Lawmakers Feel the Pain Personally

It was a block party in the old neighborhood, a blue-collar section of Queens, N.Y. With the barbecue flaring, Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) caught up last weekend with his friend and cousin John Moran.

They went down to the beach, strummed guitars and sang for the family. When asked how they had learned to play, Moran gestured at Crowley and said, “He showed me how.” And Crowley later recalled that he pointed back at his cousin, saying, “He taught me everything I know.”

Today firefighter John Moran is missing in the rubble of the World Trade Center. And Crowley, as a member of Congress, is trying to help decide how a nation responds to the terrorist attack.

Neither Crowley nor his cousin’s family wants quick revenge.

“They’re not telling me, ‘You’ve got to do this or do that,’ ” Crowley said. “Do I want to hurt the people who did this to my cousin? I do. But I don’t know how to do that without hurting other innocent people, and we have to do this in a judicious way.”

In somber phone calls and sometimes angry e-mail, legislators have been hearing from friends, family and constituents. Some call for vengeance; others call for restraint. But the calls from home, and their own personal losses, are steeling members of Congress for a sustained war on terrorism.

It was a message of restraint that Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) heard when he called the family of Sonia Puopolo, 58, a former ballet dancer who was well-known as a philanthropist and Democratic fund-raiser in Boston and Miami.

On Tuesday, she was on her way from Boston to the Latin Grammys award show in Los Angeles when hijackers crashed her plane into one of the World Trade Center towers.

“My mom was a nonviolent person. We believe in peace,” her daughter Tita said Saturday. When Nelson called last week, she said, there was little that she and her father, Dominic, could ask him to do as a senator.

“To do what? You can’t bring my mother back,” Tita Puopolo said. “I just asked him to pray.”

Talking to the family, Nelson became so agitated that he immediately went to the Senate floor to relate what Dominic had just told him “about the 40-some years he had the privilege of knowing his wife, and the 37 years of marriage . . . where he met her in Puerto Rico.”

“For me, it put a personal face on the tragedy,” Nelson said of the Puopolo family, which had strongly supported his Senate campaign. “And you just have all the more resolve that we’re going to find out the perpetrators and we’re going to get them, and we’re going to take them out.”

President Bush, aides say, is also drawing on what he hears from grieving families to build his personal resolve. In New York on Friday, Bush met with about 200 family members of police officers and firefighters missing at the World Trade Center.

“People were telling him that they knew their children, their brothers, their wives, were not dead,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Saturday. “I had one person come up to me and say: ‘If anybody can get out, it’s my brother. He was in Desert Storm, he’s a Marine, he knows how to get out.’

“There was not a dry eye in the place. Literally, at times, family members were holding each other up so they wouldn’t fall.”

Fleischer described the effect on Bush: “My take is that the president somehow grew from their sorrow an incredible strength. . . . It became pretty clear to the president that his job is to take these people’s anguish and sorrow and channel it into something positive for future generations.”

But for now it is unclear how the torrent of emotion will turn into action.

With only one legislator dissenting, the House and Senate on Friday authorized Bush “to use all necessary and appropriate force” against those behind the attacks. They unanimously approved $40 billion in emergency funding.

Beyond that, legislators talked last week of pouring more money into counter-terrorism, broadening the government’s wiretapping powers and putting armed marshals on passenger flights.

One of those suggesting changes at home was Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.), who said Congress should revisit a national commission report earlier this year that found weakness in U.S. “homeland defense.”

Meehan had been on the phone Tuesday morning with a childhood friend, Martin Fleming, now an economist and advisor to the congressman, when he saw the second hijacked plane hit one of the New York towers.

Later that day, he learned that he had witnessed the death of someone they both knew: Patrick J. Quigley.

Quigley, 40, of Massachusetts, was a management consultant. More important, he was Fleming’s brother-in-law, and he left a 5-year-old daughter and a wife who is eight months’ pregnant.

Meehan said the experience has made him more emotional about the disaster. “I’ve had to take some time out to be alone in the last few days,” he said.

Other legislators said they had been affected by the terrorist attacks in ways that, while less direct, were no less vivid.

The magnitude of the loss hit Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) as he trudged back to his Washington apartment late Tuesday through eerily empty streets. He called home on his cellular phone and smiled at the cheerful voice of his 3-year-old daughter.

“I couldn’t help thinking about how many fathers in New York and here in Washington aren’t going to be able to talk to their daughters again,” Schiff said.

He said that his office had been deluged with calls from angry constituents urging retaliation and that he felt the same way. “We will hunt these people down like the animals they are,” he said, “and bring the full weight of the country to bear.”

Crowley isn’t ready for that kind of talk. “I’m sure people will be frustrated with me,” he said. “I’m sure some people want action. But as the president said, this has to be done on our terms.”

In his congressional office Friday and in a phone conversation from his home Saturday, Crowley recalled some of the last moments he spent with his cousin.

At the block party in Rockaway Beach, they mingled with their extended family. They stepped away and hit the beach, taking turns paddling a sea kayak. It was Crowley’s first time in a kayak, “a real special moment.”

On Tuesday, Moran, a battalion chief, was preparing to go off duty when his unit was called to the World Trade Center. He is now one of more than 300 firefighters, police officers and technicians who are dead or missing.

He leaves a wife, Kim, and two boys: Ryan, 7, and Dylan, 4.

Crowley said he is now going to have to have an education about war. “I’ve never lived in wartime. I was a kid during Vietnam.” While he supported the resolution authorizing Bush to respond with force, and he helped lobby for emergency aid for New York, it will take time to form opinions on what else he should be doing.

“We’re all going to be changed by this thing,” Crowley said. “I just don’t know how it’s going to change me. I’m going to have to wait awhile to find out.”

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Times staff writers Faye Fiore, Marlene Cimons and Paul Richter in Washington, Jean Pasco in Orange County, and Susan Fox and Louis Sahagun in Los Angeles contributed to this report.