Peggy Noonan

In October 2001, shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center, an essayist who had worked in the U.S. government summed up the genesis of the tragedy this way:

It was a catastrophic systems failure, a catastrophic top-to-bottom failure of the systems on which we rely for safety and peace. Another way to say it: The people of the West were, the past 10 years or so, on an extended pleasure cruise, sailing blithely on smooth waters . . . through an iceberg field. We thought those in charge of the ship, commanding it and steering it and seeing to its supplies, would—could—handle any problems. We paid our fare (that is, our taxes) and assumed the crew would keep us safe. . . .

The American people knew, or at least those paying attention knew, that something terrible might happen. But they knew the government had probably done what governments do to protect us. The people did not demand this; the government did not do it. . . . It was a catastrophic systems failure, top to bottom.

It is generally not good form to quote yourself, but I do it to make two points:

1. That a system failure occurred has been acknowledged almost since the tragedy took place. It was acknowledged because it was obvious to those with eyes. The Democrats did not say it, nor did the Republicans, but citizens did, writers did, thinkers did, professionals did.

2. The depth and extent of the system failure, at least within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was greater than citizens knew in the months after Sept. 11, and has only now become clear. FBI officials didn’t fail to connect the dots; they refused to see a pattern. And this scandal is going to grow.

*   *   *

You know of the Rowley memo, the 13-page letter written last week by a 21-year veteran of the FBI, the chief counsel to the Minneapolis field office, Colleen Rowley. She has joined the ranks of those women—these days, as others have noted, they are always women—who blow the whistle on sick and shameful actions within powerful organizations.

You can read an edited version of the entire memo on Time magazine’s Web site. It is the story of what happened when FBI agents in Minneapolis discovered the presence of Zacarias Moussaoui’s in their state taking lessons on how to fly planes. They quickly recognized him as a terrorist threat, and arrested him on immigration charges on Aug. 15, four weeks before the World Trade Center became a burial ground. Moussaoui is now infamous as the “20th hijacker”—part of the cell or cells that planned and executed the attack on America.

Days after his August arrest, the Minneapolis FBI received information from French intelligence: Moussaoui was connected to Osama Bin Laden’s terror organization and other groups. The Minneapolis agents asked the FBI in Washington for a warrant to look at Moussaoui’s computer and personal effects; they asked too for a wiretap.

The FBI in Washington already had in its hands the Phoenix memo—the one that warned that Middle Eastern males in great numbers were taking flying lessons in Arizona. The FBI also had in its hands the French intelligence report on Moussaoui. Yesterday we found they had in their hands a report from the FBI’s chief pilot in Oklahoma warning that “large numbers of Middle Eastern males” were receiving flight training in the Sooner State. It was happening “all over the state,” said the Oklahoma agent who wrote the memo. He suggested this might be connected to future terrorist attacks.

The FBI may also have had in hand other clues, tips, warnings and data that have not yet been made public.

*   *   *

How did FBI headquarters in Washington respond to the Minneapolis request for a warrant? It refused. It said no—“no probable cause.”

The days ticked by. Ms. Rowley: “FBIHQ personnel whose job it was to assist and coordinate with field division agents on terrorism . . . Continued to, almost inexplicably, throw up roadblocks and undermine Minneapolis’ by-now desperate efforts” to obtain a search warrant.

The Minneapolis FBI agents finally, frantic to move forward, took an act that required some courage. They went around FBI headquarters to the CIA’s counterterrorist unit. The FBI found out; Ms. Rowley doesn’t say how. The FBI then “chastised” the Minneapolis agents.

And continued to refuse a warrant.

You know when the FBI finally OK’d a search? On Sept. 11—after the attacks.

Even then, it wasn’t without a fight. Ms. Rowley writes that FBI supervisory agent in Washington who had been making the decisions on Minneapolis’s requests seemed to have been “consistently, almost deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents’ efforts.” On Sept. 11, just minutes after the attacks began, the supervisory agent in Washington headquarters phoned Minneapolis, and Ms. Rowley took the call. In that call, she says, he “was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui’s computer.”

Ms. Rowley recounts the conversation this way: “I said something to the effect that, in light of what had just happened in New York, it would have to be the ‘hugest coincidence’ at this point if Moussaoui was not involved with the terrorists. The [supervisory agent] stated something to the effect that I had used the right term, ‘coincidence’ and that this was probably all just a coincidence and we were to do nothing in Minneapolis until we got their [FBI headquarters’] permission.” He added, she says, that he didn’t want Minneapolis to “screw up” investigations “elsewhere in the country.”

Ms. Rowley adds another chilling detail. In the early aftermath of Sept. 11, whenever she told the story of the Moussaoui investigation to FBI personnel, “almost everyone’s first question was: ‘Why? Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately sabotage a case?’ ” She adds that “jokes were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles, like Robert Hansen [actually Hanssen], who were actually working for Osama bin Laden.”

This is no laughing matter. When an FBI field operative who is the chief legal counsel of her office tells the head of the FBI in Washington that they’ve been wondering, out in the field, if spies or moles made the fateful decisions, she is saying something huge. She is saying she thinks it is possible that spies within the FBI thwarted attempts to stop or diminish the attacks of Sept. 11. And she wants the FBI director to know this. She uses the word joke, but she knows what she’s doing. She’s saying: This may be true. When she put this information in a memo that she knows she herself will soon hand-deliver to the Senate Intelligence Committee, she is telling Congress, the press and the people to consider the possibility that spies or moles had some part in the attack on America.

*   *   *

Ms. Rowley asserts that a terrible problem within the FBI in Washington, a problem that likely affected the handling of this case, is “careerism.” The FBI is staffed by “short term careerists” who “only must serve an 18 month-just-time-to-get-your-ticket-punched minimum.” The FBI supervisory agent who thwarted the Moussaoui search was one of them. He and his kind are a reason FBI headquarters is “mired in mediocrity.” She made it a point to look up and share with the director the dictionary definition of careerism: “the policy and practice of advancing one’s career often at the cost of one’s integrity.”

Ms. Rowley said she would not use the term coverup to characterize the FBI’s official statements since Sept. 11. She said she will “carefully” use, instead, these words: “Certain facts . . . have . . . been omitted, downplayed, glossed over and/or mis-characterized in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons.”

What improper political reasons? She does not say. But throughout her memo she demonstrates a seriousness about words, a carefulness as to meaning. It will be interesting when she is asked by Congress or the press what she meant exactly.

*   *   *

Which is where our media come in. Tim Russert, “60 Minutes”: This is the story you’ve lived for. Were there spies in the FBI helping out the other side? What political influences may have dictated or affected their decisions? Why did the FBI ignore all the information coming in from French intelligence, from Phoenix, from Minneapolis, from Oklahoma?

There are those who say sure, the picture is always clear in hindsight. But that itself now sounds like the language of coverup. Bin Laden made his plans clear enough over the years. The World Trade Center had been bombed in 1993, two U.S. embassies in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000. U.S. and Western intelligence have every reason in the world to think something terrible was coming. Anyone who read a Tom Clancy novel knew what was possible, and anyone who read a Tom Clancy novel and had a higher than average IQ knew the possible becomes the probable becomes a tragedy. Sen. Dianne Feinstein had a sense of foreboding about U.S. security; so did many of us. And the FBI is supposed to know more than we do.

It is true, as Slate’s Mickey Kaus and the columnist Ann Coulter have pointed out in different ways, that the long political-media campaign against “ethnic profiling” had an impact on this case and a bad effect on the FBI. It is true that many Democrats and Republicans who now criticize President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft for not combing the flight schools for possible Arab terrorists were previously complaining about profiling.

But it is also true—and here I display what is perhaps naivetè—that a lot of us think the FBI is supposed to be full of people with the sense and toughness to work around irresponsible demands and limitations, and not just fold in the face of potential heat. They’re not supposed to be complete weenies in the FBI. They’re supposed to have some guts and common sense.

*   *   *

If this were a dark Hollywood thriller, Ms. Rowley would feel it necessary to request whistle-blower protection.

She did.

The supervisory agent in FBI headquarters who thwarted and insulted the responsible men and women of the Minneapolis FBI would get a promotion.

He did.

And the attorney general would announce, just days after the Rowley memo became public, that FBI field offices will now be given expanded authority to move independently on terror threats without going through headquarters.

Two hundred sixty-one days after the attack on America, he did.

Every big speech has a text and a subtext. When Ronald Reagan spoke at Normandy on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, in 1984, his text consisted of a remembrance of what had happened there on the beaches on that day in 1944. He spoke of the efforts of the English and Scots brigades, the Americans, the French; he lauded the U.S. Rangers who had clawed their way up to the top of the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc. “And in seizing back this soil,” he said, as he stood on it, “they seized back the continent of Europe.”

It is the text that is remembered: “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc.”

But it was the subtext of the speech that was most important, that contained the speech’s true purpose. The subtext was a message aimed at the leaders of the West and the people of Europe. It was: Fellow NATO members, you must remember that just as our fathers beat back the totalitarian Nazis, we now must beat back the totalitarian Soviets—and we can do it, we can triumph if we hold fast, hold firm and stand together just as our fathers did 40 years ago.

That message was important: In those days NATO seemed on the verge of breaking up over disagreements on how and even whether to resist the Soviet Union. Europe roiled with anti-American peace marches. The Pointe du Hoc speech was not a commemorative event but a speech intended to exhort, persuade, and move history.

*   *   *

President Bush will go to Normandy this weekend, to speak at the American cemetery there. Is he foolishly using a stage President Eisenhower used to such benign effect in 1964, that Mr. Reagan used to such famous effect in 1984, and that Bill Clinton also used? Isn’t the stage already cluttered with presidential ghosts?

No. Mr. Bush and his people like the high wire when they think it promises to raise their standing. A presidential speech in Normandy is by definition an event; it ensures wide, broad and lengthy press coverage. The cameras can’t resist the rows of white crosses, Normandy brings out the inner Spielberg-filming-Private-Ryan in every network producer. So the Bush speech will receive big coverage.

Does Mr. Bush fear comparisons? If he did they wouldn’t have scheduled it. Mr. Bush’s people have a clever way of positioning things. They’ll assume no one remembers what Ike said or Mr. Clinton said, and as for Ronald Reagan, Mr. Bush will probably take care of that problem by quoting him, lauding him and putting him away like a pretty Christmas ornament in an old brown box.

Mr. Bush always wants to bring big meaning to big events. He likes to say important things. This is not true of all politicians, and he does not always succeed. No one really remembers the meaning of his acceptance speech in the summer of 2000; no one remembers the meaning of the speech he gave when the election was resolved the following December. In both cases he said too many things, and they didn’t seem like big things; at any rate, people left with a blurry sense of what had been said.

But his speeches since Sept. 11 have mostly been clean, straight bullets. And that’s probably what he’ll do at Normandy, a clean, straight bullet.

I say that in part because that’s what his speech was Wednesday, in Berlin—not only a bullet but a blast.

