Peggy Noonan

One year ago he stood before us, right hand raised, a new president chosen by a shade less than half the American adults who are responsible enough to bother to vote. He had been certain of victory and shocked by the closeness and the Florida aftermath. The weekend before the polls opened, Al Gore strained for every vote; George Bush went home early, making the almost fatal decision of responding with what seemed wan disinterest to a well-wired last minute revelation of a drunk driving incident in his past.

And it all seems so long ago.

He is not the minority president anymore, he is the president. His approval ratings are in the 90s. He saw that happen to his father, whose popularity was at 90% a year before he was voted out. Because George W. Bush remembers this well he does not operate under the illusion that 90% of the people think he’s just great, and mean to rehire him in 2004. He thinks of polls as thermometers: Today he is at 98.6, hale and healthy. Tomorrow he may run a fever. Things change.

He knows his father’s popularity slid in part because his father saw his numbers as a jewel you could wear. He didn’t have to do anything with his popularity, he just had to wear it. This works if your luck holds and doesn’t if it doesn’t. The economy began to falter. People looked at him and thought: “I’m getting laid off and he’s walking around with a jewel called ‘The American People Love Me.’ I think I’ll take it away from him.” They did.

George W. Bush watched and learned.

A year ago he stood before us and spoke of “the angel in the whirlwind.” In the last year he found whirlwind and angel, and the finding changed everything.

*   *   *

Sept. 11 did many important things. Somewhere on the list is this: It gave shape, purpose and meaning to the new president’s presidency. On Sept. 10 the Bush administration was about faith-based social assistance, tax cuts, an improved military—the modern conservative agenda. And like all agendas it had many parts, and the parts became a blur. That happens in politics. Sept. 11 blew the blur away. The presidency is now about two things: ridding the world of madmen who seek to terrorize, and making America safer from weapons of mass destruction. Everything else comes after that.

He has become, as everyone has pointed out, a leader. Our leader, the American president. There are some who knew he always had this potential, had the gift of figuring things out quickly, deciding, delegating, saying what he was doing and why, getting folks to see things his way. A year or so before he announced he would run for president I read a quote about him from the Texas Democrat Bob Bullock. He and George W. had become friends as they worked together during Mr. Bush’s first year as governor. Bullock was smart and tough. And when he was asked about Mr. Bush, shortly before he died, he said, “Let me tell you about that fellow. He’s going to be a president, and he’s going to be a great one.” I watched him closely after that and read everything about him. In time, I came to think: Bullock is going to be proved right.

One of the things I realized about Mr. Bush in the late 1990s was that his politics were different from his father’s in an interesting and subtle way. His father was a low-budget liberal who accepted liberalism’s assumptions but thought Democrats spent and taxed too much. George W. is a high-budget conservative, who believes in conservatism but doesn’t worry too much about spending money to, say, reform the military. And, it seems, a high-budget conservative is what he will continue to be as president.

Mr. Bush continues to prove that he is not eloquent, and that he does not have to be. People need a plain speaker who’ll tell them what he thinks and why. Mr. Bush does this. He does it with the words of the average American, simple flat words. I like the way he talks because I understand it. Bill Clinton was always issuing great smoggy clouds whose meaning I could not fully decipher. Mr. Bush gives you arrows of speech that have a target and land. It’s good.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush is not obsessed with his legacy. This is good because it suggests he is emotionally and intellectually mature, which is how we want our presidents to be. When you walk into the presidency as a fully formed adult your first thought is “What should I do first and how and when?” When you walk into it with more vanity than sense, more hunger than purpose, your first thought is of what history will say of you. This is like moving into a new neighborhood and deciding the first thing you’ll do is find out if the neighbors like you, as opposed to the more constructive, “I think I’ll cut the grass, paint the house and join the civic organization.” Mr. Clinton spent all his time thinking about his legacy, and by the end he had one: He was the president who spent his time thinking about his legacy while Osama made his plans. He wasted history’s time. Mr. Bush isn’t like this. Be grateful.

Mr. Bush works well with the competing personalities around him. He keeps Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Condi Rice and Paul Wolfowitz close, listens, seems to have an acute sense of what each can give him. He appreciates Mr. Powell’s power as a leader and man of respect, and means to keep him close. He will have to, in 2002, which he has called “a war year.” That war has many fronts and there are many ways to move forward on each; the war can become bigger or smaller, hotter or cooler, wider or narrower. When he makes his decisions he will announce them, explain them and argue for them with a striking plainness. The quality will be needed, and it is good that the president has it.

I have not read a newspaper in seven days, nor heard a news report, gone online, or called the States in four. Apparently you’re all well, or I would have heard about it on the beach. I find it very easy, for the first time in three months, not to know what is going on. It is a real pleasure. When the young man at the beach comes to sell newspapers, I do not call out to him as I did last year. I have no idea what columnists are saying. Shortly before I left home I heard that Charles Krauthammer had compared the American Battle of Afghanistan, in terms of historical impact and implications, to the battle of Agincourt. I mentioned this at dinner on Christmas night to a large table of beloved friends. A teenager piped up, “We few, we happy few, we band of Afghans.” The educational system of our country is not a complete dud.

*   *   *

I am in Mexico. It is warm, in the high 80s, and humid, but softly so. We are on a little bay in a little town on the western coast. In the Spanish-language daily there is no talk of Osama and war, only of Argentina and its financial/political crisis, which for those who live here is of great importance.

On the porch this morning there were hummingbirds floating above the pink-red bougainvilleas. A big ceiling fan turned slowly. A little boy, the three-year-old son of friends, walked in with tiny, half-inch-wide lemons and oranges. “Smell,” he said as he put them to my nose. They had a full, sweet citrus smell. I told him they were fruits specially grown for infants. He thought about this and walked away.

*   *   *

Overnight a huge white cruise ship dropped anchor in the bay. It looks very important and mighty. A local friend told me that it doesn’t dock because the town would charge it too much, so instead the ship sends little launches full of tourists to town. But they don’t walk through the town and buy things, they are met by a bus at the docks which takes them to a local and newly discovered archeological dig. There they walk around and look at it and ask questions and then get back in the bus and back to the ship. This all strikes me as not fully courteous. It is only fair if you’re going to use the town’s roads also to go to its shops, which are very nice, and give them money in return for products.

There is a little local agitation about all this. But it made me think of a subplot for a movie. A small and obscure town in Mexico is going broke. It is never frequented by tourists or cruise ships, for there is nothing there. The locals decide they must change this, or they will all have to leave and seek a living elsewhere. And they don’t want to as they love their sleepy little town. So they decide to make their own archeological site.

The mayor claims they have found great archeological discoveries 10 feet underground beneath the old bus station. It appears to be a 600-year-old Spanish mission. It has old bricks and old crucifixes and old friar’s shoes. Word gets around and tourists start coming. The locals create the dig site in a really professional way, with little dug-up and pre-dug-up areas, and little brushes for gently brushing dirt off bricks and pieces of masonry; and everyone wears big pocket khaki Gap shorts and eyeglasses and baseball caps bearing the names of movie studios and media outfits. When the buses arrive they are there, doing their work quietly and diligently, except when one of them exclaims, “But this could be pre-Columbian!” Another calls over the government site control official and says, “It is barely legible, but look—I think the lettering says C-O-R . . .”

And someone else says, wisely, “This is too exciting, do you understand what this might be?” There is silence. And then the oldest man there, soft white hair and a face baked for a century in the sun, says softly, “Cortez.”

Every day heavy launches full of tourists are met at the dock by local people with donkeys and old carriages. They charge a small amount to take the rich Americans and Germans and Asians to the site. They are well tipped. At the site the tourists ooh and aah, and watch as priceless old treasures are unearthed. A man playing the part of the local wiseguy takes one of the tourists aside. “There is loads of this stuff. No one will miss anything. We haven’t even catalogued it. You want to buy an old crucifix? I have one. Here, $50.” The tourist pays.

Everyone goes home, the tourists happily to the ship, the locals back to the little house where they make the old crucifixes, beating them with hammers and putting them on the stove for burn marks. They hammer out some new Cortez signs on old tin.

The town is saved, the tourists are happy, and one woman from Wiesbaden, holding her little burnt-up cross, experiences a religious conversion and attributes it ever after to the Crucifix of Cortez. I like this story.

*   *   *

Actually there has been one bit of local news, and I know of it because the people here who witnessed it haven’t stopped talking about it. It is what happened with the moon. Two nights before Christmas, people were outside walking along when suddenly they looked up and saw the moon and saw an amazing thing. There was a perfect brilliant white ring around it. As one who was there told me, if you imagine the moon as a one-inch-round ball of whiteness, about four inches from its circumference and making a perfect circle was a perfect white ring. “It was like a ring you would put on your finger,” a young man who saw it told me. His mother added: “It had that sort of shine to it.” And a doctor who has lived here for a decade told me, with a look of real wonder, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

They all discussed it as a meteorological oddity, but I of course immediately apprehended what it was: a celestial gift. A nod from God. For three days earlier, in Rome, Pope John Paul II had approved the canonization of Juan Diego.

Juan Diego of Mexico, the loving and humble Indian peasant who five centuries ago saw the Blessed Mother, talked to the beautiful lady and, through a series of amazing occurrences, convinced the local bishop and even ultimately the Vatican that the Lady was real and the Lady wanted a great church built. Her appearance to Juan Diego sparked what has been called the greatest religious conversion in all of Western history; it is the point at which Mexico became wedded to Catholicism.

In 1990 Juan Diego was beatified. And soon he will be recognized a saint.

And on that night, around the moon, a wedding ring to mark a marriage that for all its ups and downs endures, and was that evening acknowledged in a spectacular manner.

This is a wonderful time to be alive. I just thought I’d add that.

We wind up the year. It has been full of drama. We now prepare for fun. Christmas is coming, very soon, and whatever religious holiday you celebrate, you’ve probably got some cheer and downtime coming. And this is good.

Shall we have some fun? One thing we could do, together, is sit down for a minute, read this, and take part in a bit of constructive mischief.

