Wednesday, January 05, 2005
January 5, 2005TRADITION
Fearing a Sea That Once Sustained, Then KilledBy AMY WALDMAN and DAVID ROHDE
AMBANTOTA, Sri Lanka, Jan. 4 - "A cemetery," R. G. Jayadasa said, explaining what he sees when he looks out at the sea.
Mr. Jayadasa, 52, had come, like many others, to the edge of this southern town on Tuesday to stare at the waves rolling in. But between him and the water there was a new, studied distance that was more than just physical.
He pointed to where the tsunami had rewritten the coastline, tracing curves in place of a straight edge. It seemed to reflect the way the murderous surge also rewrote, perhaps permanently, the covenant between the people of this island nation and the sea that surrounds it.
"Now people hate the sea - they hate it," said Dudley Silva, an irrigation engineer in Matara, of a population who until Dec. 26 liked nothing better than a sea bath on a Sunday. On Monday, he said, he had seen a woman standing and cursing the ocean, waving her arms in fury.
Of the countries affected by the tsunami, none has suffered proportionately more devastation than Sri Lanka, with 30,000 people reported killed out of a population of just 19.5 million. (Indonesia has three times as many dead, but it has more than seven times the population.) In Indonesia, India and Thailand, the damage was largely confined to one geographical area, while 70 percent of Sri Lanka's 830-mile coastline was swept by the roiling waters.
For fishermen, hotel keepers and all the others who live and work along the coasts, there is a toll beyond lost lives, homes and livelihoods. There is the new psychological strain of being surrounded by, and still dependent on, a force that proved so merciless. It took Sri Lanka's civil war 18 years to kill 64,000 people. In under an hour, the tsumani killed almost half that many.
Subakean Albino, a fisherman, first heard the ocean's calming rhythm when his mother gave birth to him in a beachfront house 70 years ago. Throughout his adult life, he rose at 3 a.m. and paddled out across the sea's inky surface, hoping it would provide. On most afternoons, he thanked it for nourishing him and his family.
In Mullaittivu, his fishing town on the northern coast, home to roughly 5,000 people, Hindus worship the sea as a goddess who provides for her people. Christians like Mr. Albino dab sea water on their foreheads and eyelids, and pray to the Virgin Mary and St. Anthony, who is believed to have the power to ward off shipwrecks.
Churches and temples were built along the shore, allowing people to consecrate milestones like birth, marriage and death as the surf rolled in. "We played in the sea, we bathed in the sea," said Selva Malar, a 23-year-old whose name means Rich Flower. "We loved the sea."
In the 1980's, fighting between the Sri Lankan government and ethnic Tamil rebels flared in the area, prompting many to flee. One was Ms. Malar, who fled to India but found herself far from the ocean.
"We used to go to a church several miles away, near the shore," she said, "just to feel like it was home."
The deep familiarity with the sea is one of the reasons many people remain so bewildered by the tsunami, which struck on Dec. 26. Sellakandu Selvanayagam, a 71-year-old matriarch, said she could sense when the weather shifted and the ocean became dangerous. But both she and other longtime coastal residents said they had no inkling that Sunday that a tsunami was approaching.
"This time we were taken by surprise," she said.
Ms. Selvanayagam was swept away by the first wave and managed to survive by clinging to a mango tree. Her brother and all seven of his children died.
Mr. Albino ran to safety, but two of his grandchildren were not so lucky. Their mother, Bamini, 29, had left her children, a 6-year-old daughter and a 6-month-old son, at home and had gone to have a skirt mended by a neighbor. She was walking home when the first wave hit. She tried to dash to her house but was pushed inland like a rag doll.
"I got carried away," she said. "I never saw the children."
On Tuesday, Mr. Albino wept when his daughter told the story. He wept as his three daughters clung to each other for comfort, the children's two aunts pleading, "Come back to me, please come back to me, I am your big auntie."
In other parts of the town, entire families were wiped out, with one man losing 25 relatives, according to survivors. On other parts of the coast, whole villages disappeared. In all, 3,000 people are believed to have perished in a matter of minutes in Mullaittivu and in surrounding villages.
Mr. Albino talks of the sea as if it were part person, part god.
"We see it as a mother," he said of the force that has been his lifelong companion. "Our mother has punished us."
In Telwatta, in Galle district, the hubris of naming a train the Queen of the Sea became clear at around 9:20 a.m. on that Sunday, when the first wave came rushing in. The water reached the windows of the southbound express train, which had halted at the village, before receding an unnatural distance back into the sea.
The next wave came with such force that it lifted the train off the tracks and lifted the tracks off the ground. It left the nine cars scattered far apart, some on their sides, as if a child had thrown down his toy train in a fit of pique.
An estimated 1,200 people died on the train, but the counting is not yet finished. On Monday, eight days after the tsunami, two of the cars had yet to be lifted to unearth the bodies beneath.
No outsiders are here helping. The Sri Lankan police and army and railway engineers work alone, watched by desolate civilians. Their effort is a study in the frustrations of limited equipment and unprecedented disaster. Three earthmovers piled dirt next to a toppled car, trying to fill a watery hole so heavy-lifting machinery could approach. A crane struggled to raise the engine chassis, failed, struggled again.
Nearby, relatives of R. G. and Milina Jayasinghe watched. The couple, teachers, had boarded in Colombo in economy class to go see relatives in Tangalle, in the south. Mr. Jayasinghe had been a champion swimmer, his son said. It did him no good.
On Monday, workers found his yellow laminated identity card from Ananda College in Colombo. Of his wife there was no trace.
The relatives and onlookers gathered to watch the search, and blamed their government for not getting rescue workers to this site faster. They blamed the United States and other countries for not warning Sri Lanka of the coming tsunami.
Indra Gamaga's home was right near where the train had stopped. It had taken the family 17 years of work and saving to build. Now it is gone, among the hundreds here flattened to their foundations, as is the air-conditioned bus that provided their income. Her husband is hospitalized with chest and leg pains and a suddenly inconstant memory.
She had returned Monday for the first time to where her home once stood, finding her gold chain in the rubble. The visit made her weep, and made her sure that she would never go back there, or anywhere near the water, to live. The image of so many bodies had lodged in her mind, transposed with the image of the sea.
That evening, at a Buddhist temple where she had gone to collect relief supplies, she clutched three lavender pillows to her chest. A shudder, visible even in the darkness, passed through her.
The train had been bound south for Matara, on the south coast. There, Our Lady of Matara Church sits just across a narrow road from the sea, which can be seen out the front door. On the morning of Dec. 26, the Rev. Charles Hewawasam was just beginning to give Holy Communion when at the sound of a young woman's shout, he looked up and saw a van wobbling directly toward the church.
So strong was the glare and so strange the image that he did not see the water that was propelling the van forward. He yelled to his congregation to run, and only when he had reached the top floor of a new building next door did he realize it was the sea that had come at them.
The pastor ran back downstairs to try to save the 18-inch statue of Mary and Baby Jesus that had made the church a nationwide pilgrims' destination. It was already gone, and as he searched, another wave, and another, slammed into the church and the surrounding buildings.
He survived, but the nun who had been giving communion with him died. So did 17 congregants, with an 18th still missing.
The statue, too, survived, miraculously. History, or legend, has it that the statue first came from the sea, when it was found by fishermen 500 years ago. It was lost twice after that, once in a ship wreck en route to Europe to be painted and again on the way back, when it was misplaced. It was found both times, and again now, three days after the tsunami, in a garden. "She came from the sea," Mr. Hewawasam said. "She knows how to swim."
In Hambantota's lagoon, instead of the harvest of fish in the winter and salt in the summer, an army boat is trolling for bodies from a submerged bus. When L. B. Susanthe walks the 10 feet from his house to the lagoon's edge, he sees clumps of black hair and a piece of a foot beneath the water.
The wave that smashed like a steamroller through Hambantota's Sunday market and the neighborhood beyond deposited hundreds of bodies in the lagoon. Eighty more bodies were found on Tuesday, local officials say, bringing the total recovered in the district to 2,449, with 1,979 people still missing. [Later estimates put the death toll at 4,500.]
Mr. Susanthe's aunt, who went to the market on the morning of Dec. 26 and never came back, is among them.
Near the edge of the lagoon on Tuesday, dazed families wandered in search of bodies they would never recognize. One woman, whose house sat between the sea and the lagoon, lost her 4-month-old daughter, her 7-year-old son, her husband and her mother. Two relatives walked with her, each holding an arm.
Mr. Susanthe's house of almost 20 years was left largely undamaged, but his family is planning to move nonetheless. This winter the lagoon gave not fish but bloated bodies. Who, he asked, wants to wait for summer and the harvest of bones?
Amy Waldman reported from Hambantota, Telwatta and Matara, Sri Lanka, for this article, and David Rohde from Mullaittivu.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
January 6, 2005
Power Users, Ready for a RefillBy MICHEL MARRIOTT
MIHOKO HAKATA, a freelance illustrator and recent art-school graduate, ducked into a coffee shop in Midtown Manhattan last week, desperate for a jolt of energy.
She had work to do. But as she removed her materials from her backpack, it became clear that the energy she was seeking could not be found in a cup. She had a more pressing need: to find a power outlet for her laptop computer, whose battery had died.
"I realized they have this," said Ms. Hakata, a 29-year-old Tokyo native, as her hand slipped beneath a table to deftly plug her I.B.M. ThinkPad into a wall socket.
Before Ms. Hakata, who lives on a drafty boat on the Hudson River, could settle into her work, a young man clutching a dying cellphone rushed in.
"I just have to charge it," he said, asking Ms. Hakata if he could share one of the two power outlets under her table. She smiled politely and nodded.
Every day, millions of people are finding themselves scurrying about in search of wells of electricity they can tap so their battery-powered mobile devices can remain mobile. Dependence is growing on laptops, cellular telephones, digital music players, digital cameras, camcorders, personal organizers, portable DVD players and the latest hand-held gaming devices - most of which operate on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries - and finding available electrical outlets away from home and office has become more urgent.
