Chronicles is made possible by Springhill Senior Living.

The Regional Science Consortium.

and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

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President Bush has asked me to serve our country at this critical time in our nation's history.

And my answer is "yes."

Now, Michele and I spent several hours discussing that opportunity and that challenge, but we both knew in our hearts what our decision would be.

It is an honor to serve your country at any time, but more so now than ever.

To the President, I am humbled by your faith in me.

You have inspired us with your leadership, and I'm very proud to join your outstanding and talented team.

To Michele, to Leslie, and Tommy.

No husband and father could be more blessed.

Once again, you make a sacrifice so that I may serve.

I'm very proud of you and I'm very grateful.

Really very proud of you and very grateful.

[Applause] It's a funny story about Tom.

He was giving a speech in Philadelphia to the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce.

It had been previously scheduled, but it was also his last day of office, as it turned out, that 9-11 happened and then all that had happened.

And he was leaving for Washington from the speech.

He was introduced by a very pompous person who will remain nameless.

"Here's Tom Ridge, the man who answered the call in Vietnam.

And the man answered the call."

And Ridge gets up, and he's a pro.

He has to take the audience back down to where he can start talking real to him, you know?

He says, "You know, you do have to answer the call."

He says, "Next time I'm getting caller ID."

Brought the house down.

You know, the happy warrior to be sure, but woe is me, you know, I took that call.

And he told me, he said, he didn't remember saying that.

But I'll remember it forever.

When I got the word from the White House that Governor Ridge was to be the new Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, I called his office, told him who I was, what my background was, and would he be willing for me to come up to Harrisburg and chat with him for a while so I could get my bearings in order, recognizing the commitment that each of us had and that both of us had to doing everything in our power to get this right.

The word service has to be understood to be not what I'd call an out-of-body experience, but it is the notion of committing oneself to serving others.

It was a very hard time for the family.

I can't equate it to anything else.

It was like Tom died in office.

There was no transition.

There was no transition team.

There was no budget.

He was gone in two weeks.

So I made the decision.

I made it very clear to the staff, we will not move out of the residence until you can tell me and you can show me you have a facility to store his papers in boxes in a locked room.

I don't care where the locked room is because once I moved out of the house, I had no leverage and the Schweikers were wonderful.

Governor Schweiker and Kathy Schweiker and the kids, you know, obviously they were anxious to move into the residence, but I think Governor Schweiker understood because there was nobody who was going to worry about what happened to his papers or people going through his stuff.

I didn't want that to happen.

Michele soldiered on and from being a very respected First Lady to looking for a job raising kids that needed a place to live.

So on a personal level of Kathy and I wanted them to be reassured that whatever we're going to do, constitutionally, we had a job to do.

And, you know, the date and time was chosen for the transfer of power not long after 9-11.

So frankly speaking, all business.

It was difficult.

It was difficult because the kids were in an age where they were in high school, I think they were in high school and it's a very difficult time to be uprooted, especially when you're uprooted from an area where you were really happy and doing well.

It harkens back to the idea that as an army brat growing up, this is what you did.

I mean, you went to new situations and you adapted and you made the best of it and you made it work for you.

When 9-11 happened, America was in shock.

To think that we were to be attacked on the homeland was just unbelievable.

And it was amazing how quickly America rallied to be unified.

Today I signed an executive order creating a new Homeland Security Office charged with strengthening America's protections against terrorism.

And I have picked a really good man to lead that office.

He was sworn in October 8th.

I did go down for that and Mark Holman said, "You need to go and meet with Andy Card after the swearing in.

He is going to interview you."

I said, "What?"

But it was interesting because one of the things he must have said four or five times is one of the things in this administration that you need to know is that you will only learn things when you need to know.

We work on a need to know basis.

And then he said, "Okay, and then we'll see you here in two days."

Two days?

That was October 8th.

We were still a little bit paranoid.

We actually even looked at some of our neighbors and wondered if they were the problem or the solution.

And the president invited everybody to be part of the solution.

And people did proudly put their American flag in their front yard.

