Peggy Noonan

I am thinking about the moment in history in which we are immersed, and as usual my mind turns to the words of a great writer of the movies. In Robert Bolt’s screenplay of “Doctor Zhivago,” Lara and Zhivago, near the end of their drama, are huddled at his family’s old estate in the Ural Mountains, waiting for the local Bolsheviks to descend. All seems lost, all exits blocked. The wolves of the forest howl with foreboding. Lara comes awake in the night and begins to weep. “This is a terrible time to be alive,” she says. “Oh no, no,” says Zhivago in all his innocence and belief. “It is a wonderful time to be alive.” Life itself, whatever the circumstances, is good; it is a miracle no matter what.

He is right. She is right. It is a terrible time to be alive, it is a wonderful time to be alive.

It is wonderful right now. And not terrible but deeply, almost dazzlingly, strange. And we must take note.

*   *   *

You are perhaps reading this at the beach, or after a day at the pool, or at home in your den near midnight as you sneak a bowl of Häagen-Dazs frozen yogurt with fresh strawberries. You are comfortable, well fed, well clothed; the air conditioner hums. Everything feels normal. Everything is! Which is why you haven’t gotten your brain fully around the fact that we are living through abnormal times.

We are living Days of Lore. Days of big history. We are living through an epoch scholars 50 years hence will ask about and study. (Yes, I think there will be scholars 50 years hence.) They will see us, you and me, as grizzled veterans of something big. Which is funny since we don’t even see ourselves as soldiers.

This is the lore I grew up with, the folklore of an earlier era that brought with it pictures we still carry in our heads: The Great Depression came (bankers jumped from windows, men sold apples on the street). Then came the Dust Bowl (dark and whipping winds leave farms and families uprooted; John Steinbeck’s Joads move to California). Then the war, World War II, the big one (a million newsreels, films and pictures from Henry Luce’s Life magazine).

But we are living through an era just as big. Bigger, perhaps, or so ultimately I fear. And we haven’t fully noticed. The collapse of the bubble, the fall of the market, the sinking of the AOL Time Warner empire (once known as the great house of Luce), the emptying of retirement accounts, the declarations of the biggest bankruptcies in U.S. history—this is the stuff of Lore.

A picture to put in your head: The founder and former CEO of the sixth largest cable company in America, which is the great cable country, is hauled away in handcuffs, charged with looting his company of hundreds of millions of dollars and bilking investors of billions. John Rigas of Adelphia Communications, 78 years old, does the perp walk in Manhattan surrounded by photographers. His thick white hair stands up uncombed, his eyes seem perplexed, dulled by enormity. He looks like a defrocked priest.

That perp walk, that look, are as much a picture of our times as bankers jumping from windows and Okies selling apples on the street.

All this financial woe, all these economic headlines, take place against a backdrop of a Pentagon attacked, of falling towers and America at war.

Sort of. We know it’s going on, but unlike World War II few of us feel it. Do you know anyone who has died or been wounded in it since Sept. 12? Most of us experience the war as an abstraction, a background against which pundits occasionally explain that an event is occurring.

But it is an abstraction taking place within a new time, the Era of Weapons of Mass Destruction. An era in which the nature of war and warfare has changed utterly, an era that promises, truly promises, bad pain ahead.

*   *   *

The sitting president, our leader, was nine months into a new presidency when history’s assault began. He is friendly, intelligent, funny, not deeply experienced in terms of his personal experience but deeply experienced in terms of watching up close the experiences of his father and of the president before his father.

He was elected legally but with fewer votes than his opponent, a new-age whack job who, upon his loss, grew a beard and came to look like a portly Gilded Age banker. This man will have his rematch.

And there is the current president’s predecessor, who seems more and more like Warren Harding, president as the Roaring ‘20s came to a screeching halt—handsome, gray-haired, wayward, blame-deflecting and, as Alice Roosevelt Longworth memorably said, “a slob.”

*   *   *

The Mideast pot boils high, the Gaza front heats up, Osama remains uncaught or is dead.

There is strange weather: forest fires historic in their size and destruction, weird temperatures—134 degrees, according to news reports, in a California town two weeks ago—earthquakes, landslides, floods, hail, melting glaciers, weird thunder, weird darkness, everything but locusts . . . and then the Chinese report locusts. Signs, portents of signs, wars and rumor of war.

Time magazine does a cover on Christians who are wondering, for the 2,014th time in history, if we are in the end times, and Christian Web sites buzz with this question: Is God taking the institutions on which we normally lean away from us one by one in order that we might learn to lean more completely on him?

*   *   *

The great man of the age, a giant, the old pope, comes to our continent, to Canada, and arouses now a thing he never inspired, pity. Well, pity and awe. The Toronto Sun called the trip “a stubborn act of courage” and said his arrival was “magnificent.” On Wednesday when a little girl was pushed forward to greet him on behalf of the children of Canada, she seemed to flinch, accepted his kiss and fled in tears. Her mother later said she was so moved she wept. But she seemed frightened to me, and understandably. Why would God allow the slow public withering of the man who fills the shoes of the Fisherman just as the Church rocks with crisis? Is God allowing the beauty and gallantry of John Paul’s soul to be obscured and hidden from us by the now-rough outer shell? Why? Is the pope bearing the woe of the world outwardly, for all of us to see? What does his suffering mean? What are we to learn from it?

Meantime in the Church the pope leads, a gathering of American lay Catholics is held in Boston. They seek to wrest some control from the hands of the bishops, and good luck to them. They call themselves “Keep the Faith, Change the Church.” The group is only five months old but it draws 4,000 Catholics to its first conference. They gave an award to a priest who has for years acknowledged and uncovered sex abuse within the church. The priest told them that the clergy sex scandals are equaled in their horror “only by the bloodshed of the Inquisition.”

Equaled only by the Inquisition! There’s a man who isn’t afraid to define.

*   *   *

A congressman who regularly fills the Capitol with his deranged banter and whose head looks like the last sanctuary of tree squirrels is expelled this week from the House, the second man to be so removed since the Civil War. The vote was 420-1, the holdout being the congressman famous for being assumed to have murdered his young lover.

