After Care

After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era, by Steven Brill (Simon & Schuster, 723 pp., $29.95)

Steven Brill is not the conservative's favorite journalist. Most infamously, he did a smear job on Ken Starr, back in 1998. But he is undeniably a major journalist of our time. He founded The American Lawyer, and Court TV, and Brill's Content (the now-defunct magazine in which his Starr attack appeared). Currently he writes for Newsweek and "analyzes" for NBC.

But most important, he has written this amazing book with the simple title: After. This is the book that tells the story of how America "confronted the September 12 era," as he puts it. Brill paints a vast and detailed portrait of Americans -- from the president on down -- at work in the new age. His conclusion: This country -- including its Republican leadership -- has conducted itself admirably well, given the circumstances.

Brill's book has caused some disquiet among his liberal peers, according to The Drudge Report (not Brill's favorite news source, you can be sure). The book is immensely understanding of the administration, and it even strains to sympathize with John Ashcroft, the blackest of the Left's betes noires. Brill seems a man deeply affected by 9/11. More than a few liberals were "mugged" by that day.

What Brill set out to do was take the lives of various people and follow them daily, for about a year. Sections are actually marked by dates, diary style. At the beginning of the book, Brill gives his cast of characters -- literally. He has a list of "main characters" -- from Ashcroft to Edmund Woollen, a vice president of Raytheon -- and a list of "other key figures," who range from the White House chief of staff to a Turkish American in New Jersey, who was humiliated at the hands of FBI questioners.

The author put his heart and soul into this work. He conducted hundreds of interviews and slogged through piles of documents. His ambition, he says, was "to convey the full array of challenges America faced" post- 9/11 while providing "a coherent narrative." This, he has done.

We begin, not with 9/12, but with 9/11. Where were you? What were you doing? Tom Ridge was visiting his mother in the hospital; before long, he would be head of something called the Department of Homeland Security. Sen. Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, was in Washington; his wife, Iris Weinshall, transportation commissioner of New York City, was at her desk in City Hall. Their daughter, Jessica, was at Stuyvesant High, in the shadow of the World Trade Center.

Now get this: After the South Tower fell, Jessica's parents got on the phone with each other, and her mother "took out a street map and counted the blocks from the North Tower to Stuyvesant, which was about four blocks from the Trade Center. [Weinshall and Schumer] now tried to calculate how tall the Trade Center tower was, what the length of an average block was, and, therefore, whether it would hit Stuyvesant if it fell over." The book is full of eye-popping, hard-to-forget details like that.

Life had been rather different until then. Would you like to hear something quaint? Until 9/11, Customs inspectors in Pembina, N.D., on the Canadian border, went home at 10 every night. They put an orange traffic cone in the middle of the road, along with a note asking people to return for an inspection the next morning. An orange cone.

On September 11 itself, the woman in charge up in Pembina -- Mary Delaquis -- made a vow: "Whatever the next threat is, it is not coming through me." This was mere bravado, but it bespoke the determination of many Americans. Day by day, Brill walks us through the lives of his cast members. Sergio Magistri, head of InVision Technologies, had screening equipment to sell. Larry Cox had to figure out how to keep the airport he ran, in Memphis, open. Sal Iacono, owner of a little Wall Street shoe-repair shop, wondered what he would do with himself. Bernadine Healy had to cope with a tremendous inrush of money at the Red Cross. She did her best: but her board would give her the shaft.

The ACLU? Its executive director, Anthony Romero, is a major character here. On 9/11, he convened "what became an almost all-day rump session of his top staff . . . 'We did a list of what we thought they would try to do,' he remembers, referring not to the terrorists but to the government."

Brill captures the hurly-burly of those first days, when everyone was working by the seat of his pants. He has great sympathy for people who made mistakes, in their zeal, fear, or confusion. A million practical questions had to be decided, and quickly: airport security; treatment of those arrested; policy at Ground Zero. The Bush administration -- and, in particular, Tom Ridge -- had to devise a system of alerts: Do you risk panicking the public by issuing vague warnings, or do you risk insulting and endangering them by keeping mum? Brill knows too much to be judgmental.