Peggy Noonan

It was Sept. 14 at 9 p.m., and I was on Fifth Avenue, directly across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I was standing, that is, directly in front of the statue of Atlas holding up the world, at the entrance of Rockefeller Center. I was with my 14-year-old son. We were waiting for friends who were going to accompany us downtown to see the memorials that had sprung up in Washington Square and other places.

Our friends were a few minutes late. We waited together on the quiet, near-empty street. New York had been attacked only days before, and our city was quiet; people were home.

Suddenly to our right, on the sidewalk, we saw two “Mideastern looking men,” as we all now say. They were 25 or 30 years old, dressed in jeans and windbreakers, and they were doing something odd. They were standing together silently videotaping the outside of St. Pat’s, top to bottom. We watched them, trying to put what we were seeing together. Tourists? It was a funny time of day for tourists to be videotaping a landmark—especially when the tourists looked like the guys who’d just a few days before blown up a landmark.

We watched them. After a minute or so they finished taping St. Pat’s and turned toward where we were. We were about 20 feet away from them, and we eyeballed them hard. They stared back at us in what I thought an aggressive manner: a deadeye stare, cold, no nod, no upturned-chin hello.

They stared at us staring at them for a few seconds, and then they began to videotape Rockefeller Center. We continued watching, and I surveyed the street for a policeman or patrol car. I looked over at the men again. They were watching me. The one with the camera puts it down for a moment. We stared, they stared. And then they left. They walked away and disappeared down a side street.

Let me tell you what I thought. I thought: Those guys are terrorists.

And then I thought: Whoa, wait a minute. I must be experiencing what people experienced after Pearl Harbor, when all of a sudden they’d see a young Asian guy with a camera and get all excited. You can get paranoid. You can get unfair.

I thought: The guys I just saw weren’t breaking the law, in any case there are no cops around, and if I drop a dime to overburdened 911—“I saw two Mideastern men taking pictures!”—they’d brush me off.

So I just filed it away, as did my son.

But neither of us could shake it.

*   *   *

Ten days later I am to be a guest on the Oprah show, where we are going to talk about the events of Sept. 11. A car picks me up in the early afternoon at my apartment to take me to a studio in midtown where I’ll talk to Oprah in Chicago. As we drive south down Park Avenue, the driver chats with me, and he seems jumpy. “You bothered like everyone else at what’s going on?” I ask.

He says—I paraphrase—“Yeah, I am. I been feeling funny since a thing I saw the other day. I’m standing with a bunch of limos and drivers, we’re waiting outside that big building, 520 Madison. And suddenly—we’re all hanging around talking—and suddenly we see these two guys, Mideastern guys, in turbans. And they’re videotaping 520 Madison Avenue top to bottom. Right in front of us. So we look at them and they look back—and then they keep doing it! So one of our guys starts to walk toward them, and the guys with the camera got outta there quick. And I’m telling you, it gave me the creeps!”

I get to the Oprah studio, do the show, get home, call the FBI tip line. I tell them my name, what I do for a living, say I’m going to tell them something that sounds small but may be big. The FBI tip line guy is polite, takes notes, thanks me. He asks me to get the limo driver’s name, I call around, get the number of his car company. The tip line guy calls me back, takes the number, thanks me again.

I say, “You guys must be getting 1,500 tips an hour.” He says yes, but they’re all appreciated and if I see any more Mideastern looking men videotaping I should call.

I figured: They’re busy taking other, more urgent tips, this isn’t going anywhere.

Then I remembered an FBI agent I’d met in the neighborhood, tried to reach her, couldn’t get her at her office or home. I leave messages, hear nothing, figure she’s out chasing the bad guys.

Now jump to this past week. Two things happen. My son is surfing Internet chat rooms last Sunday and goes to a conservative site, where he sees an interesting thing. A man or woman has written in to say—again I paraphrase—“The oddest thing happened at work the other day. I work at a petrochemical company, and these two Mideastern looking guys come in and say they want to videotape the inside of the plant for a college course they’re taking. They were approached and asked for identification by the manager. They became surly, angry, and left. Later the manager phoned the school they claimed to be students at—and they weren’t even registered!”

My son calls to me, we read it and look at each other. I decided to call the FBI again.

But the next morning my phone rings and it is the FBI, and it seems to be a real agent, not a telephone answerer. My initial tip line report has, apparently, trickled up into the “check it out” category. Or maybe they’ve gotten enough reports like mine that a discernable pattern has emerged. At any rate, the agent asked me to go through my story and the driver’s story, and then I threw in the report on the Internet, and he gave me his name and number and asked me to call if I saw anything else.

*   *   *

All this, of course, has me thinking. Maybe it has you thinking, too. I will share some of my thoughts. They are not original or unusual, but I feel they should maybe be said.

Again, they are only thoughts and hunches.

I think there are a lot of “sleeper cells”—not a few, as we all hope, but a lot. I think some of them are in Queens and Brooklyn and Manhattan, and in Jersey City and elsewhere in New Jersey . Boston, too. Maybe some are in the capital or Virginia or Maryland. Maybe some of those who delivered anthrax to the U.S. Capitol took a taxi. Maybe on the other hand they took the shuttle from LaGuardia. Certainly we know some cell or cells are in Florida.

I think some cell members may not be sure what their next move is. They’re not sure of their next assignment. They haven’t been told, or they haven’t, perhaps, chosen. I think cell members have been going around taking home movies of potential targets. I suspect they’ve been downloading them into computers and shooting them off to Osama and his lieutenants in the caves. I suspect they’ve been building a video library of places they might hit over the next few months and years and decade. And I think once they take one of the targets down they’ll happily return to the scene of the crime, take a nice tourist-type videotape of the crater they made—they’ll tell the cops they want to record the brave rescue workers—and send it triumphantly home.

That’s all based on nothing but hunches.

But there are things we know. As individuals, these men—for they are men, between roughly 17 and 45, which is to say they track in terms of sex and age group American criminals in American jails—are not only “hate filled” and “evil,” though they are these things. They are also, obviously, emotionally and intellectually primitive. Their minds, if quick and highly focused, are also limited, stunted. And their young-man’s arrogance is both a strength and their potential undoing. (Young male criminals of whatever sort tend to showy arrogance, and it is often their undoing.)

And I think as we attempt to find the bad guys in Afghanistan and elsewhere, we should all be thinking a little more, as citizens, about the search going on here, in America.

The people who are trying to kill us with bombs and biological weapons are not from Canada, Chile, China, India, Ireland, Tanzania, Congo, New Zealand or the island of Jamaica.

They are from the Arab Mideast. They are not Israeli.

They are men, and not women.

They are young men. That is, they are not old men, and they are not children.

So: We know the profile of the bad guys.

I think I saw some of them that night across from St. Pat’s, and I continue to regret not confronting them, questioning them and, if I had to, tackling them and screaming for help. I could have gotten us all arrested. If they had been innocent tourists I would have apologized, begged their forgiveness and offered to buy them a very nice dinner. If they had not been innocent, I would have helped stop some bad guys.

In the past month I have evolved from polite tip-line caller to watchful potential warrior. And I gather that is going on with pretty much everyone else, and I’m glad of it. I was relieved at the story of the plane passengers a few weeks ago who refused to board if some Mideastern looking guys were allowed to board. I was encouraged just last night when an esteemed journalist told me of a story she’d been told: Two Mideastern-looking gentlemen, seated together on a plane, were eyeballed by a U.S. air marshal who was aboard. The air marshal told the men they were not going to sit together on this flight. They protested. The marshal said, move or you’re not on this flight. They moved. Plane took off.

Good news: Everything went safely and calmly. Bad news: The two men were probably Ph.D.’s from Yale on their way to a bioethics convention. They made it clear they resented being split up, and I understand their resentment, and would feel real sympathy if they told me about it. You would, too.

But you know what? I think we’re in the fight of our lives, and I think we’re going to need their patience. And I think those who have not yet developed patience are going to have to grow up and get some.

*   *   *

No one likes “racial profiling,” “ethnic profiling,” “religious profiling.” But I see it this way: If groups of terrorists took out two huge buildings and part of the Pentagon and killed 5,000 people and then decided to unleash anthrax and it emerged that those terrorists were all middle-aged American blond women who tend to dress in blue jeans and T-shirts and like to go by Catholic churches and light candles, I would be deeply upset not only because the terrorists had done what they’d done. I would also be upset because they were just like me! I fit their profile! I look like them! I act like them! Everywhere I went people would notice me and give me hard looks and watch what I was doing. I would feel terrible about this. But you know what else I’d do? I’d suck it up. I’d understand. I wouldn’t like it, but I’d get it, and I’d accept it.

Because under very special circumstances—and these are special circumstances—you sometimes have to sacrifice. You have to drop your burly pride a little and try to understand and be accepting and accommodating and generous-spirited.

I think we’re going to require a lot of patience from a lot of innocent people. And you know, I don’t think that’s asking too much. And when it’s not given, I think we should recognize that as odd. About as odd as videotaping a great cathedral in the dark.

A few weeks ago I wrote a column called “God Is Back,” about how, within a day of the events of Sept. 11, my city was awash in religious imagery—prayer cards, statues of saints. It all culminated, in a way, in the discovery of the steel-girder cross that emerged last week from the wreckage—unbent, unbroken, unmelted, perfectly proportioned and duly blessed by a Catholic friar on the request of the rescue workers, who seemed to see meaning in the cross’s existence. So do I.

My son, a teenager, finds this hilarious, as does one of my best friends. They have teased me, to my delight, but I have told them, “Boys, this whole story is about good and evil, about the clash of good and evil.” If you are of a certain cast of mind, it is of course meaningful that the face of the Evil One seemed to emerge with a roar from the furnace that was Tower One. You have seen the Associated Press photo, and the photos that followed: the evil face roared out of the building with an ugly howl—and then in a snap of the fingers it lost form and force and disappeared. If you are of a certain cast of mind it is of course meaningful that the cross, which to those of its faith is imperishable, did not disappear. It was not crushed by the millions of tons of concrete that crashed down upon it, did not melt in the furnace. It rose from the rubble, still there, intact.

For the ignorant, the superstitious and me (and maybe you), the face of the Evil One was revealed, and died; for the ignorant, the superstitious and me (and maybe you), the cross survived. This is how God speaks to us. He is saying, “I am.” He is saying, “I am here.” He is saying, “And the force of all the evil of all the world will not bury me.”