*   *   *

The Presidential Medal of Freedom was created in 1945 by Harry Truman to recognize high and heroic civilian contributions in time of war. President Kennedy reinstituted it shortly before he died in 1963; he continued it as the highest civilian award in the country but wanted it given to those who give great service to their country in time of peace.

Many great artists, scientists, civic leaders, entertainers, novelists, union leaders and political figures of all stripes have received the award, which happens to be very pretty: a red-white-and-blue enameled star on a round gold filigreed medal, with a navy-blue ribbon trimmed in white. About a dozen Americans receive them every year or so, usually in a colorful ceremony in which the president personally hands it to you in the White House, lauds your great work and thanks you on behalf of a grateful nation.

I saw Mother Teresa win it; they waived the requirement that you be an American citizen for her, in part because so many of her convents did so much work in America’s cities. She was given the award in a special Rose Garden ceremony, and afterwards, pressed by a reporter on what she thought of Ronald Reagan, she uttered a few words that carried a real definitional wallop. “In him greatness and simplicity are one,” she said. Then she and a bevy of nuns hurried away, but not before pressing into my hand a pamphlet with a drawing of Christ and inside a poem she had written about him. She looked at me and said two words: Luff Gott. Love God. Then she walked softly and quickly into a black White House car and was gone.

*   *   *

I love the Presidential Medal of Freedom. To me it’s like a Medal of Honor for civilians, only without the physical derring-do. The ceremony itself is always full of high feeling, marked by the delight that comes with seeing excellence recognized, celebrated and applauded. (It should be broadcast in its entirety on television, so children can be inspired.) And it’s an open and egalitarian award: you just have to be a citizen who has done great things that have been a great benefit.

In 1984 or ‘85, as a speechwriter to President Reagan, I wrote a series of memos putting forth the name of those I thought deserved it, and made what I felt was a strong case for Steven Sondheim and, my special hope, the novelist Walker Percy, whose “The Moviegoer” was in my view the great novel of the second half of the 20th century. (In it, greatness and simplicity are one.) My nominees were not chosen; I think that was the year Frank Sinatra won. He too had been in his career a great contributor to the pleasure of the people, so what the heck. But Percy was alive then, and I think it might have meant something.

*   *   *

It happens that our busy president is coming up on his first anniversary as chief executive. It happens that he has not yet awarded any Medals of Freedom. He and his staff are preoccupied with a hot war and a cold recession and are busy. There’s no rush; the medals don’t have to be given every year. But right about now the White House should have in it someone who is . . . thinking about it. I have not been able to find that person.

I think we should help. I think we should make our own list, don’t you?

It seems to me obvious that George Bush’s first Medals of Freedom should be given to the men and women who one way or another pulled us through September 11, 2001.

I have my list. Take a look at it, and add a name or two if you want. (We don’t have to be limited to the events of 9/11, I just think we should.) The hardy and incredibly devoted James Taranto and Brendan Miniter, editors of OpinionJournal, will post here as many of your ideas as they can. Then we will forward the whole bundle to the White House in an e-mail whose subject line is: The people have spoken.

I feel certain that the White House will listen to us, as we are the millions of men and women who read OpinionJournal, and we are not to be ignored.

*   *   *

All right, my list, not in order of importance or even love, just as they come to me.

1. The New York City Fire Department. On their medals: “The hero comes when he is needed. When our belief gets pale and weak there comes a man out of that need who is bright and shining, and everyone around him reflects some of that glow, and stores some up against the day when he is gone.”

2. The men and women, the airline staff and passengers, on the planes that went into the towers and the Pentagon. We’ll never know the exact dimensions of the heroism on those planes, but we know it was there. See quote above.

3. The New York City Police Department and Emergency Medical Services personnel. Not as celebrated as the FDNY, but full of people who put it all on the line that day.

4. The men and women of the Pentagon, who lived and led through what happened there. This includes Donald Rumsfeld, who ran not from the scene but to the scene and helped the wounded. I don’t know if that’s a good thing in a defense secretary the day a war starts, but it’s hard to think of a better symbol of the goodness and egalitarianism that people displayed that terrible day.

5. Rudy. It was said of the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa that his work was marked by this dynamic: “The villains have arrived while the hero is evolving.” Rudy had a lot of time to evolve over his two terms, and he did. By the time the bad guys came, he was ready; he had become the man he was intended to be. He used all his gifts. He led with perfect integration of head and heart.

6. The Flag Raisers. The three firemen in New York who lifted the colors, and whose Iwo Jima-like moment was immortalized on the front page of the New York Post, among other papers, with the headline PROOF THROUGH THE NIGHT THAT OUR FLAG WAS STILL THERE. Ditto the men at Ground Zero who unfurled a huge flag from a broken building. Ditto the man at the Pentagon who, the night of the attack, put up a huge flag and trained a spotlight on it so everyone going by would see the proof through the night.

7. Paul McCartney. While Rock Hollywood went somewhat Goth and dark in its all-network fund-raiser and tribute to heroes, it was the fireman’s son from Liverpool who, a few weeks later, really got it right. He came into New York, got the room, put on the show, electrified hundreds of thousands of tired and sad New Yorkers, and reminded them they could rock again. The former Beatle is already Sir Paul McCartney. America can do the Brits one better. After giving him the Medal of Freedom we can, by act of Congress, give him honorary citizenship of the United States of America. Paul McCartney, American. That just sounds right.

8. Michael Moran. I know it was vulgar; I know it wasn’t dignified; I suspect it wasn’t sober. But don’t you think Mr. Moran, a fireman, got it right when he informed Osama bin Laden that he, Mr. Moran, was from Rockaway, and OBL could kiss his royal Irish ass? It was so old-fashioned ethnic, so old-fashioned Brooklyn and Queens. It was the authentic voice of the old New York, which was newly back in style. It captured what so many of us feel, whether of the Hibernian persuasion or not. And it’s always nice to give a nod to royalty.

9. The cheerers. The men and women and kids who lined up on the West Side Highway in Manhattan for a month to cheer on the workers going into Ground Zero and the workers coming out after a 12-hour shift. I will never forget the middle-aged Hispanic woman I saw with her two little grandchildren, one in a stroller. They were standing in the dark by themselves just off the highway. The child in the stroller held a little American flag. The mother held a hand-lettered sign torn from a cardboard box. It said, “America You Are Not Alone, Mexico Is With You!” When people under stress see things like that, it means everything.

10. Oprah. I don’t know how many shows she did helping people get through the horror of 9/11—and I mean everyone, from those who lost loved ones to young people who can’t work in skyscrapers anymore, and people who started to descend into all sorts of emotional dark places. Oprah would not give up on 9/11; she stuck with it as the only subject matter of our day, she got people on her show who could help people. It was a stupendous public service, done with no eye to the ratings and against the common wisdom that we have to move on. Her show didn’t move on until it moved people on. Also she came to New York and did, with Bette Midler, a fabulous stadium show. So:

11. Bette Midler too.

12. The men and women of the media. They drive us so crazy with their lockstep view of the world; they consciously and unconsciously skew the news; they see the world through the very same lens and ask the very same questions and rarely and only for entertainment or under cultural duress allow other points of view on their air. These are people who badly need real diversity-training sessions. And for all that, they did the work of heroes on Sept. 11. They were cool and tough and unstoppable; they hit the sites and got the news and risked their lives. And the brightest of them understood for at least the first 24 hours of this war that they might be hit live, on the air, kaboom! The great symbols of American commerce and military might had already been hit; only the media remained. They did their jobs and held their ground. Well done crazy-making and courageous journos.

*   *   *

That’s my list of the people who made all the difference that day, who got covered in grit and ran to the trouble. They’re my dirty dozen. Add some of your own. We’ll send it to the White House, to help them. And yes, we are talking about a heck of a lot of medals. But then a heck of a lot of people earned them.

Some presidents have come from families of property and high renown—or notoriety. Think only of the Roosevelts and Kennedys. And other presidents come from humble circumstances, sometimes very humble.

Ronald Reagan belongs to the second group. His family moved from one rented apartment to another as his alcoholic, shoe-salesman father struggled to hold a job. Young “Dutch,” as he was known, took many lessons from his experiences growing up, including the importance of hard work and self-reliance. He worked his way through college, found jobs in radio during the Depression and went on to become a Hollywood star, governor of California and, finally, president.

In “When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan,” Peggy Noonan examines the sources—and consequences—of Mr. Reagan’s idealism, honesty, religious faith and patriotism. From his days as an anticommunist leader of the Screen Actors Guild to his legendary words to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Berlin Wall, the book investigates the way Mr. Reagan’s convictions and character affected his life, his presidency and history. A few excerpts:

Early lessons: “[Mr. Reagan’s father] felt he had been discriminated against in the old ‘No Dogs or Irish Need Apply’ days and ways, and it made him despise prejudice with a committed and consistent passion. He established the idea of equality as part of the family’s conversation, part of the way the family understood itself. They were people who stood for tolerance.”

Artistic ambitions: “Ronald Reagan did not so much have the natural talents and cast of mind of a businessman or economist or political figure, he had the natural talents and cast of mind of an artist. It is what he thought he would become, his first arguably serious ambition. As an adolescent he had thought he might become a cartoonist. And indeed he went through all his life drawing faces, caricatures and cartoons, designing leather crafts and memorizing poetry.”

Opposing communist fronts in Hollywood in the 1940s and ‘50s: “Reagan loved argument, loved freedom and thought everyone should join the fray—anarchists, Wobblies, monarchists, whatever. But if a political group refused to come forward publicly and put forth its programs in the democratic daylight; if it chose to pursue power secretly, by guile and deception, silently taking over institutions and moving for power through force—well, that was what the Nazis did in Germany. That’s what Fascists and the supporters of dictators do. That wasn’t the American style at all.”

Mr. Reagan’s simple tastes, as displayed at his California ranch: “You can imagine the expectations of Gorbachev as he was driven up this road. He knew about capitalism and how capitalists and powerful men live in America. And the expectations of the queen of England, who knew something of how the famous in America lived. And they saw: a shack. And they thought: This is how staff lives! This was nothing like his dacha, her castle. It is a little one story house with stucco and adobe walls. They are painted white. There’s a red tile roof.”