And then we had an echo.

It was an echo of fear.

And we became a little bit more paranoid.

This morning, after doing the environmental sampling around the Capitol complex, it was discovered that a sample came back from the Ford House Office Building Mailroom as positive for anthrax.

Samples that we took from Senator Daschle's' office, it is indeed anthrax.

Well, I remember Senator Daschle being the person that received one of the first anthrax letters on Capitol Hill.

And it was so soon after 9-11.

We didn't know what was going to come at us next.

Then you had sort of the hysteria, lots of copycats, and lots of people just scared.

The events surrounding the discovery of anthrax was one of the most difficult times I faced.

Having this bioterrorism attack, uncertain of the who and why it was done and how it was done, and until we worked our way through it to come up with an antidote, it created so much uncertainty.

It hasn't been that long ago you were a governor.

Now when you say that you and the president are very pleased with the response to anthrax, you must be aware that a lot of people around the country are saying, "Listen, they bobbled this thing in the beginning.

They haven't done a good job."

Well, I would say very respectfully, even though there's a tremendous amount of anxiety around anthrax, the public health community, we believe in this country, has saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives.

And we are learning as we go along.

As I look back on this, it's kind of interesting.

It was the first time, even before the department, that I personally began talking and working with multiple state and local officials, which ultimately turned out to be one of the cornerstones of the Department of Homeland Security, is you built that relationship.

In order for it to be a national strategy to deal with this, you had to have trusting relationships with state and local officials all around the country.

This was the harbinger of that.

This is something that we had to do, and then maintain it.

Which I think we did very well.

I know we've accomplished a lot so far, and we've got a lot more to do.

At home, we've created a new Office of Homeland Security under my friend Tom Ridge, and worked with Congress to provide more than $20 billion to safeguard our territory.

When Tom Ridge convened a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the West Wing of the White House, and had invited every agency that thought they had a role in security, we were surprised how many people showed up.

Almost every institution in Washington said, "I want to be at that meeting.

I'm part of the solution.

Just give me the money that you have, and I'll take it, and I'll do a better job than you will."

It turned out that a lot of the people that came to the meeting were parroting praise for their agency, and making sure that it showed up in the newspaper that they were defending their agency, their entity.

It was frustrating because Tom was looking to say, "I don't want to know what you're doing.

I want to know what is the best thing that should be done."

There were a couple of agencies that were helpful.

Most of them weren't.

A lot of folks didn't like OHS.

Rumsfeld said he couldn't afford one troop, but the president and chief of staff and vice president in early December said, "Everything's on the table."

The governor and about a dozen people went into the bunker of the White House for about three weeks, and they white-boarded DHS, a lot like it looked like when it came out, and presented the president and his staff.

The president - "Let's go."

The department was the brainchild of several people in the White House, and in order to comply with the president's directive, they took bits and pieces from other departments, and whatever second thoughts other people had, ended quickly when the president announced, "This is what we're going to do," and everybody acknowledged that it was a good idea, even those cabinet members from whom, for sure, their responsibility had been grafted into Homeland Security.

We wanted to make certain that we were responding to what had basically been a congressional charge, and certainly one of the biggest challenges was we needed to have clarity with regard to what we were being asked to actually undertake.

The Department of Homeland Security will bring Homeland Security responsibilities under one roof, working toward one goal in moving in one direction, forward.

And there will be a single clear line of authority to get the job done.

To paraphrase President Truman, "the buck will stop there."

As you know, this would be the largest reorganization of the government since the Truman presidency.

The new department would unify authority over the Coast Guard, Custom Service, Imigration and Naturalization Service and Border Patrol, and the recently created Transportation Security Administration.

It was incredibly difficult.

One of the responsibilities for the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to be to coordinate these national efforts using multiple federal departments and agencies across the government, and then also down federal, state, local, tribal and territorial as well.

That it was trying to do it under an active set of threats, and it was trying to do it without any actual standard operating procedures.

So the challenge was just multiplicative, and they were sort of building as they were going.

