Worried constituents are calling Washington for answers. “They think government screwed these people over, and I think they’re right,” says a congressional aide.
House members are still smarting from the New York Post headline that called them “Wimps” for fleeing the Capitol. When traces of anthrax showed up in the Ford Building on the House side, and in a freight elevator in the Hart Senate Office Building, forcing a quarantine of the building for many more weeks, House leaders felt vindicated in their decision. But a harried Senate aide points out that the criticism “presupposes that we understand the precise nature of the threat, and that everybody is calibrating their statements. That’s not what happened here. People honestly didn’t have the thought that those envelopes were contaminating everything along the way–or they would have acted differently. They made a mistake. They should have shut down and scrubbed those buildings. But did I think that then? No.”
“You’ve got to understand,” this aide pleaded. “The system is stretched out to the max here.”
The ornate Secretary of the Senate’s office has been converted to an anthrax war room. The team has grown in size to include health experts from the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Bethesda Naval Hospital and Fort Detrick, where the anthrax-laced letters are kept and undergoing de-contamination. Top staff from the House and Senate along with Sen. Bill Frist, a surgeon and the Senate’s only doctor, confer daily with the Capitol’s attending physician, Capitol police and environmental testers to make their threat assessment, and to decide what should be conveyed to the public.
When Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle got the initial test results back from Fort Detrick about the composition of the anthrax in the letter to his office, it is fair to say that he was panicked. Normally cool and calm, Daschle was anything but when he phoned House leaders on the night of the 16th. His message: “We’ve got to get people out of this place. This is weapons-grade. This will kill people. We’ve got to get them out of here.” The Senate won public-relations points by staying in session in the Capitol chamber, but Senate staffers fled the premises along with their counterparts in the House.
At the war room, they didn’t have much to go on. Information was confusing and contradictory. What did “weapons-grade” mean? How dangerous was this substance? Later laboratory tests conducted at Fort Detrick suggested the anthrax was high grade, meaning it could hang in the air and then lodge in people’s lungs. But the experts seemed to back away from the phrase “weapons-grade,” which had been used in multiple briefings conducted by intelligence, defense and administration officials.
House Speaker Denny Hastert was mocked when he said publicly that anthrax could be in the ventilation system and in the tunnels that connect the Capitol to the office buildings. But the truth is that nobody really knew how extensive the threat was. They only knew that they wanted to keep people from panicking. An aide who was present at the war-room meetings recalls a Pentagon representative telling the team, “We are making an effort to downplay the abilities of the people who are doing this.” Hearing the comment, the aide thought to himself, “Essentially he was saying, ‘We won’t tell the truth’.”
The team was assembled in the war room on Saturday when word came that a postal worker had been admitted to a Virginia hospital suffering from what appeared to be acute symptoms of anthrax inhalation. Senator Frist and others were present. “You could see their stomachs sink,” says an aide. “They hoped it was contained. They knew the possibilities, and hoped it wouldn’t happen.”
It is a serious charge to suggest that government officials deliberately misled the public in the midst of a health crisis, and that’s not quite what happened. There was an element of wishful thinking in how everybody proceeded, which was compounded by the lack of authoritative scientific information. But the result is a loss of credibility in the frontline agencies that Americans count on to protect them. An aide to Florida Rep. Robert Wexler who was working out of a makeshift office wondered whether he would feel safe returning to the House complex. “Even if the health folks are saying it’s not serious, I don’t know whether you should believe them or not,” he said.
Supply-side guru George Gilder was in Washington this week to meet with Vice President Cheney and other White House officials. His message: The high-tech industry is in a depression, and will bring down the rest of the economy if the government doesn’t intervene soon. Gilder wants the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to lift regulations that discourage the industry from completing the high-speed Internet access known as broadband. He warned the administration that if the economy doesn’t revive, there won’t be enough money to pay for the war on terrorism and the public health infrastructure needed to combat bioterrorism.
Gilder is using the Sept. 11 attacks as leverage. Not only is “unleashing broadband” an important economic goal, he points out that people turned to the Internet on that dreadful day much as an earlier generation relied on radio during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The result was a virtual traffic jam, which Gilder blames on inadequate broadband access. While the White House is sympathetic, Gilder suspects they see broadband as “just another desirable goal” rather than a priority. Before leaving town, Gilder had a few choice words for Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s “pathetic tax cuts” (they don’t go far enough) and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan’s cautious monetary policy. “I think he’s over the hill,” Gilder declared.