*   *   *

It was the big speech of the trip, the one I’d been told to watch for a few weeks ago when I asked the White House where the primary statements would be made. You can add Mr. Bush at the Bundestag to the list of speeches with a text and a subtext. I think you can also add it to your small list of great speeches of the 21st century. I think Mr. Bush at the Bundestag is going to be remembered for a long time.

The Text: The American president, at a heightened and dramatic time in world history, travels to Europe to speak to its people of our continued friendship, ties and heritage, and to underscore our shared destiny; and to demonstrate in the process that Mr. Bush, though not a world traveler, is acquainted with the demands and disciplines of high diplomacy; that he is about to demonstrate the seriousness of his leadership by signing an arms agreement with the Russians that reflects the end of old enmity and the beginning of alliance; and that the signing itself shows his desire for and ability to achieve a safer world.

The subtext: Mr. Bush is trying to communicate to European elites that American actions, views and plans on Islamic terrorism are not a threat to Europe but its salvation. He is trying to tell Europe to open its eyes, see the threat, join the cause. He is trying to convince them that this is not America and Israel vs. the world but civilization vs. madmen. If he cannot convince the elites he may at least win new support from the people of Europe—he’s talking to them too. And he is attempting to rally the American people again, using a European stage to drive home his worldview and display what he hopes will be perceived back home as growing personal stature.

*   *   *

A look at some of the speech.

“I am honored to visit this great city,” Mr. Bush said of Berlin. “The history of our time is written in the life of Berlin. In this building, fires of hatred were set that swept across the world. To this city, Allied planes brought food and hope during 323 days and nights of siege. Across an infamous divide, men and women jumped from tenement buildings and crossed through razor wire to live in freedom or to die in the attempt. One American president came here to proudly call himself a citizen of Berlin. Another president dared the Soviets to ‘tear down that wall.’ ”

Good stuff. It reminds the audience that America is Germany’s longtime friend—the airlift, the war against communism. It contains an implicit reminder: Standing with you cost us plenty, but we paid the price because it was right. (Side message to America: Happy Memorial Day.)

Mr. Bush praises the new Germany “made whole”—an elegant reference to unification. He then erects a generational platform from which to make his points, the same platform Mr. Reagan used in Normandy:

“On both sides of the Atlantic,” says Mr. Bush, “the generation of our fathers was called to shape great events—and they built the great trans-Atlantic alliance of democracies. They built the most successful alliance in history. After the Cold War, during the relative quiet of the 1990s, some questioned whether our trans-Atlantic partnership still had a purpose. History has given its answer.”

This got applause. Mr. Bush then jumps to today:

“Our generation faces new and grave threats to liberty, to the safety of our people, and to civilization, itself. We face an aggressive force that glorifies death, that targets the innocent, and seeks the means to murder on a massive scale.”

Here we go. The subtext in full force: Europe, wake up!

“Those who despise human freedom will attack it on every continent. Those who seek missiles and terrible weapons are also familiar with the map of Europe.”

“Are also familiar with the map of Europe” is a delicate but direct way of saying: Guess who’s next?

Mr. Bush continues: “Like the threats of another era, this threat cannot be appeased or cannot be ignored. By being patient, relentless and resolute, we will defeat the enemies of freedom. . . . Together, Europe and the United States have the creative genius, the economic power, the moral heritage, and the democratic vision to protect our liberty and to advance our cause of peace.”

Don’t be pessimistic, he’s saying, we can do it, we’ll get through this. But only if you get serious and face the facts.

He reminds Europe that for all her pain she has been invincible. “From the Argonne Forest to the Anzio beachhead, conflicts in Europe have drawn the blood of millions, squandering and shattering lives across the earth. There are thousands, thousands of monuments in parks and squares across my country to young men of 18 and 19 and 20 whose lives ended in battle on this continent. Ours is the first generation in a hundred years that does not expect and does not fear the next European war. And that achievement—your achievement—is one of the greatest in modern times.”

And so we know peace is winnable. We see this in the rise of the European Community, which is not seen by America as a rival but as living proof that “old hostilities” can be ended.

He asserts that NATO expansion will make Europe more secure; he commits American backing for membership for all European democracies; he asserts as a shared mission the encouraging of Russia to see its future “in Europe, and with America.” This echoes Mr. Bush’s statement in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last June, in which he said he had told President Putin in their first meeting that radical Islam was a threat to Russia, not the West. “Russia has its best chance since 1917 to become a part of Europe’s family. Russia’s transformation is not finished; the outcome is not yet determined. But for all the problems and challenges, Russia is moving toward freedom.”

So: together, Europe and America have transformed the Soviet Union into free Russia. And let us now discuss more deeply what we must again do, together, to survive:

“For the United States, September the 11th, 2001, cut a deep dividing line in our history—a change of eras as sharp and clear as Pearl Harbor, or the first day of the Berlin Blockade. There can be no lasting security in a world at the mercy of terrorists—for my nation, or for any nation. . . Together, we oppose an enemy that thrives on violence and the grief of the innocent. The terrorists are defined by their hatreds: They hate democracy and tolerance and free expression and women and Jews and Christians and all Muslims who disagree with them.”

He says that NATO’s defining purpose now is facing down a threat as great as Europe has faced in the past. Like the Nazis, who threatened Europe by killing “in the name of racial purity,” or the Soviets, who threatened Europe “in the name of class struggle,” our new enemy kills “in the name of a false religious purity.”

The answer is unity. “In this war we defend not just America or Europe; we are defending civilization itself.”

*   *   *

Down to the nitty-gritty:

“The evil that has formed against us has been termed the ‘new totalitarian threat.’ The authors of terror are seeking nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Regimes that sponsor terror are developing these weapons and the missiles to deliver them.” If these regimes perfect their capabilities, he says, nothing will stop them. They will use them.

“Wishful thinking might bring comfort, but not security. Call this a strategic challenge; call it, as I do, axis of evil; call it by any name you choose—but let us speak the truth.”

This is deft. Those who have abjured the phrase “axis of evil” and made their unhappiness with it into a symbol of their opposition: Fine, make up your own phrase, what matters is the facts.

“If we ignore this threat, we invite certain blackmail, and place millions of our citizens in grave danger. Our response will be reasoned, and focused, and deliberate. We will use more than our military might. We will cut off terrorist finances, apply diplomatic pressure, and continue to share intelligence. . . But make no mistake about it, we will and we must confront this conspiracy against our liberty and against our lives.”

What Mr. Bush is saying is simple: We will not back down, we cannot back down, we cannot ignore this threat and survive.

He asks each nation of Europe to make “hard choices” about financial commitments to help the war on terror. He calls for the protection of Israel, the creation of a state for the Palestinian people; he insists peace in the Mideast is possible, points to old hatreds in Europe in which foes became partners and allies.

He says that “poverty doesn’t create terror—yet terror takes root in failing nations that cannot police themselves or provide for their people.” And so we must help—through trade expansion, and humanitarian aid. “We have a duty to share our wealth generously and wisely.”

“Members of the Bundestag,” he says, “we are joined in serious purpose . . . on which the safety of our people and the fate of our freedom now rest. We build a world of justice, or we will live in a world of coercion. The magnitude of our shared responsibilities makes our disagreements look so small. And those who exaggerate our differences play a shallow game, and hold a simplistic view of our relationship.”

We are more than partners and allies, “we are heirs to the same civilization. The pledges of the Magna Carta, the learning of Athens, the creativity of Paris, the unbending conscience of Luther, the gentle faith of St. Francis—all of these are part of the American soul. The New World has succeeded by holding to the values of the Old.”

This is not only liltingly fact-filled; it has, as Henry Kissinger is said to have said, the added benefit of being true. And while Mr. Bush is citing religio-cultural markers, he is also nodding to constituent groups back home.

“Our histories have diverged, yet we seek to live by the same ideals. We believe in free markets, tempered by compassion. We believe in open societies that reflect unchanging truths. We believe in the value and dignity of every life.”

This is known as complimenting the other guy by suggesting he shares your best beliefs. It’s not quite true, but it reminds him of what he ought to believe in. In any case, no one in the Bundestag is going to stand up and yell, “Hey, we don’t believe in the dignity of life, buddy!”

“These convictions bind our civilization together and set our enemies against us,” Mr. Bush ends. “These convictions are universally true and right. And they define our nations and our partnership in a unique way. And these beliefs lead us to fight tyranny and evil, as others have done before us.”

*   *   *

We cannot afford ambivalence, Mr. Bush told Europe. We must not create or have faith in false equivalencies. We have to stay together to stay safe—but if we stay together we’ll be safe.

Good stuff.

They will hear it in Europe. We’ll see if they will absorb it, or come to agree with it, but they will certainly hear it.

And that’s a good start. Watch for Mr. Bush to underscore his message in Normandy.

Let me tell you what I think of the criticism that President Bush (a) reversed a half century of Republican philosophy on free trade and caved in on tariffs, and (b) accepted and endorsed a big-government farm bill that was so greasy, pork-filled and fat-laden that if you took the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 in your hand and held a match to it would hiss, pop and sizzle like bacon in a big black skillet.

I think the criticisms are wholly legitimate. I think they are correct. And I think they miss the point.

Mr. Bush has been justly smacked by pundits, but the man on the street and the woman being polled don’t seem to think much of it, about it or against it. Mr. Bush knows this and likes it. It means the gamble paid off. The base will forgive him, the nonbase hasn’t noticed he did anything that needs forgiveness, and the opposition can hardly knock him for taking policy positions they’ve long supported.

Why will the base forgive Mr. Bush? Because they know it’s all about the war. Which means it’s all about the 2002 congressional elections, less than six months away. Mr. Bush caving in on tariffs helps the Republicans in Pennsylvania and elsewhere; his caving on the farm bill deprives the Democrats of an issue in the farm states.

*   *   *

Right now Mr. Bush is about to take a beating over charges that he was briefed before Sept. 11 with intelligence reports suggesting Arab terrorists might be about to hijack a commercial airliner or airliners. Ari Fleischer has conceded the president was told of the possibility of hijackings but says there was no warning that the planes would be used as missiles.

Clearly we are at the beginning of a new Democratic foray. Mr. Bush’s political enemies will make as much of the story as they can. James Carville yesterday told the ABC News Internet column “The Note” that the question is “What did the President know, when did he know it and what did he do about it?” He is echoing the famous Watergate question in hopes of replicating the famous Watergate disaster.

Why wouldn’t he? Playing political games is what Mr. Carville does as a partisan, as an operative, as a holder of the banner of the opposition. It’s not only a game but a lucrative one. And it’s not terrible, it’s show biz—occasionally funny, often colorful.

And the Democrats happen to be better at it than the Republicans. Democrats on talk shows tend not to be shy about boring in, talking over guests, hectoring, murmuring sarcastic asides. They may not be courteous but they pound their points home. Republicans, in part because they represent the tougher views of the tougher party, often try to be reasonable and sweet, or intelligent and clever. They are no match. When they realize this halfway through the program they tend to try and bark back. But they bark badly, like Chihuahuas who know their yelps won’t deter a burglar.

