Defender In Chief

By MICHAEL DUFFY AND NANCY GIBBS

Everyone talks about the two-front war, but last week it was a little hard to tell where one front stopped and the other started. President Bush was in the Oval Office Wednesday afternoon being briefed on the bombing campaign: we were running out of targets in Afghanistan and struggling to take out the Taliban's command-and-control capabilities. But the same could not be said for the war at home. With each new anthrax report, the targets here were multiplying, and our command-and-control facilities were shutting down one by one. For a President who likes his facts straight and his decisions clean, the advice George W. Bush got from his top aides was no help at all. Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge had spent the day wrestling with health czar Tommy Thompson over the science of the anthrax in question, including whether it was the fluffy, airborne, superdeadly kind, as Thompson believed--or something slightly less terrifying, as Ridge thought might be possible. Each had experts to back his conclusion. Their conflict wrapped the President in the true fog of war, when a leader must make decisions with only half the necessary information, and all the initial reports turn out to be wrong. "Tom, get these people together," Bush told Ridge. "We need to get to the bottom of this."

But the bottom kept falling out before they could get there. Health officials were confounded by a germ weapon never before unleashed on a civilian population; law-enforcement officials were stymied by bioterrorists who were either linked to the Sept. 11 attacks or merely pretending to be. Military officials faced a Taliban army whose tanks they could blow up but whose will was much harder to degrade. And while the public continued to show great support for the President, each new setback would test that faith. "The American people are going to have to be patient," the President declared Friday, "just like we are."

This is how battles will be lost and won in the 21st century, when everybody finds himself caught on the frontlines. The Commander in Chief alternated between private briefings on the progress in Kandahar and public statements that "I don't have anthrax." Vice President Dick Cheney was coordinating the battle and learning that his key staff members were on Cipro. When two postal workers died, Bush privately told people that he considered them casualties of war, just like the Rangers who had perished in Pakistan a few days before. Both wars became simultaneously more difficult and more disturbing, as the generals acknowledged that the Taliban was a tougher enemy than they had thought and the anthrax threat proved more diabolical than anyone imagined only a week ago.

Just days after the White House accused the press corps of overplaying the anthrax story, the deadly germ had penetrated every branch of government, from the Vice President's mechanical letter opener to the postal facilities serving the CIA, the Supreme Court, the State Department and, of course, the White House and Congress. When D.C. mail clerk Joseph Curseen arrived at the hospital on Sunday with "the flu," he was sent home with stomach medicine and died the next day. Investigators who had swabbed down his post office hadn't told anybody to get tested or treated and hadn't even warned them about the symptoms. By week's end, 35 postal facilities had been tested, and the U.S. Capitol police had announced that anthrax had been found in three more congressional offices, all in the Longworth House Office Building. Privately, Bush advisers in the Capitol were using words like "fiasco" and "failure" to describe the White House handling of the anthrax crisis. Even Republican Congressmen were shaking their heads. "I think people are much more supportive of the Administration's handling of the terrorism abroad than they are of the public-health response," said a veteran G.O.P. lawmaker from the Midwest. "So we've got some catching up to do."

No one had any illusions that it would be easy to muster a huge coalition to fight a ruthless enemy in an unforgiving land. And as Bush returned from the Shanghai summit late Sunday night, Oct. 21, there were victories to celebrate: he had toured the gray areas of this new war and collected promises of cooperation from China and prospects of a breakthrough on missile defense with Russia. But when he got back, the war at home had taken an ugly turn.

Word spread Tuesday morning of the deaths of the two Washington postal employees who had worked in the same central Brentwood facility that handled the anthrax-laced letter sent to Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. With that, the spore war turned suddenly much more dangerous; if workers could be infected without having actually opened an envelope, the scope of the threat had been wildly underestimated. Post office officials admitted that toxic letters could now be moving through the nation's mails undetected. Postmaster General John Potter said his agency couldn't guarantee the safety of the mail, so people should wash their hands after they handle it. Thousands of postal workers lined up for antibiotics; in a few days, as many as 20,000 people had started taking antibiotics, and more would come. Within a week, the testing "perimeter" had expanded from fewer than 60 D.C. facilities to as many as 4,000.