And Wednesday came reports that an asteroid hurtling toward earth could hit us in 2019. Which gave me cause for optimism. Think of all our warring parties. We’d come together to battle the asteroid, pooling our best talent and sharing our genius, wouldn’t we? And then once we blew the asteroid up, and had a party, and felt safe, we’d get back to fighting again.

*   *   *

It is amazing that all of this is happening, isn’t it? This rush of history. Amazing that we are aware of it, see it, shake our heads over it as we eat the Häagen-Dazs, and don’t see it.

Maybe we are living in a perceptual warp, in a time when so many stray images and thoughts are coming at us that none of them successfully and completely come to us.

Five hundred years ago there was Agincourt, a battle that changed Europe’s history. And yet most of Europe slept through Agincourt, far from its fields. Most of Europe continued in peaceful oblivion to the fact its life had changed. Word spread but slowly. By the time an old lady living in a hut in Winchelsea heard the news, the news was old, which meant she already knew how the story ended: The world did not end. Her tree hadn’t shook.

She absorbed the new information by imagining what it was like, and by picking up reports from the gossip of travelers over fires in homesteads acres away. Months away. Years away.

Now we hear of an Agincourt a day. And we don’t know what the outcome will be. We don’t know how the story will end. We don’t know if we’ll be able to say: Yes, but the world did not end.

*   *   *

This is big stuff, isn’t it? I don’t know where to go with it. Do you? I have a sense of our initial and surface duty to the facts at least as I’ve presented them. That we know, first, that we are living in a time of Lore. That we pay attention. That we see the oddness of our time. That we recognize its majesty and bigness, and assume that we were made as big as the time we were born in. That we plow ahead. That we do our best. That we keep our head, talk to God, say our prayers, set an example. That we take notes. And not only park them under a heading that we won’t remember but print them out, too, and past them in a book. That we remember that each day, every day, we go into the world and either make it a little bit better or a little bit worse. And maybe you’re in a time of life now that you’re making it better. And maybe that’s good.

It is hot in New York. It is so hot that once when I had a fever a friend called and asked me how I felt and I said, “You know how dry and hot paper feels when it’s been faxed? That’s how I feel.” And how I felt all day yesterday. It is hot. We feel as if we’ve been faxed.

I found myself fully awake at 5 a.m. yesterday and went for a walk on the Brooklyn Bridge. Now more than ever the bridge, with its silver-corded cables and dense stone casements, seems like a great gift to my city. It spans. In the changed landscape of downtown it is our undisturbed beauty, grown ever more stately each year. People seem to love it more now, or at least mention it more or notice it more. So do I. It’s always full of tourists but always full of New Yorkers, too.

I am struck, as I always am when I’m on it, that I am walking on one of the engineering wonders of the world. And I was struck yesterday that I was looking at one of the greatest views in the history of man’s creation, Manhattan at sunrise. The casements were like medieval arches; the businessmen with umbrellas like knights without horses, storming the city walls; and the walls were silver, blue and marble in the light.

And all of it was free. A billionaire would pay billions to own this bridge and keep this view, but I and my jogging, biking and hiking confreres have it for nothing. We inherited it. Now all we do is pay maintenance, in the form of taxes. We are lucky.

The sun rose in haze, its edges indistinct, but even at 6:30 a.m. you could feel it heavy on your arms and shoulders. When I looked at it I thought of what Robert Bolt called the desert sun in his screenplay of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia.” He called it the Anvil.

*   *   *

As I rounded the entrance to the bridge on the Brooklyn side, a small moment added to my happiness. It was dawn, traffic was light, I passed a black van with smoked windows. In the driver’s seat with the window down was a black man of 30 or so, a cap low on his brow, wearing thick black sunglasses. I was on the walkway that leads to the bridge; he was less than two feet away; we were the only people there. We made eye contact. “Good morning!” he said. “Good morning to you,” I answered, and for no reason at all we started to laugh, and moved on into the day. Nothing significant in it except it may or may not have happened that way 30 or 40 years ago. I’m not sure the full charge of friendliness would have been assumed or answered.

It made me think of something I saw Monday night on local TV and thought to point out somewhere along the way. They were showing the 1967 movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” with Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier and Spencer Tracy, the slightly creaking old drama—it was slightly creaking when it first came out—about a young white woman and a young black man who fall in love, hope to marry and must contend with disapproving parents on both sides. It’s held up well, and parts of it seemed moving in a way I didn’t remember, and pertinent. Sidney Poitier, who has always brought his own natural standing to whatever part he’s playing, had a lovely kind of sweet intelligence, and everyone in the movie was physically beautiful, in the way of the old productions of the old Hollywood.

There was a bit of dialogue that packed a wallop. Spencer Tracy as the father of the would-be bride is pressing Mr. Poitier on whether he has considered the sufferings their mixed-race children might have to endure in America. Has he thought about this? Has his fiancée? “She is optimistic,” says Mr. Poitier. “She thinks every one of them will grow up to become president of the United States. I on the other hand would settle for secretary of state.” Those words, written 35 years ago by the screenwriter William Rose, may have seemed dreamy then. But in its audience when the movie came out would likely have been a young, film-loving Army lieutenant named Colin Powell who, that year, was preparing for a second tour of duty in Vietnam. And now he is secretary of state. This is the land dreams are made of. Does that strike you as a corny thing to say and talk about? It is. That’s another great thing.

*   *   *

Late Tuesday, on a subway ride from Brooklyn to the north of Manhattan, I resaw something I’d noticed and forgotten about. It is that more and more, on the streets and on the train, I see people wearing ID tags. We all wear IDs now. We didn’t use to. They hang from thick cotton string or an aluminum chain; they’re encased in a plastic sleeve or laminated; they’re worn one at a time or three at a time, but they’re there.

I ponder the existential implications. What does it mean that we wear IDs? What are we saying, or do we think we’re saying? I mean aside from the obvious.

I imagined yesterday the row of people across from me on the train, looking up all of a sudden from their newspaper, their paperback, their crossword puzzle book, and answering one after another:

“It means I know who I am,” says the man in blue shirt and suspenders.

“It means I can get into the building,” says the woman in gray.

“It means I am a solid citizen with a job.”

“I am known to others in my workplace.”

“I’m not just blowing through life, I’m integrated into it. I belong to something. I receive a regular paycheck.”

“I have had a background check done by security and have been found to be a Safe Person. Have you?”