Unpredictable interests: “It is not true, as has often been said, that Reagan wasn’t curious. He just wasn’t curious about what you’d expect a man like him to be curious about. If he was talking to a doorman at the Mayflower Hotel about how they park and retrieve the cars on a busy night, he’d be learning something and be truly interested. If you were a professor back from China or the Sudan and had real-world observations, anecdotes and history, he’d eagerly take it all in.”

His famous “Evil Empire” speech: “He felt that previous American leadership had not taken on the principles of Marxist-Leninist philosophy because we had feared to offend. But Reagan was not inhibited in that way. He thought: We can scarcely make the Soviets worse, and the truth might make things better. Or at least establish the only platform on which things can become better.”

His habit of telling jokes: “I think he thought everyone was too serious. I think he realized today’s dreadfully somber problem is next week’s joke about the hell we went through last week, and he figured he’d just speed up the process. I think he was also fun all the time because the constant tragedies and injustices of life while painful were also by definition passing—everything changes, today is setback, tomorrow bounty.”

Taking criticism: “The reason he took criticism so well is that he had been trained in receiving it in Hollywood. Not as an actor in the reviews, though there was some of that, but when he went up against Communists and Communist sympathizers and the anti-anti-Communists of Hollywood. They had threatened his life and livelihood. What was being called an evil idiot compared to that?”

Positive reflections: “I am still searching for an anecdote about Reagan that truly reflects badly on him. When I talk to or read the works of people in politics, entertainment or journalism who didn’t admire or agree with him, they will, if they get going, tell you Reagan was lazy, or naive or a bore. But they never say he was low or unkind or dishonest or untrustworthy. I think his character is the least criticized of any great political leader of the century.”

My friends, this is the kind of column I used to do now and then before the world changed. I tell you what I’ve been doing and thinking and if you’re interested you get a cup of coffee and sit down and read along, and if you’re not you can go back to OpinionJournal’s main page, or Drudge, or Salon, or Free Republic.

*   *   *

It is Christmas in New York. The weather as you know has been soft, nice and not freezing but often overcast. A friend who comes into New York each week from Chicago told me yesterday that on Michigan Ave. it’s hustle and bustle and the world hasn’t changed at all, it’s Christmas, but on Madison Ave. it’s dead. It happens that I often walk along Madison Ave. and hadn’t noticed that, but there’s some truth in what he said. Our great high-end commercial avenue doesn’t have quite the cheery bustle of years past. But there’s more love on it, more flags and more friendliness in the shops, and at a big expensive hand-made furniture place in the 80’s they still have the pictures of every fireman who died on Sept. 11, each face highlighted in the middle of a paper star, all the stars filling the store’s main window. (In New York there has been a slight below-the-radar anti-fireman reaction to this kind of thing. Some people are tired of hearing the firemen praised, and they have a brother-in-law who’s a fireman who’s a worthless oaf who can’t even pick up his shorts. The other day an Internet executive told me this. I said: “Believe me, as soon as 343 Internet executives rush into a burning building and die so that strangers can live, I’m gonna drop the firemen like a rock and celebrate executives.”)

*   *   *

I have had a Christmas party week, a very social week. I am not an especially social person but it’s been a time for big gatherings, and I am grateful for it. In Brooklyn in my new neighborhood a house party in a grand brownstone mansion, thrown for the neighbors by a gentleman who in the ‘80s and ‘90s became rich. When I walked in I had the oddest sense of having been in this great home, or having been in a place very much like it long ago. The huge rounded doorways, the height of the ceilings, the size of the rooms and placement of the windows.

I was born in Brooklyn half a century ago and not far from here, but in those days Brooklyn wasn’t rich. It was still full of the families Betty Smith wrote about in “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,” only two generations older than Francie, the schoolgirl in the book, and not impoverished but working class. We lived in an Irish and Italian ghetto that was turning African American and Puerto Rican. Living with our family were old aunts who’d been maids and cooks in Manhattan, and an uncle who was a carpenter. My grandmother was the coat attendant at a dance hall in Brooklyn called The Lenruth Room when I was a little girl. And I remember being there with her when I was a child, and seeing people dance and touching the coats.

My grandparents lived in an apartment on Myrtle Ave., in a walkup on the fourth or fifth floor, and their bedroom faced the Myrtle Ave. el, which was about 10 feet outside their window. The whole apartment shook, literally shook, when the elevated trains came by. When I was with my grandparents I would put my arms on the window sill like the old ladies of the neighborhood and watch the trains go by.

I’ll tell you who else did this, a generation or two before. The actor Tony Curtis, who a few years ago wrote a wonderful memoir of his years as New York street urchin and Hollywood hellion. He told this story. As a boy he would sit each morning at the window of his parents’ apartment and watch the elevated trains. Every morning he’d see a man on the 8 a.m. train sitting in the same seat, wearing a brown hat and reading the Herald Tribune. The train would stop, young Tony would glance at the man and the man would glance at Tony. Then he’d go back to reading the paper and the train would roar off. One morning the train stops and the man isn’t in his seat. Next day he’s not there, next week. Then 10 days later he’s back in his same seat with the paper and the brown hat. And he glances over at Tony and Tony glances at him. And for once they maintain their gaze. And the man lowers the paper and mouths, “I’ve been sick!” And the train roars off.

I love that story. It’s a metaphor for how we know each other and don’t know each other, how we have relationships we don’t even remark upon and barely notice until they leave.

Did I have a relationship with the house of the rich man whose home I was in this week? I didn’t see how I could, but I mentioned to the man’s friend, standing in his great hallway, that I had the oddest feeling of knowing this place even though there had been no mansions in our lives when I was a kid. The man said, “Oh, this wasn’t a mansion when you were a kid. He restored it to the way it was when it was first built. When you were a kid it was all broken up into 10 apartments. Regular people lived here.”

So I could have been there before. And now I am here as an adult, as a person who writes of presidents, and the house is a mansion. Brooklyn is, has been, will ever be a place of miracles.

*   *   *

At a party in Manhattan, I spoke to a close aide to Rudy Giuliani, our king. He told me Rudy doesn’t want to leave until the fire’s out. Mr. Giuliani, of course, leaves as mayor in January, but his aid told me he is obsessed with putting out, as his final act, the infernal fires of Ground Zero, which still burn. Rudy wants the fires out by his last day as mayor. The city, the aid tells me, has been using satellite heat-finding imagery to pinpoint exactly where in the dead zone the fires are. “We find out where, we force foam in from one direction and the fire goes in another. We force foam in from the other direction and the fire goes up or down.”

I asked him what, after three months, is still burning.

“Computers,” he said.

“Computers?,” I said.

He said the wires of computers, the innards and machinery of computers—they keep burning. “There isn’t a piece of glass in the ruins, not a single piece,” he said. The glass was melted and pulverized, turned to ash. There isn’t a desk or chair in the ruins either, he said—from two towers full of desks and chairs. Again, they were burned and pulverized by heat and force.

He mentioned another odd thing I’d noticed, we’d all noticed: paper survived. Paper from the offices of the trade center—merger agreements, divorce decrees, memos that Sandra in Accounting had a baby boy, custody petitions—the paper of the towers shot into the air. When the towers tumbled it created a reverse vacuum and papers were sucked up into the gathering cloud and dispersed all over downtown, the rivers, Brooklyn and Queens. But the binders the papers were in—the legal binders, the metal rings inside them—they didn’t survive.

What he told me made me think of a telephone repairman who wrote his memories of Sept. 11 and sent them to me after last week’s column. He had been working on a telephone pole in Queens. He heard the explosions, the lines went down, and soon paper was raining down on him and everyone else. One fluttered down and he caught it. It was a business card. A few days later he called the number on the card and asked for the name. A young woman answered. Yes, she said, she was alive, she had made it out of the building. No, she didn’t know her business cards had made it to Queens. (Hollywood: Use this. In your version they fall in love.)

*   *   *

I went to a book party in downtown Manhattan, in the spacious condo of a man and woman who had been walking their children to the first day of school when the Towers were hit. They have three gorgeous kids, one of whom, aged about four, asked to stay up to see the guests this evening and then, overwhelmed by the smiles, crinkles, wrinkles, earrings and perfume of adults bending down to kiss, and frightened perhaps by the gooney look old people sometimes get when they look at childhood beauty, hid in her mother’s skirt and then her father’s arms. The guest of honor, a wonderful man of depth and charm, arrived late, from a television appearance. I hugged him, congratulated him, asked how he was. “My whole life is work,” he said, softly. Then he sucked in his abs, turned, shook hands with friends and worked the room.

We all feel that way so often: “My whole life is work.” We all work so hard. But it is, as they say, a choice. We wouldn’t have to work so hard if we would take everything we have and rent a $600 a month apartment just outside a suburb of Tulsa, and join a local church and get a job in a hardware store and be peaceful and kind and take the elderly neighbor to the hospital every other week for chemo.

But it is not the American dream to want to live outside a suburb of Tulsa in a $600 a month apartment. It is the American dream to, among other things, be at the book party celebrating your friend’s bestseller surrounded by brilliant, accomplished and interesting Americans who take part in the world, who are immersed in it and try to turn it this way and that.

We work so hard to find happiness. But more and more I think of what a friend told me on the phone 10 years ago after I had written an essay on the subject. He called and said: “This is a famous quote from someone, I forget who, and this is what you mean. ‘Happiness is a cat. Chase it and it will elude you, it will hide. But sit and peacefully do your work, live your life and show your love and it will silently come to you and curl itself upon your feet.’ ”

*   *   *

After the book party, I went to a dinner party in upper Manhattan, at the home of a writer and thinker and his smart, bubbly wife. It was the three month anniversary of Sept. 11, and naturally the talk was: 9/11. Normally these conversations end in something like resolve and laughter, with someone saying something upbeat. But not this night, and I was glad of it. I spoke to a man, a dynamic businessman and a good person who was, to my surprise, utterly changed. I hadn’t seen him in more than a year. I found out that until recently he had been at Ground Zero every day since Sept. 11. He had lost his office, scores of friends and co-workers, had rushed to the site and worked there for months as a helper and organizer.

