A Leader, Not a Myth

Right after President Bush nominated former New York Police Department Commissioner Bernard Kerik to be the next director of Homeland Security, Rudy Giuliani told a wire service reporter that Kerik would really surprise people. Didn’t he, though.

The surprises were quick to come, if not quite what Giuliani pictured. The former New York mayor, who was Kerik’s onetime boss and is his current business associate, had said his protege would show people “how smart he is ... how effective and sophisticated a manager he is.” Not on Giuliani’s list was the ease with which Kerik apparently forgot so much about himself before Bush announced his nomination Dec. 3. Even Giuliani was apologizing by last weekend.

The smartest thing the White House has done in the Kerik affair was to announce his withdrawal on a Friday night and make sure the Saturday headlines were about a “nanny problem,” not the tangle of personal business dealings that would be so much harder to explain.

Hiring an illegal immigrant and not paying employment taxes would probably have been fatal for any nominee to head Homeland Security, which oversees border security. Zoe Baird, nominated for attorney general by President Clinton, got caught in the same employment tangle 12 years ago, as did Labor Department nominee Linda Chavez in the first administration of George W. Bush. It remains what having smoked marijuana used to be for judicial nominees: the fatal bit of history.

But what Kerik’s bland and familiar nanny tale papered over was a hill of other emerging issues about his private-sector profits from dealings with the Homeland Security Department, ethics and influence accusations from his tenure as top New York cop, an old bankruptcy, and more. White House officials argued that the other issues raised so far would not have killed the nomination. Well, maybe any one could be explained away, but not the list growing daily in the New York papers.

Because Kerik had been under Giuliani’s wing for more than a decade, and the White House owed Giuliani for his 2004 campaign efforts, it could be that the administration didn’t want to look deeply at a man who also seemed to be the perfect 9/11 New York cop hero. Kerik led the NYPD at the time of the terror attacks, and the symbolism of his appointment to Homeland Security must have been irresistible. The letters NYPD still carry almost mythic power, alongside NYFD.

The next nomination for the Homeland Security post ought to be based less on myth and more on management and political skills. The department, under the departing Tom Ridge, stayed low in the Cabinet pecking order. Ridge was often eclipsed by Vice President Dick Cheney and Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft. For $30 billion a year, taxpayers deserve better, and more reassuring, results.