I wonder if unemployed people on the train look at the tags around the other peoples’ necks and think, Soon I hope I’ll have one too. I wonder if kids just getting their first job at 17 will ever know that in America we didn’t all used to be ID’d. Used to be only for people who worked in nuclear power plants or great halls of government. Otherwise you could be pretty obscure. Which isn’t a bad way to be.

I work at home on my own and do not have an ID. But I am considering issuing myself one and having it laminated at the local Hallmark shop. It will have a nice picture and a title—President, CEO & CFO. I will wear it on the subway and when I get home I will hold it up in front of my doorbell, which I’ll rig so when I swipe the tag my front door pops open. Then I’ll turn to the friends I’m with and wink. “I know people here. I can get you in.”

*   *   *

A month ago there were news reports of a post-Sept. 11 baby boom. Everyone was so rocked by news of their mortality that they realized there will never be a perfect time to have kids but we’re here now so let’s have a family. I believed the baby=boom story and waited for the babies.

Then came the stories saying: Nah, there is no baby boom, it’s all anecdotal, there’s no statistical evidence to back it up. And I believed that too. But I’ve been noticing something for weeks now. In my neighborhood there is a baby boom. There are babies all over in Brooklyn. It is full of newborns, of pink soft-limbed infants in cotton carriers on daddy’s chest. It is full of strollers, not only regular strollers but the kind that carry two children—double-wides. And triple-wides. In the stores and on the streets there are babies cooing, dribbling, staring, sleeping. I see them and feel a rush of tenderness. I want to kiss their feet, I want to make them laugh. Kids are always looking for someone to make them laugh. The sight of any dog can do it. The sight of another baby can do it. The sight of an idiotic adult covering her eyes with her hands and moving her hands away quickly can do it. I would know.

I don’t care what anyone says, there have got to be data that back up what I’m seeing: that after Sept. 11, there was at least a Brooklyn baby boom.

*   *   *

A dream boom, too. The other day I spoke with a friend I hadn’t seen since the world changed. He was two blocks away when the towers fell, and he saw everything. We have all seen the extraordinary footage of that day, seen it over and over, but few of us has seen what my friend described: how in the office buildings near the World Trade Center they stood at the windows and suddenly darkness enveloped them as the towers collapsed and the demonic cloud swept through. “It was total darkness,” he told me. But the lights were on. They stood in his office wearing wet surgical masks. They couldn’t go out, but inside their building the smoke worked its way into the air conditioning. So they turned it off and stood there sweating and watching on TV what was happening two blocks away.

Did you see those forced to jump? I asked.

“Yes,” he said, and looked away. No descriptions forthcoming.

Have you had bad dreams?

“Yes,” he said, and looked away. No descriptions forthcoming.

I thought about this for a few days. My friend is brilliant and by nature a describer of things felt and seen. But not this time. I spoke to a friend who is a therapist. Are your patients getting extraordinary dreams? I asked.

“Always,” he laughs.

Sept.11-related?

“Yes,” he says, mostly among adolescents.

I asked if he was saving them, writing them down. He shook his head no.

So: The Sept. 11 Dream Project. We should begin it. I want to, though I’m not sure why. I think maybe down the road I will try to write about them. Maybe not. I am certain, however, that dreams can be an expression of a nation’s unconscious, if there can be said to be such a thing, and deserve respect. (Carl Jung thought so.)

To respect is to record. There is a response function at the end of this column, and you can use it to send in your Sept. 11 related dream—recurring, unusual, striking, whatever. (If you are a psychiatrist, send as many as you like—without identifying your patients, of course.) I will read them, and appreciate them and possibly weave them into a piece on what Sept. 11 has done to our dream lives and to our imaginations, when our imaginations are operating on their own, unfettered, unstopped, spanning.

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

Which I guess says it all.

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

I mark the coming holiday remembering the words of a friend of Samuel Johnson, who said, “I meant to be a philosopher, but happiness kept breaking through.”

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, and we must celebrate. Let us hold high a single sparkler to honor those American institutions that, in this interesting year, did not flounder or fail. Much has been said of those that did—Wall Street, big business, big accounting, the Catholic Church, the FBI and CIA. But most didn’t. Some stayed good and some improved and some seem to summon a metaphor: While the towers of the institution tottered, the men and women who worked within them took the stairs two at a time, hauling 80 pounds of gear to save the structure.

So: Let us hold a single sparkler to the lights that didn’t fail.

The U.S. military. Honored more than ever across the country and the world. They’re not just tough, they’re smart and brave, and to the extent we dig our way out of the current crisis they’ll be the ones with the shovels and pails.

Cops and firemen. Once patronized, now poster boys, and rightly so. They’re exemplars of courage and sacrifice, especially the firemen. What they did at the towers last September was like what was done at Omaha Beach on D-Day: They raced to fight a battle and proved we’d win a war.

Airline pilots and stewards. Under incredible stress, in a fearful time, without combat pay, they get us seated, settled and flying safely and in style. They have tons of guts. They do their jobs in spite of terror threats, pressure from family and friends to get out, and Department of Transportation rulings and methods that seem almost deliberately designed to encourage the bad guys and discourage the responsible.

The men and women of newspapers. We forget until history reminds us. But there are times when the lengthy, detailed, independent coverage of the great newspapers, and the gutsy work of reporters and editors, is irreplaceable. The past year reminded us of what Thomas Jefferson said: Given the choice between government and a free press, he’d take the free press.

American television. More news shows, more stations, more networks means more voices, more views. Only 20 years ago Big Media still had a monopoly on information, greatly pleasing those who found stimulation in bland, gray-suited corporate liberalism. It’s changed. Now more than ever we need options, now more than ever we have them. And: On Sept. 11, reporters and crews on the ground in New York literally risked their lives to get the story and the pictures.

Television entertainment. Once MGM had “more stars than there are in heaven,” but now the great studio of our time is a cable outfit. HBO will be studied by future social historians who’ll ponder the cultural impact of groundbreaking drama from “The Sopranos” to “Six Feet Under” to “Oz.” No network has reached such a consistently high level of product excellence since William Paley’s CBS, in the first golden age of television when his shop was called the Tiffany Network.