Now he is a changed man. He used to carry success on his shoulders like a well padded suit, and now in his eyes there is grief, grief, a deep well of grief. “I had to go to a doctor because I couldn’t stop smelling the smell,” he tells me. It is the olfactory disorder of Ground Zero: Work there long enough and you can’t lose the acrid burning smell, your nose absorbs it as if it were a memory, and won’t let go. You wake up 30 miles away at home in your bed and it’s 4 a.m. and you smell it and you think you’re going mad.

He told me how Sept. 11 had changed his life. “I am more religious,” he said. He looked like he wasn’t sure what that meant and was surprised to find it happening to him, didn’t fully understand it but knew it was true: He’s more religious. And, he said, what he wants to do now is not make money but help people, serve the public, do good.

And he meant it. It wasn’t post-traumatic virtue disorder, it was: A life in change.

*   *   *

I find myself drawn to and heartened by people who can’t get over Sept. 11. Because I can’t either, and I never will. But then I talk to them and realize: They’re here, and I’m here, and we’re at the party, so we’ll get over it.

*   *   *

On the way home and for no particular reason I remembered something I was told a few weeks ago by a friend who had in another time and for other reasons become a changed person.

I have known him for years but had not known the story he told me. He had been a roaring alcoholic, a man who’d lived to drink and gamble. But something was changing in him, and one night he was at home drinking by himself when he saw something on TV—something someone said, something that moved him deeply. And suddenly he knew his life must change. He picked up the phone and called the 24 hour hotline at a local rehab hospital. And he said, slurring, “I want to spick to a dahkter, I think I’m an alcaholic.”

“Is that you Billy?,” sad the woman who answered the phone.

He was shocked. Someone must have reported him! They must keep the numbers of known local alcoholics!

“How did you know my name?” he demanded.

“Because you call every night at 2 a.m. How’s your daughter?”

For two weeks he’d been getting drunk every night and calling the rehab line and having long conversations with whoever answered. And it was news to him. The next day he entered rehab, and for many years he has been a changed man.

People change. It’s not true that they don’t. It is true that it is more unusual than it is usual.

*   *   *

At the dinner party a friend told me of his son, a Marine at Camp Lejeune. My friend and his wife may or may not see their boy for Christmas, it depends on his orders. The mother, a beautiful lady, frankly admitted her fear for her son. The father was proud and wistful. I mentioned an acquaintance of ours who has a handsome young son in ROTC, and who will join the armed forces when he graduates in June. I bumped into her and she told me that this is where parenthood makes hypocrites of us all—you know our country needs men like this, you know we must fight, but not my boy, not my son.

The father and mother I was talking to smiled and nodded. It’s the same for them. “Let me tell you what my son said to me when I told him how worried I was about him,” the father said. “Dad, I am fully capable, fully trained and armed to defend myself, and I am not the target. You are not armed and trained and you are the target. Worry about you.”

*   *   *

I worry about all of us, and so no doubt do you. But Wednesday I had a wonderful, heartening experience online that I will share with you because it may help you too. I like to go to Christian Web sites such as www.redeemer.com, where you can find the Rev. Tim Keller’s inspiring and informative sermons. I go to Catholic Web sites too, and Wednesday I marked a great feast day of the church at one.

*   *   *

It was the feast of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, a celebration of the event 500 years ago in which the Mother of Christ appeared before an earnest and loving Mexican peasant named Juan Diego. The appearance and the miracles that followed sparked what was probably the biggest mass religious conversion in the history of the Americas. And indeed Our Lady of Guadeloupe is considered by Catholics to be our country’s patroness.

As America becomes more Latin and Hispanic the feast has become bigger, grander. It was marked in Washington with a mass at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, and there were masses and festivities in Albuquerque, N.M., Houston and Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz. But according to an article in Crisis magazine on a Catholic Web site the biggest celebration in the U.S. took place in Los Angeles. “Following a procession through the city’s streets, Cardinal Roger Mahony celebrated a mass for nearly 20,000 who gathered on the football field in the Cal State Los Angeles Stadium.” Twenty thousand.

And, most delightfully to me of all, yesterday in Rome, at the end of a general audience, Pope John Paul II for the first time ever activated a Web page. They brought him a laptop and he hit a key with his Parkinson-pained finger and suddenly www.virgendegaudalupe.org.mx was born.

At another site I found that people were writing prayers of gratitude and petition to mark the feast, and I read them. They were so moving and beautiful.

There is so much going on in America, in churches and on Internet sites, that no one in normal media, elite media or any media really seems to touch. But I continually discover and rediscover that there is a whole world of people who exist apart from the New York Times, the Washington Post and our beloved Wall Street Journal, who exist as part of a real and strong and authentic American community, and indeed a world community.

At the site I visited the prayers and petitions to Our Lady were in English, Spanish and French.

They asked for consolation for those who died or lost loved ones in the Trade Center attacks, they asked for protection for our country and peace for the world. “I pray for the people and kids in Afghanistan,” said one.

Most were in one way or another personal: “Dear Blessed Lady, intercede for me and pray for me that with your help I can get the money to save my home. Ask your divine son to show his infinite mercy.”

“Dear Lady, please . . . pray for dj’s, entertainers, artists, performers and media and writers.”

“Mama Mary . . . please pray for . . . all the teachers, everyone serving in the armed forces, President Bush, all the leaders especially of the Philippines, all the terrorists, bin Laden, all the priests and religious and our Holy Father.”

“Dear Lady of Guadeloupe, please let all my friends forgive me for all that I have done.”

“Pour les enfants abandonnes.”

“Senora, en tu dia te recuerdo y te amo. Gracias madre por todos tus bienes.”

“Je t’aime et mercies der ester avec moi et ma petite famille jet t’aime tres fort dis bonjourr a padre pio pour moi.”

“Happy Feast Day, my Lady Mother. You seem so close today, telling me to let the desire of my heart be that of your Son’s, and to let his desire be mine . . . bring me back to my monastic community, my Lady, though I have failed and fallen so many times.”

“Jesus, Son of Mary, our Mother—forgive me and help me to know and love her more. I desire to be just like her . . . Mama Mary, help me to let go of covetousness, vanity, lust for the flesh and food . . . and all the vices and weaknesses that separate me from your son . . . (help) all my students, especially John.”

“Blessed Mother on this, your feast day, please free [my loved one] from the bondage of drug addiction.”

“I beg for my estranged husband and for the purity and sanctity of my children . . . Please, my Mama, obtain a miracle for my family.”

“Dearest Lady Thank you for all the trials I have received these past few years for in them I have found a new love of God.”

There were men praying to be better husbands, wives to be better wives, prayers to be freed of alcoholism and healed after infidelity, for runaway children and broken families.

All were marked by humility and gratitude, many by pain and anxiety. They prayed so hard for our country, and there was a sense that they knew that they were praying at a time of heightened alert, and during Ramadan and in a time of extraordinary need.

I found it all so moving. So now I go there and pray along with them, and feel enlivened by their community. It’s as good as, better than, a wonderful dinner party.

*   *   *

I will leave you with a happy thought. The other day into my imagination popped a scene that I dearly hope will happen. I imagined that I was walking along Fulton Street in Brooklyn. It was a pretty afternoon, just pre-dusk, and the street was full of shoppers. And suddenly a woman came running from The Wiz, and she shouted to no one, to everyone, “They found Osama! They caught bin Laden!” And the street stopped stock still and then someone cheered and then we all cheered, and we went into The Wiz and watched the reporters telling the story on all the big TV monitors, row after row of them. And strangers talked to strangers and people who hadn’t wept since Sept. 11 found themselves with tears in their eyes, and it was an unforgettable moment in American history.

Actually I shared this scene with my table at the dinner party earlier in the week.

“Dead or alive?” someone asked. I shook my head. “The way you imagined it, is Osama dead or alive?”

I said I didn’t know and didn’t care. A man said I should care, it’s bad if he’s alive, that means crazy hostage things and suicide bomber nuts. Someone else said, “I feel sure that when they get him if they get him it will be an unknown CIA agent who gets him, and we’ll never know his name.” He will be invited to the White House and shake the president’s hand and be assigned somewhere far away, and it will be one of the great secrets of all time. He will be The Man Who Got Osama. And we won’t even know his name.

I thought, “Oh no, we must know his name and dedicate things to him like mountains and libraries.” I said we have to know and she said no, if he is known he will be in danger, and so will his family: “the Jihad never forgets.”

Well, we’ll see how it goes.

We’ll see how it ends.

For me today more prayer sites, and a visit to the pained and peaceful people of faith. And then on to Fulton Street, where there’s a big Macy’s and a Wiz and television and appliance stores. On to the great street bustle of Brooklyn in 2001, where miracles still happen, and have.

For America for Christmas this year there’s only one gift, a history book. And we should all get busy writing it.

Today is the 60th anniversary of “the day that will live in infamy,” the sneak attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. We know a lot about what happened on Dec. 7, 1941, but not enough. Some of the best of what we know came from a work of fiction, James Jones’s great classic novel, “From Here to Eternity.” Jones had been there that day, a young enlisted man at Hawaii’s Scofield barracks, a nascent novelist looking for experience. He got it. He wrote the great novel of World War II. It is amazing to realize that unlike the great novels of World War I, “From Here to Eternity” hinges on the day the war began, at least for America, and never touches upon the war’s execution or ending—and it was published near the end of the era in which novels really, truly mattered, when they were seen not as a tributary off the great river of American literature but the river itself.

It was a great book with wide cultural impact. People knew the names of its characters; I can still remember my father watching TV once about 20 years ago as someone played taps on a bugle, and my father said, “Play it, Prewitt.” A reference to Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the brokenhearted Southern boxer who wouldn’t fight but who could make a bugle sing. The great novel was made into a great movie directed by Fred Zinnemann. Like the novel of course but unlike the recently released movie “Pearl Harbor,” it actually had a story, a wonderful story of a lonely wife in a bad marriage and a tough man in a cold barracks, not to mention Pvt. Angelo Maggio, Prewitt’s best friend, a tough little Brooklyn boy who had issues with authority.

Sixty years later we are at war again, and I happen to think the estate of James Jones should flood the market with a new paperback version of “From Here to Eternity.” It would become a great bestseller again, would speak to our times and would give America a sense once again of what it is to be a soldier in the army of our country. Modern novelists don’t know about those things.