Starbucks and other establishments catering to wired customers appear to do little to discourage or regulate customers who plug in, either to work on AC power or charge up. In large part, the power seekers seem to negotiate their needs among themselves with cooperative grace, following a series of unspoken rules.
Chief among them, some say, is never to use more than half of the sockets in a wall outlet. If an outlet provides four sockets, electrical etiquette dictates that you can plug in, say, your laptop and your cellphone, but not the iPod, too.
Those who disregard this courtesy may find themselves the targets of grumblings and harsh stares.
"It's better not to hog all the outlets, of course," said Zyphus Lebrun, a graduate student in journalism at Columbia University. "It's like when you go to the Laundromat and there is one person using four dryers."
While some devices, like a dying cellphone, require only a few minutes of charging to regain short-term use, most devices, like laptops, take much longer. It is not uncommon for users of electronics with more ravenous appetites to camp out for hours near an electrical outlet. In some cases, those staking a claim do so by plugging in a device - even a $2,000 laptop - only to leave it unattended while fetching a $4 coffee.
Much of the mounting quest for power stems, some hardware manufacturers say, from battery performance that has generally not kept up with the rapidly expanding capabilities of today's consumer electronics.
In turn, some battery makers blame hardware makers for adding power-consuming extras like larger, brighter display screens on laptops and bigger hard drives in digital music players. The result is devices that can operate for little more than four to six hours between charges.
As a consequence, knowing the location of a well-placed (and unused) electrical outlet may be considered more vital than knowing the closest public bathroom.
"It has become part of your lifestyle," Ralph Bond, the consumer education officer for Intel, said of the continual challenge of taking advantage of the widening offerings of digital electronics but not becoming a slave to the socket. "I can give you a guided tour of the two concourses for United Airlines in Chicago O'Hare." He then rattled off a long list of airports where he knows the whereabouts of obscure but accessible electrical outlets. "I can show you where the very valued and highly prized electrical outlets are for frequent travelers that need to juice up," he said.
Stories abound about people going to extraordinary lengths to secure outlets to feed an energy-starved gizmo. Sneaker-clad teenagers sprawled on the tile floors at airport gates charging their laptops and Game Boys are a common sight. Well-dressed professionals, like Mr. Bond, can be found seated among them, juicing up their laptops before takeoff.
Sean Spector, a vice president and founder of GameFly, an online video game rental service, said he tries to book flights that have power adapters near the seats so he can plug in his electronic gadgets. He said it is not unusual for him to travel with a laptop, a cellphone, a digital camera, a Palm organizer and his new Nintendo DS portable game console.
"I'm starting to see them more and more" at the base of seats or beneath the armrests between seats, he said.
At a cafe in Berkeley, patrons draw power from an extension cord plugged into the ceiling. At Jackson Hole, a restaurant on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a regular diner used to plug his laptop into an outlet hidden behind a large framed picture.
"We finally got rid of that painting," said Anna Kalogeras, the restaurant's manager. "We definitely don't have a problem with people coming in using our electricity like that. It makes the place look busy."
Like many managers of restaurants, cafes and practically anyplace people gather to work with and charge their electronics, Ms. Kalogeras noted that patrons seldom ask her for permission. "Once in a while people ask us if they can charge their phones," she said.
But some months ago at Amy Ruth's, a Harlem breakfast spot, a diner was loudly admonished by a waitress for plugging his laptop into a wall outlet near where he was seated. "Who told you that you could do that?" she asked, sternly but rhetorically. "Somebody's got to pay for that electricity."
The electricity costs of patrons charging up are negligible, many business owners said. In fact, some places, including airlines and commuter trains, are busy adding electrical outlets for customers' convenience.
The phenomenon is probably no more visible than at the thousands of Starbucks coffee shops that dot the United States. Starbucks is famously accommodating of coffee drinkers who slog their laptops along, sometimes working for hours with their computers and cellphones plugged in.
Starbucks does not monitor the number or use of power outlets at its more than 6,000 locations in the United States and some 2,500 more internationally, said Nick Davis, a company spokesman. But he acknowledged that Starbucks does encourage customers to use their Internet-connected devices in the coffee shops. More than 3,200 of the 4,346 Starbucks stores directly operated by the company have T-Mobile Hot Spots to give customers with specially enabled laptops and personal organizers wireless Internet access, Mr. Davis said.
"Having available power outlets is part of our wireless plan," he added.
Amtrak's high-speed rail service between Boston and Washington, the Acela Express, offers power outlets at every seat. On many of Amtrak's regular lines, however, seats with outlets are less common, making those that do more coveted than window seats.
"It is almost as if people see the outlets as public property," said Mr. Lebrun, the Columbia graduate student, who lives in Brooklyn. On Columbia's campus, students freely plug in laptops and cellphones wherever they are, he said, even in classrooms during lectures.
"It is part of the culture," said Mr. Lebrun, 27, who finds it necessary to charge his cellphone in the classroom because its battery can manage little more than three hours of talk time. "I use my cellphone so often to get calls on my assignments," he said. "I have to make calls to my friends and family, and it will run out if I don't charge it during the course of a day."
Mr. Lebrun said he has learned a few tricks to extend his cellphone's battery life between charges. "I noticed that the batteries drain faster if I keep my phone on vibrate," he said.
Similarly, Mr. Bond of Intel said his 20-year-old daughter recently discovered that her iPod Mini's battery lasts longer if she limits the use of the backlight on the L.C.D. screen.
Help in the form of innovation is on the way, Mr. Bond said. Intel, for example, is developing laptops that can eke out eight hours of operation on a single charge, possibly this year, he said.
Mary Koral, marketing communications manager for Sanyo Energy (U.S.A.), a maker of rechargeable batteries, said incremental improvements in battery capacity would continue but that major breakthroughs - like widespread use of micro fuel cells - are "a long way off."
In the meantime, Bridgett M. Davis, a Brooklyn-based novelist, said she recently learned how important it was to keep her personal electronics charged while on a tour promoting her book, "Shifting Through Neutral."
"It was vital that I charge my technology in the hotel at night," she said. "I would stay plugged in as much as I could while handling business."
But back in Brooklyn, alone with her laptop as she writes a new novel, Ms. Davis said she had come to a reassuring realization. The faltering battery life of her aging computer now dictates the length of her daily writing sessions: two hours.
"It shapes my writing intervals," said Ms. Davis, an English professor at Baruch College in Manhattan. When her computer's display goes dark, she doesn't search frantically for a free outlet. Instead, Ms. Davis said matter-of-factly, "I know it's time to stop."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
NYTimes: Home - Site Index - Archive - Help
Welcome, vegasmike433 - Member Center - Log Out
Go to a Section ----------------------- Arts Automobiles Books Business Cartoons Classifieds Corrections Crossword/Games Dining & Wine Editorials/Op-Ed Education Fashion & Style Health Home & Garden International Job Market Learning Network Magazine Movies Multimedia/Photos NYC Guide NYT Front Page National New York Region Obituaries Readers' Opinions Real Estate Science Sports Technology The Public Editor Theater Travel Washington Weather Week in Review ----------------------- Services
NYTimes.com > International > Americas
Fireworks Spark Blaze in Buenos Aires Nightclub, Killing 175By UKI GOÑI Published: January 1, 2005
UENOS AIRES, Dec. 31 - The rock band Los Callejeros was barely two songs into its show at a downtown club here late Thursday night when fireworks set off by someone in the audience ignited the foam ceiling, causing a fire that killed 175 people and injured more than 700.
Some victims were crushed in a stampede as they tried to escape debris falling from the ceiling. Others choked on the noxious gases generated by the burning foam, all within the space of a few minutes. One member of the band is reported missing.
Witnesses said the club, the República Cromagnon, was packed well beyond its 1,100-person capacity, with some survivors putting the number at four times that limit.
City officials said emergency exits had been blocked in violation of safety codes, contributing to the high death toll.
"Only two exits were open, the others were tied up with wire," said Aníbal Fernández, the interior minister. "These young people were doomed in a death trap."
On Friday afternoon, sitting on the steps of the nearby Ramos Mejía public hospital, where many of the victims were brought, Jorge Ramírez, a 31-year-old construction worker, recalled the moment the club caught fire.
"It was chaos, fire everywhere, then suddenly everything turned black when the lights went out," he said. His face was bandaged and he was missing a front tooth lost in the struggle to flee the club. "The fireworks were set off when the band had just started their show. The exits were closed, we had to escape through the same door we entered, a door that seemed to keep moving farther and farther away."
Among the victims were about a dozen young children, a fact related both to the ever younger age of rock audiences here and to an impromptu child-care center set up in the women's bathroom. City officials confirmed that there were at least 13 children in critical condition in the city's hospitals. It was the worst fire at an entertainment establishment in the country's history.
The use of unsanctioned fireworks has been a problem at prior performances of Los Callejeros. At a concert for an audience of about 5,000 at the Obras Sanitarias here in July, the lead singer, Pato Fontanet, had to stop the show twice because of the amount of fireworks being set off by fans, despite heavy control by security at the entrance. His sister and girlfriend were among the victims who perished at the nightclub.
"Callejeros is the band to whose concerts fans bring the largest amount of fireworks in Argentina," Martín Bizzio, the manager of the band, said in a television interview. "Controls are very strict, but a lot manages to get through anyhow. What you see in the shows is about 15 or 20 percent of what they try to smuggle in. The roof was 100 percent flammable, and that's how it happened."
Reports in the local news media said the owner of the República Cromagnon club, Omar Chaban, a well-known figure in Buenos Aires's active night scene, came out before the band went onstage, speaking to club patrons for 10 minutes and asking them not to light fireworks. But the audience only hissed in defiance, the reports said. He was detained by the police on Friday for questioning.
"The place had two fire exits but our reports tells us they were shut so tight they had to be pried open by the firemen," said Aníbal Ibarra, the mayor of Buenos Aires.
Other reports said that one of the exit doors burst open from the pressure of hundreds of people pressing against it, allowing those closest to it to escape. Dozens of shoes were strewn on the floor outside one of the exit doors, lost by people fleeing the fire as they rushed out of the building.