American wit. From Conan to Dave to Jay to Comedy Central. It more than thrives, it keeps the country together each night as comics and writers tear apart What Isn’t Working Now.

Science and medicine. Research labs, new treatments, technologies, medicines. All continue as the best in the world. Some day someone really will cure cancer. It will happen here.

The Internet. On Sept. 11, it was the light that didn’t fail. Phones in New York and Washington went down but the Internet kept humming. Separated parents, children and friends instant-messaged news of their safety, or wrote last words. And within the Internet this year the rise of a new institution:

Blogging. The 24-7 opinion sites that offer free speech at its straightest, truest, wildest, most uncensored, most thoughtful, most strange. Thousands of independent information entrepreneurs are informing, arguing, adding information. Imagine if we’d had them in 1776: “As I wrote in yesterday’s lead item on SamAdams.com, my well meaning cousin John continues his grammatical nitpicking with Jefferson (link requires registration) ‘Inalienable,’ ‘unalienable,’ whatever. Boys, let’s fight. Start the war.” Blogs may one hard day become clearinghouses for civil support and information when other lines, under new pressure, break down.

Local government. The federal government tends to flail about at the beginning of national crises but local governments continue doing what they do: seeing that traffic lights work, garbage is hauled, libraries stocked. Local governments provide the basic services of protection of person and property. They did their job this year.

The local church. Whatever is happening in the higher structure, chances are the ministers, priests, nuns, rabbis and brothers on the ground in your hometown are doing the work of God. They’re like airline pilots and stewardesses: They’re saving the institutions they represent by doing their daily work with professionalism and love.

American abundance. From the farm fields to your table it all still worked, and shows no signs of weakening. A friend wrote the other day: “Have you tasted the peaches this year? So sweet they’ll make you cry, the best in years. Tomatoes too.”

The American Dream. Our greatest institution. Our greatest tradition. It proceeds apace. Individual dreams continue to flourish, and we chase them with a freedom of movement, an encouraged creativity and a sense of possibility that remain unparalleled.

The other day I went to the oath-taking ceremony for new citizens at the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. There were hundreds of people in saris, in skullcaps, in suits made in Romania. There was a hugely pregnant woman from Nigeria, dressed in a red-and-white plaid cotton dress; there were young Eastern European women in too-tight pants from the Gap; there were young men in gym clothes. The usual mix from all over the world. They were so happy to be joining what others of us were lucky enough to be born into. They knew they were in the right place doing the right thing, and changing their lives for the better.

New Americans. We hold high this sparkler for you.

Three scenes.

It is a spring day in the early 1990s and I am talking with the head of a mighty American corporation. We’re in his window-lined office, high in midtown Manhattan, the view—silver skyscrapers stacked one against another, dense, fine-lined, sparkling in the sun—so perfect, so theatrical it’s like a scrim, like a fake backdrop for a 1930s movie about people in tuxes and tails. Edward Everett Horton could shake his cocktail shaker here; Fred and Ginger could banter on the phone.

The CEO tells me it is “annual report” time, and he is looking forward to reading the reports of his competitors.

Why? I asked him. I wondered what specifically he looks for when he reads the reports of the competition.

He said he always flipped to the back to see what the other CEOs got as part of their deal—corporate jets, private helicopters, whatever. “We all do that,” he said. “We all want to see who has what.”

Second scene: It is the mid-’90s, a soft summer day, and I am crossing a broad Manhattan avenue, I think it was Third or Lexington. I am doing errands. I cross the avenue with the light but halfway across I see the switch to yellow. I pick up my pace. From the corner of my eye I see, then hear, the car. Bright black Mercedes, high gloss, brand new. The man at the wheel, dark haired, in his 30s, is gunning the motor. Vroom vroom! He drums his fingers on the steering wheel impatiently. The light turns. He vrooms forward. I sprint the last few steps toward the sidewalk. He speeds by so close the wind makes my cotton skirt move. I realize: If I hadn’t sprinted that guy would have hit me. I think: Young Wall Street Titan. Bonus bum.

Third scene, just the other night. I am talking to a shrewd and celebrated veteran of Wall Street and Big Business. The WorldCom story has just broken; he tells me of it. He has a look I see more and more, a kind of facelift look only it doesn’t involve a facelift. It’s like this: The face goes blanched and blank and the eyes go up slightly as if the hairline had been yanked back. He looked scalped by history.

For years, he said, he had given speeches in Europe on why they should invest in America. We have the great unrigged game, he’d tell them, we have oversight and regulation, we’re the stable democracy with reliable responsible capitalism. “I can’t give that speech anymore,” he said.

*   *   *

Something is wrong with—what shall we call it? Wall Street, Big Business. We’ll call it Big Money. Something has been wrong with it for a long time, at least a decade, maybe more. Probably more. I don’t fully understand it. I can’t imagine that it’s this simple: A new generation of moral and ethical zeroes rose to run Big Money over the past decade, and nobody quite noticed but they were genuinely bad people who were running the system into the ground. I am not sure it’s this simple, either: A friend tells me it all stems from the easy money of the ‘90s, piles and piles of funny money that Wall Street learned to play with. That would be a description of the scandal, perhaps, but not the reason for it.

At any rate it no longer seems like a scandal. “Scandal” seems quaint. It is starting to feel like a tragedy. Not for Wall Street and for corporations—it’s a setback for them—but for our country. For a way of living and being.

Those who invested in and placed faith in Global Crossing, Enron, Tyco or WorldCom have been cheated and fooled by individuals whose selfishness seems so outsized, so huge, that it seems less human and flawed than weird and puzzling. Did they think they would get away with accounting scams forever? Did they think they’d never get caught? Do they think they’re operating in the end times and they better grab what they can now and go hide? What were they thinking?

We should study who these men are—they are still all men, and still being turned in by women—and try to learn how they rationalized their actions, how they excused their decisions or ignored the consequences, how they thought about the people they were cheating. I mention this because I’ve been wondering if we are witnessing the emergence of a new pathology: White Collar Big Money Psychopath.

*   *   *

I have been reading Michael Novak, the philosopher and social thinker and, to my mind, great man. Twenty years ago this summer he published what may be his masterpiece, “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.” It was a stunning book marked by great clarity of expression and originality of thought. He spoke movingly of the meaning and morality of capitalism. He asked why capitalism is good, and answered that there is one great reason: Of all the systems devised by man it is the one most likely to lift the poor out of poverty.

