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We are here tonight because too many of thesewonderful officers have come to know this painful reality. Last year the nation as a whole received a powerful wake-upcall about the sacrifices that our law enforcement officersmake on behalf of the nation, when an armed intruderviolated the sanctity of our nation's capital, the centerof our democracy, and a symbol of freedom for the entireworld. Two valiant officers were there to withstand theattack. They sacrificed their lives in the line of duty toprotect their fellow Americans and to preserve ourdemocracy. We will never forget them.
attack attack someday came suddenly.zip
It wasn't long after Sept. 11 that the public discussion turned to the prospect of even worse attacks. The possibility of biological warfare got in our heads, and, for good reason, it's proving hard to dislocate: Even a moderately successful biological attack could kill millions -- and in many cases, rather slowly. Four out of every five Americans believe another attack within the U.S. within a year is either "very likely" or "somewhat likely," according to a TIME/CNN poll, yet how we as individuals, and as a nation, should best proceed remains murky.
The United Nations Special Commission has shown that Saddam Hussein developed massive quantities of chemical and biological weapons and prepared them so they could be delivered with Scud missiles. It stands to reason that Hussein could be interested in helping bin Laden attack America.
Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., chairman of a House subcommittee on national security, has said, "I am absolutely convinced we'll have a chemical, biological or nuclear attack. The question is not if, it's when, where and what will the magnitude be."
Read some of the preparedness recommendations from within the medical and research communities -- you can almost hear the authors sighing. A recent World Health Organization report claims that a biological attack could well be "on such a scale or of such a nature as to be beyond the capability of the health-care system to cope." Preparing for such an outbreak at this point is a terrific idea, but it's also a little like dabbing sunscreen on skin cancer. Our level of readiness would be laughable if it weren't so cryable. Even if an executive order forced the pharmaceutical industry, state and local hospitals, FEMA and the CDC to devote every single resource to prevention and response programs, it would be years before we approached basic preparedness. Even then, some argue, basic preparedness could mean acknowledging that preparedness is a myth, and a whole new approach to geopolitics is in order.
On Sept. 16, the Washington Post published an extraordinary report detailing the stunning response failures the city of Washington witnessed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
It's not just city gridlock. A recent survey of 186 hospitals in four Northwestern states found that 80 percent had no plans for a biological or chemical attack. The survey, published in the American Journal of Public Health, revealed that only 6 percent had taken the minimum recommended preparations for a nerve gas attack like the one Tokyo experienced in 1995.
Unbelievably, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson told "60 Minutes" on Sunday that the U.S. is "prepared to take care of any contingency, any consequence that develops from any kind of bio-terrorism attack." Thompson alluded to the eight staging areas throughout the country that contain vaccines, antibiotics, gas masks, ventilators and other supplies. These packages can be shipped out to a disaster site within hours.
What Thompson doesn't say is that this is a shot in the dark. According to the plan, the supplies will be shipped as soon as a city or region recognizes that an attack has occurred. By and large, recognition means it's too late. With anthrax, the appearance of symptoms marks the point at which antibiotics are useless. As for the vaccine, it's been well publicized that we don't have enough. In fact, we're not even sure it would work: The anthrax released could be a new strain that's resistant to vaccination. A report appeared Monday claiming researchers at Harvard Medical School "had identified a gene found in mice that in some forms made mice resistant to anthrax," according to Reuters. While this development takes us closer to finding an antidote, it will be years before we see anything definitive.
The media has focused recently on two indices of panic: the leading anthrax antibiotic and gas masks. Not long after last month's attacks, word spread that the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin -- also a fairly common treatment for urinary tract infections -- was already impossible to find, and that obtaining even a cheap gas mask suddenly meant spending hundreds on eBay.
As to how to combat such a threat, our options are disturbingly limited. Prevention is possible, desirable and, according to many experts, extremely undependable, if not downright impossible. Relying on quickly getting an antidote to the infected is rife with logistical problems. And, given the incubation period -- we could all have anthrax, smallpox, botulism, tularemia or the plague right now, actually -- any decision to flee presupposes that a biological attack hasn't already happened; hardly airtight reasoning if we've already accepted the premise that attack is imminent.
Now, nearly a year into the 21st century, America has begun an overhaul of its imaginative capabilities, much as plague-era Europe had to do six centuries ago. The sphere of conceivable terror now extends beyond shark attacks and occasional stray bullets. We go to baseball games, airports and subway stations with a vast and awful new narrative in our heads. Dimly, we can picture the chain of failed intelligence, the harmless-looking cooler at the football game, the cough after breakfast two weeks later, the frantic phone calls, the blocked roads, the clutching at the chest and finally a few lurching steps stumbled down the block.
