HOMELAND TRUTHS.(homeland security office)(Brief Article)

A few mornings ago, Bill Clinton came downtown from One-Two-Five Street to Vanderbilt Avenue to give a speech. He was a few minutes early, which pleased and flattered his audience--four hundred nicely tailored suits, assembled at the Yale Club by the Council on Foreign Relations--at least as much as the fact that he had forgone his usual rock-star-size fee. Peter G. Peterson, the council's chairman, introduced him as "a Renaissance policy wonk," and he did not disappoint. Speaking from notes, the former President talked for an hour and a half, offering detailed analyses of questions ranging from the Middle East to Kashmir--all shaped into a cogent argument for an anti-terrorism strategy based not only on military strength and domestic vigilance but also on the kind of global cooperation and alliance-building that helped steer the Cold War to a peaceful and positive conclusion.

It was a dazzling performance, one that left members of the audience a little stunned. It also left some of them (if post-speech conversations in one corner of the room were any guide) a little sad. The very rigor of Clinton's presentation was an ironic reminder of the private indisciplines that diminished his Presidency. And there was no avoiding the melancholy thought of how little chance there is of his successor's ever achieving a like degree of substantive mastery.

The speech didn't get much bounce. The big papers ignored it, apart from a nine-inch wire-service story in the Washington Post, which left unreported Clinton's take on Washington's obsession of the moment: President Bush's proposal for an enormous new Department of Homeland Security, with a Secretary, a Deputy Secretary, five Under-Secretaries, six Assistant Secretaries, a hundred and seventy thousand employees, and a budget, to start with, in the neighborhood of forty billion dollars a year. "Finally, what about homeland defense?" Clinton asked himself as his tour neared l'horizon. "Should there be a department? Probably. It probably will do some good and won't do much harm." In Washington, he went on to say, "Presidents and Administrations come and go, and a lot of people hang on forever, and just because you ask somebody to do something doesn't mean they're going to do it. So there needs to be somebody at Cabinet-level rank who has some swat. And I think there's something to be said for that."

That seems about the right level of enthusiasm. Clinton didn't bother to mention that the idea for the new department originated with a panel--its ungainly official name was the United States Commission on National Security/21st Century--that was appointed by his Administration, three years before the attacks of last September 11th. The panel was not only bipartisan but also ideologically diverse: its chairmen were Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, and its members, reading from left to right, included Andrew Young, Leslie Gelb, James Schlesinger, and Newt Gingrich. The principal recommendation of its final report, which came ...