Confusion Marks Response to Menace

The anthrax scare that seized the nation’s attention this week underscored two unfamiliar aspects of the war against terrorism. First, the test of victory will come at home, not abroad; this war will be won not when Afghanistan is conquered, but when Americans feel safe to open their mail or travel by air. Second, that may be a tall order for a government that learned how to handle foreign crises during the Cold War but has much less practice handling domestic crises.

“There’s no question that right now we are in a period of the unknown,” Tommy G. Thompson, the usually buoyant secretary of Health and Human Services, said Wednesday.

The government’s first response to the anthrax problem has been confused and uneven--much like its initial response to the hijackings of four airliners on the morning of Sept. 11. Some leaders, such as Thompson, suggested there was little cause for alarm; others, such as Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, seemed more worried. On Capitol Hill, the conflict of instincts would have been comical under any other circumstances: House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) closed his side of Congress but Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), whose own office was infected, ordered business as (almost) usual.

Over the course of a dizzying day, reports and rumors flew. Traces of anthrax in New York Gov. George Pataki’s office in Manhattan and three new cases of exposure to anthrax in the office of Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.) turned out to be real. A scare about white powder in a Capitol men’s room and a worrisome package at a U.S. consulate in Japan did not. And Hastert’s alarming report that anthrax was in the Senate ventilation system is still in doubt, awaiting further tests.

Polls suggest that the public is worried but not panicked, perhaps because anthrax has turned up in only a few clearly targeted places--offices of media figures and politicians in Washington, New York and Florida--and perhaps because it has caused only one death.

But if the public sought clear answers about the threat--what kind of anthrax it was and how dangerous, how far it had spread, where it may have come from, how it could be treated--a cacophony of answers was available from a variety of authorities.

Part of the problem was that the investigation was still in its early stage, and that the FBI and other authorities did not want to release more information than necessary.

But another part was that although federal and local governments have discussed terrorism for years, its forms took them by surprise when it actually arrived--both the suicide hijackings of Sept. 11 and the mail-borne anthrax that appeared subsequently.

“None of us imagined . . . a threat of this sort,” conceded Jane Garvey, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration. “It was a failure of our imagination.”

As a result, a massive burden is being placed on government agencies that aren’t used to this kind of multi-front emergency--and that are supposed to be coordinated by an untested Office of Homeland Security that is exactly 10 days old.

“The problem with anthrax is we’re not sure if the central issue is public health, intelligence, border security or mail handling,” said Paul C. Light, director of governmental studies at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution. “You’ve got the Postal Inspection Service involved. You’ve got CDC and NIH, CIA and DIA and FBI. . . . This requires a degree of coordination that is well beyond the ordinary practice of the federal government.”

(His Washington acronyms referred to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.)

“This should be a wake-up call for our domestic agencies,” Light said. “In our national security system, every so often since World War II, we’ve had problems that forced a major review and reorganization. But there’s never been anything shocking enough on the domestic side to force a top-to-bottom review of those agencies. We haven’t had [a review]since 1950.”

Among the agencies ripe for such a review, he said, was the FBI. “Look at the record over the past few years: missing laptops, missing firearms, missing evidence. But there’s no full-scale review.

“In the short run, we have no choice but to work with existing agencies,” he said. As a result, the new White House Office of Homeland Security, headed by former Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, is as good a coordinating mechanism as any other, he said.

“We cannot create a big new department that would work overnight,” he said. “Tom Ridge has got to do the best he can.”

But this week, at least, Ridge was off to a slow start, hampered--as he acknowledged--by a lack of staff. The homeland security chief told NBC that, in any future hijackings, he would have the role of advising the president whether to shoot down an errant passenger jet, but he had little to say about anthrax.

And President Bush, on his way to an economic summit in Shanghai, deliberately avoided the issue. In a speech in Sacramento, Bush urged Americans to stand firm against terrorism but gave more time to his tax cut proposals than to the threat of biological warfare.

That was at least partly because the facts behind the anthrax outbreak are still so murky, one official said. Still, the president’s near-silence seemed notable in the face of so many citizens’ concern.

“This is a tremendous challenge to the American government in general and to the president in particular, because the president stands at the center of our national life,” said historian Robert Dallek of Boston University. “What the president needs to do and has been trying to do is give reassurance to the public. But it’s a difficult balancing act. He can’t say that everything is normal. But he does want to encourage a normal schedule.

“We’re in for a long siege, with cycles of anxiety and resurgent confidence and retaliation,” he said. “It’s not going to be easy.”

So far, polls indicate that the public’s confidence in Bush--and in the federal government’s ability to defeat the terrorist threat--is high.

But anthrax is causing at least moderate concern. In a Zogby International poll, 40% of those surveyed said they worried that anthrax might strike them or someone they knew, but 60% said they were “not too worried” or not worried at all.

That suggests that the domestic front may loom larger than the foreign conflict as Americans assess whether the war on terrorism is being won. “Ten days ago, nobody knew anthrax existed,” pollster John Zogby said.

“If there is something that appears to be hitting at home . . . it pushes bombing a country that very few people know much about out of the main concern,” he said.

Yet the fear of additional terrorist attacks has been matched by confidence that the federal government can react effectively. In an ABC/Washington Post survey conducted Monday, 72% said they were either somewhat or very confident about Washington’s ability to respond to a large-scale bioterrorist attack; 68% said the government was doing all it could to prevent terrorist attacks.

That confidence may be the critical ingredient allowing most of America to operate remarkably normally, despite unprecedented attacks and unsettling headlines.