But, he asserted unassailably, capitalism cannot exist in a void. Capitalism requires an underlying moral edifice. Without it nothing works; with it all is possible. That edifice includes people who have an appreciation for and understanding of the human person; it requires a knowledge that business can contribute to community and family; it requires “a sense of sin,” a sense of right and wrong, and an appreciation that the unexpected happens, that things take surprising turns in life.

Mr. Novak was speaking, he knew, to an international intellectual community that felt toward capitalism a generalized contempt. Capitalism was selfish, exploitative, unequal, imperialistic, warlike. He himself had been a socialist and knew the critiques. But he had come to see capitalism in a new way.

Capitalism, like nature, wants to increase itself, wants to grow and create, and as it does it produces more: more goods, more services, more “liberation,” more creativity, more opportunity, more possibilities, more unanticipated ferment, movement, action.

So capitalism was to Mr. Novak a public good, and he addressed its subtler critics. What of “the corruption of affluence,” the idea that while it is moral discipline that builds and creates success, success itself tends to corrupt and corrode moral discipline? Dad made money with his guts, you spend it at your leisure. The result, an ethos of self indulgence, greed and narcissism. The system works, goes this argument, but too well, and in the end it corrodes.

Mr. Novak answered by quoting the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who once observed that affluence in fact inspires us to look beyond the material for meaning in our lives. “It’s exactly because people have bread that they realize you can’t live by bread alone.” In a paradoxical way, said Mr. Novak, the more materially comfortable a society becomes, the more spiritual it is likely to become, “its hungers more markedly transcendent.”

Right now Mr. Novak certainly seems right about American society. We have not become worse people with the affluence of the past 20 years, and have arguably in some interesting ways become better. (Forty years ago men in the New York City borough of Queens ignored the screams of a waitress named Kitty Genovese as she was stabbed to death in an apartment building parking lot. Today men of Queens are famous for strapping 60 pounds of gear on their back and charging into the towers.)

But it appears that the leaders of business, of Wall Street, of big accounting have, many of them, become worse with affluence. Or maybe it’s just worse with time. I think of a man of celebrated rectitude who, if he returned to the Wall Street of his youth, would no doubt be welcomed back with cheers and derided behind his back as a sissy. He wouldn’t dream of cooking the books. He wouldn’t dream of calling costs profits. He would never fit in.

*   *   *

Mr. Novak famously sees business as a vocation, and a deeply serious one. Business to him is a stage, a platform on which men and women can each day take actions that are either moral or immoral, helpful or not. When their actions are marked by high moral principle, they heighten their calling—they are suddenly not just “in business” but part of a noble endeavor that adds to the sum total of human joy and progress. The work they do builds things—makes connections between people, forges community, spreads wealth, sets example, creates a template, offers inspiration. The work they do changes the world. And in doing this work they strengthen the ground on which democracy and economic freedom stand.

They are, that is, patriots.

“The calling of business is to support the reality and reputation of capitalism,” says Mr. Novak, “and not undermine [it].”

But undermining it is precisely what the men of WorldCom et al. have done. It is their single most destructive act.

*   *   *

Edward Younkins of the Acton Institute distills Mr. Novak’s philosophy into “Seven Great Responsibilities for Corporations”: satisfy customers with good services of real value; make a reasonable return to investors; create new wealth; create new jobs; defeat cynicism and envy by demonstrating internally that talent and hard work will and can be rewarded; promote inventiveness, ingenuity and creativity; diversify the interests of the republic.

As for business leaders, their responsibility is to shape a corporate culture that fosters virtue; to exemplify respect for the rule of law; to act in practical ways to improve society; to communicate often and openly with investors, pensioners, customers and employees; to contribute toward improved civil society; and to protect—lovely phrase coming—“the moral ecology of freedom.”

*   *   *

To look at the current Big Money crisis armed with Mr. Novak’s views on and love of capitalism is to understand the crisis more deeply.

Businessmen are not just businessmen. They are not just moneymakers. Businessmen and -women are representatives of, leaders of, exemplars of an ethos and a way of life. They are the face and daily reality of free-market capitalism.

And when they undermine it with their actions they damage more than their reputations, more than the portfolios of investors. They damage and deal a great blow to our country. They make a great and decent edifice look dishonest and low because they are dishonest and low.

When we call them “thieves” or “con men” we are not, with these tough words, quite capturing the essence of the damage they do and have done.

It would be good if some great man or woman of business in America would rise and speak of that damage, and its meaning, and how to heal it. It would be good if the Securities and Exchange Commission held open hearings in New York on what has been done and why and by whom, and how they got away with it until they didn’t anymore. It would be good if the business leaders of our country shunned those businessmen who did such damage to the very freedoms they used to make themselves wealthy. And it just might be good if some companies, on the next casual Friday, gave everyone in their employ the day off, with just one assignment: Go read a book in the park. They could start with “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,” and go from there.

Dear Karen Hughes,

The results are in, a consensus is forming, we want you onboard.

It appears we hit a nerve last week when we asserted that Homeland isn’t really an American sort of word but a European, or rather Teutonic, sort of word, and should be retired as the name of the government’s new antiterrorism agency. In the past year no one has wanted to make an issue of this when other things, such as whether terrorists planned to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, seemed more pressing. But if we wait for a perfect time to stop Homeland we’ll never do it. And it must be done, because words matter.

Last week I outlined the arguments against Homeland. Let me add two more. First, the essence of American patriotism is a felt and spoken love for and fidelity to the ideas and ideals our country represents and was invented to advance—freedom, equality, pluralism. “We hold these truths . . .” The word Homeland suggests another kind of patriotism—a vaguely European sort. “We have the best Alps, the most elegant language; we make the best cheese, had the bravest generals.” It summons images of men in spiked helmets lobbing pitchers of beer at outsiders during Oktoberfest.

When you say you love America, you’re not saying our mud is better than the other guy’s mud. And the name of the newest and most important agency in recent history, charged with the crucial task of thwarting terrorism and protecting our nation from weapons of mass destruction be they chemical, biological or nuclear, should reflect this.

