NYT:Taking On Another War, Against Mixed Messages
By DAVID E. SANGER
nytimes.com
WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 — At the end of his roughest week so far in the war at home and abroad, President Bush had some sharp words for those who complain that the Pentagon's best-case scenarios for Afghanistan have evaporated, and that the war at home has descended into muddled, often contradictory messages about anthrax and other new terrors.
"This is not an instant gratification war," Mr. Bush sternly reminded a reporter in a Rose Garden appearance on Friday. And this morning, in his radio address from Camp David, he stopped just short of acknowledging that the White House had underestimated the threat to ordinary Americans two weeks ago, when it listened to experts who believed that anthrax could not escape from sealed envelopes. "We now know differently," he said.
Those twin messages — one testy, one rueful — seemed to underscore the administration's troubles hitting the right tone and developing a clear message that instills confidence both here and abroad nearly eight weeks after America's terrorist horrors began.
"I think the past week we hit a trough," one senior administration official said this week. "The post- Sept. 11 momentum ran out of gas. The military operation clearly wasn't going well."
Another official added, "And every time you turned on your television, there was another anthrax briefer, often sowing more anxiety than clarity."
Mr. Bush and his advisers clearly sense that something has gone awry in their communications strategy, and in the next few days, in a flurry of presidential appearances and speeches, they hope to turn it around.
On Tuesday, Mr. Bush plans to address the progress in Afghanistan in a speech, delivered by satellite, to European leaders gathered in Warsaw. The next day he will make the case that many more nations are joining the effort to cut off the cash that Al Qaeda, the terrorist network, needs to wreak havoc around the world — even though some, like Indonesia, the world's most populous Islamic nation, are clearly backing away from early promises of support.
On Thursday, Mr. Bush plans to travel to a yet-undisclosed city to deliver a speech on homeland defense, advertised by the White House as a primer in "how we live as a nation at war." That will be followed by an address to the United Nations on Saturday.
But Mr. Bush's biggest task may be to reconcile the often contradictory messages that have emanated from his top advisers — not only about the airborne habits of anthrax spores, but about the gestalt of the nation.
Mr. Bush and his aides make the point — quite accurately — that until two months ago there had never been a major foreign terrorist attack on the United States and that medical professionals knew very little about anthrax. They were the kind of events no one could plan for, much less design a communications strategy that had any hope of holding up.
Mr. Bush has been relentlessly upbeat, repeating almost daily, as he did again on Friday, that "we're making very good progress" on both fronts, at home and abroad. He has left to others the more complicated messages — that the Taliban show no sign of cracking, that no one knows how a Bronx woman who died this week contracted anthrax, that investigators are no closer to solving the mystery of whether the deadly powder is being sent by Osama bin Laden's followers, Iraq or domestic terrorists with a flair for biochemistry.
He has left the darkest warnings to Vice President Dick Cheney, who predicted a bit more than a week ago that "for the first time in our history, we will probably suffer more casualties here at home in America than will our troops overseas."
Getting the message right — and setting the optimal tone — has been a problem for the Bush White House since Sept. 11.
There was the early explanation that Mr. Bush stayed out of the capital because of a specific threat to blow up the president's plane, made more chilling by the caller's use of the code word for Air Force One. It turned out later that the call had been a crank, and the caller had never used the code word.
Then came the White House insistence that it was impossible to release a scrubbed, declassified description of the evidence against Mr. bin Laden in the Sept. 11 attacks, an argument that fell apart when Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain issued one in a few days.
Then came the secretary of health and human services, Tommy G. Thompson, and the postmaster general, John E. Potter, telling the public that there was nothing particularly dangerous about the anthrax- laced letter sent to Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader. The post office that processed the letter was kept open, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there was no danger to anyone who had not actually opened the envelope. Health officials discovered that their early confidence was wrong, and by the time the White House's warning caught up with the medical realities, two postal workers were dead.
"It's true we've had a crisper message on the war in Afghanistan than the war here," said Dan Bartlett, Mr. Bush's communications director, who has been deeply involved in the strategy. "But the military action is offensive in nature, it's all under one roof at the Pentagon, and we control it. The bioterrorism is a defensive war, it crosses many jurisdictional lines, including state and local governments, and we don't control when new facts come to light."
Mr. Bartlett argues that the Washington press corps has been far less sympathetic to the trials of managing a bioterror attack than the public has been — and many agree.
"Everybody's a rookie at this, that's the key story," said Steve Smith, the former editor of U. S. News and World Report who now works at a strategic communications firm here that advises companies on how to handle crises. "People understand pretty well that this war on terrorism is one improvisation after another. And they are cutting the government some slack — more slack than I would have cut the government if I was still sitting in my journalism seat."
What the journalists here see, of course, are the interdepartmental rivalries that are the staple of Washington life and an impediment to crisis response. The question of whether this is domestic or foreign terrorism has forced together the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, two teams that never stopped fighting their own cold war long after the one between the United States and the Communist bloc was over.
Similarly, the disease control centers were testing the first anthrax samples from Florida, while, at Congress's request, the Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., tested the letter sent to Senator Daschle. Both were supposed to work with the F.B.I. and Mr. Thompson's office; bureaucratic fumbling delayed the news that the anthrax sent to Capitol Hill was potent in the extreme, and fine enough to permeate envelopes and contaminate other mail and machinery.
And then, in the last few days, there was a tussle at the White House over whether to issue a second warning that a terrorist attack might happen someplace, sometime, with a weapon yet to be determined.
Then it became the White House officials' turn to be stunned. The new director of the Office of Homeland Defense, Tom Ridge, watched in amazement on Thursday when Gov. Gray Davis of California, who has already clashed with Mr. Bush on energy policy, declared that he had been told of "credible, specific" threats to several suspension bridges in California and called out the National Guard. Mr. Ridge says the information was "uncorroborated," and made it clear he did not support the public release of the information, which his office had kept secret.
This will hardly be the end of such debates. New threats will be detected each week. Mr. Ridge — who coordinates everything but controls nothing, a dangerous place to be in Washington — will have to decide when to warn the public and when warnings threaten to become so routine that they loose their punch. "Clearly he hasn't gotten the hang of this yet," one White House official sympathetic to Mr. Ridge said on Friday. "He's got to get out of the weeds. He can't be answering questions on every new anthrax incident."
And Mr. Bush, meanwhile, will have to regain the lofty tone he used so well in his speech to Congress nine days after the initial attacks.
That was easier to do at a time of tragedy, when the country was still in shock. It is much harder when all of Washington, the nation and the world are measuring the progress of the war, at home and abroad. |