I believe this quite literally. But then I am experiencing Sept. 11 not as a political event but as a spiritual event.

And, of course, a cultural one, which gets me to my topic.

It is not only that God is back, but that men are back. A certain style of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country since Sept. 11. You might say it suddenly emerged from the rubble of the past quarter century, and emerged when a certain kind of man came forth to get our great country out of the fix it was in.

I am speaking of masculine men, men who push things and pull things and haul things and build things, men who charge up the stairs in a hundred pounds of gear and tell everyone else where to go to be safe. Men who are welders, who do construction, men who are cops and firemen. They are all of them, one way or another, the men who put the fire out, the men who are digging the rubble out, and the men who will build whatever takes its place.

And their style is back in style. We are experiencing a new respect for their old-fashioned masculinity, a new respect for physical courage, for strength and for the willingness to use both for the good of others.

You didn’t have to be a fireman to be one of the manly men of Sept. 11. Those businessmen on flight 93, which was supposed to hit Washington, the businessmen who didn’t live by their hands or their backs but who found out what was happening to their country, said goodbye to the people they loved, snapped the cell phone shut and said, “Let’s roll.” Those were tough men, the ones who forced that plane down in Pennsylvania. They were tough, brave guys.

*   *   *

Let me tell you when I first realized what I’m saying. On Friday, Sept. 14, I went with friends down to the staging area on the West Side Highway where all the trucks filled with guys coming off a 12-hour shift at ground zero would pass by. They were tough, rough men, the grunts of the city—construction workers and electrical workers and cops and emergency medical worker and firemen.

I joined a group that was just standing there as the truck convoys went by. And all we did was cheer. We all wanted to do some kind of volunteer work but there was nothing left to do, so we stood and cheered those who were doing. The trucks would go by and we’d cheer and wave and shout “God bless you!” and “We love you!” We waved flags and signs, clapped and threw kisses, and we meant it: We loved these men. And as the workers would go by—they would wave to us from their trucks and buses, and smile and nod—I realized that a lot of them were men who hadn’t been applauded since the day they danced to their song with their bride at the wedding.

And suddenly I looked around me at all of us who were cheering. And saw who we were. Investment bankers! Orthodontists! Magazine editors! In my group, a lawyer, a columnist and a writer. We had been the kings and queens of the city, respected professional in a city that respects its professional class. And this night we were nobody. We were so useless, all we could do was applaud the somebodies, the workers who, unlike us, had not been applauded much in their lives.

And now they were saving our city.

I turned to my friend and said, “I have seen the grunts of New York become kings and queens of the City.” I was so moved and, oddly I guess, grateful. Because they’d always been the people who ran the place, who kept it going, they’d just never been given their due. But now—“And the last shall be first”—we were making up for it.

*   *   *

It may seem that I am really talking about class—the professional classes have a new appreciation for the working class men of Lodi, N.J., or Astoria, Queens. But what I’m attempting to talk about is actual manliness, which often seems tied up with class issues, as they say, but isn’t always by any means the same thing.

Here’s what I’m trying to say: Once about 10 years ago there was a story—you might have read it in your local tabloid, or a supermarket tabloid like the National Enquirer—about an American man and woman who were on their honeymoon in Australia or New Zealand. They were swimming in the ocean, the water chest-high. From nowhere came a shark. The shark went straight for the woman, opened its jaws. Do you know what the man did? He punched the shark in the head. He punched it and punched it again. He did not do brilliant commentary on the shark, he did not share his sensitive feelings about the shark, he did not make wry observations about the shark, he punched the shark in the head. So the shark let go of his wife and went straight for him. And it killed him. The wife survived to tell the story of what her husband had done. He had tried to deck the shark. I told my friends: That’s what a wonderful man is, a man who will try to deck the shark.

I don’t know what the guy did for a living, but he had a very old-fashioned sense of what it is to be a man, and I think that sense is coming back into style because of who saved us on Sept. 11, and that is very good for our country.

Why? Well, manliness wins wars. Strength and guts plus brains and spirit wins wars. But also, you know what follows manliness? The gentleman. The return of manliness will bring a return of gentlemanliness, for a simple reason: masculine men are almost by definition gentlemen. Example: If you’re a woman and you go to a faculty meeting at an Ivy League University you’ll have to fight with a male intellectual for a chair, but I assure you that if you go to a Knights of Columbus Hall, the men inside (cops, firemen, insurance agents) will rise to offer you a seat. Because they are manly men, and gentlemen.

It is hard to be a man. I am certain of it; to be a man in this world is not easy. I know you are thinking, But it’s not easy to be a woman, and you are so right. But women get to complain and make others feel bad about their plight. Men have to suck it up. Good men suck it up and remain good-natured, constructive and helpful; less-good men become the kind of men who are spoofed on “The Man Show”—babe-watching, dope-smoking nihilists. (Nihilism is not manly, it is the last refuge of sissies.)

*   *   *

I should discuss how manliness and its brother, gentlemanliness, went out of style. I know, because I was there. In fact, I may have done it. I remember exactly when: It was in the mid-’70s, and I was in my mid-20s, and a big, nice, middle-aged man got up from his seat to help me haul a big piece of luggage into the overhead luggage space on a plane. I was a feminist, and knew our rules and rants. “I can do it myself,” I snapped.

It was important that he know women are strong. It was even more important, it turns out, that I know I was a jackass, but I didn’t. I embarrassed a nice man who was attempting to help a lady. I wasn’t lady enough to let him. I bet he never offered to help a lady again. I bet he became an intellectual, or a writer, and not a good man like a fireman or a businessman who says, “Let’s roll.”

But perhaps it wasn’t just me. I was there in America, as a child, when John Wayne was a hero, and a symbol of American manliness. He was strong, and silent. And I was there in America when they killed John Wayne by a thousand cuts. A lot of people killed him—not only feminists but peaceniks, leftists, intellectuals, others. You could even say it was Woody Allen who did it, through laughter and an endearing admission of his own nervousness and fear. He made nervousness and fearfulness the admired style. He made not being able to deck the shark, but doing the funniest commentary on not decking the shark, seem . . . cool.

But when we killed John Wayne, you know who we were left with. We were left with John Wayne’s friendly-antagonist sidekick in the old John Ford movies, Barry Fitzgerald. The small, nervous, gossiping neighborhood commentator Barry Fitzgerald, who wanted to talk about everything and do nothing.

This was not progress. It was not improvement.

I missed John Wayne.

But now I think . . . he’s back. I think he returned on Sept. 11. I think he ran up the stairs, threw the kid over his back like a sack of potatoes, came back down and shoveled rubble. I think he’s in Afghanistan now, saying, with his slow swagger and simmering silence, “Yer in a whole lotta trouble now, Osama-boy.”

I think he’s back in style. And none too soon.

Welcome back, Duke.

And once again: Thank you, men of Sept. 11.

Forgive me. I’m going to return to a story that has been well documented the past few weeks, and I ask your indulgence. So much has been happening, there are so many things to say, and yet my mind will not leave one thing: the firemen, and what they did.

Although their heroism has been widely celebrated, I don’t think we have quite gotten its meaning, or fully apprehended its dimensions. But what they did that day, on Sept. 11—what the firemen who took those stairs and entered those buildings did—was to enter American history, and Western history. They gave us the kind of story you tell your grandchildren about. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it, and I don’t think my city will either.

What they did is not a part of the story but the heart of the story.

*   *   *

Here in my neighborhood in the East 90s many of us now know the names of our firemen and the location of our firehouse. We know how many men we lost (eight). We bring food and gifts and checks and books to the firehouse, we sign big valentines of love, and yet of course none of it is enough or will ever be enough.

Every day our two great tabloids list the memorials and wakes and funeral services. They do reports: Yesterday at a fireman’s funeral they played “Stairway to Heaven.” These were the funerals for yesterday:

Captain Terence Hatton, of Rescue 1—the elite unit that was among the first at the Towers—at 10 a.m. at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue.

Lt Timothy Higgins of Special Operations at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church, on Portion Road in Lake Ronkonkoma, out in Long Island.

Firefighter Ruben Correa of Engine 74 at Holy Trinity Catholic Church on West 82nd Street, in Manhattan.

Firefighter Douglas Miller of Rescue 5, at St Joseph’s Church on Avenue F in Matamoras, Pa.

Firefighter Mark Whitford of Engine 23, at St Mary’s Church on Goshen Avenue in Washingtonville, N.Y.

Firefighter Neil Leavy of Engine 217 at Our Lady Queen of Peace, on New Dorp Lane in Staten Island.

Firefigher John Heffernan of Ladder 11 at Saint Camillus Church in Rockaway, Queens.

And every day our tabloids run wallet-size pictures of the firemen, with little capsule bios. Firefighter Stephen Siller of Squad 1, for instance, is survived by wife, Sarah, daughters Katherine, Olivia and Genevieve and sons Jake and Stephen, and by brothers Russell, George and Frank, and sisters Mary, Janice and Virginia.

What the papers are doing—showing you that the fireman had a name and the name had a face and the face had a life—is good. But it of course it is not enough, it can never be enough.

*   *   *

We all of course know the central fact: There were two big buildings and there were 5,000-plus people and it was 8:48 in the morning on a brilliant blue day. And then 45 minutes later the people and the buildings were gone. They just went away. As I write this almost three weeks later, I actually think: That couldn’t be true. But it’s true. That is pretty much where New Yorkers are in the grieving process: “That couldn’t be true. It’s true.” Five thousand dead! “That couldn’t be true. It’s true.” And more than 300 firemen dead.

Three hundred firemen. This is the part that reorders your mind when you think of it. For most of the 5,000 dead were there—they just happened to be there, in the buildings, at their desks or selling coffee or returning e-mail. But the 300 didn’t happen to be there, they went there. In the now-famous phrase, they ran into the burning building and not out of the burning building. They ran up the stairs, not down, they went into it and not out of it. They didn’t flee, they charged. It was just before 9 a.m. and the shift was changing, but the outgoing shift raced to the towers and the incoming shift raced with them. That’s one reason so many were there so quickly, and the losses were so heavy. Because no one went home. They all came.

And one after another they slapped on their gear and ran up the stairs. They did this to save lives. Of all the numbers we’ve learned since Sept. 11, we don’t know and will probably never know how many people that day were saved from the flames and collapse. But the number that has been bandied about is 20,000—20,000 who lived because they thought quickly or were lucky or prayed hard or met up with (were carried by, comforted by, dragged by) a fireman.