But none of this is, strictly speaking, today’s subject.

*   *   *

Today’s subject is the subject that will not go away, Sept. 11, 2001, and what we know of what happened then, and there. I hope there will be great novels about it—it is nothing if not rich material—but until then there are data that we have that must be saved, and soon.

Do you know what it was like to be a secretary in the White House on the morning of Sept. 11 and to hear, as you passed him in the hall, a Secret Service man’s radio squawk that there is an incoming airliner aimed at the White House and everyone must run, now? Do you know what it was like for Lynne Cheney, the wife of the vice president, to be hurried down into a secret room in the deepest innards under the White House? Do you know what it was like for the desk assistants at CNN who spent that morning at their posts doing live TV while, for at least part of the time, they had reason to believe the next suicide bomber was coming for them?

Do you know what it was like for anyone beside yourself and your family and magazine and newspaper writers and those you saw talking about it all on TV?

You don’t. And we have to do something about that.

*   *   *

I was in the White House the other day as part of a weekly series in which writers and journalists meet with whoever in the White House staff is free to talk about whatever is on their minds.

Before I spoke, I chatted with some staffers and asked them if they had yet written down what they had experienced during the extraordinary events of Sept. 11 and after. They all said no. And they shook their heads as if to say, “Surprising but true,” and “I haven’t had time,” and “Only fools keep diaries in government.”

One man told me his story of that day. I asked if he’d evacuated the White House and he said yes, and I asked how it happened, who told him to leave, and he said, “No one.” It was fairly early in the morning of course and he’d been holding a staff meeting in the Old Executive Office Building, just across from the west entrance of the White House. Suddenly he noticed people running by. Then a lot of people. Then he overheard from a walkie-talkie words that seemed to mean the White House is the expected target of a terror plane. Then he realized what everyone else seemed to know but no one had formally announced: We have to get out of here, quick. One thing he remembers hearing: Someone telling women to take off their high heels and run.

They ran. They got out of the complex and ran down the street looking back and then running forward again. Someone once noted of truckers that after they park their rig at a highway rest stop, they take the keys, get out of the cab, walk about five yards and then turn to make sure the truck is there before they walk on. That’s how it was with people fleeing the White House, I gather. They’d run 10 yards and then stop and look back to make sure it was there, run 10 yards, stop and look back.

*   *   *

What a moment in American history. I suppose there had been nothing like it since the War of 1812—that night in August 1814 when whoever was in the White House scrammed as British troops, carrying torches, marched down Pennsylvania Avenue for the White House, which they soon set ablaze. (When I worked in the White House for Ronald Reagan they were repainting the facade. In order to do it right they had to strip centuries-old paint. They stripped it right down to the burn marks left by the British soldiers. You could go by and touch them.) That was the night President Madison’s wife, Dolley, saved the portrait of George Washington that hangs, still, in the East Room of the White House. Dolley Madison is said to have cut it from its ornate frame and hid the canvas under her skirt as she escaped in a coach.

That was quite a moment too.

But not enough people took notes on it. We still don’t know enough about that night, and the days and weeks afterward as America recovered, and won back its Executive Mansion.

*   *   *

What we need from White House staffers now is notes, memories, stories, oral histories of Sept. 11. History needs these things. As William Safire once said, the one thing history doesn’t have enough of is first-person testimony.

And not only from the White House, and not only from Washington. Everyone in American media that day has a story, from the people reporting live the collapse of the first tower—Aaron Brown of CNN watched, aghast, and called the great rush of smoke and ash “a mushroom cloud,” and I realized at that moment that in the first few seconds of the collapse people didn’t know if they were witnessing a suitcase nuclear explosion within the building.

Everyone in the Pentagon has a story. So does everyone in the armed forces, from sailors on aircraft carriers to the pilots who scrambled to force planes down if they had to that day.

The children of our country—they will be writing novels (well, probably screenplays, but let’s hope novels) about what they saw and heard on Sept. 11. But their novels and screenplays will be better, more realistic, more richly observed, if they write it all down now. The testimony of a bright 10-year-old can be a raw and beautiful thing.

So: Everyone should write down, or record, for history, what happened on Sept. 11. And I think everyone should be given a few hours or a day at work to do it. It could be called “The 9/11 History Project,” could be declared a public duty, could be given a special day at schools across the country, and could be led by, say, The Office of the 9/11 History Project within the White House office of Homeland Defense. Just to make it official, and just to have a central place where everyone could send their memories before they’re sent on to the Smithsonian, which might consider building a special room for them.

The record of that day should include the kinds of things people wrote and drew afterwards, too. This was the first disaster of the e-mail era, and we’ve all received cartoons and poems and essays and columns sent through cyber-space, with subject lines that say things like “You HAVE To See This.”

Here’s one I received this week, a poem by an apparently unknown author. The acquaintance who sent it wrote, “This is a must read. This person should step forward and claim this poem. The words are very powerful!”

It’s called “Two Thousand One, Nine Eleven”:

Two thousand one, nine eleven
Four thousand plus enter heaven.
A bearded man with stovepipe hat
Steps forward saying, “Lets sit and chat.”

They settle down in seats of clouds
And a man named Martin shouts out proud,
“I have a dream!” And once he did,
The Newcomers said, “Your dream still lives.”

Groups of soldiers in blue and gray
Others in khaki, and green then say
“We’re from Bull Run, Yorktown, the Maine.”
And the Newcomers said, “You died not in vain.”

From a man on sticks one could hear
“The only thing we have to fear—”
And a Newcomer said, “We know the rest,
trust us sir, we’ve passed that test.”

“Courage doesn’t hide in caves
You can’t bury freedom in a grave,”
The Newcomers had heard this voice before
A Yankee twang from Hyannis shore.

A silence fell within the midst
And somehow a Newcomer knew that this
Meant time had come for her to say
What was in the hearts of the four thousand that day.

“Back on Earth, we wrote reports,
Watched our children play in sports
Worked our gardens, sang our songs
Went to church, walked along.
We smiled, we laughed, knew love and hate,
But unlike you we were not great.”

The tall man in the stovepipe hat
Stood and said, “Don’t talk like that.
Look at your country, look and see—
You died for freedom, just like me”

Then, before them appeared a scene
Of rubbled streets and twisted beams
Death, destruction, smoke and dust
And people working because they must.
Hauling ash, lifting stones,
Knee deep in hell, but not alone.

“Blackman, Whiteman, Brownman, Yellowman
Side by side helping their fellow man!”
So said Martin, as he watched the scene. Then:
“Even from nightmares, can be born a dream.”

And down below three firemen raised
The colors high in the ashen haze
The soldiers above had seen it before—
On Iwo Jima in ’44.

The man on sticks studied everything closely
Then shared his perceptions on what he saw mostly
“I see pain, I see tears,
I see sorrow—but I don’t see fear.”

“You left behind husbands and wives
Daughters and sons and so many lives
are suffering now because of this wrong.
But look very closely. You’re not really gone.

All of those people, even those who’ve never met you
All of their lives, they’ll never forget you
Don’t you see what has happened?
Don’t you see what you’ve done?
You’ve brought them together, together as one.”

With that the man in the stovepipe hat said
“Take my hand,” and from there he led
four thousand Newcomers on into heaven
On this day, two thousand one, nine eleven.

Now you might see that poem as moving and simple, as outsider art, and you might call it cringe-inducing kitsch, but it’s part of the record of our time, because it’s part of how Americans experienced and reacted to Sept. 11. And so it ought to be saved.

*   *   *

Here in New York we’ve elected a new public advocate, Betsey Gotbaum. She is an impressive person, a woman who knows and loves New York and who in the past few years helped save the New-York Historical Society as a vital institution.

Betsy Gotbaum and her friends at the historical society too should turn their minds to getting and saving as much as they can from Sept. 11.

The huge canvas sheets that people write on, in magic marker, at the Ground Zero memorials. They hang on the gates of St. Paul’s Church, for instance, one of the churches near Ground Zero that didn’t burn. I was there one night watching the volunteers change the sheets and put out new markers. The messages people left on them—from the strangers of New York to the dead of New York—were and are priceless. They were like notes left on the side of the road at Gettysburg. Some of those canvas sheets could be bronzed like baby shoes and put in an eventual memorial.

(Two memories. One: The woman who ran the St Paul volunteer service the night I was there, in October, insisted on putting a new canvas sheet out at midnight even though there was not much foot traffic and no one who walked by seemed eager to be writing notes. But the woman told me, “The bars close at 2 and 4, and people who’ve been drinking need to write.” And you know, she was completely correct, and by 3 a.m. the empty sheet was half full. Two: A young Hispanic woman, a newcomer to America or a visitor, came by with her friends. She wrote a long note on the canvas in black magic marker. When she finished she turned and said to no one, in English, “I was here.”)

There’s a lot more to be saved. The hundreds of thousands of cards from children all over the country to the survivors of the towers and the Pentagon. In New York there were a lot of crayon drawings sent from second-graders in California of the twin towers with sad faces being saved by firemen carrying flags. We should collect them too, and bronze ‘em up, and put them in an eventual memorial.

There’s a lot that still needs saving. The remaining bottom of one of the Trade Center towers, for instance—which is still there, with the iron work like a cathedral. That piece of metal is emblematic of so much, and must be cut down in one piece, and saved for the memorial. And the gear of a cop, a fireman, an EMS worker; the gear of a construction worker—all of it should be saved.

The oral memories of everyone in the towers and nearby are valuable too. Including the terrible memories of those in buildings around the towers who saw the people who fell from the top floors. They were called jumpers. They were not jumpers. Jumpers are suicides; they decide to die. These people were on a window sill with roaring flames on one side and on the other a hundred floors of air. They didn’t decide, the flames decided.

*   *   *

We have to remember. We have to save these things. We can’t lose them. History needs them. Children will learn from them. Scholars will ponder them.

Here in New York we call what happened on Sept. 11 the greatest and most successful rescue effort on American soil in all of U.S. history.

But there’s more rescuing to be done, and it’s from a thief called time, which robs memories of their vividness, and from the Dumpster, which is daily carting history away from Ground Zero and the Pentagon.