Second, the Homeland Security Agency headed by Tom Ridge was not a conspicuous success, and was in fact nightly monologue fodder on Leno and Letterman. So it makes sense, as we create a new agency, to give it a new name. Homeland failed. Start over, make it new, change the title.

*   *   *

To what? The redoubtable Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles.com, shoulder to shoulder in this battle (even National Public Radio has joined us, making it either bipartisan, nonpartisan or multipartisan), has been collecting names. So have I. Brilliant readers of this column sent brilliant ideas. (I hope you looked at their letters. We got a lot. Almost none supported the use of Homeland.)

As you ready to leave Washington for Texas, Karen, please give the President and his advisers, as your parting gift, three or four of the following suggested names from the Kaus/Noonan list:

Department of Domestic Defense, or 3-D

Department of Domestic Security, or DDS

Department of Interior Security, DIS

Department of Federal Safety, DFS

Department of Civilian Security, DCS

Mainland Defense, MD

Department of Mainland Security, DMS

Federal Security and Intelligence, FSI

Department of American Protection, DAP

Homefront Security, HS

Department of Security, DS

Civil Security, CS

Department of Civil Defense, DCD

Any one of these would be an improvement on Homeland. As an NPR commentary said last week, “We do live in a world where real enemies mean us real harm. We do have to fight them. We have to defeat them. But in every battle we’ve fought and won our most powerful weapons have always been words. We ought to use the best ones we can find now, which means the ones that sound most like us.”

One cannot improve on such wisdom.

A final reason the administration should change the name. If the Republicans don’t do it the Democrats likely will. It is hard to imagine the literate and savvy Sen. Joseph Lieberman or the tactful and shrewd Sen. Diane Feinstein, both involved in congressional efforts to shape the new agency, being linguistically numb to the name of an agency whose creation will figure in their legacies.

They’ll change it. So beat ‘em to it.

My best to you. Go write a book on what it means to return to life.

Peggy

*   *   *

Now on to other elements in the issue of our physical security. One senses that slowly but hopefully surely, federal and state governments are finally moving forward on actions to make our people safer in the age of weapons of mass destruction. Your basic citizen, busy living his own life, is still inclined, amazingly enough, to think “the government” is taking care of business. But governments are run by politicians, and politicians respond to pressure. No pressure, no progress.

Here is an example of a political figure making progress. In New Jersey, Gov. Jim McGreevey has decided the state will distribute potassium iodide pills—that is, radiation-protection pills—to residents who live anywhere near a nuclear power plant. The pills will be free. They are being given to the state itself, appropriately so, by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If the pills are taken either just before or just after exposure to radiation they hinder the thyroid gland’s ability to absorb radioactive iodine.

This is good. A cheer for Gov. McGreevey. A cheer too, perhaps, for his focus groups. He may have consulted one or two; perhaps they made it clear that they do not disapprove of state leaders making decisions and announcements that are by their nature unpleasant and anxiety-inducing. As focus groups move, so moves the nation.

Here I will repeat what a Democratic official told me in the late 1990s when I asked him, in a private conversation, why Bill Clinton wasn’t moving to make civil defense and defense against terrorism a great issue of his final term. People will thank him, I said, and if he’s so worried about his legacy this is how to get one. The Democratic official, a charming and intelligent man, shook his head. He agreed with me, he said, but Clinton is driven by the polls, he’ll never do anything that isn’t high in the polls.

Well, Mr. Clinton got his legacy. But politics is full of Little Clintons, and if our leaders are not pressed to make our population safer they will not do it. It’s up to us.

It has occurred to me recently that civil defense in America is like being a cancer patient. If you have any friends with cancer, you know they have been forced to become experts on their illness. With so much experimentation going on, with so many swirling changes in the field of cancer research, every protocol, every treatment is debatable. There’s no one sure way to arrest this cancer or that; there are a myriad of possibilities—scores of schools, regimens, theories. More and more, cancer patients are forced to seize the initiative, make the big decisions, study, oversee treatment.

This, in a way, is where we are on civil defense. We have to do it. We have to think and study on our own. And then we have to push the “doctors,” our political leaders. If we don’t do it, it won’t get done.

*   *   *

Which gets us to smallpox. Smallpox as you know is a potent biological weapon that could be used against our country by those who wish us ill. We have known this for a long time. We know also that this virus has the potential to kill thousands, tens of thousands, millions. (When Cortez’s men brought it to Mexico it killed more than three million Aztecs.)

Why would it be so effective now as a weapon against America? Because, as you know, almost no Americans have been vaccinated against smallpox since 1972. We stopped our national vaccination program because it was thought that smallpox had been eradicated throughout the world. The last known case was reported in Somalia in 1977.

It happens that I am lucky. One day in grade school I noticed I didn’t have the scar on my arm that everyone else had. When I was in college and hoping to travel abroad, I went to Dr. Miller’s office in Rutherford, N.J., and asked to be vaccinated. He pulled out a needle and gave me the shot.

I was probably one of the last people vaccinated in America. Lucky me. But my son, born in 1987, was never vaccinated. Were your children? Were you? Not if you’re under 30 you weren’t.

Unless you’re a medical professional. We’ll get to that later.

*   *   *

Last summer, shortly before the attack on America, the Centers for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices came out with its study of and recommendations on the smallpox threat. It makes for fascinating reading. It said use of the smallpox virus as a biological weapon would have “substantial public health consequences” but asserted it was “unlikely.” Why unlikely? Because of its “restricted availability.” How did they know terrorists couldn’t get their hands on it? They didn’t say.

Which was odd. We knew then and know now that there are stores of the smallpox virus in Russia; we don’t know exactly how secure they are, and we have reason to suspect that other nations, including North Korea and Iraq, may have illegal supplies. We know smallpox is highly lethal, and we know it can be spread different ways, including aerosol spray.

But the CDC panel spoke with the kind of authority doctors seem to get the day they receive their degrees, and they had recommendations.

They were: If smallpox happens, we should “declare an emergency.” If you see smallpox, you should call the CDC. As to those who become sick, we must “isolate” and “observe” them. “Medical care of more seriously ill smallpox patients would include supportive measures only.” Why? Because currently, “specific therapies with proven treatment effectiveness for clinical smallpox are unavailable.”

Oh.

Should we look into that? They didn’t say.