I say fireman and not “firefighter.” We’re all supposed to say firefighter, but they were all men, great men, and fireman is a good word. Firemen put out fires and save people, they take people who can’t walk and sling them over their shoulders like a sack of potatoes and take them to safety. That’s what they do for a living. You think to yourself: Do we pay them enough? You realize: We couldn’t possibly pay them enough. And in any case a career like that is not about money.

*   *   *

I’m still not getting to the thing I want to say.

It’s that what the New York Fire Department did—what those men did on that brilliant blue day in September—was like D-Day. It was daring and brilliant and brave, and the fact of it—the fact that they did it, charging into harm’s way—changed the world we live in. They brought love into a story about hate—for only love will make you enter fire. Talk about your Greatest Generation—the greatest generation is the greatest pieces of any generation, and right now that is: them.

So it was like D-Day, but it was also like the charge of the Light Brigade. Into the tower of death strode the three hundred. And though we continue to need reporters to tell us all the facts, to find out the stories of what the firemen did in those towers, and though reporters have done a wonderful, profoundly appreciative job of that, what we need most now is different.

We need a poet. We need a writer of ballads and song to capture what happened there as the big men in big black rubber coats and big boots and hard peaked hats lugged 50 and 100 pounds of gear up into the horror and heat, charging upward, going up so sure, calm and fast—so humorously, some of them, cracking mild jokes—that some of the people on the stairwell next to them, going down, trying to escape, couldn’t help but stop and turn and say, “Thank you,” and “Be careful, son,” and some of them took pictures. I have one. On the day after the horror, when the first photos of what happened inside the towers were posted on the Internet, I went to them. And one was so eloquent—a black-and-white picture that was almost a blur: a big, black-clad back heading upward in the dark, and on his back, in shaky double-vision letters because the person taking the picture was shaking, it said “Byrne.”

Just Byrne. But it suggested to me a world. An Irish kid from Brooklyn, where a lot of the Byrnes settled when they arrived in America. Now he lives maybe on Long Island, in Massapequa or Huntington. Maybe third-generation American, maybe in his 30s, grew up in the ‘70s when America was getting crazy, but became what his father might have been, maybe was: a fireman. I printed copies of the picture, and my brother found the fireman’s face and first name in the paper. His name was Patrick Byrne. He was among the missing. Patrick Byrne was my grandfather’s name, and is my cousin’s name. I showed it to my son and said, “Never forget this—ever.”

*   *   *

The Light Brigade had Tennyson. It was the middle of the Crimean War and the best of the British light cavalry charged on open terrain in the Battle of Balaclava. Of the 600 men who went in, almost half were killed or wounded, and when England’s poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, learned of it, he turned it into one of the most famous poems of a day when poems were famous:

Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
     Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
      Volley’d and thunder’d:
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
     Rode the six hundred.

I don’t think young people are taught that poem anymore; it’s martial and patriarchal, and even if it weren’t it’s cornball. But then, if a Hollywood screenwriter five weeks ago wrote a story in which buildings came down and 300 firemen sacrificed their lives to save others, the men at the studios would say: Nah, too cornball. That couldn’t be true. But it’s true.

Brave men do brave things. After Sept. 11 a friend of mine said something that startled me with its simple truth. He said, “Everyone died as the person they were.” I shook my head. He said, “Everyone died who they were. A guy who ran down quicker than everyone and didn’t help anyone—that was him. The guy who ran to get the old lady and was hit by debris—that’s who he was. They all died who they were.”

*   *   *

Who were the firemen? The Christian scholar and author Os Guinness said the other night in Manhattan that horror and tragedy crack open the human heart and force the beauty out. It is in terrible times that people with great goodness inside become most themselves. “The real mystery,” he added, “is not the mystery of evil but the mystery of goodness.” Maybe it’s because of that mystery that firemen themselves usually can’t tell you why they do what they do. “It’s the job,” they say, and it is, and it is more than that.

So: The firemen were rough repositories of grace. They were the goodness that comes out when society is cracked open. They were responsible. They took responsibility under conditions of chaos. They did their job under heavy fire, stood their ground, claimed new ground, moved forward like soldiers against the enemy. They charged.

There is another great poet and another great charge, Pickett’s charge, at Gettysburg. The poet, playwright and historian Stephen Vincent Benet wrote of Pickett and his men in his great poetic epic of the Civil War, “John Brown’s Body”:

There was a death-torn mile of broken ground to cross,
And a low stone wall at the end, and behind it the Second Corps,
And behind that force another, fresh men who had not fought.
They started to cross that ground. The guns began to tear them.

From the hills they say that it seemed more like a sea than a wave,
A sea continually torn by stones flung out of the sky,
And yet, as it came, still closing, closing, and rolling on,
As the moving sea closes over the flaws and rips of the tide.

But the men would not stop:

You could mark the path that they took by the dead that they left behind, . . .
And yet they came on unceasing, the fifteen thousand no more,
And the blue Virginia flag did not fall, did not fall, did not fall.

The center line held to the end, he wrote, and didn’t break until it wasn’t there anymore.

The firemen were like that. And like the soldiers of old, from Pickett’s men through D-Day, they gave us a moment in history that has left us speechless with gratitude and amazement, and maybe relief, too. We still make men like that. We’re still making their kind. Then that must be who we are.

We are entering an epic struggle, and the firemen gave us a great gift when they gave us this knowledge that day. They changed a great deal by being who they were.

They deserve a poet, and a poem. At the very least a monument. I enjoy the talk about building it bigger, higher, better and maybe we’ll do that. But I’m one of those who thinks: Make it a memory. The pieces of the towers that are left, that still stand, look like pieces of a cathedral. Keep some of it. Make it part of a memorial. And at the center of it—not a part of it but at the heart of it—bronze statues of firemen looking up with awe and resolution at what they faced. And have them grabbing their helmets and gear as if they were running toward it, as if they are running in.

God is back. He’s bursting out all over. It’s a beautiful thing to see.

Random data to support the assertion:

In the past 17 days, since the big terrible thing, our country has, unconsciously but quite clearly, chosen a new national anthem. It is “God Bless America,” the song everyone sang in the days after the blasts to show they loved their country. It’s what they sang on television, it’s what kids sang in school, it’s what families sang in New York at 7 p.m. the Friday after the atrocity when we all went outside with our candles and stood together in little groups in front of big apartment buildings. A friend of mine told me you could hear it on Park Avenue from uptown to downtown, the soft choruses wafting from block to block.

You know why I think everyone went to Irving Berlin’s old song, without really thinking, as their anthem for our country? Because of the first word.

*   *   *

I find myself thinking in mystical terms of President Bush’s speech to Congress and the country, and I know from conversations with many people that I am not alone.

It seemed to me a God-touched moment and a God-touched speech, by which I mean, in part, that little miracles surrounded it. A president and staff who had no time to produce something fine and lasting, produced it. A president who at his strongest moments had betrayed a certain “I’m kinda surprised to be here” vibration had metamorphosed into a gentleman of cool command—the kind of command you sense in a man who understands he ought to be there, should be leading, can trust his own judgment and rely on you to respect it. A great but wounded country heard exactly what it needed to pick itself up, dust itself off and start all over again.

Mr. Bush had a new weight, a new gravity, a new physical and moral comfort. You could see it. A man who had never been able to read from a TelePrompTer before used the TelePrompTer like a seasoned pro, which is to say like a man who didn’t need one.

Mr. Bush found his voice, just at the moment when people tend to lose theirs. He didn’t rely on bromides or high flights or boilerplate; he gave it to you plain and hard with the common words of a common man. He said, “We will not tire, we will not falter, we will not fail.” He said, “They will hand over the terrorists or they will share in their fate.” He said, “These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion.”

He talked just like George W. Bush.

He found himself amid the rubble.

He talked of prayer like a man who’d been praying, and who understood that tens of millions of Americans and others throughout the world were his powerful prayer warriors. They prayed the right thing would be said and done. It was. And now we feel we have what we needed, hoped we’d have, weren’t sure we had: A true commander in chief.

All of this is quite wonderful, a tribute to President Bush and the men and women who work so hard for him. But he, and they, could not have produced that great night alone, and he, and they, would be the first to say it.

*   *   *

In the early days after the blast, I visited several of the memorials that have sprung up around town, in Union Square and in the heart of Greenwich Village. I was struck, at first, by the all the religious imagery, especially traditionally Catholic imagery—mass cards, pictures of the Sacred Heart, little statues of St. Anthony and St. Francis, pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe, votive candles, prayers written on envelopes and pieces of paper grabbed from a desk.

Then I realized there was so much because so many of the firemen and policemen who died were Catholic—Italian and Irish and Puerto Rican men from Queens and Staten Island, from Jersey and Brooklyn. It was their families and friends who had brought the mass cards and the statues of St. Anthony, by tradition the patron saint of missing things, in those early days, when they were still hoping that someone they loved would emerge from the ruins.

*   *   *

On Sunday I watched Oprah Winfrey at the wonderful Spirit of New York special at Yankee stadium. She prayed aloud—a lot of people prayed aloud—and Bette Midler made everyone feel better just by singing.

That morning I had gone to our local mosque, the biggest in Manhattan, on East 96th Street to show sympathy and regard for people who might be feeling frightened and defensive. I watched as men prayed on their knees facing Mecca.

Then a friend came over and we talked about the speech she was going to make at a memorial for a friend of hers who’d died at Cantor Fitzgerald. He was a friend from her Alcoholics Anonymous group. I asked her what she wanted to say, and she said she wanted to tell the rest of the group that the friend they’d lost had always arrived everywhere early. He was early at AA meetings, and he used to greet the newcomers at the back.

On Sept. 11 he was early at work. After that he probably got early to heaven, where he was probably greeted himself—by Bill W., the great man who was one of the founders of AA. She wanted everyone to know that their friend and Bill W probably had a great conversation about how meetings are held these days, and about the importance of having greeters in the back for new arrivals and first-timers.

I wasn’t surprised by what she said, not only because I know her faith but because some little taboo or self-editing or reticence has lifted in the past few weeks. People are feeling a little less self-conscious about integrating their actual thoughts about their faith into the actual statements they make to friends and family, to coworkers and colleagues.

That’s a great thing. In my little town that’s a kind of miracle too.

