Pete King does not wear an American flag on his lapel. His preferred symbol of remembrance is a silver pin of the Twin Towers, the flag draped across their base.
“Each day that goes past 9/11, the further you get from New York City or the Pentagon, the less you think about terrorism,” the new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said.
More than 150 friends, neighbors and constituents in King’s Long Island congressional district were murdered on Sept. 11, 2001 – cops and firefighters from the middle-class neighborhoods along its south shore; brokers and bankers from the more affluent north. King attended more than 20 funerals, wakes and memorials in the months after the attack.
“And the eulogies,” he recalls. “I had never given a eulogy before.” A jovial pol with a well- honed skill for attracting the media, King lobbied hard to win the chairman’s seat when Christopher Cox left Congress to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission. “My close relationship with first responders and with 9/11 families has also been politically helpful to President Bush and to the Republican Party,” he wrote in a letter to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay earlier this month. “I also worked with pro-Bush, 9/11 families in putting out statements of support and rebutting his critics. These statements received attention on such shows as ‘Meet the Press.”‘
The internal politicking completed, King now juggles contradictory tasks. He must help reform a homeland security apparatus that proved disastrously incapable in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while simultaneously defending Bush administration policies. He must try to win for New York the federal security funding it desperately needs – but which it does not get because Congress, controlled by King’s own party, treats homeland security as just another pork project. The hinterlands get more money per capita than high-risk urban targets.
King authored legislation to correct the dysfunction. It passed the House but a different version, more favorable to small states, is pending in the Senate.
“I wish that Congress, in both parties, would’ve shown as much interest in homeland security funding as they did in the highway bill,” King says. “We’d be a lot safer.”
There is no doubt King believes we are vulnerable.
The breakdown that marked the Katrina response, he says, revealed a fundamental flaw in post-Sept. 11 planning. The model assumed that local governments would be as capable of responding to crisis in the first 24 hours as New York City was when the World Trade Center was struck. But New York is unique. Its city workers – and its citizens – handle all manner of enormous events, from blackouts to the monumental security required for heads of state who converge at the United Nations.
King says we now must assume that no locality is up to the task of responding to a catastrophe of overwhelming proportion – a “dirty bomb” explosion involving nuclear material is a scenario that comes frequently to his lips. He wants the Homeland Security Department to conduct “onsite inspections” of local emergency plans, checking whether a municipality really has the capacities that it reports on paper. He believes the president may need more authority to move quickly into emergency zones – a power many say the chief executive already has, but which wasn’t used with dispatch after Katrina.
King rigorously defends President Bush. Yet his assessment of the terrorist threat gives no hint that those who claim we are safer now than we were four years ago could plausibly be right. His initial high-level briefing as committee chairman left him sober. “It was a reminder of how dangerous the world is, how serious the job is,” he says.
He has no single priority for bolstering homeland security because there are too many to rank. He agrees that virulent jihadist sentiment has likely increased since the invasion of Iraq, a project King supported and continues to back. Even if we captured and killed Osama bin Laden, we would not be out of the cross hairs. “It’s like mercury,” King says of global terrorism – a malleable element whose form fluctuates.
His duty and his challenge now is to use his love of the joust to shape an effective homeland security policy from the shambles that political gamesmanship has done so much to create.