I wish I could hear my father talk about what it was like 60 years ago, on Dec. 7, 1941, when he was 15 and living in a little apartment near the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, and hearing the tough men who worked there react to Tojo’s deeds. He and his memories of those days are gone. I wish I’d asked him; wish he’d written it all down; wish someone had asked him to save what he thought and heard and witnessed and feared.

So President Bush and Mr. Ridge, and Betsy Gotbaum and everyone else, as a Christmas present to history I hope you get this project going. Some day long from now when America is “old and gray and full of sleep” and “nodding by the fire,” it can “take down this book” of memories and slowly read about the hardy and inspiring country that got through that terrible day together, and the war that followed.

I flew this week. It was A-OK.

I flew from LaGuardia airport in New York to Chicago’s O’Hare and then back, and it was good.

In New York, scene of three air disasters in six weeks, everyone asks everyone else, “Have you flown yet?” They don’t have to say, “since Sept. 11.” Up till today the answer for me had been “No.” I had cancelled all business that required long-distance traveling and was happily at home, sitting with my son in the warm glow of the TV as I fielded calls from hardy souls who had, just days after Sept. 11, been up and flying to speeches in Miami and Massachusetts.

They all had tales, but the tales were always introduced with “Have you flown yet?,” which came to sound to my ears like the challenge the hard-bitten paratrooper makes of the rookie in the outfit: “You jump yet?”

“No, sir!”

“Well, come talk to me when you have, son.”

*   *   *

Finally duty called and a book tour beckoned, and there I was at LaGuardia breezing past the porters with my overnight carryon.

LaGuardia was calm, about half populated, and had an echoy quiet to it. It was Tuesday morning, and I had arrived two hours early as everyone told me was now necessary. But I only stood in line to check in for 15 minutes, and when a customer service rep at the counter told me I was in the wrong line, she let it go and gave me my ticket anyway. She was so courteous. I was grateful, and as she was the first human interaction I’d had since walking into the airport I asked for her name so I could put it in this article. Roberta Spinosa gave her name, and asked if this was my first flight. I said yes.

“Are you nervous?”

I said, “Yes. Is that kind of over, being nervous at the airport?”

She said, “Oh no, people are just starting to come back, believe me.”

Then I stood in line to get through security and found that some things have changed. You have to take off your coat now and put everything through the magnetometer, including your watch and earrings and rings. Remember the little white plastic container they used to give you to put change and bracelets and wallet and phone in? Now they give it to you but it has to go through the machine, and you watch it nervously until you get it in your hands again.

The line went slowly, but everyone seemed peaceful and accepting about it, and everyone joked and shrugged. I think they were thinking, as I was: This is good, this makes me feel safer. And if you can’t have real safety, the appearance of safety, the illusion of it, is better than nothing.

Anyway, it worked for me.

I did not experience the intrusive and wacky searches that people, especially women, keep reporting—the little nail clipper taken from the makeup case, the tweezers seized as if they were daggers. I did see some people getting wanded, and I was wanded too, at O’Hare, on my way home. There seemed no reason for it, no logic to it; I think it was random.

My coat and bags and wallet and jewelry were traveling through the magnetometer when suddenly a young woman security screener was arguing with another woman security guard over the exact nature of a shadowed portion of my overnight bag. In the X-ray it looked like something exotic to the first woman. The second insisted it was just a hanger. I backed her up. They argued some more, and then the second woman took the bag from the machine, opened it, found the hanger and shouted to the first woman, “See? Hanger!” The first woman looked away angrily.

Then I guess because I was there they gave me a thorough wanding. One has the impression the security people well know that they are wanding, searching and holding up people who—how to put it?—do not appear to be part of a conspiracy to attack America.

But they have to show they are not profiling anyone, so they inspect grandma as closely as a 25-year-old man. But somehow it doesn’t seem obnoxious; it seems OK. When I was wanded, the wand made its crazy beep sounds in odd places like the back of my head, where I keep the explosives, and we laughed as the security woman frisked my neck and patted her hands against my hair to find the gun.

*   *   *

I did not experience the level of intrusion a friend of mine who is a reporter has. She is on planes a lot because she travels both for work and to see her family; she has an elderly mother on one end of the continent and a daughter just starting out in business on the other. Because my friend works in TV her face is well known, and the minute security people see her inching closer to the magnetometer they think: Huh, I bet she’s doing an investigative piece on faulty security at airports. She’s probably got a gun on her that she’s trying to get through. Well, I’ll give her a search she won’t forget!

This poor woman almost gets thrown against the wall and given a full cavity search every time she travels; her bags are searched inch by inch, she is wanded top to bottom, her nail clippers are taken, her jewelry inspected.

When she told me about it, we started to laugh. She has been profiled. She is a victim of Flying While Famous.

*   *   *

When I got past the security checkpoint in LaGuardia and walked toward the gate, I passed two U.S. Army reservists in fatigues and black berets slouching with M-16s and chatting with each other. They looked European, like NATO troops; they were both young guys from Long Island who had volunteered for duty after Sept. 11. I asked them if they’d seen anything interesting since they started patrolling. One, a tall young man with a black mustache, said no, “except for when the pilots and crew come through. They don’t like to be searched. They really let you know! Otherwise everyone is just easygoing.”

On the plane, a 737, I took my seat in coach and smiled at the person next to me, a young Chinese woman. She smiled and said hello. I went into my briefcase and got out my Blessed Faustina Chaplet card and opened it up. It has a picture of Jesus on the front. When my seatmate saw it she said, “This is your first time?” I nodded. She said, “My first time too, I’m a little nervous!” I said, “Me too.”

Soon a steward stood next to us and with graceful ballet movements acted out with points and gestures the safety instructions the stewardess up front was reading aloud. I had never seen anyone so gracefully act out the safety features, and I smiled and clapped when he was done. He leaned down and chatted with us, and I asked him what had changed for him since Sept 11. He told me the job had lost a little of its fun. “We used to be able, the crew, in the middle of a flight, we could gather sometimes in the galley and have coffee and talk. Now we just can’t. I have to have my eyes on the passengers at all times—I can’t turn my back.” He gave me a tough little look and leaned close to my ear. “And let me tell you, if anyone starts any trouble on my flight he is going down, I mean I will break his legs!”

I laughed and thanked him.

We took off. I almost always pray on planes and have a standard prayer: “Oh dear Lord please pick up this plane in your big hands and carry it safely through the air and place it down so gently in Fill-in-the-Blank. Thank you, Lord.” I thought those words and said them, and said more. And within 10 minutes of a smooth and eventless takeoff it was just like old times. I was sound asleep.

We landed gently, I did my work, went to interviews and a book signing and met delightful and warmhearted people, and came back Wednesday evening. Our takeoff was smooth and our flight was smooth and our landing was smooth right up until we were about 20 feet above the tarmac. Then the pilot pulled back and we went up and up and over a bit and circled the airport again. The pilot soon came on to tell us there was a little too much traffic on the runway, and he was going to give it some time to clear.

We landed safely. And I went happily home.

*   *   *

The extra security precautions seem to make people feel not worse but better. I got the sense a lot of people didn’t mind it so much that things have slowed down. And I wondered if some, like me, weren’t quietly relieved and made happy by the partial slowing down of America. Slower and safer sounds good to me.

It’s fine to see the young national guardsmen who wanted to do something to help be there, and be polite and friendly with everyone, and be able to potentially eyeball bad men and deter them from their path.

But I wonder. Since American civilians are the target or at least a major target in this war, why don’t we put one soldier or one Marine on each flight? We have enough soldiers and Marines, and most everyone would feel safer with one on board.

Second, my friend who is wanded within an inch of her life, the reporter, told me that on a recent flight the pilot sought her out to tell her what he was really afraid of. He didn’t fear bad men with paper cutters anymore. He was afraid that the next trouble would be the guy in seat 23-C, a guy who presses a remote control button which sets off a bomb in a bag in the hold. “That’s what I fear,” he told her, hoping she would do a piece on it.

It’s what I fear too. This week Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta said the U.S. isn’t able yet to search and have dogs sniff each and every bag that goes into the hold of a plane.

But why not have the armed forces do it? We have the means and the manpower and it would make everyone safer, which is part of their job.

We want to get people flying again, moving around America making deals and appearances and selling things and finding new things to sell. The airlines are still in financial trouble, and a lot of people need to be reassured that to fly is not to take a huge personal risk. It seems odd to me that the administration has not moved more forcefully in this matter. Heck, Harry Truman got so mad one day that he threatened to have soldier run the railways. And he almost did it. And he didn’t have a war on terrorism to give him fire.

*   *   *

As for me, I just felt better for having flown and witnessed the same old essential boringness of it. It was good to fall asleep somewhere over New Jersey as we headed west, an unread magazine open on my lap, just like the old days.

“We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing,” the old hymn says and children still sing. This Thanksgiving some of us have felt a greater than usual desire to gather, and ask. Our first big national coming together since the attacks on America has taken on a heightened feel. There’s a lot of tenderness out there, and a lot of gratitude, too. One way or another we’ll all probably be talking about the things we’ve learned about ourselves, and our country, since that extraordinary day, September 11.

*   *   *

Trauma educates. We’ve been reminded that life is short, and probably more beautiful for the brevity: Maybe we wouldn’t appreciate flowers so much if we thought that they, and we, would last forever. To know it’s temporary is to want to see life more sharply, to breathe it in. Tragedy can leave you hungry for life.

We have learned that Americans are nimble: We crossed the divide between the old world and the new in about 48 hours. In the much-used phrase we wrapped our brains around it, and quickly. We reordered our minds, and stepped into the new reality.

We are newly aware that as a nation we are both fragile and strong. Because we are technologically highly evolved we are dependent on the maintenance of a certain infrastructure. It took only 19 men only two hours to down the power lines, cause chaos, crash markets, strike fear. We were vulnerable.

We also learned we are stronger than we knew. A nation that had spent the past few decades trying to decide what kind of cashmere slippers to buy found out it was, still, tough as old boots.

We found some things that had been lost. Our love of country, for instance. Not everyone found it because not everyone had lost it but some had. They hadn’t thought in a long time about why America is worthy of their love and protectiveness. But it’s been on their mind since 9/11. They are like the character Tom at the end of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” who said of the family he could not forget, “I was more loyal than I meant to be.” Maybe a lot of people have found they were more loyal to America than they knew.