RELATED ARTICLES
Butchers' Passover Lament: Yes, We Have No Brisket (March 31, 2001) $
Find more results for Argentina and Fires and Firemen
TOP INTERNATIONAL ARTICLES
Powell, in Indonesia, Describes Scenes of Devastation
Iraqi Leader Affirms Intention to Hold Election on Jan. 30
Israel Willing to Cede Security to Palestinians, Official Says
U.N. Official Says Iran Approves Access to Suspected Nuclear Site
Go to International
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
January 5, 2005OP-ED COLUMNIST
Land of Penny PinchersBy NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
So is the U.S. "stingy" about helping poor countries?
That accusation by a U.N. official, in veiled form, provoked indignation here. After all, we're the most generous people on earth ... aren't we?
No, alas, we're not. And the tsunami illustrates the problem: When grieving victims intrude onto our TV screens, we dig into our pockets and provide the massive, heartwarming response that we're now displaying in Asia; the rest of the time, we're tightwads who turn away as people die in far greater numbers.
The 150,000 or so fatalities from the tsunami are well within the margin of error for estimates of the number of deaths every year from malaria. Probably two million people die annually of malaria, most of them children and most in Africa, or maybe it's three million - we don't even know.
But the bottom line is that this month and every month, more people will die of malaria (165,000 or more) and AIDS (240,000) than died in the tsunamis, and almost as many will die because of diarrhea ( 140,000).
And that's where we're stingy.
Americans give 15 cents per day per person in official development assistance to poor countries. The average American spends four times that on soft drinks daily.
In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, we increased such assistance by one-fifth, for President Bush has actually been much better about helping poor countries than President Clinton was. But as a share of our economy, our contribution still left us ranked dead last among 22 top donor countries.
We gave 15 cents for every $100 of national income to poor countries. Denmark gave 84 cents, the Netherlands gave 80 cents, Belgium gave 60 cents, France gave 41 cents, and Greece gave 21 cents (that was the lowest share, beside our own).
It is sometimes said that Americans make up for low official aid with private charitable donations. Nope. By OECD calculations, private donations add 6 cents a day to the official U.S. figure - meaning that we still give only 21 cents a day per person.
One reason for American stinginess, I think, is a sense that foreign aid is money down a rathole. True, plenty has been wasted. But there's also growing evidence of what works and is cost-effective - such as health programs and girls' schooling.
One of the most unforgettable people I've met is Nhem Yen, a Cambodian grandmother whose daughter had just died of malaria, leaving two small children. So Nhem Yen was looking after her four children and two grandchildren, and she could afford only one mosquito net to protect them from malarial mosquitoes. Each night, she had to choose which of the six children would sleep under the net.
Do we really think that paying $5 for a mosquito net to keep Nhem Yen's children alive would be money down a rathole?
When I contracted the most lethal form of malaria, in Congo, I was easily cured because I could afford the best medicines. But to save money, African children are given medicines that cost only 5 cents a dose but aren't very effective; the medicine that would actually save their lives is unaffordable, at $1 a dose. Do we really think $1 a dose for medicine to save a child is money down a rathole?
Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist, estimates that spending $2 billion to $3 billion on malaria might save more than one million lives a year. "This is probably the best bargain on the planet," he said.
The outpouring of U.S. aid, private and public, for tsunami victims is wonderful. But, frankly, the affected nations will get all the money they can absorb for the moment, and Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka are far from the worst off in the world.
"The really big money can be better and more usefully absorbed by developing good health and education programs in the poorest countries," noted Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development. "But that's not as visible or heroic."
With America's image tarnished around the world, one of the most effective steps Mr. Bush could take to revive it would be to lead a global effort to confront an ongoing challenge like malaria. That would also give Mr. Bush more credibility by suggesting that the "culture of life" he talks about embraces not just fetuses, but also African children crying from hunger.
The best response to accusations of stinginess is not to be defensive, but to be generous. And the measure of generosity is not what you offer when the spotlight is upon you, but what you do when the spotlight moves on.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
News Home - Help
Leaders Tour Tsunami Areas, Up Donations
50 minutes ago
By BURT HERMAN, Associated Press Writer
JAKARTA, Indonesia - Australia promised $810 million — the largest government pledge — to the tsunami relief effort, topping a $674 million German aid package on the eve of a crucial donors' conference Thursday. World leaders were competing to head the donors list as summit participants got firsthand looks at the apocalyptic landscapes carved out by south Asia's tsunami.
AP Photo
Reuters
Slideshow: Asian Tsunami Disaster
Latest Headlines:
·
Corruption of Tsunami Funds a Concern AP - 7 minutes ago
·
Teen's Letters Describe Tsunami Horrors AP - 18 minutes ago
·
Powell Unprepared for Tsunami Devastation AP - 20 minutes ago
Special Coverage
RSS:
Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites), a battle-hardened veteran of the Vietnam War, was aghast at the devastation on Indonesia's Sumatra island. "I've never seen anything like this," he said.
India has politely turned down the unprecedented offers of money and military might, but many Indonesians appeared to be putting pride aside: During Powell's visit, survivors expressed gratitude for American aid.
"Thank God he's come. Thank God," said Mohamed Bachid Madjid, peering from a bridge into the Aceh River, where two bloated corpses floated among the flotsam.
The fresh outpouring of generosity appeared at times to be almost like a bidding war and raised questions about whether rich nations were using tragedy to jockey for influence on the world stage and with hardest-hit Indonesia, which has a wealth of natural resources.
Louis Michel, the European Commissioner for development and humanitarian aid, urged donors not to engage in one-upsmanship. "We have to be careful and not participate in a beauty contest where we are competing to give higher figures," he said.
But U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland, the man who riled Washington by complaining that wealthy nations were often "stingy," said Tuesday: "I'd rather see competitive compassion than no compassion."
Michel also said too many countries were making pledges that may not be honored.
A little over a year ago, donors promised Iran more than $1 billion in relief after an earthquake killed 26,000 people there. Iranian officials say only $17.5 million has been sent.
The twin pledges Wednesday by Australia and Germany pushed the total relief sum above $3 billion for the 11 countries hit by killer waves whipped up by a massive earthquake on Dec. 26.
Egeland, at the United Nations (news - web sites), called the two countries' pledges "phenomenal" and said the offers were so large that his staff members had to ask donors to repeat what they said to make sure they heard the number of zeroes correctly.
Most of Australia's pledge was for neighboring Indonesia.
"Out of the appalling tragedy of the tsunami has emerged an opportunity to build a new future," Australian Prime Minister John Howard said. Rocky ties between Australia and Indonesia have improved steadily since the nations came together in the aftermath of the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.
The United States was the first to raise the stakes dramatically in the aid race by pledging $350 million on Friday; it now lies fourth on the donor list and has sent in two aircraft carrier groups and thousands of troops. Japan last week promised a $500 million package.
The donors' conference was focusing on how best to allocate the billions in aid following a disaster that wiped out villages and infrastructure, left millions homeless and threatened with disease, and killed more than 139,000 people. Leaders also were to discuss a warning system to prevent massive death tolls from future tsunamis.
The World Health Organization (news - web sites) said it urgently needs $60 million to provide safe drinking water, sanitation, shelter, food, medical and other supplies to prevent disease outbreaks that would put another 150,000 people at "extreme risk" of dying. The United Nations announced that camps for up to 500,000 tsunami refugees will be built on Sumatra.
Touring overflowing hospitals in Banda Aceh on Wednesday, UNICEF (news - web sites) director Carol Bellamy and WHO Director-General Dr. Lee Jong-wook saw the health problems close up: gangrenous wounds forcing surgeons to amputate limbs, scores of children with diarrhea, pneumonia cases caused by inhaling dirty water.
Powell was one of the first leaders to arrive in Indonesia ahead of the conference. From an altitude of a few hundred yards, he and his entourage saw not a tree or building standing along the coast. City block after city block in Banda Aceh had been swept clean. A large ship lay on its side, half submerged in water and mud.
"I cannot begin to imagine the horror that went through the families and all of the people who heard this noise coming and then had their lives snuffed out by this wave," Powell said. "The power of the wave ... to destroy everything in its path is amazing."
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites), Powell, Howard, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi were among the officials expected in Jakarta for the tsunami relief summit.
Even impoverished North Korea (news - web sites) has chipped in with a pledge of $150,000. Convicts in Malaysia were donating money earned doing prison work, and war-torn Afghanistan (news - web sites) planned to send doctors.
Some refugees on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka began returning home after 10 days in limbo. They went back however they could — on foot, by bicycle or in motorized rickshaw taxis.
But most of the survivors from Nasuvantivu village found they had nothing to go back to.
Subramaniam Nadarasa's once solid brick home, set among coconut trees on the sandy beach, was stripped to its cement floor. Blocks of the blue-painted walls lay broken. A pot and his crumpled blue bicycle were all that remained of his possessions.
Story Tools
Email Story
Post/Read Msgs
international papersGlobal Dis-easeThe international press looks at U.S.-Syrian tension, Iraq's election, and new danger for Asia's tsunami survivors.By Michael YoungPosted Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2005, at 11:07 AM PT
The biblical proportions of the Asian tsunami catastrophe continued to make headlines in the international press on Wednesday, even as Arabic newspaper editors began returning their attention to the Middle East amid rising U.S.-Syrian tension over Lebanon and reports that some officials in Iraq are thinking of delaying parliamentary elections scheduled for the end of January.
Ten days after the Asian tsunami, the World Health Organization has warned, according to the French daily Le Monde, that the main danger now is the spread of diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, and cholera. WHO also estimated that some 500,000 people were injured by the monstrous waves and their destructive aftermath. To detect the outbreak of transmissible diseases, the organization "will set up in New Delhi a surveillance center [in the context of a] Global Outbreak Alert Response Network, which will be linked to hundreds of laboratories around the world." A WHO official predicted that in addition to the estimated 143,000 people killed by the tsunamis, 50,000 more might die because of disease.