"They tell us we're safe and don't need to be tested, but we don't believe them," a veteran letter carrier told TIME. "The President says he doesn't have anthrax. How does he know that? They must have tested him, but they're not testing us." People understand that there are some things health officials don't know, and others that they can't say. But the failure to protect mailmen as vigilantly as anchormen and Congressmen looked negligent on its face. Postal workers were furious that congressional aides--and even Capitol police dogs--who might have been exposed to the Daschle letter received immediate treatment, while mail handlers were left in the dark for days. But in fact some congressional aides shared their complaint. An aide says neither he nor any of his colleagues were told to get treatment. They learned about the dangers through CNN and phone calls from friends. And when given Cipro, they weren't asked questions about symptoms or warned about side effects. "Last week I really trusted the government's handling of this," said a Republican aide. "Now I'm pessimistic and disillusioned. It's like no one is in charge."

Bush faced a sudden collapse of public faith in the men he had picked to run the home front, particularly the former swing-state Governors Ridge and Thompson. In days of briefings, neither had been able to get his arms around the crisis; both had a bad habit of raising more questions than they answered. They were each responsible for coordinating the efforts of agencies, from the FBI to the CDC to the Army's biowar researchers, that seemed unable or unwilling to share what they knew with one another. "The Toms let him down this week," said a top Administration adviser. "But the President is adamant that nobody say anything bad about them, and the Veep has a big stake in them too."

Well before he arrived at the White House, Bush had established his preference for delegating. It served him well in his race against Al Gore, as Bush said over and over that the secret to making government work was putting together a great team and then demanding results. That's a sensible approach when you have White House veterans like Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld to delegate to; but as Bush is learning now, it's not so great when you don't.

So it was a surprise last week when the White House pronounced Bush "satisfied" with the pace of the homeland effort, which meant he was practically the only person in town who was. Appearing to neglect domestic concerns in favor of foreign affairs is such a Bush family taboo--it has been ever since Dad won the Gulf War only to lose re-election--that W. is about the last guy you'd expect to risk repeating the mistake. But so far his domestic generals--Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI chief Robert Mueller, Thompson and Ridge--have not found a way to coordinate their message or let just one voice deliver it. If they do, that person will have to start inspiring confidence, or he will do more harm than good.

Not that the Pentagon sounded as if it had everything under control either. Just a week after officials boasted that the Taliban had been "eviscerated" by the allied air war, U.S. military officials acknowledged that the war was going slowly at best. For the second time in 10 days, U.S. bombers hit the same Red Cross facility in Kabul. Rumsfeld on several occasions tried to crank back public expectations of a quick kill of Osama bin Laden. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," he said. And the Taliban had begun to melt into Afghan cities, mixing into schools and mosques to evade detection from the air and threaten heavy civilian casualties if targeted.

U.S. officials made clear last week that the war will not stop for Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, or for rough winter weather. But they admitted privately that they would soon be running out of things to bomb--and running short of the videos that help keep public support for the war afloat. That was one message delivered by Rumsfeld last Friday when he invited a dozen top Republican Party advisers to the Pentagon to discuss ways to keep the public behind a long, drawn-out conflict. Most important, the group agreed, was to repair the confused U.S. response to the anthrax outbreak at home. An adviser told Rumsfeld that Americans trust only four officials at the moment--Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell--and that other Cabinet officials only gum up the message.

Some Administration insiders suggested that Bush had made a mistake by ensconcing Ridge in the West Wing as his home-front czar, without leaving some room for scapegoating. Ridge would be able to walk into the Oval Office whenever he wanted, Bush said, which was meant to reassure the public that even though he had no budget and no operational authority, he had the power that comes from the President's attention. But "by putting Ridge in the White House, you have lost the distance," said a senior Administration official. "You bring anthrax into the White House."