I was thinking the other day: In 1964, Time Magazine famously headlined “God Is Dead.” I hope now, at the very highest reaches of that great magazine, they do a cover that says “God Is Back.”

This, for me, is the unforgettable image of the day: the fine gray ash that covered everything downtown, all the people and buildings and cars; the ash that flew into the air in the explosions and the burning and that settled over half the city. It was just like Pompeii, which also was taken by surprise and also was left covered top to bottom with ash, fine gray ash.

This is what everyone in New York says, sooner or later, when they talk about what happened: “It was such a beautiful day. It was the most beautiful day of the year.” It was. Clear stunning cloudless skies, warm but not hot, a breeze. It was so clear that everyone in town and Jersey and the outer boroughs—everyone could see the huge, thick plumes and clouds of black and gray smoke. Everyone could see what happened.

And when it began, everyone was doing something innocent. It was morning in New York in the fall and workers were getting coffee and parents were taking their children to school.

*   *   *

And yet: For all the horror we are lucky. If you are reading these words you are among the beneficiaries of great good fortune. Those of us who were not in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or nearby, those of us who were not among the terrified victims on the planes, those were not heroic firemen and tough cops—-on a local TV show last night the reporter Dick Oliver was asked how it was that so many firemen died, couldn’t they have escaped, and he said, with a rough voice that had love in it, “Firemen don’t run out of buildings. Firemen run into buildings”—are blessed indeed.

And not only because we are alive. We are lucky because for some reason—for some reason, and we don’t even know what it was—the terrorists didn’t use a small nuclear weapon floated into New York on a barge in the East River. We are lucky that this didn’t turn nuclear, chemical or biological. It could have, and I thought the next time the bad guys hit it would have. Instead they used more “conventional” weapons, fuel-heavy airliners and suicide bombers. And so the number of dead will be in the thousands or tens of thousands and not millions or tens of millions.

We have been spared. And now, chastened and shaken, we are given another chance, maybe the last chance, to commit ourselves seriously and at some cost to protecting our country.

*   *   *

People were saying “This is like Pearl Harbor,” but it wasn’t Pearl Harbor. Our fleet wasn’t taken out; we weren’t attacked by a nation whose planes had clear markings; we lost 10,000 or 20,000 people, and they were civilians. If it has to be a movie, yesterday really to most of us in New York was “Titanic.” It was the end of a world, the drowning of illusions as brave men and women held hands and jumped; it was, I hope, the end of the assumptions that ease and plenty will continue forever, that we rich and powerful folk will be kept safe by our status, wealth and luck; it was the end of a culture of indifference to our nation’s safety. Those Twin Towers, those hard and steely symbols of the towering city: they were the ship that God himself couldn’t sink.

*   *   *

I was, like most of New York, very afraid. My sense from the beginning was: This isn’t going to be over for a while. My son, 14, had just begun at a new high school in Brooklyn, just a stone’s throw across the river from the World Trade Center. He’d left for the subway at 7:30. At 8:45 as I watched TV I saw the first explosion, and the breathtaking telephone report of a terrified man who had seen, he said, a big plane fly straight into one of the towers. “Oh my God,” he said over and over, and it was like hearing the first report of the Hindenburg. I was still watching when something—I thought it was a helicopter—hit the second tower and it blew. And then minutes later the Pentagon.

Phones went down. I could not reach my son or his school. He’s new there—no friends yet, no teachers he felt close to. And Manhattan was cordoned off; no one could get in. Should I go, try to walk to Brooklyn, try to get across the bridge? But what if he calls? If I don’t answer he’ll think I was hurt.

But the Internet did not go down, and I was comforted by instant messages from friends reporting in, e-mails from friends with information—the phones were down but the Net stayed up, and I kept it on all day. I thought a network or newspaper would be hit—the bad guys had targeted the great symbols of American power, the wealth of Wall Street, the military might of Washington. Now I thought: They will hit their much hated media. I sent an e to a friend at a newsmagazine: You guys may get hit, go home. I e’d word to my praying friends: Pray for the children at my son’s school. They e’d back: Pray for my aunt at her school.

*   *   *

I waited by the phone, by the computer, hoping for word. The phone would ring and go dead, or I’d pick it up and get a busy signal.

I ran out, got cash at the bank, walked to 92nd Street and saw, with awe, that the clouds of smoke were visible all the way up here, five miles away. Trucks unloading food at restaurants and grocery stores were double- and triple-parked, their cab doors open, radios blaring. The Church of the Heavenly Rest, an Episcopal church in the neighborhood, immediately taped flyers to utility poles: “On this tragic day, come and pray.”

Three hours later, at noon, my son got through. They had heard the explosions; the head of the high school had come in and said, “Please, peacefully, follow me downstairs.” Most everyone was calm and purposeful; they gathered downstairs and listened to a radio. My son had a long line of kids behind him wanting to call home and he couldn’t speak long. “I’m safe,” he said. “We’re all completely safe.”

I told him the attacks seemed over—he covered the phone and yelled to the line, “My mother says the attacks seem to be over.” I said it had all ended, he said, “She says it has ended.” In times of crisis every American becomes an anchorman.

He told me with the offhand gallantry of a 14-year-old boy, “It looks like I’ll be sleeping in Brooklyn tonight.” The school took him and all the children who couldn’t get home in, cared for them and sent them to the homes of teachers who lived nearby. My son was with a gaggle of boys at the French teacher’s house. He had seen people sobbing on the subway in Brooklyn.

*   *   *

I walked over toward church after noon, and now the scene was silent and jarring. The sidewalks and gutters were jammed with an army of expressionless marchers going from downtown to uptown, silently trudging through the traffic-less city.

Midday mass was pretty full, and people seemed stricken. I saw a neighbor I’d been trying to reach. We’re all fine, she said.

“Did a rat stand on its hind legs this morning?” I asked.

“No, and if it had, I would have run to your house to tell you.”

Like so many in New York, she has feared a catastrophic terrorist event for years, the type from which you have to flee, quickly. Years ago she told me that she saw a rat in her neighborhood, and he had risen on his haunches and then scrambled away. For no reason she could remember, she said a prayer at that moment: “Dear Lord, if the big terrible thing is ever coming, will you warn me by having a rat rise like that?” She often prays this. I was very glad she had not seen the rat.

*   *   *

I walked by a local schoolyard. On the steps, a group of young tough kids who are often there playing a boom box. They have the look, the manner, of danger, and everyone says drugs are sold there. Yesterday they were on the steps, boom box blaring, only this time it was news reports telling us what was happening. The well-suited men and women marching by would stop and listen to the news, and then nod with thanks and leave. I listened for 10 minutes and when I left I said “Thank you, gentlemen,” and they smiled and said “Welcome.” They were offering a public service.

In the afternoon I went to the home of a friend in midtown—again stunning silence, and the streets now empty of people and traffic. On the way home, in the early evening, I went to get on a bus, and as I went to put my fare card in, the driver said softly, “Free rides today.”

The bus was jammed, and people had what Tom Wolfe calls “information compulsion”: Everyone was talking about where they’d been, what they’d seen, “I was in the Trade Center at 8:00 a.m. and left 15 minutes later.”

A funny moment: A seat opened up and we disagreed over who should get it. “Oh I don’t need it.” “No, I’m getting off in a minute.” The courtesy made us all laugh. An elderly Englishwoman in a seat chatted with a young girl standing nearby. As the young girl left, she turned and said, “I’m so sorry you’re seeing the city like this.” The Englishwoman shook her head and put out her hands as if to say: No, I am seeing the best.

*   *   *

As I watched television I became aware, as everyone I’ve spoken to has mentioned along the way, that the great leaders in our time of trauma were the reporters and anchors and producers of the networks and news stations. What cool and fabulous work from Peter Jennings, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, what stunning work from Brit Hume and Aaron Brown, Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer, and the cameramen who took stupendous and dangerous pictures, and the guests like Richard Holbrooke and Norman Schwarzkopf and Tom Clancy, who added knowledge and context and well-grounded viewpoints. They all did that knowing it was dangerous where they were, knowing it could get worse, that the weapons or targets could change. They stood their ground and did their jobs.

Those anchors and reporters, they led us Tuesday, with cool and warmth, with intelligence and deep professionalism. And every one of them must have known he, or she, was one way or another in harm’s way. These men and women of the media should all get a mass Medal of Freedom the next time it’s given. They really helped our country.

*   *   *

The night of the attack my son got through to me again, and he told me more of what he’d seen and then he told me, just before he rang off, of the amazing thing he’d seen. At dusk, as the sun was going down over the city, he looked over at Manhattan. The rays of the sun hit the smoke and debris floating in the air, hit it strong and at an angle, and it all reflected on the water of the river and the light it produced was beautiful. “It looked golden,” he said. “It was all the color of gold.”

Even in horror there is beauty to be seen, even in trauma there is strength to be gained, and at the heart of every defeat is the seed of a future victory. After the Titanic sank, they reformed international maritime law, mandating enough lifeboats for passengers and constant radio contact.

And that is what we must do now, that is where the golden lining can be: We must admit that we have ignored the obvious, face the terrible things that can happen, decide to protect ourselves with everything from an enhanced intelligence system to a broad and sturdy civil-defense system, with every kind of defense that can be imagined by man, from vaccines to a missile defense.

For the next time, and there will of course be a next time, the attack likely won’t be “conventional.”

Sometimes bad luck is good luck. A few weeks ago, I’d had an appointment to interview President Bush for a book on Ronald Reagan. It was canceled due to Mr. Bush’s upcoming trip to Europe, then rescheduled, and when I walked into the Oval Office last week I found a president in a talkative mood.

Europe was on his mind. His thoughts were on his meetings with European Union leaders and with Russian President Vladimir Putin, from which he had returned three days before. As the official purpose of the interview had not been to discuss Mr. Bush’s trip, I asked officials at the White House afterward whether his comments on the trip could be used for publication in an article for The Wall Street Journal. They approved.

I had not seen Mr. Bush since late last summer, and he seemed to me changed. His hair is already grayer after five months in office, and as he grows older he looks to me more like his father, in the angles of his face and the way he moves it. Gone is the tentativeness of 20 months ago, of the lost man of the early Republican debates. In its place seems an even-keeled confidence, even a robust faith in his own perceptions and judgments.