Why are Democratic operatives more effective? Because they see politics as total war. When you see yourself as a captain in a great unending struggle you not only fight harder, you rationalize fighting meaner. Why are Republican operatives less effective? Most of them don’t believe politics is total war. It’s only about government, it’s not as big and important as life. If they thought it were that big they’d fight as if it were total war, but they wouldn’t be Republicans; they’d be people who think government is everything.

Another problem for Republicans: Some of them are actually dignified and reasonable. A few of them are actually nice. And a lot of them are trying to avoid being stigmatized by the press. If a GOP operative—a nervous, please-like-me Scott Reed, a well-meaning and courteous Alex Castellanos—attempts to be as crude and manipulative as a Paul Begala, and actually succeeds, the press will not say he is a worthy opponent. The press will paint him as dark-jowled and Nixonian, a hater, a hammer. The press doesn’t like rude Republicans.

There is also this problem for the Republican Party on TV: Their most spirited battlers are either in the White House (Mary Matalin, Torie Clark) or not Republican. Ann Coulter could eat her lunch off Paul Begala’s head and use his tie as a napkin, but Ms. Coulter is not a Republican, she is a conservative. She’d knock Mr. Bush harder on pork and tariffs than Mr. Carville would.

*   *   *

Back to Mr. Bush and the criticisms he faces. I think the Sept. 11 charge will have some traction. It’s easy to understand, and it plays into cultural assumptions dearly held by both Republicans and Democrats. (Democrats: Those sneaky Republicans always screw up and then blame it on Bill Clinton! Republicans: Those jerks in government are stupider than we noble folk.)

The story will be around for weeks, maybe months, and Mr. Bush will have to address it. And it will have traction. But not that much.

The reason is Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The reason is that GWB is doing an FDR.

And I think people know this without quite knowing it.

FDR would sacrifice anything, he’d tack left right and center, to win World War II. You can almost literally trace the end of FDR’s New Deal legislation to the beginning of the war in Europe in September 1939. Yes, the court-packing scandal had something to do with it, and so did the Supreme Court finding aspects of the New Deal unconstitutional. But after Hitler moved on Poland, Roosevelt sacrificed almost all his liberal domestic plans, angering his own supporters and disappointing his party’s interest groups, in order to mollify conservatives and refocus voters’ attention away from the Depression and onto the war. He knew he would need broadened support to execute a war. He disappointed much of his base to get it.

Mr. Bush is doing the same thing. He is accepting what he thinks he has to accept (pork, a bad trade bill) in order to keep or expand the power balance he has in Washington, and in order to keep from angering or offending your basic, normal, politically nonobsessed citizen.

If Mr. Bush’s popularity falls, his party’s popularity suffers. The congressional elections six months from now could produce a Democratic House and a more heavily Democratic Senate. Mr. Bush will do almost anything to keep that from happening. Because if it happens his ability to prosecute the war will be weakened, perhaps fatally. Power would shift and his opposition, no longer fearing his popularity, would go for his throat. The war effort, such as it is, would be compromised. He has to keep his popularity high.

So Mr. Bush is doing an FDR, and angering only a base that will forgive him.

*   *   *

It is interesting that FDR too was dogged, from Dec. 7, 1941, onward, with the charge that he and his administration had repeatedly and even emphatically been warned that the Japanese were about to move on Pearl Harbor. Somehow FDR didn’t hear the warnings, or heed them. Editorialists howled, Congress held hearings, Republicans tried hard to nail him. But they didn’t get anywhere, really. Not because there wasn’t any evidence but because the public knew what the Congress seemed to have forgotten: There’s a war on. The thing to do is win the war, concentrate your efforts on it, focus, don’t fritter away time and resources on a question we don’t have to answer just this second. We have to build bombers just this second.

The Dec. 7 question remains alive, but is muted. Whatever the truth, the people were right: Winning the war was more important than finding out what the president knew and when he knew it.

And FDR won his war, clear and clean. Mr. Bush will have to do that too or history, and the people, will not be so forgiving.

How is George W. Bush doing? In Washington the past weekend everyone I spoke to answered that question by referring to the recent USA Today poll that said the president’s popularity continues undiminished and, amazingly enough, for reasons apart from the war. People like him. They respect him. Almost eight in 10 said they thought he was doing a good job as president.

Nor is the press fully immune, or so it seemed to me. After Mr. Bush gave his humorous speech at the White House Correspondents Association dinner, I mentioned to an acquaintance, a veteran journalist at a national newspaper and presumably not a reflexive Bush supporter, that I thought the president’s speech all right but undistinguished. “Wasn’t as good as Clinton,” I said. Bill Clinton’s material at dinners like this was top-notch.

“But Clinton was vulgar!” the journalist said. Mr. Clinton’s very smoothness, the fact that he was at his best doing shtick for the media, was vulgar. Mr. Bush is more like a president: boring.

Presidents should be boring. We don’t hire them to entertain us, we hire them to be stable, sane and sure-handed.

*   *   *

What is the key to Mr. Bush’s popularity? I think the source of it is something that isn’t new. He walked into the White House with it. But it has become more apparent with time and is, I think, more appreciated.

It is that he does not need the job. He did not lust for it and does not hunger for it. He does not need the presidency to fulfill a romantic sense of personal destiny. He does not have a neurotic fixation on the office. He does not love having or wielding its power. He views the presidency as a responsibility, and sometimes a burden. But he tries each day to meet it. Sometimes it is pleasurable for him, sometimes not.

There is with Mr. Bush an almost palpable sense that he would rather be at the ranch. He would rather be enjoying life and having fun with baseball teams, he would rather have privacy, he would rather go for a drive. He radiates a sense that he has given up a lot to be president. He radiates a sense that he will enjoy it when he gets back what he gave up. But right now he has work to do.

I do not mean to suggest that Mr. Bush is or seems ambivalent about the presidency. I don’t think he is or does. He means to be a good president, that is obvious. He works hard, is committed, ambitious and serious. He means to win the war. He is capable of wielding the power he has to wield, and one senses he has enough vanity to believe he is as good a wielder of it as any, and maybe better than most.

But . . . he doesn’t need it.

He doesn’t love celebrity, doesn’t gravitate to the glamorous, doesn’t seem to think fame can bestow magic, gladness, personal contentment. I watched him sitting on the dais Saturday night; he looked like he was thinking about whether the jeep needs tires. He was not excited to be surrounded by the glittering prizewinners of Washington, who were arrayed in tuxedoes and gowns before him. His wife, also on the dais, smiled pleasingly at everyone, but her smile is unvarying, almost inexpressive, and still seems to hide more than it reveals. She too radiates a sense that she’d be happy back home, kicking her shoes off with the girls and then falling asleep with a book.

When the Mideast was blowing up a few weekends ago, the president was at the ranch. When asked why he wasn’t more involved in what was happening, he groused that he was; he’d spent half of Saturday morning on the phone. If he had been LBJ or Nixon or Bill Clinton he would have been a Toscanini of the telephone, talking to world leaders and attempting to bring some personal magic to the drama. Mr. Bush doesn’t seem to believe in magic. Yesterday afternoon, talking in the White House to reporters about the struggle he has had getting his judicial nominees through Congress, he looked like someone who was indignant and frustrated but not loaded for bear. He looked like it was work.

*   *   *

Why does Mr. Bush’s seeming not to need the presidency contribute to his popularity? Why would it be, in fact, a central reason for his high poll numbers?

Because when you know they don’t need it, you know they won’t do anything to keep it. And you can start to trust them.

When you know a man experiences an office not as a prize to which he is entitled but as a burden by which he is bound, you feel you can comfortably appreciate him and his efforts.

When a leader doesn’t need the office he holds, the electorate feels free to have faith in him. They infer from his lack of need a simple thing: He will be less likely to sacrifice the country’s interests to his own. He will not tend to put his own passing political interests over the needs of the nation in order to win. Because he doesn’t have to win.

When you know a man doesn’t have to win, you know he probably won’t do anything to win. And when you know he won’t do anything to win, you feel more secure in letting him win.

In the Vatican after they have chosen a new pope, they lead him to a room off the Sistine Chapel where he is given the clothing of a pope. It is called the Crying Room. It is called that because it is there that the burdens and responsibilities of the papacy tend to come crashing down on the new pontiff. Many of them have wept. The best have wept.

That in a way is why people like Mr. Bush. They can tell he has been to the crying room. They respect him for it.

“Former President Bill Clinton met with NBC executives Wednesday in Los Angeles to discuss hosting his own talk show, according to several television sources.”—Los Angeles Times, front page, May 2

*   *   *

As befits our subject, I will begin this piece with an assertion of my brilliance. Years ago when asked what I thought Bill Clinton would do after his presidency, I began answering that he would probably have a TV talk show called “Here’s Bill!” People would always laugh. I would explain that talking is what Bill Clinton does, that the subject matter of daytime chats would be congenial to him, and that he is a handsome, sunny-seeming and, as they used to say in the Clinton era, compelling figure. So why not?

His entire presidency seemed like a talk show. Or actually his entire presidency seemed like daytime TV—a talk show followed by a soap opera followed by a news bulletin followed by another talk show. Sometimes the last show of the day had the tone of “Washington Week in Review,” sometimes “Jerry Springer.” Looking back, one sees that at the end of his presidency Mr. Clinton was like Dave Attell in “Insomniac,” the Comedy Central show in which a charming and apparently aimless man stays up all night looking for company.

So: I was ahead of the curve in saying the talk show would happen. Now I wish to be ahead of the curve in telling you why it won’t. And no, it doesn’t have anything to do with the debate on whether he’d be sponsored by Haines Underwear or The Gap.

The primary reason Bill Clinton won’t host a talk show is that Hillary won’t let him. She won’t let him because she is not a stupid woman. She doesn’t want her husband in a job that would put him back on the media radar screen on a daily basis. She knows that if he had a TV show he’d wind up in the kind of trouble presidential spouses aren’t supposed to get into. And she intends for him one day to be a president’s spouse.

*   *   *

The Clintons are already wealthy. He is raking in tens of millions a year, including a record-breaking $12 million advance for his memoirs. More to the point, he is wealthy with little effort.

Talk shows take effort. A talk show is real work and not just talk. And Bill Clinton is a talker. Those who witnessed his presidency up close speak of its iconic moment: the endless bull session, with the president talking issues every which way and from every angle. Some suggested he did this to fill time while he avoided decisions; his labor secretary Robert Reich said he thought Mr. Clinton enjoyed talking so much because the sound of it made him feel like he had real beliefs.

At any rate he loves to talk but not necessarily to work—to decide, to carry through.