As the breadth of the disaster becomes clearer, several papers focused on narrower stories, not all of them wretched. New Delhi's the Times of India, citing the country's Tribal Ministry, reported that the tsunami had "not been as big an anthropological disaster for primitive tribes of Andaman & Nicobar as was being feared. Jarawas, a heritage tribe, numbering around 270 are reported safe." Still, the repercussions of the tsunami continue to pose a danger to the tribes, with 3,000 Nicobarese still missing, out of a population of 26,000. From Thailand, London's Guardian described "one of the few moments of light relief in what has otherwise been a week of heart-rending loss, ghoulish encounters with death, and heroic self-sacrifice." The paper was referring to the arrival at Phuket's town hall of Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, amid utter bewilderment as to who he was. When Bush, who was "bearing news of a $350m … U.S. contribution to the $2.5bn international relief effort" told a skeptical Australian tourist he was President Bush's brother, the tourist jokingly shot back: "Oh. Good for you."
"Good" is the last way one would describe the relationship between the Bush administration and Syria, following repeated accusations from Washington recently that Damascus was helping the Iraqi resistance, something the Syrians have denied. The standoff is now extending to Lebanon, from which the United States (in the framework of a U.N. Security Council resolution) is demanding that Syria withdraw its soldiers. The London-based Al-Hayat gave prominence to a story on how last week, while visiting Damascus, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage "warned the Syrian side against any action targeting the Lebanese opposition, [and added] that any such action would be Syria's responsibility." Meanwhile, Beirut's English-language Daily Star reported that the U.S. ambassador in Lebanon said he hoped "that foreign forces will not interfere with Lebanon's upcoming parliamentary elections." With the Syrians and their allies facing an expanding, multi-religious opposition front in Lebanon that wants to end Syrian hegemony, a showdown is likely in the spring elections. Armitage's statement harked back to the attempted assassination in Beirut last October of a former minister and now opposition figure (an attack in which Syrian officials were widely believed to have played a part), as there is growing concern that Syria will use violence to allay its slipping authority in Lebanon.
In Iraq, meanwhile, there is confusion over whether the interim Iraqi government wants to delay parliamentary elections. It fears that a widespread Sunni boycott, combined with ambient violence (a bomb blew up outside a police academy today, and the governor of Baghdad was killed yesterday in an ambush, apparently by followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi), will undermine the legitimacy of the process. The London-based Iraqi newspaper Al-Zaman noted that the interim government "officially asked Egypt to intervene and persuade the Sunnis to participate in the elections and abandon a boycott … or, if [Sunnis] had a difficulty in doing so, [Egypt could] propose delaying [the elections]." Some Iraqi officials, however, remain adamant that the election will be held on time, though there clearly are differing views inside the interim government.
Kuwait's Al-Rai al-Aam picked up the same thread in a piece titled: "Did Allawi and Bush Pave the Way for a Delay in Elections?" After recalling an alarming statement by a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few days ago that there probably were some 200,000 insurgents, the paper quoted analysts as saying that while U.S. officials still denied elections would be delayed, Allawi had perhaps tried, in a telephone call he had with Bush two days ago, to lay the groundwork for such a contingency if the situation on the ground demanded it. The only problem is that that would anger Iraq's Shiites. To drive this point home, in its Tuesday edition the Daily Star sported a front-page photograph of Shiite schoolgirls walking in front of a banner reading, "We refuse elections delay."Michael Young is opinion editor at the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut and a contributing editor at Reason magazine.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2111842/
The biblical proportions of the Asian tsunami catastrophe continued to make headlines in the international press on Wednesday, even as Arabic newspaper editors began returning their attention to the Middle East amid rising U.S.-Syrian tension over Lebanon and reports that some officials in Iraq are thinking of delaying parliamentary elections scheduled for the end of January.
Ten days after the Asian tsunami, the World Health Organization has warned, according to the French daily Le Monde, that the main danger now is the spread of diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, and cholera. WHO also estimated that some 500,000 people were injured by the monstrous waves and their destructive aftermath. To detect the outbreak of transmissible diseases, the organization "will set up in New Delhi a surveillance center [in the context of a] Global Outbreak Alert Response Network, which will be linked to hundreds of laboratories around the world." A WHO official predicted that in addition to the estimated 143,000 people killed by the tsunamis, 50,000 more might die because of disease.
As the breadth of the disaster becomes clearer, several papers focused on narrower stories, not all of them wretched. New Delhi's the Times of India, citing the country's Tribal Ministry, reported that the tsunami had "not been as big an anthropological disaster for primitive tribes of Andaman & Nicobar as was being feared. Jarawas, a heritage tribe, numbering around 270 are reported safe." Still, the repercussions of the tsunami continue to pose a danger to the tribes, with 3,000 Nicobarese still missing, out of a population of 26,000. From Thailand, London's Guardian described "one of the few moments of light relief in what has otherwise been a week of heart-rending loss, ghoulish encounters with death, and heroic self-sacrifice." The paper was referring to the arrival at Phuket's town hall of Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, amid utter bewilderment as to who he was. When Bush, who was "bearing news of a $350m … U.S. contribution to the $2.5bn international relief effort" told a skeptical Australian tourist he was President Bush's brother, the tourist jokingly shot back: "Oh. Good for you."
"Good" is the last way one would describe the relationship between the Bush administration and Syria, following repeated accusations from Washington recently that Damascus was helping the Iraqi resistance, something the Syrians have denied. The standoff is now extending to Lebanon, from which the United States (in the framework of a U.N. Security Council resolution) is demanding that Syria withdraw its soldiers. The London-based Al-Hayat gave prominence to a story on how last week, while visiting Damascus, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage "warned the Syrian side against any action targeting the Lebanese opposition, [and added] that any such action would be Syria's responsibility." Meanwhile, Beirut's English-language Daily Star reported that the U.S. ambassador in Lebanon said he hoped "that foreign forces will not interfere with Lebanon's upcoming parliamentary elections." With the Syrians and their allies facing an expanding, multi-religious opposition front in Lebanon that wants to end Syrian hegemony, a showdown is likely in the spring elections. Armitage's statement harked back to the attempted assassination in Beirut last October of a former minister and now opposition figure (an attack in which Syrian officials were widely believed to have played a part), as there is growing concern that Syria will use violence to allay its slipping authority in Lebanon.
In Iraq, meanwhile, there is confusion over whether the interim Iraqi government wants to delay parliamentary elections. It fears that a widespread Sunni boycott, combined with ambient violence (a bomb blew up outside a police academy today, and the governor of Baghdad was killed yesterday in an ambush, apparently by followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi), will undermine the legitimacy of the process. The London-based Iraqi newspaper Al-Zaman noted that the interim government "officially asked Egypt to intervene and persuade the Sunnis to participate in the elections and abandon a boycott … or, if [Sunnis] had a difficulty in doing so, [Egypt could] propose delaying [the elections]." Some Iraqi officials, however, remain adamant that the election will be held on time, though there clearly are differing views inside the interim government.
Kuwait's Al-Rai al-Aam picked up the same thread in a piece titled: "Did Allawi and Bush Pave the Way for a Delay in Elections?" After recalling an alarming statement by a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few days ago that there probably were some 200,000 insurgents, the paper quoted analysts as saying that while U.S. officials still denied elections would be delayed, Allawi had perhaps tried, in a telephone call he had with Bush two days ago, to lay the groundwork for such a contingency if the situation on the ground demanded it. The only problem is that that would anger Iraq's Shiites. To drive this point home, in its Tuesday edition the Daily Star sported a front-page photograph of Shiite schoolgirls walking in front of a banner reading, "We refuse elections delay."Michael Young is opinion editor at the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut and a contributing editor at Reason magazine.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2111842/
January 5, 2005
Powell, in Indonesia, Describes Scenes of DevastationBy SCOTT SHANE
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, Jan. 5 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida got their first look at the epicenter of the tsunami's destruction today, flying low in Navy Seahawk helicopters over miles of flattened coastal villages where tens of thousands of people died.
"I cannot begin to imagine the horror that went through the families and all of the people who heard this noise coming and then had their lives snuffed out by this wave," Mr. Powell said after the half-hour flight.
"The power of the wave to destroy bridges, to destroy factories, to destroy homes, to destroy crops, to destroy everything in its path is amazing. And to consider that we only did a brief tour around Banda Aceh, but to know that you will see the same thing if you flew 100 miles along the coastline going south, or if you went to the east side and flew along the coastline you would see the same things.
"I have never seen anything like it in my experience."
For the secretary and Governor Bush, who has come as the personal representative of his brother, the president, the Aceh visit was the second day touring the disaster area.
Governor Bush will head home Thursday as Mr. Powell attends a conference in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, of nations affected by the tsunami and those that have pledged more then $2 billion in aid.
Today, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany confirmed reports that his country would pledge $674 million in long-term aid.
"We know about the importance of immediate aid but it's not enough," Mr. Schroder said at a news conference in Berlin after a cabinet meeting.
Germany was later surpassed by Australia as the biggest single contributor to relief funds, when Prime Minister John Howard announced at a news conference that his country had pledged $765 million in loans and grants over five years to relief efforts.
"This is a historic step in Indonesian-Australian relations in the wake of this terrible natural disaster," Mr. Howard said during a visit to Jakarta.
Mr. Powell, who visited the island of Phuket in Thailand with Governor Bush on Tuesday and will visit Sri Lanka on Friday, seemed moved by his first-hand view of the scale of the destruction in the remote Indonesian region of Aceh.
"In more than 40 years in the military and as a high-level government official, I've been in war and I've been through a number of hurricanes, tornadoes and other relief operations, but I have never seen anything like this," he said.
"Flying over Banda Aceh and seeing how the wave came ashore, pushing everything in its path, cars, ships, freighters overturned, all the way up to the foothills, and then starting up the foothills until finally the waves came to a stop."
Mr. Powell said he and the top Indonesian official in charge of the recovery, Alwi Shihab, agreed on the need to increase the number of landings by American C-130 transport planes delivering water, food, shelter and medicine. The number of flights has been limited by flight-control operations, said Andrew Natsios, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, but should be increased over the next day or so.