He was tanned, and is clearly still exercising. He wore a blue pin-striped suit, white shirt and blue tie, sat in the chair he uses for photo-ops when dignitaries visit, and surveyed the bright room before him.

The president referred several times to the mystique of the presidency, and pointed with a grin to a side door. That’s where people wait outside and figure out how to tell me off, he said. Then, he said, they come in, see the Oval Office, meet the president and say, It’s great to be here, great to see you!

His Oval Office is bright, determinedly so, no high formality, no deep blues. But no one, he says, can enter without a tie, and though we talk for 35 minutes he never unbuttons or removes his jacket.

The president noted the carved American eagle on the front of his antique desk, the one used by Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. The head of the eagle, he notes, is turned toward the arrows it holds in its talon. But look here, he says, at the American eagle in the presidential seal on the rug: The head is turned away from the arrows and toward the olive branches he holds in his other talon. “Harry Truman changed it,” he says. “He wanted America looking toward peace.”

Then he talked Europe, and you could hear the sound of the Bush foreign policy at work, or rather the thinking that determines that policy at its most expansive.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush came away from Europe with a deep feeling of satisfaction at how he’d done and who he’d been. He returned hopeful and determined, with what seemed a heightened sense that history is not just something that happens to the world but is something that human beings produce.

He knew the reigning media cliché going in was Will Bumpkin Boy Embarrass Us? But he wasn’t concerned about that. He enjoys being underestimated and likes the columns that begin “Once again Bush was underestimated.”

But Mr. Bush feels the real story of the summit is that he stood his ground with Europe and began a new relationship with Mr. Putin.

“I didn’t think about Ronald Reagan when I was there, but now that you bring it up. . . . With all due modesty, I think Ronald Reagan would have been proud of how I conducted myself. I went to Europe a humble leader of a great country, and stood my ground. I wasn’t going to yield. I listened, but I made my point.

“And I went to dinner, as Karen [Hughes, who sat in on the interview] would tell you, with 15 leaders of the EU, and patiently sat there as all 15 in one form or another told me how wrong I was” about the Kyoto accords. “And at the end I said, ‘I appreciate your point of view, but this is the American position because it’s right for America.’ ” Mr. Bush said the issue of a missile defense was similar to global warming, though to a certain degree there was “a different attitude” among the EU leaders; they were “a little more forward leaning” on it.

“My point is that I was holding my ground on issues I think are important for our country. And I believe in missile defense in particular, that as a result of standing my ground based on principle, not based on hostility but based upon a positive point of view, that I’ll be able to reach an accord with Putin.”

I asked Mr. Bush if there is anything he’d like to ask Mr. Reagan. He said he’d like to talk to the former president about his meeting with Mr. Putin.

“How was it with Putin?” I asked.

“It was a big moment,” said Mr. Bush. “I found a man who realizes his future lies with the West, not the East, that we share common security concerns, primarily Islamic fundamentalism, that he understands missiles could affect him just as much as us. On the other hand he doesn’t want to be diminished by America.”

Mr. Bush said he is seeking to encourage a relationship with Mr. Putin, and that this hope was reflected in his public comments.

“I just didn’t complete the Reagan sentence,” he said. “Reagan said, ‘Trust and verify.’ My attitude was, I said ‘Trust.’ Sophisticates surely understand that once you lie, you know, that trust isn’t forever, trust is something you must earn. But when I looked at him I felt like he was shooting straight with me.” I asked the president if he would attempt to keep up a personal relationship with Mr. Putin.

He said, “I will. That’s why I’m going to invite him to my ranch.”

He spoke sympathetically of the challenges Mr. Putin faces—an “anti-American bureaucracy” that is “a hangover” from the Cold War. He mused that Mr. Putin probably thinks that the American president is dealing with “a bunch of hard-liners here about him, too.” The best way to “welcome him to the West,” and to “encourage him to make the right choices in terms of the rule of law and transparency and defense measures is to break down any barriers that he may have.”

“I told him, I said in a meeting, ‘You know, if you look at me and think I’m trying to pull one over on you and trying to weaken Russia, then we don’t have much to talk about. We can go through the diplomatic niceties.’ I said, ‘Mr. Putin, you’ve got to figure—you’ve got to look at me and decide whether I am hostile or not hostile, whether or not I want to diminish Russia or whether I want Russia as a friend and ally with whom we can trade and keep the peace. And . . . if you think negative, then this is going to be an interesting conversation for us but short-lived, and we’ll go out and play like we had a good conversation.’ And he thought that was interesting.”

Mr. Putin spoke at some length about Russian history, and seemed intent on making the case that Russia had sacrificed a great deal in the transition to democracy. Mr. Bush listened and did not argue, although at one point, he said, he felt like saying, “Wait a minute, you didn’t give up anything. The people actually demanded freedom and you didn’t have any choice.” But Mr. Putin, he said, viewed the great changes of the past decade as a matter of giving things up, and referred often to his country’s debt.

The president listened, and noted Mr. Putin’s interest in history. Mr. Putin said, “Yes, I love history.”

Mr. Bush: “I said, ‘You know, it’s interesting, I do too, I like history a lot.’ ”

*   *   *

“I said,” Mr. Bush continued, “ ’You know, sometimes when you study history you get stuck in the past.’ I said, ‘President Putin, you and I have a chance to make history. The reason one should love history is to determine how to make good history. And this meeting could be the beginning of making some fabulous history. We’re young. Why do you want to stay stuck? This isn’t the Nixon-Brezhnev conversations! Why do you want to stay stuck in that kind of attitude?’ ”

Mr. Putin, he said, seemed taken aback. “I said, ‘Why aren’t we thinking about how to fashion something different [so that when historians think] about the Bush-Putin meeting and the Bush-Putin relationship they think about positive things? It’s negative to think about blowing each other up. That’s not a positive thought. That’s a Cold War thought. That’s a thought when people were enemies with each other.’ ”

He said Mr. Putin seemed to like what he heard.

The president spoke sympathetically of the challenge Mr. Putin faced during their joint press conference. Mr. Bush noted that observers had thought Mr. Putin seemed somewhat unsure at their meeting with the press. Well, Mr. Bush said, it was the biggest press conference Mr. Putin had ever had. Mr. Putin, he noted, is 43 years old, and in some ways unused to the demands of the world stage. “For me I was used to it but . . . here’s a guy who walks out, and now he’s in the—this is the big leagues, this is the brightest klieg light of all. And it was a big press conference, there were a lot of people, and he didn’t know what to expect. I knew what to expect, I knew there were going to be essentially softball questions by those reporters.”

I said to President Bush, “What you’re telling me is this meeting with Putin was a kind of breakthrough, it was something special.” “I think it was,” said Mr. Bush.

Referring again to his hopes for a missile-defense agreement, the president said there was work to do. He told Mr. Putin he feared that diplomats would talk things into the ground. He asked if Mr. Putin would agree to a one-on-one negotiating dialogue between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Putin intimate Sergei Ivanov. Mr. Putin agreed without hesitation. Mr. Bush was encouraged. This way, he said, bureaucracies will not “jabber it to death.”

It seemed to me as I left the White House that one might infer—and perhaps should infer—from the president’s comments that he will not attempt to tear the ABM treaty up, but instead will move for an amendment that would allow further missile testing.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush noted he has gotten some flak for saying he trusted Mr. Putin. “I’ve been noticing some of these guys popping off saying Bush shouldn’t have used the word ‘trust.’ If you’re trying to redefine a relationship, and somebody asks you, ‘Can you trust the guy?’ imagine what it’d have been like if I’d have stood up in front of the world and said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ Or, ‘You know, perhaps.’ Or, ‘It’s yet to be proven.’ To me my attitude is, and this is Reaganesque in a sense, ‘Yes I trust him, until he proves otherwise.’ But why say the ‘proves otherwise’? To me that goes without saying.”

He said he is aware that when he talks to Mr. Putin he is talking to a man who is not happy that “the Soviet Union is no longer the Soviet Union,” and that Russian leaders now are “stuck” with a reality in which they have “the Soviet Union’s debt” but not its “asset base.” He said he understood Mr. Putin’s frustration.

In this part of our talk, the president reminded me again of his father, whose temperament and talents were well suited to diplomacy, and who made an effort to understand the forces that pulled and pushed allies and adversaries. This part of his nature helped him build the most successful international coalition of our time in the Gulf War. But it also led him to say essentially nothing the day the Berlin Wall came down. He had sympathy for how the Soviet leaders felt, and didn’t want to “gloat.” And so the end of an epic struggle in human history went unremarked by the victor. Empathy can be a double-edged sword.

The president said that Mr. Putin seems to want a relationship with the United States. Mr. Bush told Mr. Putin that in the long run his greatest likely challenge is from China, not America. “I said, ‘You’re European. Mr. President, you have no enemies in NATO; NATO has been good for you, not bad. NATO doesn’t create any problems for you.’“ On the issue of NATO enlargement, of including Russia in the alliance, Mr. Bush said it would be “interesting,” that part of him thought, “Why not?” though “I haven’t thought about the nuance of it.”

*   *   *

After I left the Oval Office, I talked to Karen Hughes, who told me that when Presidents Putin and Bush were walking in the gardens after their meeting they chatted by themselves, without translators. Mr. Putin is taking English lessons for one hour each day, and wanted to talk to Mr. Bush on his own. Mr. Putin told the president, “I see you named your daughters after your mother and your mother-in-law.” Mr. Bush smiled and said, “Aren’t I a good diplomat?” Mr. Putin laughed and said, “I did the same thing!”

As is fitting for a soft June afternoon with bright sun and a mild breeze, I have no thoughts today, only bits and pieces of thoughts. I continue to work on a book and find myself happy, tired and thinking about things that happened long ago when the world even then was not young. Also this has been a big week in my home, with my son having a birthday on Monday, being confirmed in the Catholic Church on Tuesday and taking part in closing exercises at school on Wednesday.