Talk shows require discipline. You get up early, have conference calls, hold meetings, read every newspaper and magazine to stay current. You oversee the tone and topics of the show, prepare for plan interviews, rehearse skits and bits. You meet with writers, you coddle, dominate, bond with and coolly fire producers. You meet with the network to discuss the focus-group data that say people think your hair is too thin, and then spend an hour insisting that you can’t start wearing a toupee as you’re a woman, or you can’t start wearing black leather as you’re a 56-year-old man.

You make the hundreds of personal appearances that boost the show. You manage the charities you’ve created or agreed to head because how could you not—you’re rich and famous in America. You take care of the band leader going through a personal crisis and attend the drummer’s debut with Paul McCartney’s band. This allows you not only to show solidarity with your colleagues but to get to know Paul, which you must do in part because it will help to get the exclusive when Ringo dies.

You also do 128 more things, all the while getting the daily ratings that tell you if you’re slipping or gaining, which information will be in the papers tomorrow with your producer’s reaction, an amusing one-liner the two of you just made up on the phone.

Talk shows are not for sissies. They are not for lazy people. Talk shows take actual leadership. And you have to do them without the power of the government of the United States behind you.

*   *   *

America is a great democratic meritocracy and an odd thing about it is that those at the very top of it, our media stars in New York and Los Angeles, who have more job security than political figures (Jimmy Carters come and go, but Tom Brokaw is forever) and are certainly better paid and more famous, actually work like slaves. They work like staff! Yes, they are wildly compensated, but they don’t get enough sleep, they travel all the time, and half of them say on a semiregular basis, “I hate my life.” Because they’re always tired. Because they carry great responsibility. Because they have to prove they’re good citizens and show up for the speech, the dinner, the fund-raiser, or else a gossip columnist will say they’re not nice, and the bad publicity will hurt the show, whatever the show is.

Luckily for them they tend to love movement and action as it keeps them from having to think. But some of them really do think. And they suffer.

Which gets me back to Mr. Clinton. Not that he’d suffer, just that this would all be too much for him.

Also, Bill Clinton cannot do a talk show because he cannot do the monologue. He cannot do the monologue because to this day, 17 months after his presidency, the most consistently reliable subject of mirth and merriment in monologues is Bill Clinton. (Indeed, Mr. Clinton’s inability to do a monologue last night became the subject of a monologue, as Jay Leno joked that the former president “couldn’t do a late-night show because he couldn’t do Clinton jokes. You can’t do a late-night show without Clinton jokes.”)

And Bill Clinton cannot have a talk show because exactly half the guests on talk shows are young actresses who are beautiful and giggly or soulful and serious. And part of the longstanding talk show tradition is that the host, the Leno or Letterman, flirts with them, either eagerly or awkwardly or both.

Bill Clinton can’t do that because . . . well, back to Hillary.

She knows her husband cannot have a talk show because it would give him a new alternate universe into which to bring his Billness. It would immediately be a success—early numbers at least would be wonderful. Mr. Clinton is and always will be a walking talking event. But success would give him the kind of pleasure that in his case is always the prelude to personal disaster.

He will be so happy he will get into trouble. It will be bad and public trouble. And if he gets into bad and public trouble, Mrs. Clinton may have to handle it. She would have to consider distancing herself from him even more than she does. She might have to divorce him to keep the scandal goo on him and not get it all over her. And one can imagine she does not want to divorce him for many reasons, including that there would be no clear political gain in it. There would be loss and a rehashing of old finger-waving film clips, and it would get in the way of her White House bid in 2004 or 2008.

I’ll bet the talk show won’t happen. Sometimes two people who’ve had a certain relationship for a long time experience something big and even painful: a power shift based on a status shift. With her election to the Senate and her slow subtle emergence as the country’s leading Democrat, Mrs. Clinton’s career is the dominant one in the Clinton family, and the one most promising of future dividends.

The coming departure of Karen Hughes has been covered every which way but mostly as a story about a modern woman who, having it all, decided to relinquish some of it, at least for a while, so she could lead a more personally enjoyable life back home, in Texas, with her son in a local school with longtime friends and her husband, a lawyer, able to practice his profession free of the constraints necessarily placed on spouses of powerful Washington personages.

All of which is a long way of saying she wanted to return to life.

*   *   *

What is life? It is the nice big thing you enter each morning when the alarm goes off and you put your feet on the cool floor and then stand, with your hands on the bottom of your back, and look out the window.

Life is putting on coffee, picking up the newspaper and putting on the radio and listening for a few seconds to see if something huge and terrible happened last night. You can tell by the sound of the voices. Once you hear everyone sounds calm and nice and boring, you keep the station on but don’t really listen.

The mist from the coffee in the mug is rising. The sun hits the newspaper you’re reading as you stand at the kitchen counter and you feel it on your hand. You think: That’s the feel of the sun on my hand.

You open the kitchen window and breathe in fresh air—grass, the man next door just mowed. It’s fresh and cool. You hear birds. You leave the window open so you can keep hearing them. You think, I’ll put a bird house back there.

You notice you do not have a hard little ball in your stomach. Your acid glands do not appear to have launched the morning’s guerrilla attack on the bagel you’re eating. Your heartbeat is not accelerating. You do not have the slight tremor you sometimes get when the phone rings so often it’s come to seem like a constant alarm.

The rictus muscles around your mouth are not tightening. You are not frowning.

What’s happening? Oh—you’ve returned to life.

*   *   *

You are standing there reading the front page. And the front page does not contain information you must respond to. It contains information other people must respond to—the mayor, say, or the head of the arts committee. You wish them well.

You have only one fear. For a long time you’ve had a hunch that fear keeps you slim. That anxiety creates a quicker metabolism. That happiness will make you fat.

You think: I’ll worry about this next week. Or next month.

You dress in soft clothes. That’s what cops and firemen and members of the armed services call not being in uniform. You wear soft old jeans and a thin cotton sweater. They smell of Tide and fabric softener. They feel warm from the dryer. They drape on you light as an oversized glove.

When Karen Hughes worked in the White House she wore hard clothes—wool blend suits and heels and jewelry and makeup; there were buttons and fasteners and flecks of mascara in the eye. She doesn’t have to wear makeup now. She can have a soft face. She can wash her face in Dove foamy cleanser, pat it dry, put on a nice-smelling moisturizer and walk onward into the day.

In that day she can daydream. This is especially important for intelligent people; it’s how they find out what they think.

She can walk and go for long drives. This is important for adults as it allows them unconsciously to absorb through their eyes a changing landscape while they think about things big and small, all of which relate to time going by, meaning to a changing of landscapes.

She can not answer the phone. Not answering the phone is a great gift in life. When you answer the phone, other humans very often bring you their need. “I need you to listen/know/react/advise.” They get you on their agenda.

When you don’t answer the phone you stay on your agenda. Which may or may not be clear but at least is yours.

She can shop. Shopping is a wonderful thing. It’s more wonderful if you have money to buy what catches your eye if you want to own it, but it’s also fun if you don’t have money. It’s really wonderful to just sort of walk along the mall and see what your country is selling, buying, offering. You get to see the other people look at and judge your country’s products. You can buy a big soft pretzel at a stand and sit on a bench and watch the mothers and daughters buy shoes together. If you sit close enough to hear them you’ll be hearing how mothers and daughters talk to each other these days. That’s a good thing to know.

Then you can have lunch with friends and bring each other your agendas, which is a word you never use with friends because you don’t have to. You know each other so well you don’t have an agenda. Or you have one but it’s unspoken, shared and simple: It is: We’re friends, we help each other through life.

Then you can go home and read a book in a chair outside, or on your bed, with the sunlight streaming in on the comforter. It’s good to read. When you read books by people who know things you don’t know, or rather who know things you don’t know and would benefit intellectually, spiritually or emotionally from knowing, you are giving your brain/soul good nutrients. No one ever got stupider, shallower or worse from doing this.

*   *   *

You can think of dinner. You can make it or order it. You can think of what everyone would enjoy and then try to make sure it’ll be good for them too.

You can watch the news and be interested like a normal person by what’s going on, as opposed to being interested like an abnormal person—a person who works for a president, say. You can watch TV shows with your son and husband and just enjoy them. You can daydream to them and have uninterrupted thoughts about what’s happening in Hollywood and what’s happening with people who are 27 and secretly running the country. You can have these thoughts uninterrupted by bells that ring like alarms and agendas that are thrust on you and things you must attend to or the president may suffer.

You can become reacquainted with your country.

You can become reacquainted with the idea of normality.

You can find out how much—or how little—you miss The Great World. You can figure the difference between how much it needed you and how much you needed it.

You can find out how much you need the distractions you used to complain about. You can find out if you were right that you didn’t need them.

You can find out what comes in to fill and take the place of the pressure, pleasure and importance you just left. You have to try and make sure that space is filled by better things. But you have to be open-minded, easy and welcoming about the word better. It can have broad meanings you didn’t expect.

*   *   *

All of this sounds really nice to me. Does it sound nice to you? Then you may want to consider the Hughes Plan, if you can, if you’re able to, if it’s possible, if you’re at a point in life where it’s doable.

Let me tell you why I’m riffing along. I have a feeling the Hughes Plan is related to Sept. 11. The other day a writer friend e-mailed me and said quick, give me a quote on how Sept. 11 changed your life. She was writing an article and just needed another voice to jump in and give words she could put quote marks around.

I didn’t know the answer, or rather I knew a bunch of answers but not one. My friend, however, needed one. So I sat and thought, and then I knew. I wrote back: “Let me tell you what 9/11 did to me. It made me hungrier for life. It made me feel more tenderly toward it and more grateful. It’s all short, even in the worst life it’s too short, and you want to really feel and experience it and smell it and touch it and thank God for it.”

I realized, again, that Sept. 11 had given me a case of Judith Delouvrier. Judith Delouvrier was a wonderful woman who was my friend; our boys went to school together and she was a fine mother and a happy spirit and she loved her husband and they’d just left their apartment and bought a house in my neighborhood. She had a million plans. She jumped on a plane one summer day and never came back. It was TWA 800.

It was all so impossible, so jarring, so unnatural. And in the months and years after her death, if I was walking along and saw something nice—an especially cute dog, a sweet moment between humans, a pretty baby, a beautiful pair of shoes in the window—I’d feel my usual old mild pleasure. And then I would remember that Judith couldn’t see this boring common unremarkable thing. And it made the boring common unremarkable thing seem to me more like a gift, more precious and worthy of attention and appreciation, and even love.

So Sept. 11 did to me what Judith’s death did, only deeper and newer.

And Karen Hughes, who was with the president that day and the days after, maybe she got a case of Sept. 11 too. And maybe it made some part of her want to be more immersed in life. Or more urgently aware that life is not only what you’re doing right this second at the desk, it’s also going on out there beyond the desk, it’s going by like the wind and if you want to you can step out and feel it.

To the extent her decision reminds us of the life outside the desk it is a public service. Not many public servants do things that you can immediately experience as a benefit. So thank you Ms. Hughes. And now I’m going to go read Michael J. Fox’s memoir. And then walk across the Brooklyn Bridge because it’s fun.