Mr. Natsios said his agency has rented 80 trucks to move supplies overland to Banda Aceh. But the trip takes three days because of damaged roads and the threat of violence in a continuing conflict between Aceh separatists and Indonesian government troops. A firefight two days ago halted the relief trips for eight hours.
Today's announcements by Mr. Schröder and Mr. Howard came as fresh infusions of aid on Tuesday gave yet more push to the global relief effort for Asia as it confronted monsoon rains, logistical breakdowns and the urgent need for everything from earthmoving equipment to trucks in the struggle to reach the survivors in the most remote areas.
Jan Egeland, the United Nations' emergency coordinator, acknowledged the many obstacles but called the global response "phenomenal." He spoke on a day when expectations rose that pledges could far exceed $2 billion.
With television broadcasts showing American servicemen delivering aid to victims of the last week's tsunami, Mr. Powell candidly acknowledged on Tuesday the hope that the United States' military help and its $350 million contribution might improve America's image in the Islamic world. Indonesia, home of two-thirds of the estimated 150,000 people who have died, is the world's most populous Muslim country.
"We'd be doing it regardless of religion," Mr. Powell said in Jakarta on the second day of his tour through the region with Mr. Bush. "But I think it does give the Muslim world and the rest of the world an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action."
"America is not an anti-Islam, anti-Muslim nation," Mr. Powell added in his remarks to reporters alongside the Indonesian foreign minister, Hassan Wirajuda. "America is a diverse society where we respect all religions. And I hope that as a result of our efforts, as a result of our helicopter pilots being seen by the citizens of Indonesia helping them, that value system of ours will be reinforced."
For his part, Mr. Wirajuda, a Harvard Law School graduate, went out of his way to praise the performance of the American military in the aid effort. "We particularly appreciate the crucial role that the United States armed forces play in providing helicopters for relief assistance for victims and survivors at the remote and isolated areas," he said.
The American forces sent so far, which include a crew of nearly 6,000 on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, proved essential in launching rescue helicopters on Tuesday after a cargo plane reportedly struck a water buffalo at the airport in Banda Aceh.
The accident closed the runway for much of the day and exposed the vulnerable logistics of what relief and military officials have called the largest aid operation ever.
"We are making extraordinary progress in reaching the majority of people affected in the majority of the areas," said Mr. Egeland, the United Nations coordinator. "We are also experiencing extraordinary obstacles in many, many areas."
Even as contributions mounted, the United Nations office overseeing relief from Geneva appealed for generators, water purification equipment, some 250 trucks and cargo planes able to land on short runways, which it said only the United States and Britain could provide, according to Reuters.
With each day, the relief efforts amounted to a race against time for perhaps tens of thousands among the estimated 400,000 people left injured or without shelter since the earthquake erupted on Dec. 26 and sent wave after wave crashing into Sumatra's western shore.
The World Health Organization warned that pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria and many infections, including gangrenous wounds left untended in the tropical heat, were taking an increasing toll in Aceh, Sumatra's most afflicted province. The region around the coastal town of Meulaboh, still inaccessible except by air, remained a particular concern.
"The casualty rates in Meulaboh defy imagination," Aitor Lacomba, the Indonesia director of the International Rescue Committee, an aid group, told Reuters. "Tens of thousands need immediate assistance there."
Rescue workers were reportedly preparing to use small boats and motorbikes in the hunt for more survivors and to deliver assistance, as helicopters shuttled workers from the international aid group Doctors Without Borders into isolated areas. They reported casualty rates of 70 to 80 percent in some places.
"The people who survive have done that under very difficult circumstances, often surviving on coconuts alone," an official of the group, Erwin Vantland, told BBC World TV. "The picture becomes grimmer and grimmer the more we learn."
The full scale of the devastation came into sharper focus in other regions as well. Indian officials raised the number of those believed missing on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to more than 6,000. They also came under increasing pressure from international aid groups to allow outside relief workers to tend to more than 21,000 people now sheltered in camps on the islands, which have been closed to protect endangered aboriginal tribes.
In Sri Lanka, health officials warned that relentless seasonal rains were slowing the delivery of aid and threatening to spread water-borne disease.
Mr. Powell said Myanmar, also known as Burma, the region's most politically isolated nation, did not appear to have suffered severely, according to satellite photographs of the closed country's coastline. Another government official said visitors from the Red Cross and other organizations had confirmed that impression.
The Myanmar authorities and aid agencies had announced fewer than 100 deaths, but other authorities believed that the actual toll might be far higher.
For the United States, the aid effort that is focused on Indonesia unfolds at a time when America's standing among Muslims is at an all-time low.
Since the 9/11 attacks, the State Department has begun a number of public diplomacy campaigns aimed at improving the image of America and emphasizing that it is not hostile to Islam. But with the war in Iraq filling television screens worldwide with images of American soldiers battling in a Muslim land, those messages have often been muted.
In Indonesia, which has also suffered terror attacks from extremists in recent years, Mr. Powell said America supported democracy and economic progress globally in part because such change "dries up those pools of dissatisfaction which might give rise to terrorist activity."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
'Pressure Cooker Andrew Card Has the Recipe for Chief of Staff Down Pat
By Mark LeibovichWashington Post Staff WriterWednesday, January 5, 2005; Page C01
Andrew Card is talking about his kitchen. "I know my kitchen really well, as evidenced by my rotund being," Card says, patting his belly. "I know where the oven is and I know where the microwave is and I know where the sink is and I know where the refrigerator is and the freezer and the cupboards and the table and the chairs."
Card, 57, is sprawled on the couch of his West Wing office, describing the kitchen from his mind's eye. It is from here that the White House chief of staff organizes the nation's most potent workplace and man-hours. Like his boss, Card is an aggressively lowfalutin character. He is the longest-serving chief of staff in 46 years, yet he reminds people that he toiled many years at a McDonald's and spent one summer as a garbage collector. "I'm not a very smart person," Card says. "I have to work really hard at remembering things." Which explains the deceptively prosaic tour of the Cards' Arlington kitchen. Card rarely takes notes. He does not make to-do lists or scrawl reminders to himself on Post-its. Instead, he keeps much of the Bush White House in his head, or in his kitchen. This is where it gets eccentric for everyman Andy Card.
Card is a student of memory. He practices a technique pioneered by Matteo Ricci, a 16th-century Italian Jesuit. Ricci, who did missionary work in China, introduced the notion of a "memory palace" to Confucian scholars. The "memory palace" is a structure of the mind, to be furnished with mnemonic devices. Ricci might construct an imaginary palace room for each of his students -- filled with furniture and shelves to represent aspects of that student (a painting to express his appearance, a shelf on which to array his scholastic record).
Memory is central to a chief of staff's job. He must possess enough instant knowledge to execute the president's minute-to-minute pursuits, be it macro (his agenda) or micro (when he's due for a haircut). Brad Blakeman, a former White House scheduler, says it's not uncommon to have someone ask where the president will be on a certain date three months in the future and have Card answer precisely. "He knew the president's schedule a lot better than me," Blakeman says, "and I was the scheduler."
While Ricci used a palace, castle or other elaborate edifice, Card's palace is his mental kitchen. Every Monday morning when he arrives at the White House, Card performs the ritual of "cleaning my kitchen."
"I view my job as being responsible for the president to have everything he needs to do his job," Card says. "So when I clean my kitchen, it's really about anticipating what it is the president will have to do, what kind of help he will need to do it and when it has to be done."
When tackling matters of top priority, Card stands at the stove, working his "front and back burners." Intelligence reform is cooking this morning. He needs to call several people: 9/11 Commission Chairmen Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, Reps. Duncan Hunter and James Sensenbrenner, and House Speaker Dennis Hastert. They are "on my right front burner," he says.
"Then I shift gears to my left front burner, which is second most important," Card says. He will help the president hire a Cabinet secretary, then move to his right rear burner (hiring White House staff for the second term). "I do that all in my kitchen," Card says. "Now the things I want to put off for a long time, I put in the freezer. But then I can go to my freezer and generally remember things that I put there a long time ago." He will store matters that were resolved or tabled yesterday in a cupboard.
"If you go see Andy at his desk, it looks like he's not doing anything," says Andrew Natsios, a close friend of Card's who is head of the Agency for International Development. "It's almost empty, there's no paper anywhere. But he's created this whole system in his head with this mind discipline of his."
So much institutional history and memory of both Bush administrations is stored in Andy Card's kitchen. He has been as entrenched in Bushworld as the family furniture. He is chronically there -- as in there in the room, in the meeting, in the photo, on the Sunday shows. Card was there, next to Bush One when he vomited on the Japanese prime minister, there in the Oval when Bushes One and Two choked up together on Inauguration Day 2001, and there, in Bush Two's ear as he read "My Pet Goat" on 9/11.
He wakes at 4:20 each morning, commonly stays at work until 10 p.m. and spends most weekends at his office or at Camp David with the POTUS.
He wears his fatigue proudly, advertises his minimal sleep regimen, mentions what bad shape he's in, how he drinks too much coffee and that he needs to spend more time with family -- three grown children, four grandchildren and wife Kathleene, a Methodist minister, whom he met when both were in the fifth grade. In 2003, he passed out during a three-mile run with the president in Crawford, Tex.
Does his fatigue make it harder for Card to remember things? He shakes his head: "My kitchen is in order," Card says, "though I may not be."
Card loves to doodle, a rare indulgence of paper for him. "I am almost always doodling," he says. He can look at old doodles and recall where he was when he drew them, what meeting he was in and what was decided. They are his de facto notes.
Card pulls out a doodle from the top drawer of his desk: It is a pencil sketch of a Canadian flag, which Card drew in a meeting during the president's recent visit to Canada. Beneath the flag is a network of circles, jots, lines and warped squares. It is the driveway of his summer house in Poland, Maine: "Here's the house," he says leading a tour of the doodle. Here's the rock garden, the drainage scheme and a tool shed that he's thinking about building.