However (she said not at all defensively), it is not true that I have nothing to say. It is only true that I have nothing important to say. So go read Mickey Kaus or check Drudge or Romenesko’s MediaNews, or cruise the papers or jump around this splendid site. All I’m going to do is something that a part of me has always wanted to do, and that is a gossip column with boldface names. Only the boldface names don’t belong to the celebrated and famous. But they are very important in my neck of the woods, as we say on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

*   *   *

St Thomas More Church in Manhattan rocked Tuesday night with the strains of a small, well-trained choir singing into adulthood the eighth graders of the Narnia Class of 2001. Standing to the right of a statue of St Joseph, in which the earthly father of Jesus bears a striking resemblance to Douglas Fairbanks Jr., were the confirmation candidates: Robert von Althann, Philippe Arman, Timothy Barr, John Mason Coyne, Christine Culver, Michaela Culver, Henry Delouvrier, James Fouhey, John Gerard, Nicola Johnson, Christopher Latos, Skye Lehman, Nicholas Manice, Gregory Marino, Diana Mellon, Christopher Mixon, Evan O’Brien, Patrick Fionnbharr O’Halloran, Gregory Pasternack, Matt Petrillo, Rudi Pica, Will Rahn, Brett Rehfeld, Jimmy Reinicke, Evan Richards, Lily Salembier, Alexandra Schueler, Chris Skrela, Katrina Sullivan and Giulia Theodoli.

They were confirmed in a ceremony that not only started on time it ended early because Bishop Patrick Sheridan likes both people and homilies to move at a brisk pace. Also there was a beautiful young woman named Jennifer who was confirmed with the kids and who walked proudly with them and didn’t make them feel she was any different. She did her part with great style.

When you are confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church, you take as your own the name of a saint whose life you find moving or inspiring. (Some take this very formally and internalize it; Bobby Kennedy signed his name Robert Francis Xavier Kennedy into early adulthood.) So many of the candidates this year chose unusual names—Clement, Blaise, Augustine, Siobahn, Alejandro. One of the girls took St. Michael the Archangel.

Will Rahn, son of a certain Wall Street Journal columnist, read the intentions during mass—“for the poor of the world, that they might find sustenance”—and Matt Petrillo did a Bible reading. The boys were so tall and dignified in their red graduation-style gowns—14-year-old boys are now often six feet tall—and they repeated with deep voices the words, the prayer actually, said at baptism but voiced at that time for the baby being baptized by his godparents. But Tuesday night they made the vows on their own, with their own voices.

“Do you renounce Satan and all his works?” they were asked.

“I do,” they answered.

I wondered if those in the pews were struck by the starkness of those grave words, and I wondered too how many were thinking: This is like the end of “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone stands for Connie’s baby at the Baptism while his enemies are rubbed out. Francis Ford Coppola made great artistic use of the extraordinary dialogue of Baptism but may have damaged the ceremony for an entire generation (no, for two) that would be relieved not to be thinking about gangster movies while taking part in the sacraments.

JoMarie Pica, mother of three and wife of Vin, had taught many of the boys in Christian doctrine classes and had readied them for confirmation. Three hours before the ceremony she was in an accident and the front of her SUV was smashed up. She went to the preconfirmation buffet at Natika and Victor von Althann’s anyway, threw back two Advils and a glass of wine and walked into the church with the candidates holding her candle high.

I taught a small class of girls and got to walk in holding a candle too. The writer Sim Johnston, who also lives in the neighborhood and also teaches one of the Christian doctrine classes, was there helping out the boys too. My girls were beautiful and a little nervous, and a few of their sponsors were late—you have to have an adult Catholic who stands up with you, and for you, when you’re confirmed—and Lily worried that her sponsor might not make it. I said don’t worry, I’ll stand in for her if she doesn’t make it. And then I was so relieved for Lily and half-disappointed for myself when her sponsor came to the altar with Lily and stood with her right hand on her shoulder as the bishop made the sign of the cross with holy oil on Lily’s forehead.

Before the ceremony began the bishop stood with us in a little side room. He looked dignified and weighty, holding a tall staff shaped like a shepherd’s crook and wearing a miter, the big pointy hat, or rather the liturgical headdress, that bishops and cardinals sometimes wear. He was in bright red robes. He had thick eyeglasses and gray hair and was in his 70s and as the girls and the boys chirped and shoved and laughed he took a hard look at them and said “Quiet!” in a way that made me mildly ashamed of my inability to whip them into shape. They listened to him for at least eight seconds before becoming themselves again.

*   *   *

I love some of these children. Some of them have been my son’s friends and in my house since preschool—and I want to hug them when I see them. Some are so kindhearted that they bring tears to your eyes. Some of them are deep inside good and mean to do good in the world. A handful of them are brave, too, and have had a lot to put up with in their parents.

But some of them are victims of the self-esteem movement. They have a wholly unearned self-respect. No, an unearned admiration for themselves. And they’ve been given this high sense of themselves by parents and teachers who didn’t and don’t have time for them, and who make it up to them by making them conceited. I’m not sure how this will play out as they hit adulthood. What will happen to them when the world stops telling them what they have been told every day for the first quarter century of their lives, which is: You are wonderful.

Maybe it will make for a supergeneration of strong and confident young adults who think outside the box (apologies to Pete du Pont) and proceed through their lives with serenity and sureness. Maybe life will hit them upside the head when they’re 24 and they get fired from their first job and suddenly they’re destabilized by the shock of not being admired. Maybe it will send them reeling.

I always want to tell them: the only kind of self-respect that lasts is the kind you earn by honestly coming through and achieving. That’s the only way you’ll make a lasting good impression on yourself.

*   *   *

One of the best things about Tuesday night was that the church was almost full, and so many families with many generations were there, and it was a pretty night in June and everyone could have been somewhere else, and yet here they were, making their responses during the mass and making them with strong voices, as if they knew what comes next. Which in a mass is not always so easy. But here we all were, and it always seems a surprise to me, the acting out of such old beliefs in the heart of new-millennium Manhattan by sophisticated mommies and daddies and hip grandmas. It was moving. It was as if the Holy Spirit were saying, “It’s all right, there is a future here.”

When it was over, families fanned out into neighborhood restaurants, and we went to an Italian place called Vico, where they had a vanilla cake for my son, who had taken his confirmation name from St. Jude. The cake had a cross and said “Hey Jude,” and when the waiters brought it to him they sang happy birthday.

The restaurant—smallish, white-walled, with doors and windows open to the street—had some long tables with happy families. The Picas were across the room with an assortment of uncles and aunts, and with a handsome young man named Alex Mendik, who recently lost his well-loved father Bernie, and whom everybody hugged with great affection. At our table was young Miles Pope,,also an eighth-grader, a young conservative intellectual who quotes Aristotle in an appropriate and unshowoffy manner, not an easy thing in a young man.

It was just a happy night. It was like the junior high school graduation scene in “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn” except we weren’t in an ice-cream parlor and it cost roughly 200 times what egg creams for everyone cost Francie Nolan’s mother. But the spirit of Mrs. Nolan, who made Francie so proud by knowing that on a night like this you should leave a tip, prevailed, and my son’s father and my former husband, as flawed and messy modern Catholics say, was generous and charming and had a great debate with the boys about the nature of the modern European Union. My son’s godmother, Peggy Byrne, our Aunt Peggy, merrily made faces as the boys talked about continents and kings.

And then it was going on 11 p.m. and we all kissed goodbye and jumped in cabs or walked home. And I thought: I belong to a community. My son belongs to a community. This is it. It’s a neighborhood community, and a community of faith, a school community and a community of old relationships that last forever.

You can forget that you are part of a community. You don’t even notice it, and then one night you look around and realize that you’re in the middle of it. It’s a good feeling to be part of something so big and so important, and to realize that when we celebrate something like a confirmation, we’re celebrating what we belong to and what we’ve just joined.

So I went and told Jude.

It is interesting how American and British political realities have mirrored each other the past few decades, with Britain lagging slightly behind—though only slightly, and not at the beginning.

In the beginning, in 1979, came the revolutionary Margaret Thatcher, there to change all the assumptions of longtime left-wing Britain. She was conservative, tough, antitax, antielite, for small business, a doughty daughter of middle-class live-above-the-shop folk.

A year later her friend Ronald Reagan (who was born over a bank) took power in America and showed himself to be her sort. He had met her in the early ‘70s and told English friends she would be a good prime minister. (“A woman?” a Tory fathead had snorted. Yes, said Mr. Reagan, like Queen Victoria.) To make things even more interesting, the current pope, who came in in 1978, broke all the rules from the start simply by being Polish, and shared Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan’s views on totalitarianism, Soviet communism and religious freedom.

Mr. Reagan left in 1989, replaced by the softer George Bush. Mrs. Thatcher was forced out in 1990, replaced by the more ameliorative John Major. In 1992, after a dozen years of conservative-to-relatively-conservative federal governance, the people of America voted for change.

Enter Bill Clinton, a man of the left who was a reformer of the left and who, having seized the Democratic presidential nomination, moved to seize the restless and prosperous middle of America. To an extent he had a clear philosophy—expressed not by him, but by the intelligent and accomplished Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis’s campaign manager in 1988, who told me in 1992 that she was tired of losing elections over the death penalty. She would now support those who were for it, such as Mr. Clinton, who made his point by sending a brain-damaged Arkansas man to his death during the campaign. (His name was Rickey Ray Rector, and he famously told his guards minutes before he was taken to the death chamber that he wouldn’t eat his dessert right now, he’d save it for later.)

In 1997 John Major and his Conservatives were upended by Tony Blair, a Third Way man who, like Mr. Clinton, always seemed to be devoting more of his impressive intellectual energy to hiding his views than communicating them. In politics you can walk like a cloud or pierce like a sword; Messrs. Blair and Clinton walk like a cloud, indistinct perhaps but large, and there, and recognizable.

In 1996, at the first chance, the conservative party of America, the Republican Party, fielded an old party war horse against the young Third Wayer. Mr. Clinton, astride a growing economy and relative peace, trounced him.

In 2001, at the first chance, the conservative party of Britain, the Conservative Party, fielded a young party war horse against the young Third Wayer. Mr. Blair, on top of a growing economy and relative peace, trounced him.

It took another try for the Republicans of America to scrape into the presidency, barely, six months ago. Maybe William Hague’s party will succeed after another try, and maybe it’ll just scrape in too.

*   *   *

That the political experiences of America and England have pretty much mirrored each other the past few decades doesn’t mean the British are playing follow-the-leader. They are playing follow-the-trends. All the Western industrial democracies are experiencing variations of the same ones: changing demographics, changing populations, changing cultures, prosperity and its mixed blessings, a lessening of religious feeling.

