprise Bush administration decision to reverse itself and back a national ID card, and step up border and immigration control.

All in all, huge news. By the way, Peter, administration foe Richard Clarke, who did commentary on Rice’s testimony for CNN—that’s him next to Anita Hill—said: “I must admit I realize for the first time that there’s a heck of a lot I didn’t know and didn’t imagine. This is food for thought.” Asked by Wolf Blitzer if he might now disavow some of the charges in his recent best-selling book Clarke said, “I may put a new preface on the paperback.”

But that is just what happened in the hearings on Thursday.

Friday morning, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts made a stunning speech retracting what he called his “intemperate and, truth be told, cynical” comments earlier this week when he compared Iraq to Vietnam and George W. Bush to Richard Nixon. Kennedy said that Sen. John McCain’s remarks on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon had been “both sobering and steadying.”

McCain, the respected Republican moderate, said Iraq is “safer now” than it was under Saddam and “this is no time to cut and run.” Kennedy said he’d pondered McCain’s views, and concluded they were right. “I guess I panicked,” Kennedy said. “I wanted to be relevant again. I wanted to be young again. So I indulged my ego and hoped, aloud, for hopelessness. The fact is, we cannot afford to let Iraq descend into chaos and nihilism.”

Kennedy said that while U.S. troops were deployed in a foreign land he would say nothing that would give inspiration to those who do not wish our country well. He said he will lead a movement within his party to both assist in the democratization of Iraq, and begin a national conversation on what should be next in terms of U.S. national security. “My needs are nothing compared to my nation’s needs,” he said. “Even though I am, uh, roughly, arguably the size of Connecticut, and can personally moon Europe. Thank you.”

In possible response to that—Peter, we cannot claim to know all the reasons for these events, only their order—the president of France, Jacques Chirac, made his own stunning speech in Paris. In what appeared to be an extended ad lib in an otherwise unremarkable text, Chirac said he had just finished reading Anne Applebaum’s book “Gulag,” which this week won the Pultizer Prize.

Said Chirac, “Halfway through it a lightbulb went off. I had an insight. An inspiration! Applebaum reminds us of the Soviet reign of terror. We know who ended that, and let’s face it, it wasn’t French intellectuals smoking Gauloises and shrugging with silent existential eloquence. It was America. While Harry Truman was doing his best to give us the Marshall Plan and save Europe, Stalin was getting drunk all night and deciding who to shoot next. Bastarde. A regular Saddam. And then I realized: Oh, I have been unappreciative! I have been silly about America. She has more than proved her high mindedness and idealism and tradition of goodness. And now she is having a bad time in Iraq. Well, I have decided it is time to stand with America as America has stood with us. So, ‘Pershing, we are here!’ We will send French troops to join the coalition. This is a historic move—but then any country that is magnifique would do it. And France is magnifique. And by the way, Mr. Berlusconi, the leaders of Europe are not a bunch of ‘big ugly slugs.’”

Finally, Rome. The Vatican. Where pope John Paul II this week said he is praying for coalition troops in Iraq. He asked churches throughout the world to “offer up” Easter Sunday masses for peace, and said he knows the American effort in Iraq “is meant at improving lives and leading that unhappy place toward democracy.” The pope performed his ritual washing of the feet of the poor, a yearly act aimed at showing Christian humility and love.

The pontiff asked this year also to personally wash the feet of Riccardo Di Segni, the chief rabbi of Rome. Afterward the two went into the pope’s private Vatican apartment and watched a DVD of “The Passion,” the fourth viewing for the pope, and about an hour ago they had dinner “as friends do.” Those words are the pope’s. The chief rabbi upon leaving pronounced the movie “a little boring but not so bad.” The pope seemed to nod, and said, “If you believe what you’re watching is a true story it’s enthralling, but if you think it’s not, it’s probably not.” Pressed by reporters for his own reaction to the film, the pope smiled. “I say it again,” he said in a deep but soft voice. “It is as it was.”

An amazing Holy Week, Peter, an amazing Passover holiday, some amazing moments.

Jennings: Amazing indeed. When we return, good news for humor writer Al Franken: His numbers may not be good at the end of his first week on the air but his new liberal radio network has nonetheless grown 100%. He now has six stations—roughly, or rather exactly, 1% of Rush Limbaugh’s. Now this. . . .