It was a bad time to be worrying about image control. With so much to fear and so much at stake, there was no way Bush could or should have run homeland defense by remote control. And it was unfair to blame Ridge or Thompson or any other single player for not being able to master a message and sell it day after day. For one thing, the world we are in is too new to package; there is nothing to compare this with, no analogy that holds up, and it's moving too fast. "We are realizing an old combat rule that says the initial reports are always wrong," says Bush adviser Karen Hughes, the daughter of an Army officer. A senior Administration official complained about the double standard they face. "People say we should say what we don't know," said the official. "Yet when we say, 'We don't know,' people ask why we don't know."

When Bush stepped in front of the cameras on Friday to make his case that progress was being made, the focus and lift of his earlier speeches was all but gone. It suggested the toll these days are taking on him--what Bush has called his destiny and life's purpose is also his terrible burden--and it helped explain the White House reluctance to have him rally the nation on a daily basis. At some point his repetition of how we will smoke out the Evil One will lose its blunt impact, if it hasn't done so already. In his speech to business leaders, he offered assurances without argument or evidence. "The culture in our agencies has changed," he claimed, even though just 48 hours before, the scientists and sleuths had been pointing fingers at one another. "We've got a great response mechanism in place," he said, even though each time health officials have responded to one ring of infection, they have found they had drawn the circle too tight. "We've got a strategy to fight the war on the home front," he said, but no one could tell you what the strategy was, and with good reason. Events were moving so quickly that today's rumor was tomorrow's headline, and no one wanted to lock in a plan and then be caught off guard again. There was persistent dispute over whether the anthrax terrorists were domestic militants or Islamic extremists--which made nailing down a strategy all but impossible and surely unwise.

And then there is the basic problem that the moment we are in contradicts itself. We are under attack yet are told not to panic; we sense that everything has changed but are told to do what we did before, as though ignoring the threat is a patriotic duty. The tension embedded in this task is reflected in the White House as it argues about what tone a deeply worried but naturally optimistic President ought to set. Even as the national security team works to confront the new threat, political operative Karl Rove serves as the West Wing's unofficial Secretary of Normalcy. It was Rove who, in the first weeks after Sept. 11, lobbied Major League Baseball to improve safety so it could resume play as soon as possible. He has staged the events to help rally the country and show that business can get moving again. And last week it was Rove who pushed hardest for Bush to attend a $1 million Republican Governors Association fund raiser in Washington, arguing that elections and politics were an important part of getting back to normal. Rove almost won that fight too, but the there's-no-going-back crowd, led by Cheney, prevailed and the Vice President attended the dinner in Bush's place.

Rove's agenda is understandable: too much dire talk and people may desert the economy and lose interest in and support for the military campaign. "Some might ask why, in the midst of war, I would come to Dixie Printing," Bush said during a visit to a Maryland box-making plant on Wednesday. "And the answer is because we fight the war on two fronts. We fight a war at home, and part of the war we fight is to make sure that our economy continues to grow."

So far it has fallen to Cheney to merge the messages, to declare that there is "a new normal" now--one that makes room for courage and fear, joy and loss; one in which we attend birthday parties and funerals on the same day. Unlike Bush, Cheney has been warning Americans that life is different now and is probably going to stay that way for the rest of our lives. The question, of course, is how different, and Bush will soon have to begin helping us chart the dimensions of the new normal. How he does it will be a measure of how his judgment of us has evolved. For all his faith and focus on this crisis, the President can't lead us to higher, safer ground without assessing our strength and stamina along with his own. If he's having trouble, maybe it's because he's just asking the same questions about us that we're asking ourselves.

--Reported by John F. Dickerson and Andrew Goldstein/Washington

With reporting by John F. Dickerson and Andrew Goldstein/Washington