What they did say, in short, is that there’s no real reason to inoculate the public, and if smallpox is introduced by terrorists, we should make the sick as comfortable as possible and watch them closely as they expire.

That’s what I call a plan. An idiotic one, but a plan.

This week the CDC is again studying smallpox, and one hopes this time their report will get a lot of attention. The panel—it’s the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices again—has been charged with advising on whether Americans should be allowed to get the smallpox vaccine if they want it. The New York Times reported Wednesday that the leader of the study, Dr. John Modlin of Dartmouth Medical School, is approaching his work with great concern. What is he concerned about? The Times reports he’s not sure the threat of a biological attack using smallpox is real, or real enough, or likely enough.

Odd. Just last summer the committee “knew” terrorists probably couldn’t get their hands on smallpox. So they didn’t move forward with a national vaccination program. Now they can’t move forward because they don’t “know” the actual risk of a bio-terror attack.

It makes me shake my head. Does it make you shake yours?

No one “knew” a year ago that people shouldn’t work above the 50th floor of the World Trade Center. It was “unlikely” terrorists would slam a jumbo jet into the Pentagon—if indeed anyone thought of the possibility at all. That is the essence of our problem: No one knows.

No one knows if smallpox will ever be released into America. But if we have the vaccine (and we do; the CDC once announced we don’t, but in March 2002 a drug company found 70 million to 90 million doses of vaccine that had been forgotten in some freezers in Pennsylvania, and since then the Bush administration has bought more) and people want to be vaccinated, and they are told of the dangers—smallpox vaccinations can make some people sick, and historically, as Sen. Bill Frist, a physician, has noted, the vaccine has caused one death for every million people who receive a first time vaccination—and they agree to sign a waiver saying they will not sue if the vaccination’s outcome is unfortunate, then why not make it available?

Why not let people choose? Why not give them the freedom to protect themselves?

It seems odd that we’re even debating it. The worst that could happen is that in the next 20 years we are never faced with a smallpox epidemic and so didn’t need to be vaccinated. That’s a pretty good worst case.

*   *   *

Right now virtually the only Americans who receive vaccinations against smallpox are medical professionals such as the CDC’s own first-response units. This week the National Academy of Sciences met to discuss smallpox, and asked that local doctors and their staffs be given the vaccine too.

When I read this I thought, God bless doctors, I love them, and they certainly, as professionals who would be exposed by sick patients, need to be vaccinated. But—there’s a very rude thought coming—when medical professionals band together to press for protection for medical professionals, one thinks of the very human tendency for people to take care of their own. And take care of themselves. It makes me wonder if the members of the CDC immunization advisory group have been vaccinated. Somehow I can’t help but think yes. After all, they’re essential.

People have a funny way of protecting themselves while they undertake the strenuous task of debating whether other people, common people, nonessential people, ought to be protected.

People in positions of authority sometimes get like CEOs who complain about the high cost of the company’s medical coverage while seeing to it that the board OK’s payment for the very best and most expensive coverage for the company’s officers and their families.

I hope the CDC’s advisory board isn’t consciously or unconsciously thinking this way. One hopes they’re being serious, respectful, and thinking imaginatively.

*   *   *

The astronaut Frank Borman once said a brilliant thing. He was testifying before Congress on the deaths of the three American astronauts who, in 1967, were incinerated when a fire broke out in the space capsule in which they were training. Congress, rightly concerned, called hearings. When Col. Borman was asked how such a terrible accident could have happened, he could have given many truthful answers. But he chose a broad one of great clarity and meaning. He said, “It was a failure of imagination.” NASA had planned for so many things that could have gone wrong. But they never sat back one night and brainstormed about what would happen in an enclosed, oxygen-drenched environment if a short-circuit created one spark. Which is what started the conflagration.

“A failure of imagination.” One hopes the CDC is not undergoing such a failure. Their immunization panel seems to be asking for certainties—Yes doctors, we are certain al Qaeda operatives will introduce smallpox into America on Nov. 13, 2003, delivering it by five “suicide bio spreaders” who will arrive in five geographically equidistant airports—in the midst of a crisis that derives its very shape and definition from one fact: uncertainty. The unknown. The merely possible.

We don’t know what will happen. We must be imaginative, take chances, do our best, protect people. And if that means giving a vaccination to those who want it, give it. Period.

Will President Bush get his proposed Department of Homeland Security through Congress? Yes. Should he? Yes. Why? Because what preceded it didn’t work; because it is what we have at a moment when time is of the essence; because an administration that has the responsibility of keeping the nation safe from terrorists must be given the authority, power and structure to do so; because no one—no one—knows if moving boxes on a federal flowchart makes complete sense, but giving the administration what it asks for leaves them fully accountable for its success or failure, and that does make sense; because if defending our nation against the terror threat is the great necessity of the age and the government’s No. 1 job—and it is—then a single department dedicated to that function is in order.

We think labor is important and we have a Labor Department, ditto transportation and a Transportation Department. When you have a huge and crucial task being shared by a half dozen departments it doesn’t work. Sometimes you have to tear down and rebuild. A friend of mine, as part of his living, helps big companies merge; he finds the bureaucratic pressure points, the likely weak points, the overlapping, the pending personality conflicts. When I asked him sometime back what the government should do about the FBI/CIA mess, he said: “Start over. Make it new.”

Or as Napoleon said and generals quote, “Never reinforce failure.”

*   *   *

President Bush should do two things to get the department he wants and to increase its chance of ultimate success.

The first and more important is to name Rudy Giuliani now as his nominee for head of the new department.

It is absurd even to consider anyone else. Mr. Giuliani may in fact be the only person who could do it. He has the standing for the job. He is the symbol of Sept. 11 leadership and Sept. 11 suffering, of Sept. 11 success and American toughness. He is a galvanizing, dramatic figure who comes with his own klieg lights. People on the ground admire him, and people in the bureaucracy will fear him. This is good.

Tom Ridge, through little fault of his own, is a symbol of failure, a symbol of a governmental response that so far has not worked. He is Mr. Yellow Alert.

Mr. Giuliani’s unique standing gives him the one thing the new director must have: pull and sway with Congress and the public to do what needs to be done, from profiling to a national ID card to fingerprinting to taking on Norm Mineta’s Transportation Department for its security rules, which at once betray a frightened timorousness and an unwillingness to respect others. (E.g., pilots can’t be armed because they can’t be trusted not to run around shooting people.) Unlike Mr. Mineta, Mr. Giuliani knows what time it is. And he loves to tell people what he knows.