This week an old giant returned to speak of what roils us. His words were welcome, heartening and necessary. But they were not, I think, sufficient.

In Rome John Paul II, our warrior-saint of a pope, addressed, finally, the sex scandals that continue to rock the American Catholic Church.

Now the pope is a great man. From almost the moment of his election to the papacy in 1978 he raised his staff—the silver crosier he carries in public, which bears at the top the crucified Christ—turned toward the east and, in effect, commanded the atheist Soviet Union to recede. And almost from that moment the Russian dictatorship began to recede like the great debris-filled wave it was. John Paul II is not only a warrior, of course; he is a mystic who believes the hand of the Mother of God literally guided the bullet away from his heart the day, 21 years ago, that he was shot. He is said to pray seven hours a day—alone, at mass, while doing work. He is a holy man.

In his Holy Thursday letter to the Catholic priests of the world, the pontiff spoke on the sex-abuse scandals that have engulfed the American church. His words were strong and direct. They were also brief, comprising only about 10% of his letter. Here in toto is what he said of the scandals:

At this time too [he refers to the new millennium] as priests we are personally and profoundly afflicted by the sins of some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of Ordination in succumbing even to the most grievous forms of the mysterium iniquitatis at work in the world. Grave scandal is caused, with the result that a dark shadow of suspicion is cast over all the other fine priests who perform their ministry with honesty and integrity and often with heroic self-sacrifice. As the church shows her concern for the victims and strives to respond in truth and justice to each of these painful situations, all of us—conscious of human weakness, but trusting in the healing power of divine grace—are called to embrace the mysterium Crucis and to commit ourselves more fully to the search for holiness. We must beg God in his Providence to prompt a whole-hearted reawakening of those ideals of total self-giving to Christ which are the very foundation of the priestly ministry.”

So, the pontiff said that the priests who have abused and seduced teenage boys and adolescents had given in to the most grievous forms of “the mystery of evil.” He did not call the guilty priests only disturbed or in need of therapy; he said they had done evil and betrayed God’s gift to them, the gift of the priesthood.

One could not read the pope’s words and doubt his dismay. One could not read them without imagining too the anguish behind them. Surely they gave heart to the good priests and seminarians who need to know the pope is on their side; certainly the bad priests, and their protectors in the hierarchy, understood what the pope thinks of them and their actions.

*   *   *

And yet, one must hope the pope’s letter was only a beginning, only a prologue to action more grave and definitive.

To those who have campaigned on the airwaves and in the newspapers of our country, reporting the cases of abuse, payoffs and coverups, and attempting to force the American church toward a new honesty, a new toughness; and to those who have called on Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law to resign, to offer up his career as a sacrifice to demonstrate in a dramatic and unmistakable way that the leaders of the American church have been wrong in their coverups, regret them, feel shamed by the abuse of teenage boys and will begin to clean the church; to all of these people I suspect the pope’s letter seemed both necessary and, sadly, insufficient.

It was heartening that the pontiff broke his silence, heartening that he did not say that priests who prey are only sick, which is how the American cardinals have treated them in the past.

The pope did not say some things that many if not most—I think almost all—Catholics here yearn to hear. He did not speak of defrocking the abusers, of defrocking serial seducers of the young and their protectors. And he did not speak of the victims of abuse and their families, except to assert the church always intends to treat them justly and with sympathy.

But it has not always treated them justly, truthfully and with sympathy, not on our shores.

*   *   *

Some have already said the pope’s statement seems to reflect a mindset in which the church in this drama is more victim than victimizer. I do not think that can fairly be inferred from his letter, but I’m afraid neither can this: a sense that the pope has fully absorbed that the scandal in the American church is not just a heartbreaker but a potential history-changer.

The most ardent American Catholics I know, and an imperfect and sinful lot they are, and I would know as I am one of them, but the most ardent Catholics I know, the ones who are the church—who take the sacraments, go to church, get ashes, go to confession, visit the Blessed Sacrament in the middle of a busy day, who give money to the local church to fix the roof and get new computers for the local Catholic school, who love the church, adhere to it as best they can and hold it high—are the most angry, shocked and disgusted by the scandals. They do not in this tragedy defend the leadership of the American church, as they have in the past. They are not complaining that a few cases of misbehavior are being blown up by a hostile press to attack the church, as they have in the past. Instead they send each other e-mail attachments containing new reports of abuse, and they welcome calls from prominent Catholics such as Bill Buckley and Bill Bennett to clean out the stables.

For the first time in my lifetime ardent Catholics, or perhaps I should say orthodox Catholics, no longer trust their cardinals and bishops to do what’s right. They have pinned their hopes on the Vatican, and on the old warrior saint, JPII. They want him to hold up his silver crosier with the crucified Christ on the top and demand that priests who seduce teenage boys—or who sexually abuse, molest or seduce anyone—be thrown from the church, and that their protectors, excusers and enablers be thrown from it too.

As the scandal has escalated, the language used to describe it has become more shaded, more full of euphemism. Any scandal involving sex in the modern world will become in time an ideological/political scandal, and the little dishonesties of ideological discourse have worked their way into this drama. And as usual they haven’t made things any clearer. But here are some things that appear to be true of the overwhelming majority of the known cases: they involve not rape but seduction; they involve not a sole sin, mistake or indiscretion but a series of seductions by priests who are serial seducers; the seductions do not involve priests in pursuit of sexual relations with women or girls but of priests in pursuit of sexual relations with boys and young men; and most of the victims have been young male teenagers, not little boys.

*   *   *

How did this happen? How did we reach this pass? Perhaps great books will be written in answer to these questions. I think of the simple wisdom of an Irish Catholic grandfather in his 70s who has 11 children and 35 grandchildren and who always seems to be silently praying. He is a low-key leader who has led his family by example, and who is unkind about no one.

I asked him a few months ago if the church was having this trouble 50 years ago. He said no. I asked why. He said, “Because 50 years ago the church had a bigger pool from which to pick its priests.”

It’s true. Half a century ago in the American church the pool from which young seminarians were chosen was wide and deep, fed by belief, love, tradition and large families. But in the decades since, the world has changed, and the pool from which the church picked her priests became narrower, shallower. So much that had fed the pool dried up. America went on a toot—and I would know as I was at the party, as perhaps you were, though I must say the very best people I know seem not to have been. But America went wild in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, and the priesthood got fairly strange too.

Fifty years ago hale and eager young men entered the priesthood out of devotion and gave their celibacy and chastity to God as a gift, to join in His sufferings and deepen their commitment to serving others—to serving, that is, a family of strangers in a place called a parish. There were scandals here and there and problems; some priests left to marry, or for other reasons. But mostly it worked.

But in the past 30 years or so, many young men who were less clear-minded, who were ultimately less devoted, put themselves forth for the priesthood. And the church took them. Some, perhaps many, were sexually ambivalent, or confused, or burdened. Certainly some of them saw themselves as homosexual in their orientation, and some perhaps hoped the church’s very limits and strictures might help them, might protect them from their own desires. And some no doubt became priests in part in hopes they would find comfort surrounded by those who shared their burden.

In any case some of them rose, gained power, prestige and local respect, and became sexual bullies—predators who preyed on 12- and 14-year-old boys in their ambit. And they got away with it. And one priest saw another get away with it, and he tried to get away with it too.

*   *   *

The church turned a blind eye, not institutionally but in case after case, instance after instance, until it might as well have been institutional policy. And for a long time the church got away with it.

Why? Part of the answer is that so many of the serial seducer priests preyed on the powerless. They moved on adolescent boys in families in turmoil, teenage boys in families that had no connections, no status, no one to look out for them. They preyed on families without fathers. In fact, in some of the grimmer cases they were asked in by overwhelmed mothers who were trying to hold to the church in a rocky and dangerous world. The mothers wanted their sons to know a man they could look up to.

One wonders if those who run the American church fear that if they remove all the sex-abuser priests the church, which has a shortage of priests as it is, simply won’t be able to operate anymore. Local churches would close; schools would be understaffed. And this is perhaps the central reason—not the only reason but the biggest one—the cardinals have reassigned abusive priests, and sent serial seducers for psychotherapy, sending them back to parish work when they’d been “cured.”

But the pragmatism of the cardinals and bishops has resulted in scandal for the church—a scandal that will take at least a generation to heal. Now it has resulted in tragedy for the hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocent victims. And now it has resulted in shame and embarrassment for the faithful, striving and suffering priests who have done right, and not wrong, through the years. For they have been tarred by this, and badly.

People who call themselves pragmatic are often the least practical of people. The cardinals thought they were pragmatic.

*   *   *

The other day, like a fool, I thought to myself these words: The church needs a savior. This was followed by the thought: But the church has one. He is its meaning, its purpose, its light. He threw the abusers and predators out of the temple in a great rage; he said “Suffer the little children to come unto me” and gave the innocent His love. He hangs, crucified, on the top of the crosier carried by the pope.

If the Catholic Church throws out the evil priests, its Savior will no doubt see to it that good priests come forward to take their place. That Savior is after all the God of miracles.

Some cardinals have no doubt chosen to keep the sex-abuse stories quiet in order to protect the assets of the church. And in truth the church has assets that deserve protection—great cathedrals, great works of art, schools in which poor children and immigrant children are given a good education and where all are welcome no matter their faith. And local churches with high heating bills where new Americans and old Americans gather, work together, know each other.

The church does so much good! So much of what it is should be protected.

But not, of course, at the price of betraying what the church stands for. The Catholics I know, and I know all kinds, left, right and center, would rather see the cathedrals sold for condominiums than see the decay continue.

Which is where the old pope—the mover of mountains, defeater of tyrannies, killer of communism, holder to the faith whose most special gift has been his power to show the powerless of the world, the peasants, the workers with grim hands, that he was their protector, that he loved them in the name of the church—comes in.

The powerless need his protection now. They need that old crosier held up again, to tell the dirty wave to recede.

Which is why so many of us are hoping that what we heard this week will not be remembered by history as “the pope’s statement” but as “the pope’s first statement—the one that led to a great shaking of the rafters in 2002.”

I have a small thought. I would like to speak of it in a low-key manner. My thought is that we are all talking too much, or rather too dramatically—too colorfully, and carelessly—about things that are really quite dreadful. And we should stop it.

I will start with this: I have been thinking about hospitals for the psychologically and emotionally unwell, and how they run.

Now, there are many wicked people in the world, and some of them are stone evil, but some are also not at all sane. They are frighteningly obsessed or delusional; they have illusions of omnipotence, or no control over their impulses and desires; they hear voices, are unhinged by fantasies of rage and revenge, imagine that they are the reincarnation of Napoleon, or Saladin.

You can ponder whether Saddam Hussein is more evil than crazy or crazy than evil, but anyone who’s seen him on the news would likely conclude that Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber who failed to blow himself and 400 other people out of the sky, is quite clearly unstable.

