Later in the day, Bush himself phoned. By Thursday, Ridge was in Washington, meeting with Cheney and Bush. By the time the President delivered his address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday night, the deal was done. Florida Sen. Bob Graham, who had planned to introduce legislation today creating a similar post, had brought the idea up with Cheney as recently as Wednesday, and the vice president had said nothing. “I didn’t know it was so close to being reality,” Graham says.
But reality it is. Ridge, a moderate governor and friend of the president, is now faced with a job that is, at least publicly, both undefined and terrifying. He’s responsible for coordinating U.S. efforts to prepare for, prevent and fight terrorism within the country’s borders. Ridge has been looked at for national office before: as a possible running mate for both Bob Dole and George W. Bush. He has also been considered for other cabinet positions. But there’s never been anything like this.
A law-and-order governor who served in Vietnam, Ridge can’t run for reelection in 2002 because of Pennsylvania term limits. Ridge was said to be Bush’s sentimental choice for the veep spot last year, but his pro-choice background made him unacceptable to the GOP. Bushies floated his name for a few posts, most notably secretary of Defense, but again the right objected-despite his tough stances on crime, Ridge was considered too moderate on military issues.
Even without an official job in Washington, Ridge has been a close adviser to the president. Earlier this year, when Cheney underwent a heart procedure, Ridge could be seen standing behind Bush at Camp David. And he occasionally joins the president on trips outside the capital. It’s assumed within the GOP that Cheney will step aside in 2004, leaving room for a more natural successor to Bush, and speculation within the party has Ridge near the top of the list.
First, though, he’ll have to master a tough job. Ridge’s role? “To develop a coordinated, integrated and comprehensive national strategy to combat domestic terrorism, strengthening our homeland preparedness and security at all levels of government,” White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said today. That’s a daunting task: Within the federal government there are more than 40 departments and agencies with some counterterrorism responsibility, including big dogs like the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. Various commissions have for years tried to put together plans to corral the chaos-one headed by former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman suggested creating a new agency to do it. Another, headed by Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, proposed a kind of “antiterrorism czar.”
Ridge has already started feeling the pressure of the job. In addition to coordinating some kind of orderly transfer of power in his home state, he’s started a crash course on homeland defense. “He’s a very aggressive gatherer of information and research,” says Kevin Shivers, a spokesman for the governor. “He’s meeting with people, getting up to speed. The White House has already done a major document dump on him to get him ready.”
At a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing this morning, domestic-defense experts were optimistic about the new post, but cautious. A detailed job description still hasn’t been released, and absent a clear notion of the president’s expectations, the various commissions still differ on what someone in Ridge’s position will need to do. “No homeland czar can possibly hope to coordinate the almost hopeless dispersal of authority that currently characterizes some 40 agencies with some piece of responsibility for homeland defense,” former senator Hart told the committee. Speaking after the hearing, former ambassador Paul Bremer-a Gilmore commission member-expressed a similar sentiment. “My instinct is they’re doing the right thing with Ridge, but the devil’s in the details,” he said.
Those details have a certain historic resonance. Sixty years ago, a little-known Missouri senator started poking around the nation’s defense contractors, concerned that the rush to rearm might be leading to waste and fraud. In March 1941, nine months before the raid at Pearl Harbor, Harry Truman established his Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, known as the Truman Committee. It was among the most needed and successful in congressional history, holding hundreds of hearings and saving millions of dollars in cost overruns. It also landed its chairman on the ticket with FDR in 1944, which propelled him to the Oval Office. Fighting terrorism isn’t like fighting the war in the Pacific: success is harder to define. But for Tom Ridge, the call to service this week was just as loud.