Just as important, the national press is invested in his excellence. The media have been celebrating Mr. Giuliani for nine months as the best we have. (Or, as David Letterman put it, “This, ladies and gentlemen, is a man.”) Because they are invested in Mr. Giuliani’s excellence, they will be invested in his success as homeland security secretary. The story line will go this way: Sept. 11 champion becomes terrorism savior. When reporters are invested in a story line like that they help it come true. They can’t help themselves.

Tom Ridge’s story line will be: The guy who didn’t do it right is given new authority to not do it right. And reporters will help that story line come true, too.

*   *   *

The new department will be a bureaucratic nightmare—a new agency that is the third-largest in the government, employing 169,000 people. It will need an experienced tough guy to run it. Mr. Giuliani has the right background—eight years in New York’s fractious political and bureaucratic fields, eight years in the Justice Department as a killer prosecutor. Remember when he had U.S. agents drag some Wall Street guys off the trading floor in shackles and chains? That’s the kind of overkill that bureaucrats never forget, and that would not, frankly, be utterly and totally unwelcome in the new role.

Moreover, the announcement that it would be Rudy will help get the new department through Congress in one piece. Mr. Bush can’t afford to let it bog down or be torn apart. The White House could send Mr. Giuliani up to the Hill to give testimony on how he envisions the new agency, which would no doubt be riveting, increasing public support and putting new pressure on Congress to move.

None of the other rumored potential nominees carry Rudy’s standing, his ability to rally, to lead, to command respect. Which makes him such an obvious choice you have to wonder why Mr. Bush hasn’t chosen him.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush is often accused of preferring to be around family retainers and what a former colleague of his calls “ethical cronies.” I never completely bought this. Mr. Bush likes to be around talent, but yes, he prefers men and women who, as they say in Hollywood, play well with others. Mr. Bush likes Dick Cheney, for instance, because he’s solid as a rock—but some of his solidity comes from the fact that he is smooth, cool, and doesn’t ruffle feathers that don’t need ruffling.

I think it’s true that Mr. Bush likes those who add to his luster more than those who might outshine him. This in general is true of political figures. But it is something Mr. Bush should get over—especially now and especially in this case. Right now Mr. Bush needs someone on his team to outshine him. He needs someone who is known to be independent, known as his own persona. Mr. Bush needs a star.

Mr. Bush is not the only problem, not the only one reluctant to pick Mr. Giuliani. Democrats aren’t keen to give a historic new platform to a Republican who might run for the presidency in 2008.

But the Democrats should, on this one, be wily. Knowing Mr. Bush doesn’t want him, they should push for Mr. Giuliani. The public will love it, Democrats will get credit for backing the right guy, they will be able to claim it’s for the good of the country and partisanship be damned, and their efforts will make Mr. Bush look smaller. That’s a four-fer. In addition, if Mr. Giuliani gets it and fails they can say he’s a Republican—he’s Mr. Bush’s, it’s his fault. If Mr. Giuliani gets it and succeeds, the Democrats did it. Mr. Giuliani is a half-Democrat anyway; he supported Mario Cuomo over George Pataki in 1994. The Dems owe him.

*   *   *

Of course another problem may be Mr. Giuliani himself. He is enjoying being a hero, making money, speaking, being adored. He has not run out of ambition, but he might think he can move forward politically while unattached to office. Just float, goes this thinking, and see what raft comes by. Keep the options open.

But this almost never works. Ask Dan Quayle, Bill Bradley, Bob Kerrey, Colin Powell. If you want to rise in the game, you better be in the game.

And at any rate, Mr. Giuliani owes it to the country. He knows he’s the best for this too.

Personality and temperament mean a lot in the making of a career. Mr. Giuliani illustrated this when he was mayor of New York. He was both very successful and truly high-maintenance. He led a great city to new heights, and then when the city faced its greatest crisis since Black Friday of 1929 on the black Tuesday of 2001, he led us the way a genius would if he had a big heart.

That day Mr. Giuliani finally found a foe big enough for his aggression. Before then he had brought his own dramas with him, entering each room with a sack of dysfunction on his back, creating new spats and fights when things got slow. His temperament was at odds with peace. He flourishes in war. When there wasn’t a war he created battles just for fun and out of need.

Now we have a war, and it is big enough for him. In this war, as a bureaucratic leader and policy setter, his flaws—impatience, combativeness—will be virtues.

If Mr. Bush is serious about security—and he is—he should pick Mr. Giuliani. Who even comes with an easy nickname—“The Jewel.” Give the Jewel the crown.

*   *   *

The second thing Mr. Bush should do is change the name. The name Homeland Security grates on a lot of people, understandably. Homeland isn’t really an American word, it’s not something we used to say or say now. It has a vaguely Teutonic ring—Ve must help ze Fuehrer protect ze Homeland!—and Republicans must always be on guard against sounding Teutonic.

As a brilliant friend who is also actually an intellectual says, “I think it’s creepy, in a Nazi-resonating way, any time this sort of home-and-hearth language is used by people who are essentially police. When police honestly call themselves police, or ‘domestic security,’ I salute and say ‘Yes officer.’ When they call themselves ‘Protectors of the Hearth’ I get the creeps.” He adds, “I’d argue we want to feel we’re pursuing our old values in a new more dangerous world” and suggests “trusty, familiar-sounding words as our touchstones.”

Who could argue? Not me.

My own imperfect nominee is Heartland Security, which unfortunately sounds like an Omaha-based insurance company, though maybe that’s not all bad. But it’s hokey.

Brilliant readers of this site will likely think of a better name. You are invited to jump in. We’ll send your ideas to Karen Hughes who when she is not beating swords into plowshares is said to read this site, and would I’m sure, as she readies to leave the White House, enjoy giving a new name to the new department as her parting gift.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

And continued to refuse a warrant.

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

She did.

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

He did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

*   *   *

A look at some of the speech.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

Down to the nitty-gritty:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

Good stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

The reason is Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The reason is that GWB is doing an FDR.

And I think people know this without quite knowing it.

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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