*   *   *

We have learned that the baby boom generation was up to the crisis history finally handed it. From the White House to the media to the Pentagon to Ground Zero the salt-and-peppered ones met the challenge. We may have to stop calling them babies now.

*   *   *

We have learned, as a minister put it, that the age of the genius is over and the age of the hero begun. The observation is that of Father George Rutler, a Roman Catholic priest who ran to the Trade Center when the towers were hit. As New York’s firemen, the first and still greatest warriors of World War IV, passed the priest on the way to the buildings they’d pause for a moment and ask for prayers, for a blessing, for the sacrament of confession. Soon they were lined up to talk to him in rows, “like troops before battle,” he told me. He took quick confessions, and finally gave general absolution “the way you do in a war, for this was a war.”

When I heard this story it stopped me dead in my tracks because it told me what I’d wondered. They knew. The firemen knew exactly what they were running into, knew the odds, and yet they stood in line, received the sacrament, hoisted the hoses on their backs and charged.

When Father Rutler hears sirens now his eyes fill with tears. There was so much goodness in that terrible place! And he saw it, saw the huge towers burning, melting, saw a thousand Americans hit the scene and lead what is now known, in New York, as the greatest and most successful rescue effort on American soil in all of American history.

*   *   *

We have learned, perhaps in a new way, that we are one people. In the past 50 years we have seen our country inch closer each day to greater affection, regard and understanding among our many races. For half a century we’ve seen Americans of all colors in the office, at Bible study, on the playground, in school negotiating the new respect in a million private transactions every day.

But something in the events of 9/11, something in the fact that all the different colors and faiths and races were helping each other, were in it together, were mutually dependent and mutually supportive, made you realize: We sealed it that day. We sealed the pact, sealed the promise we made long ago. We went from respecting our differences to having, essentially, no differences. We are Americans. That’s a lot to have in common.

If you need one stray bit of proof: Helping to run the war, negotiate the diplomatic aspects, standing and speaking for the administration, said to be the most trusted longtime counselor of the president of the United States is a 46-year-old black woman who was born when black girls had to be escorted to public schools by federal marshals.

Nobody really mentions this about Condi Rice because it’s not big news. And it’s not big news because it’s what we do now.

What kind of country does this? A great country. That’s a good thing to learn, or relearn, too.

*   *   *

We learned or were reminded that in America the toughest moments become, within weeks, tough jokes about the fix we’re in. And we still know better than almost anyone how to laugh at ourselves. A small for instance: It was said by a late night comedian that since Americans can’t keep all the “istans” straight—Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, Afghanistan—the best plan was to invade them all, turn them into one country and call it JenniferAnistan, as that way we’d both remember it and like it.

*   *   *

We have learned that in the life of this nation faith trumps everything. Faith trumps culture, faith trumps politics, faith in God is simply at the heart of the American experience and has been from the very beginning, from the first Thanksgiving, which was a giving thanks to God.

The men and women in their 20s and 30s who are on the ships, in the jets, in the troops on the ground: They wear crosses and Miraculous Medals and Stars of David. America taught them to be ambitious, but life taught them to be religious, because it teaches that rising is not enough. They are like the firemen: They believe. And their belief may lead them to heroism, and their heroism may win the day.

Individually many of us have learned what was said the other night at a dinner for the widows and children of New York’s firemen and police. That when you’re with the grieving you don’t have to say the right thing because there is no right thing. You just have to be there. Just be “there,” not distracted and daydreaming but loyally there and consciously there.

And we have learned that people experience things in different ways, draw different conclusions. The priest, Father Rutler, who was at Ground Zero was, a few days later, on a train on the East Coast. He fell into conversation with a young man on his way back to college. He told the young man what he’d seen, what the firemen had done, how none of them turned back or turned away. And the boy listened and said, “They must have been sick.” The priest was startled; he thought to himself that the boy was a victim of modern philosophy, of the deconstructionist spirit, of modernity.

“They were heroes.” “They were sick.” That’s a division, but it’s not a question, because most of us know what they were. It’s something else we’ve learned since 9/11. And I don’t think we’ll be forgetting it any time soon.

He walked into history an obscure, flat footed, bantamy little fellow in a light gray suit, the inhabitant of an eloquence-free zone who gave boring speeches in a flat voice. He was not compelling. This was more obvious because he followed a charismatic leader who did big things and filled the screen. He was quickly defined and dismissed by the opinion elite as “a first-rate second-rate man.” And maybe at the beginning he feared the appraisal was correct, for when he became president he said very frankly that he felt the moon and the stars had fallen upon him.

Why would he expect people to be impressed by him, to see him as a leader? His background: a failed businessman who wanted to rise in politics but was forced to do it through a corrupt local political machine. He worked and rose within it, doing his best to hold onto his integrity. He achieved local office, and then shocked everyone when the machine picked him to run for the U.S. Senate and he actually won. He served a term with mild distinction and then through an accident of history became president because—well, because history can be antic, unknowable, full of tricks.

His name of course was Harry Truman, and to him fell the hard and hellish job of keeping the world up at a terrible time. He made tough decisions at the toughest moments—admitting, as his predecessor never did or could, exactly who “Uncle Joe” Stalin was and what he wanted, stopping him in Greece, pushing through the Marshall Plan to save Europe and getting the money for it from a depleted American public, fighting a land war in Korea. All this when his exhausted nation—we had been through two world wars in 25 years—did not want another war, and needed to be rallied.

He stopped or thwarted communism wherever he could, fought like a tiger, faced down the most admired American general of the day and canned him for overstepping his bounds, made the crucial and horrific decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and took the responsibility himself to the extent that when the head of the Manhattan Project came to him and said he feared he had blood on his hands, Truman took out his handkerchief and wiped J. Robert Oppenheimer’s hands, and said no, I made the decision, the responsibility is mine.

Harry Truman was a great man. And I believe we are seeing the makings of a similar greatness in George W. Bush, the bantamy, plain-spoken, originally uninspiring man who through a good heart and a good head, through gut and character, simple well-meaningness and love of country is, in his own noncompelling way, doing the right tough things at a terrible time.

And he faces stakes as high as Truman faced, if not, as many think, higher. Truman had to stand for freedom and keep the West together while keeping Stalin from getting and then using weapons that he could, in his evil, use to blow up half the world. Mr. Bush has to stand for freedom and keep an alliance together while moving against a dozen madmen who have it within their power to deploy weapons of mass destruction that can blow up half the world. He has to see to it that this great mission doesn’t end with getting or killing Osama and his men. He must lead the civilized world now to root out, get and remove every weapon of mass destruction—every chemical and bio depot and laboratory in every rogue nation—and banish this scourge from the world. It will be hard to keep the allies on board and supportive, hard to keep the American people behind him, because it’s going to be a long war.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush also followed a charismatic leader, and I do not mean Mr. Clinton. Mr. Clinton, whose eight years in the presidency could be compressed like an accordion into one inch of meaning, was no FDR. The charismatic figure Mr. Bush follows is the last big American president, the last who had the massive presence of a battleship, Ronald Reagan.

People kept wondering last year during the election if Mr. Bush had it in him to be a Reagan. I thought maybe he did. But now as I watch him I think: Truman.

Harry Truman did it all through gut and instinct and character. He was a good man who loved his country. He loved to read history and could quote Ovid, but he was no intellectual, not a man of strikingly original thought; his mind wasn’t so much creative as quick, and solid as a rock. He grew into the job, on a steep learning curve, forced by history to absorb facts and decide quickly. He didn’t know about the atom bomb until the first week of his presidency.

Mr. Bush has been on a similar steep curve, forced to absorb and decide quickly, and his decisions too seem to have been issued from a mind that’s quick and solid as a rock.

In the early days of the current struggle he immediately understood the situation—“We are at war”—but did not immediately strike back. He seemed, at first, in the day after Sept. 11, to have been as shocked by history as Harry Truman—the moon and the stars had fallen upon him. He was eight months into a new presidency, and now all the facts of the world changed. But he righted himself as Truman did, and he made his plans. There were no showy and meaningless kabooms with our missiles hitting aspirin factories in the desert. Instead Mr. Bush prepared, pushed, waited and struck—and now the Taliban are on the run and Afghanistan is teetering on something that whatever it is will surely be better than what it had been. Al Qaeda is not done, but as Mr. Bush said again yesterday in his news conference with President Vladimir Putin, we will not rest until it is.

*   *   *

It was in that remarkable news conference that Mr. Bush displayed once again in public what is reported of him in private—that he has an instinctive command in his private dealings, a way of appealing to his guests with a well-meaning warmth that is both ingenuous and . . . yet another little weapon in the Bush armory, an armory whose job it is to provide him with what he needs to get what he wants. In this case and for some time now what he wants has been a personal bond with President Putin that both reflects and promotes a new and deep alliance between America and Russia.

“It all starts with the human element,” he said yesterday. And of course that personal element was much in evidence, and yielded a news conference between an American president and a Russian leader the likes of which has never been seen in history. “Yesterday we tasted steak and listened to music and did all of this to increase the understanding between peoples,” said Mr. Putin. He especially liked the barbecue: “When I asked the president he said, ‘Indeed this cannot be done except for in Texas.’ ”

It would be naive to see this as anything more than a charming routine by two men in a charming mood if it were not also clear that, as Mr. Putin said, serious discussions had been held. And though some issues remained open, Mr. Putin announced, “We will arrive at a conclusion acceptable to Russia, the United States and indeed the entire world.”

Mr. Bush was at his best, and I realized there is a way you can tell that he is and knows he is in full command. He signals it by talking the way he talks; that is, he signals it through bad grammar, or if you will highly colloquial usage. When Mr. Bush is uncomfortable or being formal he says, “The tax structure in Russia is exemplary in many ways.” When Mr. Bush is in full command he says, as he did yesterday, “And by the way they got a flat tax in Russia.” They got one indeed, and it’s turnin’ that country ‘round big-time. (English teachers across the country are going to have to get used to saying, “It is good to listen to this nice man’s thoughts but not to adopt his usage.”)

