Tim Roemer says he
will never forget the moment when the grieving widow handed him
her murdered husband’s wedding ring.
Kristen Breitweiser was the mother of a 3-year-old daughter. Her
husband died on September 11, 2001, while working on the 94th floor
of the World Trade Center’s South Tower.
“She told me that she wanted me to remember
that event,” says
Roemer. “She said: ‘They found it about six weeks after
9/11, and they found it with part of his finger still in it. This
is all I have left of my husband. I want you to hold onto that
ring as you go about your work on the commission. And whenever
you look at it, I want you to think about what might happen in
the future if you and the other commission members don’t
ask the tough questions, don’t knock the doors down, don’t
put these witnesses on the spot and get us accountability.”
Tim Roemer—the former six-term Democratic congressman from
Indiana—was about to begin what he now calls “the most
important assignment I will ever receive in my lifetime.”
In the next two years, along with nine other high-profile Americans
on the commission, the 48-year-old politician-turned-lobbyist would
interview 1,200 witnesses and examine 2.5 million documents. They
would attempt to understand why the 9/11 attacks had not been prevented
and how to stop such attacks in the future. They would fight a
running battle with a dozen highly secretive federal agencies that
often seemed as intent on protecting their own “turf” as
they were on disclosing the intelligence foul-ups that had allowed
Al Qaeda to wreak havoc on New York and Washington.
Often described by the Washington Post and other national publications
as “the most outspoken member of the commission” and “a
thorn in the side of the White House,” Roemer would again
and again step forward to demand access to information that could
shed light on exactly how the devastating attacks of September
11, 2001 had taken place.
During that long and exhausting struggle, the former congressman
from South Bend says he kept his gaze locked firmly on Ron Breitweiser’s
wedding band.
“That ring never left me for two years,” Roemer
told @UCSD magazine during a recent, lengthy interview in Washington. “All
during the hearings, I kept thinking about the people who’d
lost folks on 9/11.
“I knew from beginning to end that it was
my job to try and make
sure more people don’t lose their husbands or wives or
sons and daughters in the years to come. And I can tell you—that
kind of responsibility just eats you alive. And so I decided,
early on, that we had to get it right. We had to uncover the
facts about
9/11 and let them speak for themselves. And we had to come up
with a series of recommendations that would help prevent the
errors
and the mistakes and the failures that made us so vulnerable
to the terrorists.
“Our world changed forever on 9/11. In the
space of a few minutes, we went from
a ‘cold war’ to a ‘hot war.’ We went from
the old world of a threat from the Soviet Union to the new world
of threats from terrorists driving pickup trucks and using laptops
in Tora Bora [Afghanistan].“
This is going to be a long, brutal battle. My hope—and I
know it’s shared by all of the others who served on the commission—is
that we did our job well enough to help us win that battle, and
to prevent a 9/11 from ever happening again.”
* * *
After serving six terms (1991-2003) as a self-described “centrist” Democratic
congressman from the heavily blue-
collar Third District of Indiana (South Bend and environs), Roemer
seemed a perfect candidate for the 9/11 Commission. He had served
as a vocal member of the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11
during his last term in the House and had energetically spearheaded
the creation of a commission into the terrorist attacks. By the
spring of 2002, he was frequently locking horns with the White
House, which insisted that the Republican-controlled Congress
could do a better job of uncovering intelligence failures and
remedying
them.
But Roemer and his congressional allies fought that battle
and they won it, according to most veteran Washington observers,
by continually bringing forward family members who’d lost
loved ones during the attacks. This strategy proved effective,
as the
grieving family members (including such highly visible figures
as Kristen Breitweiser) stepped
in front of the TV cameras to demand the creation of an independent
inquiry
into the attacks. And so, in November 2002, it was announced
that the 10-man commission would be created with a budget that
would
eventually reach $20 million.
Roemer was a logical candidate. Seven-term California (Fresno)
Democratic congressman Cal Dooley is a longtime close pal of
Roemer since their years in the House. “The record shows that Tim
Roemer was a courageous legislator who stood up to anyone who tried
to tell him how to vote,” says Dooley. “But he also
has a sense of humor. He isn’t full
of his own self-importance, and that counts for a lot in Washington.”
Along with these powerful
credentials, the usually easygoing and affable Roemer also
enjoys some high-octane personal connections inside the Washington
Beltway—having
married Sally Johnston, daughter of legendary Louisiana Senator
J. Bennett Johnston, back in 1989.
And perhaps most important, Roemer had a
reputation as a Democratic Party “moderate” well
to the right of the Party’s
historic liberal wing. That eased fears that the commission’s
findings and judgments might be based on political partisanship.
