BERNIE GOT BACK
With Michael Chertoff's confirmation hearings wrapped up in Washington, the moment seems right to look back one last time at the brief but incredible saga of Bernard Kerik's tenure as Homeland Security Czar designate.
From the original rumor-breaking Dec. 2 story in the Post-which offered the priceless image of Kerik and Bush bonding on a White House couch while discussing a video of two Doberman Pinschers eating one of Saddam's general's alive-to the sputtering Jan. 21 coda-in which Kerik's former "special assistant" was busted for scuffling with a cop outside a Staten Island bar, and found carrying Kerik's retired NYPD identification card-it's hard to imagine a time when anyone thought Kerik should be running the Washington agency that stands between eight million New Yorkers and a big, apple-shaped mushroom cloud.
But think it they did. Much as they'd like to forget it, both New York senators drooled like zombies at the prospect of funneling more anti-terror money into the state, and fell over each other praising Kerik's nomination. The pugs at the Post and Daily News dutifully led the local media charge-"Kerik's the One," "Kerik's Got a Big Future"-and found allies at the Observer, which ran a Dec. 13 editorial claiming that Kerik's nomination "immediately makes the city and its citizens much safer." (Since bin Laden is a man who understands the power of facial hair, Kerik's thick 'stache must have sounded like a certain trumpet.) A full 10 days after Kerik's nomination, the Observer was still dismissing "the nervousness which spread through the department," claiming such beltway skittishness spoke well of Kerik.
DHS employees weren't the only nervous ones. Go back and look at the pictures and footage from the Dec. 3 White House press conference, and Kerik looks lost, at once nervous and utterly blank.
What was our "Republican working-class superhero" (Zev Chafets, Dec. 5) thinking as Bush recounted the heroic way in which Kerik showed up for work on 9/11? Was it those handgun giveaways? The illegal nanny? The numbers he fudged while Corrections commish? Dripping sweat onto Janet Pinero's back while staring at the smoking ruins of Ground Zero? Passing the buck of post-9/11 reforms to Ray Kelly? Skipping out on Iraq four months early? Those Saudi business buddies (old and new)? All that Taser stock? His latest job as a walking infomercial for war-on-terror profiteers? Or were Kerik's thoughts more Homer Simpson-like: "White House? Fancy rug? Rudy? Donuts?"
We'll never know what was going on under Kerik's dome as he stood next to the president on Dec. 3, but we'll always have those editorials from the News, the Post and the Observer. While Newsday pulled back the razor thin epidermis covering Kerik's mountain of dirt, most everyone else was singing the life story of a man who should still be taking roll call at Passaic County Jail.
Two months later, we know the local boy doesn't always make good, no matter what his mother did for a living and no matter where he was on the morning of 9/11/01. Let's hope the lesson sticks when Rudy announces for 2008. Because some of these Kerik stones are going to be good for two birds, not one.
-Alexander Zaitchik