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9/11 Widows Skillfully Applied the Power of a Question: Why?
April 1, 2004
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON, March 31 - Kristen Breitweiser was at home in
Middletown, N.J., cleaning out closets. Patty Casazza of
Colts Neck was dashing to the dry cleaners. Lorie Van Auken
of East Brunswick was headed out to do grocery shopping.
Her neighbor Mindy Kleinberg had just packed her children
off to school.
Then came word, Tuesday morning, that President Bush had
agreed to allow his national security adviser, Condoleezza
Rice, to testify publicly about the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks. All at once, the cellphones started ringing and
the e-mail started flying and "the Jersey girls," as the
four women are known in Washington, were getting credit for
chalking up another victory in the nation's capital.
Americans just tuning in to the work of the commission
investigating the attacks may not have heard of Ms.
Breitweiser and the rest. But on Capitol Hill, these
suburban women are gaining prominence as savvy World Trade
Center widows who came to Washington, as part of a core
group of politically active relatives of Sept. 11 victims,
and prodded Congress and a recalcitrant White House to
create the panel that this week brought official Washington
to its knees.
"They call me all the time," said Thomas H. Kean, the
commission's chairman and a former Republican governor of
New Jersey. "They monitor us, they follow our progress,
they've supplied us with some of the best questions we've
asked. I doubt very much if we would be in existence
without them."
The families have spent months pressing for Ms. Rice's
public testimony; when the White House failed to send her
to last week's hearings, they walked out in silent protest.
On Tuesday, two Democratic senators, Edward M. Kennedy of
Massachusetts and Charles E. Schumer of New York, suggested
that the families think about asking Mr. Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney to testify publicly as well.
Ms. Van Auken said that had always been their preference.
"Of course we would like them to testify publicly," she
said Wednesday.
Before Sept. 11, the Jersey girls (the nickname, which
distinguishes the women from their New York and Connecticut
counterparts, was popularized in song by Bruce Springsteen)
knew little about government and less about politics. The
closest Ms. Casazza came to foreign affairs was processing
visa applications for French trainees while working for the
cosmetics company Lanc�me. Ms. Van Auken could not keep the
two chambers of Congress straight.
"I remember saying to Patty: `Which one is the one with
more people, the Senate or the House?' " she recalled.
The story of how they helped move a seemingly immoveable
bureaucracy is at once the tale of a political education,
and a sisterhood born of grief. They gathered Monday in the
sun-drenched living room of Ms. Casazza's spacious home to
tell it. The place, with its well-tended lawn and tennis
court out back, spoke of another life. Ms. Casazza, who has
a 13-year-old son, is planning to sell it. "Downsizing,"
she said simply.
Three of them were married to men who worked for Cantor
Fitzgerald, but the women were strangers until after the
attacks. Ms. Breitweiser, 33, and Ms. Casazza, 43, voted
for Mr. Bush in 2000. Ms. Van Auken, 49, and Ms. Kleinberg,
42, voted for Al Gore. All insist they had no political
agenda, then or now.
But they had a burning question. "We simply wanted to know
why our husbands were killed," Ms. Breitweiser said, "why
they went to work one day and didn't come back."
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers were pressing for a commission;
in December 2001, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of
Connecticut, had proposed a bill. By the spring of 2002,
Ms. Kleinberg had befriended the father of a victim of Pan
Am Flight 103, the plane that was bombed over Lockerbie,
Scotland, in 1988. "He said, `The bill is languishing. If
you want it to go anywhere, you have to make it happen.' "
The women went to Home Depot, sawed wood for signs and
staged a Washington rally; 300 people came out in the
blistering heat. They staked out lawmakers and boarded the
elevators marked "Senators Only." They wheedled their way
into the White House. Jay Lefkowitz, a former Bush domestic
policy adviser, recalls giving them chocolate chip cookies,
even as he successfully opposed some demands.
They stayed up nights surfing the Web, taking notes on
things like Islamic radicalism and the Federal Aviation
Administration's hijacking protocols.
"The Internet," Ms. Breitweiser said, "has been our fifth
widow."
In the Capitol, they cried, they pleaded, they cajoled. Ms.
Breitweiser showed her husband's wedding ring, found at
ground zero still attached to his finger. Ms. Casazza
brought photos of a Cantor Fitzgerald pool party, telling
lawmakers, "All the men are dead."
They befriended reporters: Gail Sheehy, in The New York
Observer, dubbed them "the four moms." With her articulate
manner and Ivory girl complexion, Ms. Breitweiser became a
fixture on the television networks.
"No one wanted to say no to these women," said a Republican
who participated in negotiations over the commission. He
said the women "were used" by Democrats, an accusation
Republicans repeated recently when Ms. Breitweiser
criticized the Sept. 11 images in a Bush campaign
advertisement. It is an acccusation she hotly denies.
Since the commission began its work, the Sept. 11
relatives, who call themselves the Family Steering
Committee, have dogged its every move. When the panel
complained of a lack of money, they lobbied for a bigger
budget - and won. When the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert
of Illinois, refused to grant the panel an extension, they
headed to Washington again, and the speaker retreated.
"Public pressure by the 9/11 families," Mr. Hastert's
spokesman, John Feehery, said about the reversal. "There is
no doubt about that."
For every battle they have won, though, the families have
lost others. The commission rejected their calls to
subpoena classified intelligence briefings and to fire its
executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, who co-wrote a book
with Ms. Rice. The families also complained that last
week's hearings deteriorated into a partisan spat over a
book by Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism
official. "They were right on that one," Mr. Kean conceded.
So the Jersey girls are not congratulating themselves now
on Ms. Rice. "There are no victories here," Ms. Casazza
said. Ms. Breitweiser added: "A victory implies that this
is a game. And this is not a game."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/01/national/01FAMI.html?ex=1081868079&ei=1&en=4ed0999c6f44838d
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