“I think we did ask some tough questions,
and I think we put some people on the spot,” Roemer said soon after the publication
of the commission’s 567-page report in late July of 2004. “But
I’m absolutely convinced that politics didn’t enter
into anything we did. We were motivated by three things: we had
the eyes of history on our backs; we had the claws of Al Qaeda
on our shoulders, and we had the grief of 9/11 in our hearts.”
“Our Mandate Was Sweeping”
Selected by both Congress and the president, the September 11 Commission
members held 12 public hearings between March 31, 2003, and June
17, 2004. During those highly visible sessions, which covered
a total of 19 days, the 10 commissioners on the panel took turns
questioning 160 different witnesses—including the national
security advisor, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency
and more than a dozen national security and intelligence-gathering
agencies.
In addition, the panelists spent several hours interviewing
former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton, as they struggled
to put
together the fractured jigsaw puzzle of national security in the
wake of 9/11.
President George W. Bush had first named former Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger to chair the commission, but he soon
disqualified
himself because of potential conflicts of interest. The White House
replaced him with former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, a likable
GOP moderate who’d spent the previous decade as president
of Drew University.
In the end, after considerable jockeying, the panel contained
five Republicans and five Democrats—signaling that a spirit of
nonpartisanship and cooperation would control the proceedings.
As the hearings got under
way in the spring of 2003, political observers on both Capitol
Hill
and Pennsylvania Avenue realized that they were about
to witness an unprecedented event in American history: a public
discussion
of some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets.
They were also about to watch a fierce struggle between the
White House and the investigators over access to information
about intelligence
and military failures—information so explosive that it might
very well have helped decide the presidential election.
Battling For The “Barbecue
Potato Chips”
“
Serving on the September 11 Commission was an incredibly difficult
and nerve-wracking and exhausting process,” Roemer says with
a weary shake of his head. “Right from the very first day
of our work, I think all of us understood that we were probably
engaged in the most important investigative hearings of our generation.”
The first crucial step was to make sure that in every interaction
the commissioners had with the news media, all comments would be
scrupulously balanced and non-partisan. “We insisted on this
kind of balance, to the point that it actually became rather comical
at times,” recalls Roemer. “We started calling the
chairman [Republican Tom Kean] and the vice chairman [Democrat
Lee Hamilton] ‘The Twins’ because they simply refused
to go anywhere without each other!”
Describing the long days they spent together during nearly
two years of nonstop information gathering, Roemer paints
a vivid picture
of 10 people working day-in and day-out at the edge of exhaustion. “Typically,
we’d start at 8:30 in the morning and go straight through
to 5 or 6 p.m., with very few breaks.
“Usually, we’d work in a 20-foot-by-20-foot
conference room, and lunch would be brought in to us. We must’ve
eaten a thousand tuna fish sandwiches, and the big deal each
day was
whether or not you could get a bag of barbecue
potato chips, instead of the regular chips, along with your diet
Coke!
'Quite often, we’d work well into the
dinner hour—and
then they’d give you three or four chapters to study at
home until two o’clock in the morning. After that, you’d
try to grab a few hours of sleep . . . then come in the next
day and do it all over again.”
After only a few meetings, Roemer says the commissioners realized
that if they were going to do their job effectively, they would
have to perform an exquisite balancing act. Their self-imposed
task was to maintain enough pressure on the White House and the
executive-branch intelligence agencies to force disclosure of
the information they needed. At the same time, they had to make
sure
they were not perceived by the public as engaged in a blame game,
or in the kind of cheap-shot, election-year partisanship that
would surely have eroded both their credibility and their authority.
And it was here, during this period of front-page battles
over access to information, that Tim Roemer would play his
ace card—the
extensive and intimate relationships he had developed with the
9/11 families during his earlier investigative work with the
congressional joint inquiry.
Each time the White House
or one of the intelligence agencies balked at a commission
request
for access, Roemer and the other commissioners would make sure
that
some of the highly
visible family members came forward
to demand that such access be provided. In the end, according
to many Washington observers, the families proved to be the decisive
factor in the release of scores of important documents while
also
prompting vital testimony from such key figures as National Security
Advisor Condoleeza Rice and President Bush.