"Doodling helps my thinking," Card says, a corollary to creating pictures in his mind. "It helps me to visualize that which I'm listening to." A Range of Options
As Card describes his "kitchen," he is cagey about his front-burner items. "I'm not gonna show you everything I have in my kitchen," Card says. But when less pressing topics arise, Card offers a window into the size and complexity of his kitchen.
An eager storyteller, Card can take a long time with his explanations and descriptions. He is at times compelled to show you every crumb in his cupboard.
Ask Card, for instance, how he chose the exact words he whispered to President Bush on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001: "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."
"Very carefully," Card says, noting that he wanted to give the president maximum information without giving him a chance to respond, avoiding a public conversation. "I wanted to pass on two facts and one editorial comment and then back away."
The rest of his answer -- unloaded from Card's 9/11 cupboard -- takes 20 minutes.
Card describes the vivid smell of dead fish at the Sarasota golf resort where the president ate dinner on the night of Sept. 10. Walking back to the hotel, Card saw a car parked in a way that blocked a narrow alley. He asked an advance man to remove it.
The next morning, Card became concerned that there was a misspelled word on the blackboard behind the spot where the president would read. The word -- Card doesn't say what it was -- "was adroitly covered by a book cover," he says, adding that it was written in red, orange and blue chalk. Bush learned that the first plane had hit the North Tower as he stood at the door of the classroom, just before he was to begin reading. "We're standing at the door, I'm standing to the president's left," Card says. "The president was holding a doorknob in his right hand."
Card first learned the discipline of Matteo Ricci as a high school junior. He was attending a talk given by "some kind of memory expert" at a Rotary Club near his home in Holbrook, Mass., a middle-class suburb south of Boston. The man quizzed the 50 or 60 people in the audience about personal details -- their names, where they lived and so forth. Then, without notes, he repeated all the information back to them.
Card approached the speaker afterward and asked if he had a photographic memory. "No, no, no," the man said. "I work really hard at this." He explained the Riccian principle of linking facts to visual mnemonics. "He said, take something that you know really well and then associate something with it," Card says. "And I began doing that over the course of time."
Card studied engineering at the University of South Carolina while working at a McDonald's in Columbia (rising as high as night manager). As he manned counters, Card tried to calculate the total price of an order before the clerk could punch it into the cash register. "It really turned into great sport," Card says.
Another McDonald's episode bears mention: Once, when money went missing from the cash register, Card threatened to fire everyone unless it was returned. The cash reappeared and the crew kept their jobs. But Card was serious about his threat, and the episode reflects the resolve behind Card's soft edges, a combination that has served him in politics.
Card's father, a small-town lawyer and unsuccessful candidate for the state legislature, was active in Holbrook politics. Card was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1974, a Republican moderate who favored abortion and gay rights. "He was always very supportive of the things that the Bush administration has been hostile to, like gay rights," says Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who served with Card in the legislature.
Card sought the GOP nomination for governor in 1982 but finished third. An early supporter of George H.W. Bush's campaign for president in 1980, Card ran Massachusetts for Bush, who narrowly won the state's Republican primary over John Anderson. "From then on, it became personal for Andy and the Bushes," says Phil Johnston, a former Democratic state House member who worked with Card on a landmark anti-corruption bill.
Through his link to Bush, Card joined the intergovernmental affairs office of the Reagan White House in 1983. He remained close to Vice President Bush, eventually taking a senior position on his presidential campaign in 1987. He worked closely with Bush's sharp-edged political guru Lee Atwater. "Lee always thought Andy was his guy," says Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist and close Atwater associate. "But everyone thinks that Andy is their guy. That's the beauty of him. He has assumed the role of chief therapist in the Bush camp." Rogers also dubs Card "a human Alka-Seltzer" who offsets the acid of clashing egos, ideologies and agendas in a political enterprise.
He was deputy chief of staff in the Bush administration under John Sununu and gained a reputation for his forthright and pleasant manner, especially when performing unpleasant tasks. "We always said that if we ever got fired, we wanted Andy to do it," said Bush press secretary Marlin Fitzwater. (This reputation endures: "I figure when Andy fires me, I'll probably be slapping him on the back laughing on the way out the door," says Dan Bartlett, the current White House communications director.)
Card's signature firing occurred in 1990 when he had to tell his own boss, Sununu, that it was time to leave. There is a vivid scene in Fitzwater's memoir, "Call the Briefing," in which Card, White House counsel Boyden Gray and Bush family friend Dorrance Smith nervously enter Sununu's office after the president concluded that it was time for him to go. Smith and Gray hold back, leaving Card to deliver the news. "This kind of thing always winds up falling to Andy," Fitzwater says.
"Hearing bad news from Andy is like hearing bad news from Dudley Do-right," says Rogers. "You can't shoot the messenger with Andy. And this is a town where the messenger gets shot all the time."
After being appointed Bush One's secretary of transportation, Card was given the dirty work of running the president's outgoing transition team. He spent the rest of the '90s lobbying, first for the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, then General Motors.
Card first met George W. Bush in 1979 during his father's first presidential campaign. ("May. Kennebunkport. We were on Ocean Avenue.") When Card was deputy chief of staff, Bush Two would sometimes walk into his office, collapse on the couch and gather intelligence about his father's administration. "I wouldn't call us friends," Card says of that time.
Card was not involved in George W. Bush's primary campaign, not unusual given that few people who worked at a high level for the former president also worked for his son. "There was an aggressive effort to avoid it," says Bush's longtime media adviser, Mark McKinnon. But in the spring of 2000, Bush's team was dissatisfied with the planning for the summer's GOP convention in Philadelphia and needed someone to take over. "It was a difficult situation in that there was an existing structure in place," says Bush political adviser Karl Rove.
The elder Bush suggested to his son that Card's convention performance could be an audition, according to a source familiar with the discussion. If it worked out, and if Bush won the election, Card would be a natural for White House chief of staff. The younger Bush referred to the job as "The Big One." The Crisper
The story of how Card went from running the 2000 GOP convention to "The Big One" is, frankly, long. At least it is in Card's retelling, which takes 25 minutes.
"This is one of those cupboards you don't open until somebody says, 'Hey, where are those string beans?' " Card says.
Herein, the string beans:
Card tells of discussions he had "that were not very directioned" with Rove, future commerce secretary Don Evans and Bush.
And how, just before he began working on the campaign, Card took his wife to Bermuda after she graduated from divinity school.
And a conversation Card had with Bush on the night of his acceptance speech in Philadelphia in which Bush told him to "keep your dance card clear."
And the conversation Bush had with Card in Boston on the night of Bush's first debate with Gore ("when Gore had a little too much orange makeup on"). They were on a boat ferrying them from Logan Airport across Boston Harbor (not as polluted as before, "thanks to the good leadership of the former president Bush").
And how, over breakfast, an annoyed Kathleene Card asked her husband, "Are you married to me or George W. Bush?"
And then the phone rang and it was George W. Bush, who told Card to call his gubernatorial chief of staff, Clay Johnson.
And so Card flew to Austin and met with Johnson, who had a bunch of notebooks marked "transition" on his desk, and Card figured they wanted him to run the transition, which Card calls "a pain-in-the-neck job," but one he'd be willing to do.
And then, on his way out of Texas, Card visited the elder Bush in Houston, where he began to believe they were considering him for The Big One. (Card arrived in Houston at 9, and the Bushes were out when he arrived. Barbara Bush arrived home at 11, the former president at midnight. "I woke up early the next day. I made the bed. I showered. I shaved. I got all dressed."
And then Card flew to Tampa to meet the younger Bush, who was holding a rally in Jacksonville. But Card's flight was delayed and he missed Bush before the candidate went to sleep. ("Karen Hughes was there, her son Robert. Got a bite to eat late at night in the hotel.")
Next morning he met with Bush, who mentioned "The Big One," and the rest, as they say, is in another cupboard.
"Sorry I talked so much," Card says.Counter Strategy
Shortly after Bush took office, Mack McLarty, Bill Clinton's chief of staff, and Ken Duberstein, who held the same post under Reagan, co-hosted a dinner for Card at McLarty's Kalorama home. Several former White House chiefs of staff attended -- or, as McLarty puts it, "those of us who have held the office of chief javelin catcher in the White House." Guests included McLarty's neighbor Donald Rumsfeld (chief of staff under Gerald Ford), Donald Regan (Reagan) and Samuel Skinner (Bush One).
In a toast at the dinner, McLarty told of how Reagan chief of staff Howard Baker called him when Clinton took office to say, "Congratulations, you just got the worst job in Washington."
It's a job that Card is neatly suited to do. "He has that intangible ability to anticipate the rhythm of the presidency," says Duberstein. Card is "a comfortable shoe," Duberstein says, someone the president has become accustomed to.
Bush will tease Card in meetings for his long-windedness and tendency to veer off on tangents. People who have watched them together say the president will sometimes order Card around in a tone that suggests he's talking to a servant. In "The Price of Loyalty," former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill describes a scene in which Bush impatiently demands that Card get him a cheeseburger.
One former Bush administration official compares Card to a little-brother figure to the president, even though Bush is only 10 months older: Bush regards him as a member of the family and would never doubt his loyalty. "But the president can walk on Andy a little bit," says the former official, who asked not to be identified because he doesn't want the White House to be angry with him. "The president talks to him like he's hired help more than he would someone like Cheney or Rumsfeld."
Card loves reminding people that he is hired help -- that the "of staff" in his title is more important than the "chief," as if he were manning a drive-through window back at McDonald's.
"The president has every right to be selfish with my time," Card says. "That means there are sacrifices I need to make for the president to have what he needs. And those sacrifices usually impact my wife or my kids or my grandkids, or my siblings or my friends. And that is a burden I carry."
The burden wears heavily on chiefs of staff. It is "the ultimate burnout job," Duberstein says. In her memoir "Ten Minutes From Normal," Bush confidante Karen Hughes describes Card telling a prospective White House hire what he expects of his staff. "You don't get home until late at night, you work every weekend," Card said, according to Hughes. He said he didn't have a single day off in several years during the first Bush administration.