By Mark F. Bernstein '83 Q: Before you start writing one of your books, you make a very substantial outline. How do you construct that outline? A: At first, you don't know how to do it. What I learned is that I have to know what the last sentence is. I can't start writing the book until I know what the last sentence is. With the Power Broker, I had never written a book before. I had this huge mass of material, and I didn't know how to organize it. [New York Parks Commissioner Robert] Moses had long since stopped talking to me, but I would go whenever he appeared in public. So I went to this event out at the World's Fair grounds, where he was giving a talk, and at the end of the talk he said, "Someday, let us sit on this bench and reflect on the ingratitude of man!" And in front of me was this line of old guys who used to work for him, nodding and saying, "Oh, yeah, that's right." And I suddenly knew that the last line of the book would be: "Why weren't they grateful?" So I went right back to work and started outlining. I'm not one of these writers — I really admire them — who can just start and go where the stuff takes me. I think it's great to be able to do that but I can't do it. Before I start a book I have to see the book. Q: Do you do all your research first or do you research as you go? A: I try to do all the research first, but that's nonsense because when you get into a chapter you always find that something was important but you didn't know it so you didn't look for it. That happens constantly. So you have to fly down to Texas and spend another month in the library. But you do the bulk of the research. And when I've done that, then I make myself think, "What is all this about?" That takes a long time. I write very fast with the outline, but sometimes you just sit here for a long time. Q: How did you come to write the section on the history of the Senate for your latest book? A: One thing that was different with Master of the Senate is that I did the outline without doing the history of the Senate. I was unhappy with it. I knew something was wrong. And I thought this has to be as much about the Senate as about Johnson, so you might as well stop trying to put in little bits here and there and just write the history of the Senate. If no one wants to read it, they won't read it. If you write it well enough, they'll read it. So then I did the whole history of the Senate, which I hadn't put in the first outline at all. Q: The research part sounds like fun. Is it? A: I love finding out. People say, oh it takes you so long, but that's not the way I feel about it. You're just learning something constantly. Q: You rely quite a lot on interviews. Would you be interested in writing about someone long dead who left few letters and for whom there were no surviving contemporaries left to interview? A: It would be very hard. One of the things I try to do is make the reader see the scene. In order to do that you have to be able to pick up the phone and call the guy and say, "You know that scene — where were you sitting? On the sofa?" You can't make it up. Q: The climax of Master of the Senate is the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. You graduated from Princeton in the spring of 1957, when a lot of that would have been going on. Was it something you followed at the time? A: No. I was politically very unaware. Q: What made you decide to go to Princeton? A: Because they had the best parties. I went to Horace Mann, and I had very good marks. In those days, if you went to Horace Mann and you had good marks, they'd ask where do you want to go to college? Well, I had a friend and he had me down to Houseparties, and I thought, "These are the greatest parties I've ever seen!" That's the truth. Q: How do you respond to criticism of your work by academic historians? A I think it's very unfortunate this divide between academic historians and historians whose backgrounds in many cases is journalism. Because I think that the best popular historians are just as rigorous in their demands for proof. Academic historians don't seem to fully realize how much the writing matters. You can tell within three pages whether the historian thinks the writing matters. Parts of history are very dull, but parts of history are quite thrilling. So you're not really being true to history unless you do everything you can to make it just as exciting on the page as it was in real life. When that is done, as in the best books that are being written now, people do get interested in history. One thing Carlos Baker used to say [in class at Princeton], it stuck with me all my life, is that Hemingway used to try to find the thing that created the emotion. So I'm always asking people I interview, what is it that got you? You spend endless hours interviewing someone asking, if I were there, what would I see? But if you do it long enough, you do find out what was the atmosphere, what produced the emotion. I think that's a very essential part of writing history. One of the things [academic historians] attack nonacademic historians for is the nonacademic historian's reliance on interviews. They say, well no one remembers. Well, that's because they've never been a journalist, they don't know what an interview is. They think an interview is where you sit there and ask a question and the guy answers it and you go on to the next question. That's not what an interview is. And you don't use just one interview. Q: You are a great fan of Tolstoy and Trollope, both of whom wrote about politics and history. Is there are relationship between great history and great literature? A: There is. A couple of summers ago, I wanted to find out if this was true, because I was working so hard on the writing and people said, you're just wasting your time. So I took Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and I would read a hunk of that. And then I said, what historical novel is most like it? Well, War and Peace, because it's so huge. So I would read a couple of chapters of Gibbon and a couple of chapters of Tolstoy and I thought, yeah, it's the writing. No one can ever fool me about writing. Their styles are different, but they're both writing at the same level. They are each trying just as hard to get le mot juste, the perfect word. When I started to write The Power Broker, I wanted to write it on the same level as great literature. And as time has passed, I've come to believe that history that endures, really endures because the writing, the level of the narrative, the words, are the same as in great fiction. Q: Professor Stanley Kutler of the University of Wisconsin was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that historians would not cite your books 20 years from now. Do you care? A: Absolutely. I want a wide readership. And I feel I have my standards — I never put anything in my book that I haven't researched. Twenty years, Kutler says? Well, The Power Broker has been out for 28 years. The first volume [of the Johnson series, The Path to Power] has been out for 20 years. Neither of those books has ever been out of print in hard cover or paperback, and neither has Means of Ascent. You can walk into almost any big bookstore in New York and there they are, still on the shelves. To me, it's important that they have endured. The Power Broker and The Path to Power are both now appealing to a whole new generation of readers. People aren't still reading The Power Broker because they remember Robert Moses, because there's almost nobody still around anymore who does. His Coliseum used to be right out there at Columbus Circle until it was torn down a couple of years ago. I remember Moses used to say, "Oh, that book won't last." That's what he used to say. "How long will The Power Broker last? It'll be gone before you know it." So when they started tearing the Coliseum down, that was one of the greatest moments of my life! Books do last. Mark F. Bernstein '83 is working on a book about the electrification of New York. 2ff7e9595c
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