Balanced Response Wins Praise for White House

It was a fierce test of what President Bush likes to call “the new normalcy.” A plane falling from the sky into a crowded residential neighborhood. Witnesses with conflicting accounts of the plane’s final moments. The inevitable question immediately swirling onto the television airwaves: Was this another terrorist strike?

In this tense atmosphere, the Bush administration drew praise Monday for its measured response to the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in New York. It did not rule out the possibility of terrorism but mainly sought to reassure Americans still jittery after the traumatic attacks of the last two months.

After being accused of initially under-reacting to the threat of anthrax in the mail early last month--and then of overreacting by issuing general warnings of possible terrorist attacks later in the month--the White House appeared to find a more effective balance Monday, not only in words but also in actions.

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer and other officials aggressively insisted that the government was not eliminating any possibilities. At the same time, though, they repeatedly declared that they had no information linking the crash to terrorism--an insistence the administration backed by quickly deciding not to shut down airports outside the New York City area.

With that decision and its subsequent actions, the administration offered the nation the subtle comfort of established procedures and familiar protocols at a time of rampant anxiety.

“The big decision they faced was whether to close down the U.S. airline system,” said Joe Lockhart, a White House press secretary under President Clinton. “That’s a difficult one, because post-Sept. 11 you are afraid of being second-guessed, and with the missteps on anthrax, that fear is heightened a bit. But ultimately they do well when they make decisions based on the acts in front of them and don’t worry about the 24-hour play-by-play commentary. And it appears that’s what they did here.”

But even with the administration’s assured first-day performance--echoed by New York City officials who found themselves on the front line of disaster once again--the crash is likely to present a stern test to the country’s slow recovery from the events of Sept. 11.

“The possibility that it is terrorism will create the potential for anxiety until something definitive is known,” said Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. “In this situation, we are going to find the public extremely sensitive to what the causes are.”

Until Monday’s crash, it appeared that the nation was tentatively recovering its footing.

For example, in Gallup surveys, the percentage of Americans who said they were very concerned that their family might be victims of terrorism had dropped by a third since mid-September.

Even the airlines, the industry perhaps most directly affected by the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, were seeing some breaks in the clouds. According to the Air Transport Assn., the carriers’ trade organization, passenger traffic in October was down 24% from last year--a significantly smaller figure than the 34% decline the airlines experienced in September.

This fragile psychological and economic recovery may now be at risk--at least until federal investigators find out why Monday’s crash occurred. Those answers may not come quickly.

While officials Monday pointed toward mechanical problems rather than terrorism as the cause for the latest crash, the events of the last two months are likely to make the wait for a definitive answer more nerve-racking than usual.

“The nation’s nerves are frayed [but] . . . I would hope that reasonable people will understand that an investigation takes time,” said Jim Hall, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. “The most important thing is that we have the correct answer, and the correct answer may take time.”

Patience and protocol were likewise the watchwords from the White House on Monday. In every way, officials tried to send a signal of vigilance without alarm. Fleischer offered an unusually unequivocal no when asked if there had been any credible intelligence identifying a threat of a terrorist attack on a civilian airliner before Monday.

White House officials said that the new Office of Homeland Security worked smoothly to coordinate the government response. Homeland security Director Thomas J. Ridge, who was told of the crash during a live radio interview, immediately convened a videoconference that included top officials from the Justice, Defense and Transportation departments, as well as the FBI and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But more revealing than the new structure may have been the decisions to follow old procedures. The group apparently never considered giving lead responsibility for the investigation to the FBI--which would have suggested that terrorism was suspected--rather than to the NTSB, whose expertise is accidents.

And while White House officials said that there was brief discussion of shutting down the entire aviation system--as the government did for the first time Sept. 11--the group quickly accepted a recommendation from the Federal Aviation Administration to close only the New York-area airports, said Dan Bartlett, White House communications director.

More than anything said to reporters, those two decisions signaled the White House’s desire to avoid unnerving the country further. In fact, by late Monday morning, Ridge decided to recede from the decision-making amid initial indications that the probable cause of the crash was mechanical, not terrorism, aides said.

“All decisions made are looked at through the new prism of Sept. 11,” Bartlett said. “But we think it is important to let the facts speak for themselves and not judge them prematurely.”

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Times staff writers James Gerstenzang and Aaron Zitner contributed to this report.