And there are of course many Richard Reids. The problem in this age of weapons of mass destruction is that we don’t have one Saddam to worry about but cells of Saddams, rings of Reids, scores, hundreds of independent operators, some of whom are trying to create their own weapons of mass destruction, their own obliterates aimed at obliterating life in this place or that.

And many of them are not fully sane. Which is a problem. Which is why I’m thinking about mental institutions.

*   *   *

If you have ever worked in one or visited a friend in one, you’ve probably observed some things about how the unwell are treated. For instance: It is always wise when speaking to the unstable to speak softly if you can, and soothingly if possible. It isn’t good to be loud or theatrical in your subject matter or usage. It is wise not to speak with heightened drama, because for the unstable things are quite dramatic enough. They have storms going on inside them. They don’t need your howling verbal gusts. So, a general rule: Never excite the unstable.

At the same time some of the unstable are dangerous or potentially so, and this cannot be ignored. So it’s always good to be planning ahead. It is wise to be preparing restraints, to have areas in which the dangerous can be segregated from the general population, to have security guards who speak softly but, as they say, carry a big stick. It is wise to have serious plans for treatment, wise to make sure that they cannot get their hands on, say, the ingredients to build a bomb.

Nurses and doctors in such hospitals know all this, especially the part about not bringing unneeded drama to their patients. They do not tell someone who may behave violently, “We hate you and plan to do terrible things to you. The next time you are bad we’re going to kick you, punch you, push you in a hole and put a large cover on it. Then we’re going to cover you with Italian dressing, let you marinate overnight, and cook you.” That kind of language would less likely discourage dramatic action than summon it.

And that’s what I think we all ought to be keeping in our minds these days, how not to summon dramatic action from the marginally stable.

*   *   *

We are at war. This is a grave time. And yet in some ways we are being quite careless in what we are saying and how it might be received. We are being too colorful, too vivid, and unnecessarily so. We are acting as if we are not fully aware of the gravity of the moment.

One gets the sense, reading the newspapers and columnists and Web sites, and listening to news conferences, that we are talking too much these days, saying too much and saying it too graphically.

We are being noisy and clamorous.

We are frightening the inmates. This is not good.

*   *   *

“Let’s Nuke Em All!” Britain’s Daily Mail headlined this week. The story was about the U.S. government review of its nuclear capabilities. Someone—Mary McGrory wondered in her column if it was “doomsday planners” or “a subversive showoff”—leaked the news that the U.S. may be re-evaluating its nuclear posture, strategy and potential targets with an eye to breaking the taboo on tactical nuclear weapons. The New York Times, one of the great newspapers of the world and received by some in the world as a voice of the West, ran an editorial in which it likened America to a “rogue state.” A columnist in the Boston Globe said President Bush is “as frightening as al Qaeda.”

All of this of course followed the previous week’s story of secret plans to invade Iraq.

On Wednesday, President Bush took to the airwaves in an informal news conference and refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons in the war, explaining that his position was “a way to say to people who would harm America: Don’t do it. . . . There’s a consequence.”

Indeed there is, and it would no doubt be terrible. But one wonders if this subject is not better confined to a grave and formal speech to the nation from a somber president, and not served up along with teasing of the press—“That you, Stretch? Oh, it’s Superstretch”—and jokes about the length and complexity of follow-ups. Perhaps this is the White House’s way of showing the president is utterly unrattled by the facts of the new world. But there are other ways to show that he is unrattled, if that has to be shown.

*   *   *

Why are we being so careless and colorful, so offhand, at a time when what faces us is so somber? Maybe we in the media are not thinking of the impression we make en masse, all together, on the world. We think of the impression we make individually, not as part of a media wave that rolls over the globe each day.

And people, even the most sophisticated, tend to project some of their inner world on the outer world around them. The unstable see themselves surrounded by threats, or secret signs. But the stable have illusions too. People who are sane tend to project sanity onto others. Those who, like the writers at great Web sites and great newspapers, are fully stable, imagine that their thoughts and words are received by the stable. And of course that is true. Except when it isn’t.

What they think and write and say is also disseminated throughout the world of America’s enemies, and is not always received in a way that is sober and measured. Some of those who see, on the computer in their home outside Tehran, the headline “Let’s Nuke Em All!” will take it quite literally. They will receive it as yet another reason to get back to work packing the dirty nuke into the backpack. The man who leaked the nuclear review story perhaps thought he was making the world safer—that everyone would understand it as he did. But not everyone will.

*   *   *

“Children will listen,” the old song says. But so will the fragile and mad, and it’s not good to excite them. We should not be leaking that we are reviewing our nuclear capacity; we should be quietly reviewing it. We should not be reporting in hyperventilated tones the review of nuclear policy; we should remember that this only feeds the sickness of those who mean us harm. We should be very quietly debating in the offices of government what an appropriate response would be to the bombing of America; we should reach conclusions, create a plan, and very quietly tell the leaders of the real rogue nations exactly what will happen to them, and to the terrorists who slumber within their borders, if they should dare to bomb an American city. Our words should be blunt little bombs whispered in the ears of Arab leaders in a manner that leaves them with the kind of ringing headache you sometimes get when you’re told terrible news that is true.

But we should probably not be having chatty conversations about whether or not it would be a good idea to take out Mecca.

This is not censorship, it is using judgment in a time of war. It is awareness that projecting stability and sanity onto others, while polite and even touching, is not always warranted.

We should lower our voices, and be chary with words. As if we were well-meaning professionals in an asylum who want to keep everyone safe, and help the sick, and keep them safe as possible too.

Hello my friends, or rather my brothers and sisters, which I’ll explain later. This is going to be one of those long pieces, so park it and come back later, or make some coffee and settle in.

Our thought for today: This is the age of miracles and wonders, and of signs and symbols too.

I am experiencing a change of temperament, if that is the word. I have mostly gone through life as a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist, but now I find, and perhaps it’s only temporary, that I am increasingly a short-term optimist and a long-term pessimist. That’s not quite right. I am certain there is a heaven, which is not a pessimistic belief. But my long-term thoughts about the world are not as sunny as once they were.

And yet I am happy each day and enjoy my life.

While I am worried about the future in a way I cannot shake.

*   *   *

The first e-mail I opened this morning was from a friend who said this: Peggy, the government fears a nuke has been smuggled into the U.S., the Mideast is boiling, the weather is roiling, the church is reeling from sexual corruption in the clergy, and last night came a report that a statue of Padre Pio in Sicily is weeping blood. “I’m feeling very apocalyptic, and I’m serious,” he wrote. He’s sane, sound, not usually excitable. He reminded me of Andrew Sullivan, who wrote Wednesday on his blog that for the first time since Sept. 11 he is having nightmares. The next day he posted Senate testimony that a dirty bomb would render Manhattan uninhabitable for decades.

So many of us, at least so many of my New York friends, are experiencing a Second Great Wave of anxiety. Maybe it is connected to or heightened by the approaching milestone, six months after Sept. 11, maybe it is that and other things.

The friend who had e’d me followed up with news that the Chinese are creating dozens of cloned embryos in their labs. The British medical journal New Scientist has reported a Chinese team “based at Shanghai No. 2 Medical University” says it has “derived stem cells from hybrid embryos composed of human cells and rabbit eggs.” The journal said scientists throughout the world fear similar research in the US and UK has been “bogged down” by “ethical concerns.”

Ah, those pesky ethical concerns. They slow you up just when you could be creating in a Petri dish the recipe for Rabbit Man. And then of course you could grow him, bring him into being, for all but dunces know that what man can do he will do. And then perhaps once you’ve grown him you can have Rabbit Man for dinner.

My friend sent the story because once, in conversation, I had told him I feared cloning was the key, that the big headline I feared is “First Cloned Human Being Born: ‘We Call Him Adam!’ Says Scientist.” I had told my friend I thought there would be few happy headlines after that one. Because, as the bible says and Sam Ervin quoted, God is not mocked.

And so today, after the morning mail, I thought again as I often do these days of Langston Hughes. “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / Said, ‘No more water, the fire next time.’ ” If it comes, I feel we will have to thank, among so many others, the good men and women of Shanghai No. 2 Medical University.

*   *   *

I found the Padre Pio story on a Catholic Web site and didn’t know what to make of it. As Kevin Orlin Johnson, the great writer on Catholic mysticism, has said, there are few stories the church dislikes more than levitating housewives and bleeding statues. And yet. The BBC report, based on an Italian news-agency story, said that thousands of people flocked earlier this week to the city of Messina, in Sicily, after reports that a statue of the Catholic mystic had begun to weep blood. The seven-foot-tall bronze statue stands across the square from Our Lady of Pompei Church in Messina. Tuesday night a passerby looked up and saw that it seemed to be weeping. A local priest was called. The BBC said he tried to wipe away “a red substance leaking from the eyes” of the statue.

Padre Pio, who died in 1968, bore the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, an extremely unusual mystical phenomenon in spite of what Hollywood movies suggest. There have been only a handful of such men and women in all of human history. Padre Pio was a great man, a gifted confessor, an ascetic, a mystic, a saint; he has quite a following in the church, and is to be canonized in Rome in June by Pope John Paul II, who knew the padre when he was a young cardinal from Poland.

The weeping statue was reported on Tuesday. On Wednesday John Paul, who is suffering among other things from persistent pain in his knees, which has no doubt been made worse by his continued habit of kneeling and praying, greeted a Vatican audience from his papal study. He spoke on Psalm 64: “Hear my voice, O God in my prayer: reserve my life from fear of the enemy. Hide me from the secret counsel of the evil-doers.”

The pope told the audience, in his commentary: “In the Bible, creation is the seat of humanity and sin is an attack on the order and perfection of the world. Conversion and forgiveness, therefore, restore integrity and harmony to the cosmos.” It is amazing that this 82-year-old man who suffers from Parkinson’s, who has lived an arduous, effortful, searing life, who was born during war, who endured Nazism and communism, who is fighting now materialism and fatalism, who has been shot, who suffers, is still with us, and occasionally with a startling vitality.

It is interesting to me too that so many Catholics, at least ones I know, seem to feel that while he is alive they are safe. It will be hard when he leaves. Although I must say Catholics can be merry even about that. A few months ago I was talking with a priest about the prophecies of St. Malachy, a mystic who, 1,000 years ago, wrote a line of prophecy about each future pope. The next one, the priest told me, is described by Malachy as “the joy of the olive.” I didn’t know that, and asked him what he thought it might suggest. He said, “It suggests we should keep our eye on Cardinal Martini.”

When I told another friend he laughed and added, “But the olive tree is also the symbol of Israel. It may mean the next Pope will be a son of Israel.” Such as the retired Cardinal Lustiger of Paris, a convert from Judaism.

*   *   *

But back to my subject, which may be the six-month mark since Sept. 11. The papers in New York have been carrying reports that the emotional aftershocks of trauma tends to be most intense six to 12 months after the event. Which would possibly explain both my friends’ apocalyptic jitters and what I’ve been seeing on the subway.

