Decision Points

picked up six seats in the House and two in the Senate. Karl Rove reminded me thatthe only other president to pick up seats in both the House and Senate in his first midterm election was Franklin Roosevelt .
    Within weeks of the election, the homeland security bill passed. I didn’t have to search long for my first secretary of the new department. I nominated Tom Ridge .

    With Tom Ridge.
White House/Paul Morse

    On October 2, 2001, a tabloid photo editor named Bob Stevens was admitted to a Florida hospital with a high fever and vomiting. When doctors examined him, they discovered that he had inhaled a lethal bacteria, anthrax. Three days later, he was dead.
    More employees at the tabloid turned up sick, along with people who opened the mail at NBC, ABC, and CBS News. Envelopes laced with white powder arrived at the Senate office of Tom Daschle . Several Capitol Hill staffers and postal workers got sick. So did a New York City hospital worker and a ninety-four-year-old woman in Connecticut. Ultimately, seventeen people were infected. Tragically, five died.
    One of the letters containing anthrax read:
    09-11-01
    YOU CAN NOT STOP US.
    WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.
    YOU DIE NOW.
    ARE YOU AFRAID?
    DEATH TO AMERICA.
    DEATH TO ISRAEL.
    ALLAH IS GREAT.
    I was struck by a sickening thought: Was this the second wave, a biological attack?
    I had been briefed on the horrifying consequences of a bioweapons attack. One assessment concluded that a “well-executed smallpox attack by a state actor on the New York City metropolitan area” could infect 630,000 people immediately and 2 to 3 million people before the outbreakwas contained. Another scenario contemplated the release of bioweapons on subway lines in four major cities during rush hour. Some 200,000 could be infected initially, with 1 million victims overall. The economic costs could “range from $60 billion to several hundred billion or more, depending on the circumstances of the attack.”
    As the anthrax news broke, panic spread across the country. Millions of Americans were afraid to open their mailboxes. Office mailrooms shut down. Mothers rushed to the hospital to order anthrax tests for children suffering from a common cold. Deranged hoaxsters mailed packages laced with talcum powder or flour, which exacerbated people’s fears.
    The Postal Service tested samples of mail for anthrax at more than two hundred sites across the country. Mail at the White House was re-routed and irradiated for the rest of my presidency. Thousands of government personnel, including Laura and me, were advised to take Cipro, a powerful antibiotic.
    The biggest question during the anthrax attack was where it was coming from. One of the best intelligence services in Europe told us it suspected Iraq. Saddam Hussein ’s regime was one of few in the world with a record of using weapons of mass destruction, and it had acknowledged possession of anthrax in 1995. Others suspected that al Qaeda was involved. Frustratingly, we had no concrete evidence and few good leads. *
    One month after 9/11, I held a primetime televised press conference from the White House. Earlier that day, we had raised the terror alert level in response to reports about a senior Taliban official warning of another major attack on America.
    “You talk about the general threat toward Americans,” Ann Compton of ABC News said. “…   What are Americans supposed to look for?”
    A CIA briefing on the threat of terrorists spraying anthrax over a city from a small plane was fresh in my mind. “Ann,” I said, “if you find a person that you’ve never seen before getting in a crop duster that doesn’t belong to [him], report it.”
    My line got a laugh, but behind the humor was a maddening reality: We believed more attacks were coming, but we didn’t know when, where, or from whom. Striking the right balance between alerting and alarming the public remained a challenge for the rest of the administration. As time passed, some critics charged that we inflated the threat or manipulated alert levels for political benefit. They were flat wrong. We took the intelligence seriously and did the best we could to keep the American people informed and safe.

    “This is the worst we’ve seen since 9/11,” George Tenet said in a grave voice as he pulled out his half-chewed cigar at a late October intelligence briefing. He cited a highly reliable source warning that there would be an attack on either October 30 or 31 that was bigger than