I remember the chart that Tom Ridge presented in the Roosevelt Room.

It was a spaghetti chart, and it looked like a spaghetti bowl.

And the father of the Stafford Act brought FEMA into Homeland Security.

Were there bumps and bruises and complaints?

Yes.

And jealousies?

Yes.

But none of that impacted the mission.

Because Tom has always been very inclusive, not exclusive.

He brings people into the tent.

Sometimes they didn't even realize the tent's around him.

He's a lot like George H.W.

Bush.

The Homeland Security Act of 2002 takes the next critical steps.

Dozens of agencies charged with Homeland Security will now be located within one cabinet department, with the mandate and legal authority to protect our people.

I have great confidence in the men and women who will serve in this department, and in the man I've asked to lead it.

As I prepare to sign this bill under law, I'm pleased to announce that I will nominate Governor Tom Ridge as our nation's first Secretary of Homeland Security.

[Applause] First and foremost, we didn't know what the next shoe was that was going to drop, and it was up to us to try to imagine what the threat really was to the homeland and prepare to defend against those would-be threats.

The Homeland Security Advisory System is designed to measure and evaluate terrorist threats and communicate them to the public in a timely manner.

The advisory system is based on five threat conditions or five different alerts.

Low, guarded, elevated, high, and severe.

They're going to be represented by five colors.

Green, blue, yellow, orange, and red.

You know when you've made it when you're featured on Saturday Night Live, - That on the basis of a change in the nature of Al-Qaeda chatter, we are changing the current threat level to magenta.

Today the United States government is raising the threat level to coat orange for the financial services sector in New York City, Northern New Northern New Jersey, and Washington, D.C.

The problem with the color-coated system is that the threat level to our nation is always high.

And so you have to go up.

It's like really high, but it's really hard to go down.

Once again, you're saying that Al-Qaeda wants to disrupt the democratic process.

There are some who will interpret that, that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for Osama bin Laden.

How do you address those concerns?

People who think that this is political?

Well, I think, of course, what's the wrong interpretation?

We are basically laying out before the general public the kind of information that we receive.

Mr.

Secretary, Mr.

Secretary, can you comment on the rift between the Ju.. and Homeland Security?

Yeah, I can communicate every day.

We talk every day.

We collaborate our efforts every day, and whatever we can do to put that unfortunate story to rest, we need to do immediately.

I know Secretary Ridge brought up there with you.

I'm wondering if you, gentlemen, are all on the same page.

But there's some sort of disagreement about how to interpret this recent involvement.

I believe we're all on the same page.

They have failed.

We work together.

Now we move forward to serve and to guard the country we love.

It has been my special privilege to serve as Vice President alongside this exceptional American.

He's a man of deep conviction and personal kindness.

His leadership is wise... The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.

May God bless you, and may he watch over the United States of America.

Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Earlier today, I submitted a formal letter of resignation to the President.

And with his concurrence, it is in my desire to continue to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security through February 1st of next year.

Unless my successor is confirmed by the Senate earlier.

I don't think he formally came to me and said I'm going to quit.

He just said, "I've done what I want to do.

I stood the department up.

I've got it in place.

There are good people there.

We have got to leave government.

And so I'm going to move on now.

I've got to go into the private sector.

And we want to be able to give our children a good education like we were able to get.

And we can't do that if I continue to stay in government.

I started thinking much more seriously about it around election time in November after the election.

I thought about it a little bit before, but serious thought is to win and under what circumstances after the President was reelected.

Mr.

Secretary, can you say with confidence that measures taken by the Department of Homeland Security have actually prevented attacks?

And in how many cases do you think that's true?

How many times?

One of those questions that I could give you a very confident answer and you'd say "prove it" and I'd be difficult to prove what I can't necessarily quantify.

But I am confident... I think he was also physically worn down by the job.

I told you before, you know, you could tell he was under a lot of stress.

He sacrificed a lot to do the job.

And Michele sacrificed a lot for him to do the job.

His relationship with Michele was more important than his relationship with the President.