I notice that people on the subway in just the past few days have been—well, I am seeing less beauty in our subways, after months of finding them the best place to be.

I love my darling subway and feel great tenderness toward the people crowded into it. We’re all together in the noise and clamor and crowdedness, with lights flickering on and off and the public-address system hissing inadequately and the train jerking to a stop in the middle of the tunnel. I sit there—I almost always get a seat—and say the rosary and am happy. How could I not be? I have progressed in my prayer life from praying for myself and my loved ones to praying for others. This took a solid 12 years. Twelve years to learn to pray consistently for others! (This is, I know, an amazingly personal thing to say, but I don’t imagine it can harm anyone, and this is not a time for reticence in such matters.) I now pray for strangers, happily. I am so proud of this, and relieved. The subway gives me constant new people to pray for.

It’s like the Canterbury Tales down there, like the great procession, so many different kinds of people doing different things, thinking fabulous things, on their way to different places, living different lives. It’s like a Broadway show. I wish people would stand and share their reveries, or sing whatever song is in their heads. On the No. 4 train there is the man with no legs. He pushes himself along on a little roller-blade sort of rig, pushing himself through the cars with a paper cup, saying nothing. He looks like Porgy in “Porgy and Bess.” The tall white men almost uniformly ignore him, the shorter darker people, especially the women, give him quarters and dollars. The ones who have least give quickest, and most.

Last week a woman was walking car to car as the train rushed along. She was in her 40s, black, heavy, with a little white wool hat on her head. She was preaching Christ and him crucified. You looked at her and you really couldn’t tell if she was filled with the Holy Spirit or off her meds. You didn’t know if she was in the full sway of evangelical fervor or in full psychotic break. But there was a lovely tolerance with which everyone looked up, observed, listened and then went back to their papers or back to sleep.

There are crazy people who won’t harm you, and friendly old people, and kids. There is an Asian woman whom I’ve seen a few times, dead asleep, with her two children, each under 10, sleeping soundly next to her.

I sit and pray and feel my prayers bring greater peace wherever I am. And lately this is good, for in just the past few days, as we approach the sixth-month point, things are getting snarkier in our underground. There is more disturbance down there in the dark, more tension than in December and January and February. Or so it seems to me.

Yesterday a man was haranguing a young stranger in a loud voice, verbally harassing her on the need for friendliness between people who don’t know each other. He was aggressive, hectoring. The poor young woman just nodded, smiled and tried to placate. I prayed on him, and he got off the train.

Earlier this week there was a more dramatic moment. A woman—hyper, in her 20s, tall, strong, Jamaican accent, tight black pants, high boots—got into an argument with a young Asian woman. I couldn’t make out what it was about, but the Jamaican woman was very angry. Then she turned her anger on a young man, who intervened for the Asian woman. In a loud and dominating voice she called him “rude” and “inappropriate” and “incapable of facing” his own lack of manners. She was very articulate and quite forceful, and she seemed on the edge of out of control.

Finally, pale with anger, the man snapped, “You’d be a lot better off if you’d lay off the heroin. I’m a doctor, and I know what I’m talking about.”

She became enraged, stood and yelled, “What do you know? You’re a doctor? I’ll show you my needle-pocked arm as I knock your block off!” And she went toward him. And ever so smoothly, ever so massively, a young black man wearing earphones blocked her way, as if by accident.

“Yes, my sister, he is rude, ignore him. I know you’re not on H. He has no idea the charge he’s making.”

She looked at him. She pleaded her case to him. She started to simmer down. He said soothing words.

She was utterly unconscious of her own aggression, and experienced herself as a person under siege, forced to stand up for her own humanity. She couldn’t see that she was pushing people around.

But he understood, and befriended her. And now they stood talking, finally chuckling, as we bumped along from station to station through the darkness. She got off at 33rd Street. We all let out sighs of relief. The man who’d helped her moved to get off at the next stop.

I patted his arm. “My friend,” I said.

He removed his ear phones and looks at me.

“You are a diplomat,” I said. He shook his head in the noise. “You are a born diplomat,” I said louder.

His face broke into a smile. Now the man sitting next to me joined in. “Did good, man,” he said. He looked like a cop.

The diplomat smiled, nodded, shrugged. “All just tryin’ get home, man. Just doin’ our best.”

I switched trains at 14th Street, stood a few stops. A seat opened up and a man who was drinking from a bottle in a brown paper bag gestured to me to take it. I smiled my thanks, and a few stops later the seat next to me opened and I moved over and he sat down. When I got to my stop I asked him if he wanted my paper and he said no, and then yes, and thanked me with a sweet smile. I said, “Goodbye, my brother,” and he said goodnight.

The man on HBO’s “Oz” who is the leader of the prison Muslims gets to call those who share his faith “my brother.” I always like the way he says it, with such dignity and respect. My faith is one whose adherents include all races and ethnic groups, and I never know who my brothers and sisters are. So I’ve decided they’re everyone. I have taken to calling strangers with whom I interact “my brother” and “my sister.” It surprises people but no one seems to dislike it, and almost everyone smiles. There is a great liberation to age. You are allowed to say anything when you are a middle-aged woman, for no one is eager to be offended by you. You’re harmless, and probably well-meaning. I can’t wait till I’m old. I will call strangers “my beloved little darling.”

But the point, and there really was one a few score paragraphs ago: New Yorkers are getting jittery again, and the subways are getting tenser, or so it seems to me.

*   *   *

I have been on the subway so much because I’ve been going into town to witness and be part of various events. One was a screening of the CBS documentary on 9/11, which airs next week. CBS was nervous about it, though it’s hard to see why. It is a respectful and affectionate look at Lucky 7, the FDNY Ladder company downtown that was among the first, if not the first, company to respond that terrible day. All of its members survived because, paradoxically, they got to the scene early. They went to the first tower that was hit, which was the second tower to fall. They milled around in the lobby. There’s nothing gruesome in the documentary, no falling bodies, no people on fire. The story is told through the eyes of a “probie,” a probationary fireman newly assigned to the company, and through the lens of two Frenchmen, brothers who were doing a documentary on the NYFD.

The film captures the ghost-town quality of downtown that day, with everything covered in Pompeii-like ash. It captures the lostness of the firemen massed in the lobby of the first tower, as lost as a platoon on D-Day overwhelmed with heavy fire and not knowing where anyone is or what to do. It captures one of the great strangenesses of the catastrophe, and of modern life in general. And that is that the men on the scene, in the lobby of the tower, knew less about what was going on that day than did a casual viewer of television half a world away in Taiwan. The Taiwanese anchorman had the wires, live pictures, live reports. The firemen on the scene had nothing but dead radios in their hands. They had no idea what was happening, and didn’t know what to do.

It is amazing when this happens, when people a world away know what’s happening 200 yards from you and you don’t. But it happens in our modern, fully wired and utterly fragile world. Wires, wires everywhere, and yet when the catastrophe comes the firemen have dead radios and can’t get word on what’s happening.

*   *   *

I went to a lunch at the home of Tina Brown, whose Talk Books is publishing a memoir by a young Afghan woman who defied the Taliban and started a school for women in her home. She is young, in her early 20s, and shy. She does not speak English and seems overwhelmed, understandably so. I asked her something I have not heard fully answered. It is: What is in young men in your homeland that makes them want to join a movement as destructive of culture and violent toward women, toward their sisters and mothers, as the Taliban? But the question-and-answer became lost in translation, and I did not learn what I hoped to learn.

The women invited to meet the writer were a slice of Manhattan life—other writers and editors, publishers, media people, political people. It was a ladies’ lunch, all women. In a dozen years in New York I had met many of them before, but now I see them less, and in a way I saw them anew. Erica Jong, the novelist, was there, warm and full of conversation. She told me she is hoping to be principal for a day soon at a local high school. An old friend from CBS was there, wry and funny.

I saw a woman I used to know sitting at one of the small white round tables, went to say hello and halfway there thought without thinking: Don’t. I wondered afterward what had stopped me. On one level she seemed like a handsome lady at lunch. On another she was . . . like a snorting animal pawing the ground. She was glowering. In fact observing her made me think of a Lewis Carroll poem about spending Christmas Day with his extended family. “I thought I saw a buffalo upon the chimney piece / I looked and saw instead it was my sister’s husband’s niece.”

She was a buffalo ready to charge. Later conversation with others at her table revealed that she’s still smoking with rage at the failed presidency of Bill Clinton, who is her close friend of many years. “Why does Bush get good press?” she demanded of her table mates.

I don’t understand the bitterness of New York Clinton folk. They had their eight years; some of them did their best; it ended with its derelictions; we had 9/11; now it’s over. You’d think they’d keep their counsel, choose a new man to back for president and back him, help him, tout him, fund him.

Instead they waste their time simmering, resenting, as if Clinton had been their only shot. If he was, they’re in worse trouble than I thought.

And there was a woman who was once my friend, who backed and worked for the Clintons and who thought being loyal to them meant we must no longer be friends after I wrote so much against them. She approached me, kissed me hello and kept walking. When I first met her 10 years ago she was humorous, modest, hopeful. Now she is sharp featured and tough. No, hard. She is hard.

The odd thing about these people is that they have everything. They are rich, accomplished, healthy; they have marriages, children, love; they don’t have to be up nights worrying about paying the rent or the electric bill. And they are not really happy.

They have been lucky so long they don’t even know they’re lucky anymore. That’s the bad thing that can happen to you when you’ve been lucky too long: You start to think it’s not luck, it’s what you deserve. And instead of being grateful you get a bitter-tinged sense of entitlement. You start to think you deserve it, you made the right choices. You’re smarter than the dumb people, or more accomplished than the lazy people.

When the truth is you’re lucky and blessed and should be on your knees saying thank you for your good fortune, and giving out 20s on the subway.

Instead they have a sense of being cheated. Why isn’t my life perfect? Why don’t we have $2 billion instead of $1 billion? Why isn’t Al Gore president? Why can’t everyone love Bill, he deserves it!

*   *   *

But back to the topic of this piece, which appears at one point to have been that we’re coming up on six months after Sept. 11.

I think the untold, unmentioned story about New York right now, as I wrote in a British newspaper earlier this week, is the disjunction between what we truly think and how we act.

Each day we re-enact normality. We re-enact life before Sept. 11. That woman hurrying along Fifth Avenue in the coat with the mink collar, rushing with shopping bags from Barneys and Saks into the place where they do your nails. She thinks a nuke may go off in midtown this afternoon. But she also knows she needs a manicure.

She gets her nails done and muses on what will happen when the big thunderclap comes, and the sky fills with light and the wind begins to whip.

I don’t think the world fully appreciates how targeted we feel in New York, but then I don’t think we fully appreciate it either. But it occurs to us now and then, as we rush through the streets in our busy, distracted way, that we’ve got a target on our backs. You can walk along Madison Avenue, or First, and look and see: Nothing has changed since Sept 10. We’re all still hurrying along, walking briskly through the world with our distractions and our plans. And yet every one of us knows it’s quite possible—oh, it’s quite likely—that we’ll be hit again, and worse next time than last.