Card likes to point out that the average tenure of a White House job is 18 months. And that the chief of staff's job in particular is not suited for the long haul. Yet a few days after his reelection, Bush showed up at Card's morning senior staff meeting at to announce that Card would stay on.
"He's under severe stress and I worry about him," says Card's friend Natsios. "I'll call him at his office, at 6 [a.m.], when I know he's there, just to see how he's doing."
Card's name is periodically raised for Cabinet posts -- most recently, he was rumored to be the successor to John Snow as Treasury secretary. Card says he places such items "right on top of the garbage disposal." He shakes his head, asks, "What are you gonna do?" He rubs his eyes and says that it's been another long week.
He was in the office at 5:10 this morning. And he was out at a function at the Kennedy Center two nights earlier. He went to bed at 11:35, "then got a call at 3:50 a.m. from the Situation Room."
Don't bother asking: The rest of that cupboard is closed.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
'
By Mark LeibovichWashington Post Staff WriterWednesday, January 5, 2005; Page C01
Andrew Card is talking about his kitchen. "I know my kitchen really well, as evidenced by my rotund being," Card says, patting his belly. "I know where the oven is and I know where the microwave is and I know where the sink is and I know where the refrigerator is and the freezer and the cupboards and the table and the chairs."
Card, 57, is sprawled on the couch of his West Wing office, describing the kitchen from his mind's eye. It is from here that the White House chief of staff organizes the nation's most potent workplace and man-hours. Like his boss, Card is an aggressively lowfalutin character. He is the longest-serving chief of staff in 46 years, yet he reminds people that he toiled many years at a McDonald's and spent one summer as a garbage collector. "I'm not a very smart person," Card says. "I have to work really hard at remembering things." Which explains the deceptively prosaic tour of the Cards' Arlington kitchen. Card rarely takes notes. He does not make to-do lists or scrawl reminders to himself on Post-its. Instead, he keeps much of the Bush White House in his head, or in his kitchen. This is where it gets eccentric for everyman Andy Card.
Card is a student of memory. He practices a technique pioneered by Matteo Ricci, a 16th-century Italian Jesuit. Ricci, who did missionary work in China, introduced the notion of a "memory palace" to Confucian scholars. The "memory palace" is a structure of the mind, to be furnished with mnemonic devices. Ricci might construct an imaginary palace room for each of his students -- filled with furniture and shelves to represent aspects of that student (a painting to express his appearance, a shelf on which to array his scholastic record).
Memory is central to a chief of staff's job. He must possess enough instant knowledge to execute the president's minute-to-minute pursuits, be it macro (his agenda) or micro (when he's due for a haircut). Brad Blakeman, a former White House scheduler, says it's not uncommon to have someone ask where the president will be on a certain date three months in the future and have Card answer precisely. "He knew the president's schedule a lot better than me," Blakeman says, "and I was the scheduler."
While Ricci used a palace, castle or other elaborate edifice, Card's palace is his mental kitchen. Every Monday morning when he arrives at the White House, Card performs the ritual of "cleaning my kitchen."
"I view my job as being responsible for the president to have everything he needs to do his job," Card says. "So when I clean my kitchen, it's really about anticipating what it is the president will have to do, what kind of help he will need to do it and when it has to be done."
When tackling matters of top priority, Card stands at the stove, working his "front and back burners." Intelligence reform is cooking this morning. He needs to call several people: 9/11 Commission Chairmen Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, Reps. Duncan Hunter and James Sensenbrenner, and House Speaker Dennis Hastert. They are "on my right front burner," he says.
"Then I shift gears to my left front burner, which is second most important," Card says. He will help the president hire a Cabinet secretary, then move to his right rear burner (hiring White House staff for the second term). "I do that all in my kitchen," Card says. "Now the things I want to put off for a long time, I put in the freezer. But then I can go to my freezer and generally remember things that I put there a long time ago." He will store matters that were resolved or tabled yesterday in a cupboard.
"If you go see Andy at his desk, it looks like he's not doing anything," says Andrew Natsios, a close friend of Card's who is head of the Agency for International Development. "It's almost empty, there's no paper anywhere. But he's created this whole system in his head with this mind discipline of his."
So much institutional history and memory of both Bush administrations is stored in Andy Card's kitchen. He has been as entrenched in Bushworld as the family furniture. He is chronically there -- as in there in the room, in the meeting, in the photo, on the Sunday shows. Card was there, next to Bush One when he vomited on the Japanese prime minister, there in the Oval when Bushes One and Two choked up together on Inauguration Day 2001, and there, in Bush Two's ear as he read "My Pet Goat" on 9/11.
He wakes at 4:20 each morning, commonly stays at work until 10 p.m. and spends most weekends at his office or at Camp David with the POTUS.
He wears his fatigue proudly, advertises his minimal sleep regimen, mentions what bad shape he's in, how he drinks too much coffee and that he needs to spend more time with family -- three grown children, four grandchildren and wife Kathleene, a Methodist minister, whom he met when both were in the fifth grade. In 2003, he passed out during a three-mile run with the president in Crawford, Tex.
Does his fatigue make it harder for Card to remember things? He shakes his head: "My kitchen is in order," Card says, "though I may not be."
Card loves to doodle, a rare indulgence of paper for him. "I am almost always doodling," he says. He can look at old doodles and recall where he was when he drew them, what meeting he was in and what was decided. They are his de facto notes.
Card pulls out a doodle from the top drawer of his desk: It is a pencil sketch of a Canadian flag, which Card drew in a meeting during the president's recent visit to Canada. Beneath the flag is a network of circles, jots, lines and warped squares. It is the driveway of his summer house in Poland, Maine: "Here's the house," he says leading a tour of the doodle. Here's the rock garden, the drainage scheme and a tool shed that he's thinking about building.
"Doodling helps my thinking," Card says, a corollary to creating pictures in his mind. "It helps me to visualize that which I'm listening to." A Range of Options
As Card describes his "kitchen," he is cagey about his front-burner items. "I'm not gonna show you everything I have in my kitchen," Card says. But when less pressing topics arise, Card offers a window into the size and complexity of his kitchen.
An eager storyteller, Card can take a long time with his explanations and descriptions. He is at times compelled to show you every crumb in his cupboard.
Ask Card, for instance, how he chose the exact words he whispered to President Bush on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001: "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."
"Very carefully," Card says, noting that he wanted to give the president maximum information without giving him a chance to respond, avoiding a public conversation. "I wanted to pass on two facts and one editorial comment and then back away."
The rest of his answer -- unloaded from Card's 9/11 cupboard -- takes 20 minutes.
Card describes the vivid smell of dead fish at the Sarasota golf resort where the president ate dinner on the night of Sept. 10. Walking back to the hotel, Card saw a car parked in a way that blocked a narrow alley. He asked an advance man to remove it.
The next morning, Card became concerned that there was a misspelled word on the blackboard behind the spot where the president would read. The word -- Card doesn't say what it was -- "was adroitly covered by a book cover," he says, adding that it was written in red, orange and blue chalk. Bush learned that the first plane had hit the North Tower as he stood at the door of the classroom, just before he was to begin reading. "We're standing at the door, I'm standing to the president's left," Card says. "The president was holding a doorknob in his right hand."
Card first learned the discipline of Matteo Ricci as a high school junior. He was attending a talk given by "some kind of memory expert" at a Rotary Club near his home in Holbrook, Mass., a middle-class suburb south of Boston. The man quizzed the 50 or 60 people in the audience about personal details -- their names, where they lived and so forth. Then, without notes, he repeated all the information back to them.
Card approached the speaker afterward and asked if he had a photographic memory. "No, no, no," the man said. "I work really hard at this." He explained the Riccian principle of linking facts to visual mnemonics. "He said, take something that you know really well and then associate something with it," Card says. "And I began doing that over the course of time."
Card studied engineering at the University of South Carolina while working at a McDonald's in Columbia (rising as high as night manager). As he manned counters, Card tried to calculate the total price of an order before the clerk could punch it into the cash register. "It really turned into great sport," Card says.
Another McDonald's episode bears mention: Once, when money went missing from the cash register, Card threatened to fire everyone unless it was returned. The cash reappeared and the crew kept their jobs. But Card was serious about his threat, and the episode reflects the resolve behind Card's soft edges, a combination that has served him in politics.
Card's father, a small-town lawyer and unsuccessful candidate for the state legislature, was active in Holbrook politics. Card was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1974, a Republican moderate who favored abortion and gay rights. "He was always very supportive of the things that the Bush administration has been hostile to, like gay rights," says Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who served with Card in the legislature.
Card sought the GOP nomination for governor in 1982 but finished third. An early supporter of George H.W. Bush's campaign for president in 1980, Card ran Massachusetts for Bush, who narrowly won the state's Republican primary over John Anderson. "From then on, it became personal for Andy and the Bushes," says Phil Johnston, a former Democratic state House member who worked with Card on a landmark anti-corruption bill.
Through his link to Bush, Card joined the intergovernmental affairs office of the Reagan White House in 1983. He remained close to Vice President Bush, eventually taking a senior position on his presidential campaign in 1987. He worked closely with Bush's sharp-edged political guru Lee Atwater. "Lee always thought Andy was his guy," says Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist and close Atwater associate. "But everyone thinks that Andy is their guy. That's the beauty of him. He has assumed the role of chief therapist in the Bush camp." Rogers also dubs Card "a human Alka-Seltzer" who offsets the acid of clashing egos, ideologies and agendas in a political enterprise.
He was deputy chief of staff in the Bush administration under John Sununu and gained a reputation for his forthright and pleasant manner, especially when performing unpleasant tasks. "We always said that if we ever got fired, we wanted Andy to do it," said Bush press secretary Marlin Fitzwater. (This reputation endures: "I figure when Andy fires me, I'll probably be slapping him on the back laughing on the way out the door," says Dan Bartlett, the current White House communications director.)
Card's signature firing occurred in 1990 when he had to tell his own boss, Sununu, that it was time to leave. There is a vivid scene in Fitzwater's memoir, "Call the Briefing," in which Card, White House counsel Boyden Gray and Bush family friend Dorrance Smith nervously enter Sununu's office after the president concluded that it was time for him to go. Smith and Gray hold back, leaving Card to deliver the news. "This kind of thing always winds up falling to Andy," Fitzwater says.