I don't care whether you're in a military uniform or you're engaged in a non-military way in public service at the state, local, federal level.

The whole family puts the public service uniform on.

When you are working at this level and these kinds of critical issues, and again, it's not unique to me.

But, you know, there are opportunities that you may have planned with your family, occasions to be with the family that you miss.

I mean, when I was governor, I had a chance to have a little bit slightly manage my schedule a little bit differently and actually coach my daughter's softball team for several years.

That's just not something that would be available to do now.

But I do like to, I am looking forward to going to my son's rugby games.

You know, so there's just a lot of things out there on a personal level that I just would like to take, have a little bit more time to do.

It was, I think, a relief.

I think that there was a hope of just kind of getting back some of the normalcy and the family life that we, you know, had sacrificed at that point for a couple of years while he was in that role.

Being able to get out of the spotlight and just kind of getting back to being a family, focusing on, you know, your graduation, where I was in college and doing that sort of thing, having them up for family weekend.

Yeah.

So it was, you know, quick, but overall, I think a relief.

I was glad for him because I know how hard he was working.

I cannot imagine the stress he and his team were under.

And it was, the realm would go on, even with someone else.

It was as good of a job as he did.

We both knew that because what he had set up and put in place, the mission could continue, even if he was not the one leading it.

I was happy for him.

At the time, I'm there like, you know, good, you did your service.

Time for a little time for you to do something different.

Have some fun in business.

Do some other things.

And my regret in retrospect is I wish he would have stayed through Katrina, at least.

Because the response would have been different and President Bush would have had a better responder because that was a mess and that was an unnecessary mess.

So I know it would have been different if the governor had been there, but I wasn't unhappy that he moved on at that time.

But in retrospect, I kind of think he would have liked to have stayed a little longer.

He certainly wasn't pushed out.

He left on his own accord for sure.

If you go back to post-World War II history of the Republican Party, there had always been these two strands.

An Eisenhower strand - boring, governing, sane.

And a McCarthy strand - xenophobic, conspiratorial, non-governing, often racist.

Now, there was a group of us involved with Bush - the whole concept of compassionate conservatism.

We thought, certainly I thought, that yes, we knew about this dark side.

We probably played to it too much.

But we thought we were the dominant gene.

And this is what the party would be if only because the country was changing so much and it would have to be.

And I don't know any conclusion to come to this, as any intellectual honesty at all, is, that's wrong.

We were the recessive gene.

And the party wanted to be the Joe McCarthy Party.

So the Republican Party spent decades largely as a white party.

And I think something happened to the party that when we were so focused on a homogeneous audience, that we developed this sort of a genetic experiment of electing very weak people.

And we see that playing out now.

[Music] You know, Tom Ridge might not be able to win a primary election for borough council today.

And the reason for that, of course, is that his superpowers of mutual respect given as a starting point for every relationship, of self-deprecation, of affability, a deep commitment to bipartisanship, not as a tactic, but as the right way to do things.

Those incredible talents are incredible detriments in the political environment today.

We are, you know, political environments are pendulum swings.

And I truly believe no change is forever.

But we are on a swing right now that has really changed how people value attributes like bipartisanship, like civility, like respectfulness.

Tom Ridge is one of the most unselfish Americans that I have ever encountered in my Americans that I have ever encountered in my life.

On occasion, when I'm pressed, I get almost a bit weepy with regard to that kind of a statement, because I know, having been there, done that with him, for him, that there were very few that could step up and do what Tom Ridge did for our country.

Then what he did in those terribly difficult circumstances.

The coins of the realm are now more often demonization and a cervic disregard for your opponents.

And Tom Ridge never wired that way, could not be that way.

And so Tom Ridge being defeated in an election is something that none of us have ever contemplated because it never happened.

But it could happen today for reasons that I think we should probably all reflect on.

But if there still was a Tom Ridge part of the Republican Party, this country would be a much, much more hopeful place.

Chronicles is made possible by Springhill Senior Living.

The Regional Science Consortium.

And the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

We question to learn.