It is odd and interesting that everyone thinks it will be midtown next time, not downtown or uptown. Times Square, or Broadway, or 50th and Fifth.

*   *   *

If we think this, why don’t we leave?

You’d think we’d always be asking each other this question. We’re not. We don’t talk about it much at all. We keep our thoughts to ourselves. We don’t want to be the morbid person at the lunch, or the downer at dinner. We maintain our cheerfulness. And it isn’t even a mindless good cheer, it’s something else.

There is no really good answer to why we don’t leave, but there are a million understandable ones. “My life is here.” “My job is here.” “The kids are in school here.” A friend told me she doesn’t want to live in a world without New York; she’ll go down with the ship.

And, “We don’t know anyone in Topeka, Laramie, Tuscaloosa.” We only know people here.

The people who lived at the bottom of Vesuvius didn’t leave Pompeii while the volcano simmered and smoked. How could they? They didn’t know anyone in Messina, or Rome. They had their lives in Pompeii, their ties in Pompeii.

But there’s another thing New Yorkers are thinking. It’s that deep in their hearts they don’t really think there is a safe place. They don’t think there’s any safety anymore. They only think there’s time, right now, this second. So they have their nails done, and do their work, and go to the lunch, and file the story, and argue the case. There’s a gallantry, a cool courage, to New Yorkers now, and I wonder if they see it, if they appreciate it in themselves. I do. It’s part of why I want to call them my brother, and my sister.

A good little scandal this week and just when we needed it, when things were getting a little slow. “The West Wing” producer Aaron Sorkin perked things up by telling Tad Friend of The New Yorker that it’s good we’re “laying off the bubblehead jokes” about President Bush but let’s face it, we’re all just “being polite” and making believe Mr. Bush is a substantial figure. He added that it’s too bad NBC’s Tom Brokaw agreed to let the White House rearrange the president’s schedule to make him look “more engaged” when NBC aired its “A Day in the Life of the President,” which was broadcast after a recent “West Wing” episode.

When Matt Drudge got hold of the New Yorker interview, he headlined it on his site, spicing it with comments from an unnamed NBC executive who said “Sorkin does not speak for us.” Soon NBC president Jeff Zucker came forward to defend Aaron’s criticisms of Mr. Bush, saying he has every right to his views although he was wrong to criticize Mr. Brokaw, as everyone knows all presidents change their schedules for day-in-the-life shows. (And good thing, too. Cameras need action. You can’t show a president discussing national-security secrets or sitting in the offices daydreaming or answering the mail. You have to show them dashing into important meetings or burrowing quickly through the halls, which is how Aaron shows President Bartlett on “The West Wing.”)

*   *   *

I call him Aaron because I know him and I know him because I am an adviser or contributor to “The West Wing.” I’m not sure which because I can’t find the letter of agreement. I am, as far as I know, the only conservative who works on the show, though maybe there are more. I send Aaron e-mails from New York with ideas and suggestions. About every fourth show someone says something conservative. That’s usually me. Two weeks ago, for instance, Press Secretary C.J. was talking to Presidential Conscience Tobey about affirmative action. When Tobey pressed C.J. for her views, she said she was the wrong Democrat to ask. She explained that her father had once been denied a job when someone else got it in an affirmative action decision. Tobey nodded and asked, “How’s he doing?” C.J. said, lightly, “Fine.”

In my version, C.J.’s father had suffered. He was an idealist who believed everyone has an equal shot at success in America, a public school teacher who wanted to help kids and was gifted in his work with them; now he saw a less qualified and implicitly less loving person elevated at his expense, and only because he was the wrong color. It left him shattered. The flag on which he’d stood had been pulled from under him, and he never fully regained his balance.

When Aaron wrote it, C.J.’s father was not a victim of government but a fellow doing fine. In part because that’s how Aaron thinks about affirmative action, and it’s his show. And in part perhaps because C.J.’s terse “he’s fine” is dramatically interesting—a man is treated badly and he’s fine. Life is strange.”

*   *   *

Aaron is a really interesting man. He is brilliant to begin with, and he has more wit than he displays on his show. He works like a dog and is deeply committed to excellence in his work. He is, in my view, an incipient artist who has not fully decided whether he is a political operative who does art or an artist who does politics.

The show he produces each week is a hymn to the American political process. I love it. I think one of the most constructive things it does for our culture is help young people feel romantic about adulthood. It tells them that no matter who they are or where they’re from, they can work hard and rise and come to walk the halls of the White House, helping a great president lead his country well. It is a hymn, too, to professionalism, to the joy of being a professional operating at the height of one’s powers “along the lines of excellence” as JFK used to say.

It is a show about friendship and loyalty. No one cares about people like the chief of staff, Leo, a pained and sensitive man who’s earned his furrowed brow. It is compassionate about people in trouble (see Leo’s relapse into active alcoholism during the New Hampshire primaries) and respectful of people who struggle (see Josh’s secretary attempt, with respect for her own real if not heightened intelligence, to puzzle through the great issues of the day.) It is not a highly sexualized show, it is not violent, and it is wonderfully dramatic.

The shows in which Bartlett, reeling from the death of his beloved secretary in a car crash, struggling with his multiple sclerosis, trying to decide whether and how to run for re-election, and remembering his childhood with a bullying father who showed one face to the public and another to his son—well, this is a very long sentence but when it all came to a head with Bartlett having a semi-unhinged argument with God in the National Cathedral and then a semidelirious colloquy with the dead secretary in a lightning-lit Oval Office as a storm raged without—I thought it was as big and terrific and absorbing as TV gets. Some people put down the argument with God, but I thought it was beautiful because you don’t argue with one who does not exist. The estimable President Bartlett knows there is a great God. This is not bad.

Some episodes are not so good. The dreary lecture-show that followed Sept. 11 was an intellectual’s attempt to evade the truth of Sept. 11 by avoiding the emotions Sept. 11 elicited. It yielded lifeless drama, because the emotions of Sept. 11 contained within them the great truth of Sept. 11: Bad men did bad things, leaving us wounded and furious. A prim little history of terrorism that was wholly somber and yet lacked seriousness was just what no one needed. I thought it was an example of how stupid intellectuals can be, missing the obvious point that the neighborhood dunce apprehends in a second.

*   *   *

But back to what Aaron said about Bush. It is surprising that it caused so much comment, even in a relatively slow news week. Because Aaron Sorkin was only saying what Aaron Sorkin thinks. And Aaron Sorkin thinks the thoughts of a left-liberal.

Because he is a left-liberal. And the show he writes and produces each week, the show whose storylines and dialogue he dreams up, reflects his views, utterly.

No one has every accused “West Wing” of being a conservative show or a right wing show—no one, ever. That’s because it’s not. It’s a left-liberal show that propounds left liberal ideas through the acting of such left-liberals as the gifted Martin Sheen. I know this. Aaron Sorkin knows it. And you know it too if you’re paying attention.

A reporter once asked me if I thought, as John Podhoretz had written , that “The West Wing” is, essentially, left-wing pornography. I said no, that’s completely wrong. “The West Wing” is a left-wing nocturnal emission—undriven by facts, based on dreams, its impulses as passionate as they are involuntary and as unreflective as they are genuine. After I sent the answer in an e-mail to a reporter, I showed it to Aaron so he could have a response ready. I told him he was completely free to fire me and I could hardly complain, but he should fire me right away before the comment was published or down the road when no one remembers it. He laughed and said no, and the comment in any case was never printed.

Which left me mildly relieved. I continued sending my e-mails, and soon there was a rumor that the character of Ainsley Hayes, the young, blond, chic, fair-minded, miniskirt-wearing Republican lawyer, was based on me. I loved that rumor. I certainly enjoyed spreading it. I told my friends of course she’s based on me, it’s obvious, I have legs exactly like her legs, inside my legs. (Ainsley, alas, was dreamed up and in the Sorkian creative pipeline long before I got there. However if you tell people she’s based on me that’s really all right.)

*   *   *

But back to what Aaron said about President Bush. I think his comments were bubbleheaded. But they were not “wrong” or “terrible,” or “scandalous,” and not only because everyone in America has the right to insult the president, or any politician anywhere for that matter.

His comments were, to me, a step toward clarity and candor, which are good things. Aaron Sorkin thinks Republicans in general are bubbleheads. He thinks conservatives tend toward evil and cynicism, although I think some stubborn little part of his brain knows it isn’t quite that easy.

But it isn’t bad that Aaron was frank, and it isn’t bad that he put his political heart on his sleeve. He writes what is arguably the most important political show in America. He shouldn’t have to hide where he stands. His New Yorker comments reminded me of the flap following the disclosure that my old boss Dan Rather had hosted a Democratic fund-raiser in Texas. He’s a liberal, why shouldn’t he go to a Democratic fund-raiser? And why shouldn’t we know it, and factor it in as he reports the news?

Tony Snow of Fox News Channel got in a small amount of trouble last year for making a speech to a conservative group. So what? Why shouldn’t he speak to a conservative group? One of the great things about the explosion of media in our time—all the TV and radio and talk shows and Internet sites—is that everyone gets a voice. There isn’t only one media funnel now, as there used to be, and the people at the networks don’t have to pretend anymore that they don’t hold political views when they do, and passionately.

“The West Wing” is liberal. I like it. I am not a liberal. I am a conservative. I watch it each week and enjoy it because I am capable of ignoring its political slant and filtering out its political propaganda. Once I push past them, and I do not as a rule find it difficult, I can find out how the Bartlett campaign is going and whether Sam is getting a personal life and whether Tobey will get back with his former wife and C.J. fall in love with the reporter. You just have to push past the slant to get to the drama. Then you can sit back and enjoy not only the characters but the actors, like Martin Sheen, who happens to be a wonderful Dorothy Day kind of Catholic and whose politics are intransigently leftist and therefore quite stupid.

*   *   *

A note on Aaron’s art. If he screened out the propaganda on his own it would not only make it easier on a lot of us, it would put him that much closer to being a dramatist of the stature of a William Inge or Tennessee Williams or Paddy Chayevsky. With a first-rate artist you can often guess his politics. Walker Percy, who wrote about the secret brokenness and lostness of our selves, which is to say our souls, was probably in many ways a conservative. Tennessee Williams with his great tugging heart toward the outsider, the outrider, the one who doesn’t fit, was probably a liberal. Eugene O’Neill, if he had lived 20 years longer, through the 1970s, would probably have completed the transit from socialist to right-wing nut.

Or so I imagine.

But I have to guess. Their work doesn’t bludgeon me with the political views of the dramatist (or, in Percy’s case, the novelist.) Their work stands, speaks and stays, untethered to passing political views and positions. Which is one reason they’re great.

His show would be better if Aaron Sorkin tried to be great.