"Hearing bad news from Andy is like hearing bad news from Dudley Do-right," says Rogers. "You can't shoot the messenger with Andy. And this is a town where the messenger gets shot all the time."
After being appointed Bush One's secretary of transportation, Card was given the dirty work of running the president's outgoing transition team. He spent the rest of the '90s lobbying, first for the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, then General Motors.
Card first met George W. Bush in 1979 during his father's first presidential campaign. ("May. Kennebunkport. We were on Ocean Avenue.") When Card was deputy chief of staff, Bush Two would sometimes walk into his office, collapse on the couch and gather intelligence about his father's administration. "I wouldn't call us friends," Card says of that time.
Card was not involved in George W. Bush's primary campaign, not unusual given that few people who worked at a high level for the former president also worked for his son. "There was an aggressive effort to avoid it," says Bush's longtime media adviser, Mark McKinnon. But in the spring of 2000, Bush's team was dissatisfied with the planning for the summer's GOP convention in Philadelphia and needed someone to take over. "It was a difficult situation in that there was an existing structure in place," says Bush political adviser Karl Rove.
The elder Bush suggested to his son that Card's convention performance could be an audition, according to a source familiar with the discussion. If it worked out, and if Bush won the election, Card would be a natural for White House chief of staff. The younger Bush referred to the job as "The Big One." The Crisper
The story of how Card went from running the 2000 GOP convention to "The Big One" is, frankly, long. At least it is in Card's retelling, which takes 25 minutes.
"This is one of those cupboards you don't open until somebody says, 'Hey, where are those string beans?' " Card says.
Herein, the string beans:
Card tells of discussions he had "that were not very directioned" with Rove, future commerce secretary Don Evans and Bush.
And how, just before he began working on the campaign, Card took his wife to Bermuda after she graduated from divinity school.
And a conversation Card had with Bush on the night of his acceptance speech in Philadelphia in which Bush told him to "keep your dance card clear."
And the conversation Bush had with Card in Boston on the night of Bush's first debate with Gore ("when Gore had a little too much orange makeup on"). They were on a boat ferrying them from Logan Airport across Boston Harbor (not as polluted as before, "thanks to the good leadership of the former president Bush").
And how, over breakfast, an annoyed Kathleene Card asked her husband, "Are you married to me or George W. Bush?"
And then the phone rang and it was George W. Bush, who told Card to call his gubernatorial chief of staff, Clay Johnson.
And so Card flew to Austin and met with Johnson, who had a bunch of notebooks marked "transition" on his desk, and Card figured they wanted him to run the transition, which Card calls "a pain-in-the-neck job," but one he'd be willing to do.
And then, on his way out of Texas, Card visited the elder Bush in Houston, where he began to believe they were considering him for The Big One. (Card arrived in Houston at 9, and the Bushes were out when he arrived. Barbara Bush arrived home at 11, the former president at midnight. "I woke up early the next day. I made the bed. I showered. I shaved. I got all dressed."
And then Card flew to Tampa to meet the younger Bush, who was holding a rally in Jacksonville. But Card's flight was delayed and he missed Bush before the candidate went to sleep. ("Karen Hughes was there, her son Robert. Got a bite to eat late at night in the hotel.")
Next morning he met with Bush, who mentioned "The Big One," and the rest, as they say, is in another cupboard.
"Sorry I talked so much," Card says.Counter Strategy
Shortly after Bush took office, Mack McLarty, Bill Clinton's chief of staff, and Ken Duberstein, who held the same post under Reagan, co-hosted a dinner for Card at McLarty's Kalorama home. Several former White House chiefs of staff attended -- or, as McLarty puts it, "those of us who have held the office of chief javelin catcher in the White House." Guests included McLarty's neighbor Donald Rumsfeld (chief of staff under Gerald Ford), Donald Regan (Reagan) and Samuel Skinner (Bush One).
In a toast at the dinner, McLarty told of how Reagan chief of staff Howard Baker called him when Clinton took office to say, "Congratulations, you just got the worst job in Washington."
It's a job that Card is neatly suited to do. "He has that intangible ability to anticipate the rhythm of the presidency," says Duberstein. Card is "a comfortable shoe," Duberstein says, someone the president has become accustomed to.
Bush will tease Card in meetings for his long-windedness and tendency to veer off on tangents. People who have watched them together say the president will sometimes order Card around in a tone that suggests he's talking to a servant. In "The Price of Loyalty," former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill describes a scene in which Bush impatiently demands that Card get him a cheeseburger.
One former Bush administration official compares Card to a little-brother figure to the president, even though Bush is only 10 months older: Bush regards him as a member of the family and would never doubt his loyalty. "But the president can walk on Andy a little bit," says the former official, who asked not to be identified because he doesn't want the White House to be angry with him. "The president talks to him like he's hired help more than he would someone like Cheney or Rumsfeld."
Card loves reminding people that he is hired help -- that the "of staff" in his title is more important than the "chief," as if he were manning a drive-through window back at McDonald's.
"The president has every right to be selfish with my time," Card says. "That means there are sacrifices I need to make for the president to have what he needs. And those sacrifices usually impact my wife or my kids or my grandkids, or my siblings or my friends. And that is a burden I carry."
The burden wears heavily on chiefs of staff. It is "the ultimate burnout job," Duberstein says. In her memoir "Ten Minutes From Normal," Bush confidante Karen Hughes describes Card telling a prospective White House hire what he expects of his staff. "You don't get home until late at night, you work every weekend," Card said, according to Hughes. He said he didn't have a single day off in several years during the first Bush administration.
Card likes to point out that the average tenure of a White House job is 18 months. And that the chief of staff's job in particular is not suited for the long haul. Yet a few days after his reelection, Bush showed up at Card's morning senior staff meeting at to announce that Card would stay on.
"He's under severe stress and I worry about him," says Card's friend Natsios. "I'll call him at his office, at 6 [a.m.], when I know he's there, just to see how he's doing."
Card's name is periodically raised for Cabinet posts -- most recently, he was rumored to be the successor to John Snow as Treasury secretary. Card says he places such items "right on top of the garbage disposal." He shakes his head, asks, "What are you gonna do?" He rubs his eyes and says that it's been another long week.
He was in the office at 5:10 this morning. And he was out at a function at the Kennedy Center two nights earlier. He went to bed at 11:35, "then got a call at 3:50 a.m. from the Situation Room."
Don't bother asking: The rest of that cupboard is closed.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
'
News Home - Help
Sri Lanka Tsunami Survivors Return Home
6 minutes ago
By ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press Writer
NASUVANTIVU, Sri Lanka - On foot, by bicycle or in motorized rickshaw taxis, the people of this east coast village began returning home Wednesday as Sri Lanka turned its attention from relief efforts to resettling people uprooted by the Asian tsunami.
AP Photo
Latest Headlines:
·
Sri Lanka Tsunami Survivors Return Home AP - 6 minutes ago
·
Australia Becomes Largest Tsunami Donor AP - 9 minutes ago
·
Tsunami Scenes Horrify Secretary of State Powell Reuters - 11 minutes ago
Special Coverage
RSS:
The villagers, all ethnic Tamils, piled bundles of relief goods into the three-wheeled taxis or balanced them on their heads as they traveled the two miles home from the school complex where hundreds took sanctuary when waves hit their village, destroying or severely damaging their homes.
Sri Lankan military officers were visiting shelters across the eastern part of the country advising people it was time to go home and start rebuilding their lives.
Nothing indicated a wide-scale evacuation of relief centers was under way in Sri Lanka, which was the second hardest-hit nation after Indonesia, with more than 30,000 people dead and about 800,000 displaced by the Dec. 26 tsunami.
But the aid agency Oxfam also said it plans to speed up its work aimed at helping people rebuild their lives, since many Sri Lankans are eager to return home.
"This fast-tracking of the rehabilitation phase is unusual after a disaster, but it is clearly required and desired in this particular situation," Oxfam's program coordinator Raphael Sindaye said in a statement in the capital, Colombo.
"It is clear that many people are already wanting to return to their homes, or what is left of their homes, and try to start rebuilding their lives. This is despite the real fear many have that the tsunami could strike again," he added.
Most of Nasuvantivu, about 20 miles north of Batticaloa, eastern Sri Lanka's main town, is set back several hundred yards from the seashore, and even some flimsy looking bamboo structures survived. But some people lost everything.
Subramaniam Nadarasa's solid brick structure, set amid towering coconut trees on the sandy beach, was stripped to its cement floor. Blocks of the blue-painted walls were broken off and scattered dozens of yards away. One pot and a crumpled blue bicycle were all that remained of his possessions.
When the wave hit, Nadarasa scrambled up a tree, but his 14-year-old daughter fell from his arms into the roiling water. He later found her body and buried her.
About 400 thatched fishermen's huts had been clustered on the same beach under the palms, he said, but on Wednesday there wasn't a trace of them. The water had reached a depth of about 8 feet, he said, pointing to a branch on a tree as the marker.
Further inland, where most villagers lived, the water left a stain on the red brick houses about 4 feet from the ground.
A woman who called herself Rosa Amma, or Mother Rose, trudged slowly up the dirt paths and across the narrow causeways over a marshy lagoon that led to her thatched house. She looked far older than her 38 years and complained of heart problems.
Repeatedly breaking down into tears, Rosa Amma said two of her children and her sister died when the tsunami smashed the church where they were attending Sunday prayers.
"I'm very afraid to stay here. If it comes again, I won't have the strength to run away," she said.
Basic food, water and clothing have been flowing to refugee centers from United Nations (news - web sites) agencies, international charities and government warehouses. Authorities say aid has reached all but a few pockets.
But the facilities are overcrowded, unsanitary and potential breeding grounds for contagious diseases.
Story Tools
Email Story
Post/Read Msgs
Formatted Story
Ratings: Would you recommend this story?
Not at all 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 Highly
Copyright © 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