(A great French novelist of the 19th century once said, feelingly but also as a simple observation, “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.” It has been a century since anyone could say that, but somehow it always comes as a surprise that Italy, say, is no longer a Catholic country in habit or culture. It somehow shocked me, though there is no reason it should have, that my first time in Paris, at Christmastime 1993, you could walk miles through streets and neighborhoods and not see a single sign or indication that a great Christian holiday was here. In France, the country of the Curé d’Ars and Bernadette or Lourdes and Joan of Arc.)

And a great challenge for conservatives in all the Western countries is how to show that conservatism is relevant, applicable to the times, reflective of the true nature of the people of the West—and to do so without violating what conservatism is. It is, of course and by its own nature, a way of saying “Stop!” to the aggression and bullying of government, to the encroachment upon the rights of the individual.

But it is fair to say and politically demonstrable that saying “Stop!” is not enough to rouse a populace.

I find that my mind goes back, and has for more than a decade now, to one word: immigration. We live, as we all know, in the great age of immigration, which is transforming America as it is changing Europe. (A small Catholic note: It is ironic and maybe cause for sadness that the church ended the standard Latin mass just as all the Catholics started moving around. The Latin mass might have helped them hold together. Then again, the church made the reform to help people understand what was happening in the mass by telling them in their language. I wonder if any immigrants to America would say that the mass said in English helped them learn the language.)

At any rate, immigrants as we all know have a general personality profile that could be called conservative, and that I would call conservative. That is: They put themselves in charge of their lives, made a big change that took guts, took a chance that showed faith in the future, work hard, are committed to education as a way to rise, care about their community, feel like outsiders, and have often been abused by their own governments, which is part of the reason they left home. They’re often church-, mosque- or synagogue-goers. Unlike affluent natives, they know they need God.

It’s hard to believe the conservatives of Western Europe can’t make something of that, can’t forge bonds that not only broaden their own base but even change the immigrant experience by including them, quickly, in the political life of the nation they’ve joined.

*   *   *

A note about England. Margaret Thatcher, whom I know very slightly and admire greatly, once told me a wonderful thing. She told that the way she saw it, part of England’s purpose, part of its historic mission, had been to stop the bad ideas of Europe from jumping quickly and completely across the Atlantic. The little island to the west of the Continent was the last stopping point for Europe’s unfortunate affection for communism, for full-fledged socialism, and England had slowed them, helped stop them, before they jumped across the Atlantic like a great sneeze and made America and the rest of the West sick.

“It stopped Europe’s bad ideas!” she said.

Mrs. Thatcher is a Tory, and it is clear from her recent speeches that she thinks the modern Labour Party and the cunning and cheery-looking Mr. Blair are in fact aiming to outlaw England: to slowly, subtly take from it its Englishness. You start with the House of Lords, say, or fox hunting, and soon enough you’re on to abolishing the pound and relinquishing autonomous nationhood as you rush to join Europe.

Why would any leader, any great political party, aggressively follow a course that would ultimately lessen its own power? Because it won’t. It will lessen England, but it will raise up those like Mr. Blair and his followers who will go on to lead the new Europe. This is the rise of the Third Way boomers, the liberal intellectual and media establishment. It’s probably the kind of world the folks at AOL Time Warner would like, as they’d have only one big power to make deals with and not a dozen dinky little ones with strange rules and languages. And anyway, the point is: AOL Time Warner folk are culturally and in their politics like Mr. Blair, like Mr. Clinton, like the men and women who would rule the new Europe. They’ll be right at home.

One of the results of a new and fully confederated Europe would be a more homogenized Europe, one in which France is not so French and Germany not so German (yes, this would not be all bad), Greece so Greek, Ireland so Irish. A big Blairite blur of a continent, with the strings of power held in Brussels by bureaucrats whose loyalty is not to a nation or a national idea but to each other. To liberal bureaucratism. To being 50 years old and in power and shaping the new world as it ought to be shaped, which is along the lines you like—modern lines, leftist lines. Big state, big power, big pleasure.

I wonder how the immigrants of Western Europe will feel about finding out that even though they left this country and journeyed to that one they’re still in the old country, only now it’s run in Brussels. I wonder if they’ll like that idea.

I also wonder if, as each separate European country became more homogenized and more like the others, they will start to have very successful local theme parks where you can take the kids to visit your country as it once was. The one in Dublin would have people with big families and dad and mom drinking Guinness and fiery political arguments and pictures of the pope on the wall. I pick Dublin because I was there most recently, and also because I’m Irish-American and I can. The people online waiting to get in will be pleasant daddies with cell phones in their ears and Blackberries clipped to their pockets as they surf around monitoring what’s up with the euro today. (Actually, that’s what it looked like waiting to get into Dublin Castle last summer.) In the Rome Theme Park they’ll have a little Coliseum and a woman who looks like Anna Magnani chasing cats.

*   *   *

I suppose another reason the Blair Labour Party will continue to push to join Europe is that it will be a rejection of the leadership of the United States, a decoupling of Europe’s fate with ours. That’s why they want to start a European army. The never-affectionate-toward America leaders of the coming European confederacy will rule a rich and united force of nations, one that has more power than ever, makes more impact on history than ever. And if the cost of all that is liberty, well, that’s a price they’d pay.

A loss of independence in the judiciary of individual sovereign states, a loss of power for an English government to call the shots in its own economy . . . It seems so counterintuitive. But sometimes history is.

Now that the Democrats dominate the U.S. Senate, the junior senator from New York is poised to achieve a new and rather sudden prominence. Hillary Clinton is not only her party’s acknowledged expert on health care legislation, she has taken to referring to her tenure as first lady in a way that suggests she feels those years should be added to her seniority in the Senate. When recently asked about Jim Jeffords’s jump across the aisle, she said “I’ve known him and worked with him for more than eight years,” before adding she felt his decision was “a matter of conscience.”

The quotes are from a remarkable interview published Wednesday in the Poughkeepsie Journal. It was remarkably long at nearly 9,000 words, and remarkably revealing. It deserves more attention because it provides what seems a window on Mrs. Clinton’s recent style, attitude and approach to her job.

*   *   *

In her remarks Mrs. Clinton reverts to a level of partisan invective that she has not shown since entering the Senate five months ago. She says the Bush education bill is a fraud, that the Republicans only want to spend money on defense, where “the sky’s the limit”—the Bush team supports “a total blank check on defense spending.” Why would the Bush administration attempt to mislead voters? Because of their “hypocrisy” and “cynicism,” which she finds “shameless.” The Bush economic policy is “a total sham” in which “the bulk of [the tax cut] goes to the people who are already the richest taxpayers in America.”

Mr. Bush, as president, is radical. “I think many of us were surprised at how far right many of the moves were and how captured by the very large special interests the administration seems to be.” She suggests his environmental decisions were belligerent: “It’s almost like, ‘We are going to do it because we can do it and make you like it.’ ” The Bush administration must be watched: “You have to look really carefully at what these people do.” Of one Republican she says, “You had Frank Murkowski running the Energy Committee in the Senate. Bless his heart, all he wants to do is drill ANWAR.”

Those who support a voucher system or a way for public school students to opt out of failing schools just want to “dump” on needy children, using them as “whipping boys and girls” for selfish reasons. “A lot of them don’t want us to have a public school system.” “They are privatizers,” she warns darkly. She suggests one problem with getting children out of failing schools is that there is little or no room for them in successful schools.

Why did Al Gore lose? “It wasn’t an effective campaign. Unfortunately.” This slap is followed by a standard denunciation of Mr. Bush: He wasn’t elected, he was elevated by “the interference by election officials in Florida, and the United States Supreme Court.” And, of course, Mr. Bush has “no mandate.”

Throughout the interview Mrs. Clinton is sharply personal. Republicans aren’t wrong, they’re bad. Democrats are thoughtful and trying to help. This kind of thing is unusual even for New York in a non-election year. This is not the nuanced and directly dignified sound of Mrs. Clinton’s predecessor, Pat Moynihan, in a fury. Nor is it the sound of her colleague, the more easygoing Chuck Schumer, on a bad day.

This is the sound of Hillary Clinton moving forward at a seemingly dramatic time and attempting to make a vivid impression.

She claims it was not the Republican Party’s idea to cut taxes and provide a tax refund. “The refund, which was a Democratic idea, we were the ones who said give back a refund, do it this year, provide a stimulus.”

She seems preoccupied with how to sell things, how to “market” them. The Democratic Party isn’t doing “a very good job communicating to you or anybody else.” A small upstate airport can become important “if we can figure how to market it and sell it.”

Asked what can be done to help upstate New York’s economy, she seems to suggest that a greater sophistication on the part of the locals would be nice. “Look at Niagara Falls: I mean, when I was a little girl, we went to Niagara Falls, we stayed on the American side. Now everybody goes to the Canadian side. Why? The Canadian government said, ‘Hey, We’ve got this great natural resource, let’s invest some money in it.’ I mean, it’s not complicated. I was just down at Roosevelt’s Top Cottage. And they’re going to open it on June 16th. This part of America should be a tourist corridor, second to none. We have everything from pre-Revolutionary War history, and Revolutionary War history, to the Roosevelts.” We could bring in “zillions of tourists.” She has been trying to explain that to the upstate folk. “I was talking to some of the local people there. They’re just beginning to think maybe they should go out and hire somebody who knows how to market tourism.”

*   *   *

How to help Poughkeepsie? She suggests “the cooperative technology extension service that I’ve advocated.” Poughkeepsie makes good products but “can’t really get them into the global marketplace.” The answer: “I think we should do a technology cooperative extension service, so that businesses would have access to that kind of know-how. . . . They can’t possibly afford it at this point.” Upstate New York, she says, is not well connected to the Internet. “There’s no doubt in my mind that if you could connect up upstate New York from one end to the other, it would be one of the most attractive places for people to do business. You could attract businesses out of California that don’t have electricity or water now and would be very interested in coming here. I have a program for grants and loans and tax credits that would be a public/private partnership to try to get the infrastructure that we need.”

This is viewing upstate as the Clintons viewed Arkansas: as a third world country in need of their knowing assistance. But it is also indicative of a mindset that does not know and perhaps cannot know the real story of upstate New York, which is a story of clobberingly high taxes that have continued off and on, mostly on, for the past half century, all of it accompanied by deteriorating public schools. Less convinced, or perhaps reflexive, ideological enthusiasts than Mrs. Clinton might wonder not if the government has the answers, but if the government caused the problems.