You also know when Mr. Bush is in full command when he’s not afraid to let his merriness out. His natural verbal style is Texas wise-guy: asked by a student if he had any advice for her life he said, “Yeah, listen to your mother.” This got a lot of laughter but then, to show respect for a child who asked an honest question, he turned serious, and what he said was moving. “Follow your dreams. . . . You never know where life’s gonna take ya. I never sat and thought, ‘Gosh, if I work hard I’ll be president of the United States.’ It wasn’t in my vocabulary. But you never know. You never know. Trust the Lord.”

Harry Truman couldn’t have said it better himself.

*   *   *

I wrote to one of Mr. Bush’s aides the other day, a smart and gifted man, and he sent back a note saying the most moving thing that has happened to him the past two months is “seeing that George Bush is a great man—a truly great man.”

He meant it sincerely, and would not have said it to me if he did not think it. And it reminded me of something. I spent a lot of the year 2000 writing about Mr. Bush when he was running for president, and stating in these pages and elsewhere that I felt he had potential greatness in him. This seemed to some of my friends absurd. He didn’t look great or act great; he looked like an aging preppy fortunate son.

But there’s an odd thing about presidents. Sometimes you can meet a man on his way up in politics and you can see the president within. There were people who met Ronald Reagan in the 1950s and ‘60s and who saw—one wrote a notarized letter so he could prove decades hence that he had seen it—that Ronald Reagan would be president one day, and a great one. There were people who met Jack Kennedy and thought: president.

But no one met young Harry Truman and started hearing “Hail to the Chief,” and no one even 13 years ago, in 1988, met George Bush Jr., as he was then called, and saw the president within. I certainly didn’t.

But life is funny, and what matters is that Mr. Bush has found the president within. I think he knows he’s going to be a great one, and that’s significant because all the great ones always know it somewhere inside. Even Truman did, eventually.

That was an interesting speech President Bush gave last night in Georgia. Its subject was homeland security, and in terms of content, style and tone it seemed to be, essentially, nothing new. And yet by the end and after reading it, I thought: He’s telling us a great deal here.

The terrorists “want to kill Americans, Jews and Christians”; we’ve seen this hatred before in history, and “the only possible response is to confront it and defeat it.” The bad men “have no religion, have no conscience and have no mercy”; it is a war “to save civilization itself”; the way to win peace is “to take the battle to the enemy and to stop them.”

He talked at length—at too great length, I think—about how we as a people are buoyed by faith and family, how flags are flying everywhere, how Americans have contributed a billion dollars to relief efforts and charities, and how this would be a good time to mentor or tutor a child.

This has already been said, but it allowed him to underscore what he wants us to absorb, and every day: that the terrorists brought out the very best in our people, and the very best is what it will take to defeat them.

It was a speech in which the president was determined not to announce but to underscore, and to leave his audience inferring. Inferring that yes we’re in a heck of a war, and yes we’ll get through, yes the government is on the case and yes, we must continue to live and love life and refuse to let the terrorists diminish the simple joys of dailyness.

It was a long-haul speech, not a review-the-current-crisis speech. It was the kind of thing we’re going to be hearing from him for a long time, because the war will go a long time.

Along the way he announced as his subject “how to live”—Tolstoy’s great question, which suggests someone in speechwriting has been hitting “War and Peace.” Mr. Bush continued to accent the importance of viewing Islam as peaceful and the terrorists as its abusive misinterpreters.

Most interestingly, I thought, he seemed to suggest along the way that Sept. 11 has given us as a people an opportunity to revisit our long history, and understand better what it is we are fighting for. “Ours is a great story, and we must tell it,” he said. I suspect very soon now he will be expanding on that thought, and asking our public schools to return to the old history curriculum, the one that told our story from prerevolutionary days through the Civil War through the age of invention to all the great social and moral movements that have swept the past century. Our children, that is, for the first time in 25 years, may be taught our history again. What a boon this would be for our country.

In the middle of the speech Mr. Bush touched on ways to mobilize the interest and energy of our newly aroused country. Most significantly, he said he will ask state and local official “to create a modern civil-defense service,” to help us win the war at home. Well done, hooray, and just in time.

*   *   *

Where we are right now is 1939, and what we’re in right now is the Phony War. That was the placid time that followed Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, after Germany invaded Poland. Everyone knew that what would soon be called World War II had begun, and yet things were relatively quiet. John Bull found his daily life undisturbed and actually quite pleasant in the way that walking out of a funeral on a pretty summer day makes you see the buds on a tree more brilliantly and receive them more gratefully. That was the autumn of ‘39; it was followed by 1940, and the German invasion of Paris, and the Blitz.

But for now and until the next shoe drops—I like that phrase, which people use to mean “until the next terrorist attack,” but it’s not really the right phrase unless you are envisioning a centipede with a lot of different shoes—the phony war is what we’re in. Difficult times loom ahead, and most of us know it, but tonight we’re on our way to the movies or to dinner or to buy a new car to take advantage of the fantastic values being offered.

*   *   *

A phony war is better than a real one. We’ll be happy as long as it lasts and safe as long as we remember it’s phony.

The other night I heard a man say, “While we’re in a war . . .,” and I said “No, we’re not in a war. We’re at war, but we’ll be in it soon enough.”

It is a question of time, and timing.

Tony Blair, who has been bold and stout hearted in his support of America, is reported in the London Independent to be urging the Bush administration not to widen the American bombing campaign to include Iraq. At the same time the New York Times reports (and The Wall Street Journal Europe reported three weeks ago) that two highly placed defectors from Iraq’s own intelligence agency have revealed that Iraq has been hard at work training Islamic terrorists at a local terror camp since 1995. The defectors said they knew of a highly guarded compound within the training camp where Iraqi scientists, led by a German, produced biological agents. One of the defectors told the Times the terrorists receiving training came from Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other countries. “We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States,” he said. “The Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were repeatedly told this.”

This report is of course not surprising. It is just more data that backs up what we already know. It’s the kind of thing Richard Butler, the former United Nations weapons inspector, has been talking about for years. Now people listen.

*   *   *

The argument about targeting is an argument about timing. The argument about whether to bomb and take Iraq is not an argument about whether to take Iraq, it is an argument about when, in this long war, it will be best to move on Iraq. If Secretary of State Colin Powell does not know this he will know it soon enough; if President Bush does not know (I believe he knows, in spades), he will find out; if Mr. Blair doesn’t know, he will find out too.

Why is it only a question about the timing of the effort and not the size and scope of the effort? Because we cannot survive—the West in its entirety cannot survive—in a world in which Saddam and his friends are able to unleash what they desire to unleash. We cannot last in a world in which those whom Christopher Hitchens aptly calls Islamic fascists mean to and can kill us by inches, or yards.

There is another question about time, and timing. I know people who think this struggle may last years. I will be grateful and surprised if it does not last decades. Some of that will depend on whether we widen the war quickly or not. If we don’t, history will widen it for us.

The enemy has already bombed our country and unleashed biological warfare on us, clear acts of war. We are now bombing the Afghan areas in which we believe the terrorists are hiding, and feeling impressed and rather taken aback at the sight of hardy Northern Alliance soldiers charging would-be terror enclaves on horseback. They remind me of the Polish cavalry, whose efforts in defense of their country in World War II were as gallant as they were doomed. (More heartening thought: They put one in mind of the fearless and quite crazy Arab tribesmen who charged Aqaba during World War I. They took it. Still, as I watched what appeared to be a Northern Alliance cavalry charge on the news last night, I thought: This is how David Lean would have shot it in “Lawrence of Arabia” if his producer, Sam Spiegel, had drastically cut the budget. Mr. Lean had a cast of thousands; the Northern Alliance looked like dozens.)

*   *   *

Let me tell you why I have a hunch that Mr. Bush sees it all, in his head, as ultimately a matter of timing and not mere targets.

On the morning of Sept. 11, when he was in Florida with his top staff unveiling an education initiative at a local public school, the second World Trade Center tower was hit. This was exactly the moment at which all the most sophisticated people understood, and said, “This is terrorism. This is no accident. This is a terrorist incident. It’s Arab terrorists.”

That was the smart and obvious thing to think.

But at the point where most sophisticated people were saying “this is terrorism, he said, “We are at war.”

He jumped ahead of the obvious and went straight to the not-so-obvious. I found it interesting that his heart-head-and-spirit apprehended immediately the fix we were in. (And let me tell you, presidents are not quick to say sentences like “We are at war.”)

I found it interesting when, on Tuesday, Mr. Bush told European leaders that the terrorists are trying to get their hands on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons to use against the West, though I did not understand why he said “are trying to,” as opposed to “have acquired and are attempting to acquire.” Some accused him of scare-mongering, but he was not. He was underscoring the obvious. And underscoring the obvious is a good thing to do when the obvious is not obvious to everyone.

Everything I hear about him and of him, everything he says that I watch or read, tells me he is ahead of the curve in his thinking on what we are in. This is only a hunch—I have neither seen nor asked—but let me tell you what I feel certain he knows.

It will not only be a long war, he will probably be only the first (though perhaps the most crucial) president who fights it. It will be a terrible war, too. This war happens to be the reason he is president: because something big and bad and dark was coming, and he was the man to lead us through it. He didn’t, you will remember, really hunger for the presidency only two years ago, did not have the famous fire in the belly; when the local preacher talked about what God wants us to do to help our country, his mother really turned to him and said—I paraphrase—He’s talking to you, George. It is interesting that she felt she had to say it. But the president feels none of his old ambivalence now.

The new war has given shape, form and historical purpose to his presidency. My sense is that he walked into office knowing huge history was coming but not knowing when, what, where. Now he knows. I can quite imagine him thinking, This is the reason I’m here.

I’ll tell you something else I keep thinking about him. It is the thing he did, or that happened to him, that no modern president has ever done, that no past president is reported to have done. As George W. Bush took the Oath of Office on the steps of the Capitol last January, his eyes filled with tears. You could see them on TV, and the people around him saw them up close.

And I remember thinking: Those tears have meaning, those tears are about something, and I wonder if he knows exactly what. Because sometimes people have presentiments they don’t even understand until later.