“There’s no doubt that Tim was a thorn in the side of the
administration, when it came to gaining access to both people and
documents,” says commission member Slade Gorton, the former
Republican senator from Washington. “And it was primarily
due to his influence that we eventually got everything we needed.
“Tim worked very, very hard, and one
of the biggest roles he played—because
of his earlier work on the joint inquiry—took place
because he was very close to the [9/11] victims’ families.
The families took strong positions, and they insisted on
access to
the information
. . . and many of them did it because they trusted Tim.”
* * *
As the hearings heated up in the spring of 2004, it became obvious
that the most telling confrontation would take place over the question
of why the U.S. defense and intelligence apparatus had failed to
prevent the attacks on New York and Washington.
During public hearings that opened an astonishing window on
the workings of the U.S. intelligence community, the commission
analyzed
several remarkable disclosures:
•
CIA Director George Tenet, who later resigned, told the commission
that he’d been warning the administration for months that
a terrorist attack might take place in the United States: “The
system was blinking red.”
•
National counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke testified that
he had implored the Bush White House for several months before
9/11 to heed his warnings about possible attacks by Al Qaeda, but
had never been asked to present his findings to the president.
•
A July 2001 memo by a Phoenix, Ariz.-based FBI agent warned
that Al Qaeda terrorists were reportedly undergoing training
at
U.S. flight schools, but the FBI never acted upon the warning.
In spite of these and other obvious warnings, however, the
commission would find that the nation’s air defense system (to say nothing
of its airport security systems) failed dismally to prevent the
hijackers from wreaking devastation on September 11.
* * *
After wrapping up its work in the
summer of 2004, the September 11 Commission announced its findings
in a massive and painstakingly detailed report that will surely
rank as one of the most important—and widely debated—public
documents of recent American history. While refusing to pinpoint
blame for the breakdown in national security that allowed the
tragedy of 9/11 to occur, the commission issued 41 separate recommendations
aimed at reforming and repairing the system. The most important
of these was a proposal to place all security matters in the
hands of a newly created “national intelligence director,” who
would have the budgetary and personnel authority to change the
way the United States will defend itself against terrorism in
the future.
After several months of wrangling over details, congress surprised
many of its critics by passing a wide-ranging intelligence reform
bill in early December that implemented many of the changes recommended
by the 9/11 commission. The 600-page measure, which enjoyed large
majorities in both the House and Senate, will create a new National
Director of Intelligence, along with a national counter-terrorism
center and beefed-up border patrols, among many other reforms.
But the sweeping new package of laws left many questions unanswered,
and many of its provisions seemed vague and ambiguous to Washington
insiders. For example, the new plan does not give the soon-to-be-appointed
national intelligence director control over CIA operations, so
the stage seems set for potential conflict and continuing turf
wars. That reported weakness, along with several other flaws led
many in Congress to criticize the plan. “The bill simply
adds another layer of bureaucracy to the intelligence process,
which doesn’t solve any problems,” said Rep. Martin
Sabo, a Democrat from Minnesota in an interview in the New York
Times on December 8. “If the president wants greater supervision
of intelligence, he can do that today. The National Security Council
exists for that purpose.”
* * *
And what of Tim Roemer’s own future, now that the commission
has done its work and disbanded? These days, he says he’s
quite content with his new life as director of a middle-of-the-road,
Washington-based political think tank (the Center for National
Policy) and as a part-time political science professor at nearby
George Mason University in Virginia.
Ask him for a candid assessment of the commission’s
performance, and Roemer will tell you that
he was “quite pleased” with the “coherence and
credibility and accuracy” of the report, itself . . . but
also “quite uncertain” about whether or not the nation
will be capable of making
the reforms that he and the other nine commissioners so urgently
recommend. “Those of us who served on the commission recognize
how slow Washington can be to embrace change,” says the former
UCSD political science student, “and we know it’s a
battle to take turf from one bureaucracy and give it to another.
It’s like plucking somebody’s eye out, to take money
from one organization and give it to another!
“
But we need bold reforms now, and we need them badly, because time
is running short. We have to move from the cold war to the new
hot war, the ‘Jihadist’ war, that all of us are going
to be facing in the future. “We have been slow to do that
in the past, but we better do it now. Because if we fail to make
these changes—difficult or not—then we are going to
remain vulnerable, far into the future. And I don’t think
any of us ever want to go through a tragedy like 9/11 again.”
Tom Nugent is a freelance writer. He wrote the book Death
at Buffalo Creek, published by W.W. Norton.
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