*   *   *

In the interview, Mrs. Clinton was less cutting and colorful in her language when asked, finally, and in the gentlest terms about her “difficult” transition, in the words of a reporter, to the Senate amid charges that her husband granted pardons “that . . . were somehow connected to the campaign.” Does she think she “will have to address this issue at another point, or do you think it has been addressed?”

This was remarkably soft even for a softball and it inspired Mrs. Clinton’s shortest answer: “We’ll just let it run its course. There was no quid pro quo. There wasn’t any connection what so ever. That’s what is going to be determined and it will all fade away, as these things usually do. And we are just going to wait for that to happen.”

Read that paragraph again. That’s how lawyers talk when they aren’t sure what the prosecutor has. (We will find out when U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White of New York concludes her investigation of charges that Mrs. Clinton played a role in the granting of certain pardons in return for political support in her senate run.)

*   *   *

In the earliest days of her Senate job the sharpest criticism of Mrs. Clinton had to do, not with what she said, but how she looked. Freed of the campaign obligation to be attractive and friendly looking on the rope line she showed up for Senate duty with flat hair and no makeup. She was criticized for this. It made her campaign efforts to be attractive look phony, and left her looking like a rough tough hard-line boomer feminist babe, ready to lecture you on gender equity as she orders you to put out that cigarette.

Burned by the criticism, she started doing her makeup again, or having someone do it, and doing her hair or having someone do it, and tying a soft-pastel cashmere sweater around her shoulders and throat, as she did during the campaign. The sweater does for her what 20 years ago a sweater vest did for Dan Rather: warmed the image.

*   *   *

Mrs. Clinton spoke at Yale this commencement season, and joked that she had one bit of advice: Pay attention to your hair, everyone else will. Her frustration was understandable. She is right that the media take an unusual interest in how she looks, but I don’t think the reason is that they are shallow and she is not. I think the reason is this: How she looks is what she shows, as opposed to how she thinks, which she has historically hidden. Paul Wellstone and Diane Feinstein tell you how they think, so no one obsesses about how they look.

Perhaps another reason for the media obsession is this. When caught off guard—not posing, not noticing the cameras, but daydreaming perhaps or thinking about something she has to do later, her face settles into a hardness, a pale blank thin-lipped ovoid that looks very, very angry.

Remember the videotape of Bill Clinton leaving Ron Brown’s funeral in Washington four years ago, and not knowing a camera was on him? He was chuckling and chatting as he walked out of the church. Then he saw the camera, put on a pained and stoic face, and wiped a nonexistent tear from his eye.

For some of us, that captured his essence.

That’s what Mrs. Clinton without makeup, with the hard un-posed unconscious look, does. The media think so too, which is one reason they’re always taking her picture.

But perhaps after this week’s Poughkeepsie Journal interview they’ll listen to her more, and learn as much. For the interview really reveals a level of aggression that had previously remained hidden, and there are reasons for the aggression. The first is that she feels it: This is her, this is her anger. The second is that she really does see those who disagree with her politically not as intellectually opposed, but as stubbornly obstructionist for personal reasons. They are flawed, thus their policies are flawed.

And the third reason she talks like this now is that she is moving forward, gaining ground by gaining attention, and starting to lead. She is breaking past the clutter to make an impression. Only two years ago when someone said that Mrs. Clinton will run for president, people scoffed. Now almost everyone on the American political scene wonders if she will move in 2004 or 2008.

*   *   *

Her party is not star-heavy. It does not have a deep bench. She is very famous, and appeals to the Democratic base. It is a mistake to think Mrs. Clinton has achieved her ambitions, just as it is a mistake to think Mr. Clinton has. He wants to be the first First Spouse. It will be part of his legacy. And it’s a lot better than what he has now, which is speeches in tacky venues and hanging out at the diner.

Mrs. Clinton, by the way, said in the Poughkeepsie Journal interview that her husband does a lot of reading, and travels, and is “pursuing some of his philanthropic activities.” He does “great interviews” with schoolchildren in the neighborhood, and when the Girl Scouts come selling cookies “he buys 20 boxes.”

Will he be back in politics? “I think he’s had a good time and he hasn’t been wanting to be in the political mix because that’s not appropriate for him to do at this point.”

Note the last three little words.

We had a wonderful weekend, hiking, barbecuing, visiting friends, snapping a friendly salute to the flag as it went by on TV or the street so our children would see and absorb the information that we honor the flag in our family, we note the parade that remembers the men and women who have fought for our country in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

Or at least that was the plan. We did some of these things when we weren’t watching TV talk shows about the Democratic Party’s winning of control of the Senate.

We have eased into the new reality. This evening there will be news stories about Jim Jeffords’s first day as an independent. In this clip, he will be cheered by tourists and pose for pictures with a gaggle of them in the Capitol; here he’ll shake hands with a new caucus colleague, who’ll laugh and pat his arm; there he’ll shake his head over the criticism, which he’ll call understandable and surprisingly mild.

We have been through the Jeffords story this way, that way, inside out and upside down. We have absorbed it in the modern way: sitting in front of an electric box that gives us more pictures and factoids than we need. We have separated the wheat-news from the chaff-news and concluded: This is a story that changes everything and nothing. It’s just another few bars in “The Ballad of Blue and Red,” or, less gently, another chapter in “The Battle of Blue and Red.” We are a divided country; it is a divided Congress; it is a divided Senate, which just tilted.

*   *   *

History is biography. Mr. Jeffords had things he wanted or needed and Mr. Jeffords got them. Others in his position might have experienced themselves as stuck in a frustrating reality. He is a member of the 10% of Republicans in the Senate—10%!—who are liberals. They are sometimes treated like they’re a mere 10%. Sometimes they’re treated as if they’re key, because sometimes they are. But mostly they’re just 10%. To make it worse, the Senate 10% reflects the Republican reality on the ground: Only about 10% of the base is liberal, too.

What a losing position to be in. But Mr. Jeffords didn’t see the muck of reality, he saw rich opportunity. A way to move from obscurity to prominence, from powerlessness to power, from membership of a minority to majority of one, from one voice in a hundred to shaper of destiny, from representative of a silly state to king of a personal power base whose creation puffs up both his state and his standing.

Now was the time to move, before the fate of a Thurmond or Torricelli is settled, and the Senate rearranged by the powers on high. Mr. Jeffords moved, served his own interests, put himself in the history books, and did it all in such a way that those who want to, and there are many, can claim he took the high road of political conviction and not the low road of personal calculation. What a move! His public persona has, in a matter of days, morphed from boring, bland, singing senator who harmonizes with goofy Southerners to that of Lincolnesque leader, the sharp planes of whose face reflect a gritty tradition of New England moral dissent.

What a 10 strike. For Jim Jeffords. Who is in politics by the way. So no one should have been surprised. Everyone should have been calculating that he would do this.

Still, there’s something refreshing when one man grabs history and shakes it up, bends it. It reminds us all of our power, our personal power to change the facts as we walk into the world each day.

*   *   *

But what a skievy choice. Rather than announce his desire to change parties, resign and run for the Senate again (as few, but some, have done), leaving it up to the voters to accept him or reject him under new colors, he wins office as a Republican six months ago, walks out on his base and party leadership in his state and in Washington, and announces that he had to on principle.

But what principle? His principles survived Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. Couldn’t they survive a George W. Bush whom Mr. Jeffords campaigned for and who has turned out to be a president who has proceeded on exactly the issues he campaigned on? If it was principle, why did Mr. Jeffords reportedly tell Mr. Bush that he is a one-termer? That sounds more like politics, an honorable profession but not a principle itself.

*   *   *

It changes everything and nothing. It keeps the voting lines and patterns of the Senate the same; Mr. Jeffords voted like a liberal Democrat and will continue to. (Actually it would be in his interests to confound expectations, demonstrate independence and show it’s not personal against Mr. Bush by supporting the president vigorously in the first vote he can. And let’s assume he’ll do what is in his interests!) But it will still take 60 votes to control the Senate and neither side will have them.

So nothing changes. But everything changes. Democrats rule the upper house for the first time in six years; they win back all committee chairmanships and the right to slow, speed and kill legislation.

And they elevate both their stalwarts and their stars to new roles. Ted Kennedy will chair the Labor Committee. And the new Democratic honcho in charge of health-care legislation will be Hillary Clinton. This makes her an activist again. No more the quiet backbencher, saying that “I’m just here to learn.” Now she will be given authority. Now she returns to a position of real power.

You lock the door and she comes in the window, you lock the window and she comes up the floor boards. This is like “Alien”—she lives in Tom Daschle’s stomach. Just as the music gets soft and the scene winds down you hear the wild “Eeek! Eeek!” and she bursts out of Tom and darts through the room.

Mrs. Clinton signaled her new aggression within hours of Mr. Jeffords’s announcement. When the Senate, on Thursday, overwhelmingly confirmed Viet Dinh and Michael Chertoff as assistant attorneys general, Mrs. Clinton cast the only vote against either man. Were her reasons serious, or spiteful? You decide. Both men were lawyers with the Senate Whitewater Committee.

All this is a threat to the Republic. But in a narrow sense it is also a gift to the GOP base, to the party’s hackocracy, to those Republicans on the street who’ve never really been comfortable sitting back and just hoping Mr. Bush will do well. They can now jolt awake with the super charge of adrenaline that only Hillary—Eeek! Eeek!—can give them.

Well, Hillary and Ted.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush, on the other hand, no longer has to fashion legislation acceptable to a liberal Republican who in the months before he bolted kept telling reporters that it’s just a short walk across the aisle from one side to the other. Mr. Bush has other liberal Republicans to consider and persuade, but one suspects they’ll be less likely to bolt now that Mr. Jeffords has reaped bolting’s main rewards.

And Mr. Bush has something to fight now—the Democratic Senate. He won’t have to spend the 2002 congressional campaign explaining to a not-always-attentive electorate why a president whose party controls Congress is unable to bring dramatic change. Now he can happily rail against “the do-nothing 107th.”

And he’ll have a worthy foe in the endlessly calculating Mr. Daschle, who was as nimble as Mrs. Clinton in taking advantage of the new circumstances, but not with what seemed to be spite. He did his hair up and got made up and went outside among the people and made a speech marking the beginning of his majority leadership. It had the semi-moving anecdotes—“ ‘Give them hope,’ my friend told me before he died”—and semi-graceful grace notes we’ve all become so used to. It almost had a hero in the balcony. Except it wasn’t really like a State of the Union, it was more like the first draft of an inaugural address.