Panic in the Capitol

Thirty-one Hill workers test positive for Anthrax exposure, and a day of conflicting reports ends with only a little reassurance.

By Jake Tapper

Oct. 18, 2001 | WASHINGTON -- In what would turn out to be a particularly bad omen, staffers for Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., were confronted last Friday by a tuft of caribou fur hand-delivered by a constituent, a quirky sort of thanks to Daschle for protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the homeland of many a caribou.

But that day carried news of anthrax spreading from tabloid offices in Florida, to Tom Brokaw's assistant in New York. They took no chances, and called the Capitol Hill Police, who immediately sent a team to check out the strange package. The ruled it a perfectly safe, if odd, present.

Still, it demonstrated how on-edge government staffers had already become before a truly dangerous envelope arrived in the mailroom of Daschle's South Dakota office in the Hart Senate Office Building Monday morning, with the seemingly harmless return address of "4th grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, N.J." And as Congress settled into a sort of controlled panic Wednesday, with the announcement that 31 Hill workers had tested positive for anthrax exposure, it was enough for many to wonder what grim news Thursday might bring.

As has typified so much of the governmental response to this crisis, the mixed messages from different officials in the letter's wake made it difficult to distinguish between false reassurance and good news, between spin and candor. Was it a virulent and high-tech type of anthrax, the fine-ground kind that only could be manufactured with state sponsorship? Or was it low-grade, garden-variety, eminently treatable? Were the dangerous spores free-floating throughout the area or contained? Were you at risk only if you'd been in the immediate vicinity of the anthrax letter, or had an entire ventilation system been compromised?

For the most part, officials tried to coo the most reassuring answers to all of these questions. But at the end of day, the authority of their answers could only be taken with a grain (or is that a spore?) of salt.

Wednesday morning, having seen images of the envelopes of the anthrax-laden letters sent to Brokaw and Daschle on the front page of the newspapers, an administrative staffer for Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., recalled a similar-looking letter that had arrived in the mail maybe 10 days before. She had placed that letter, unopened, into a bag of suspicious letters -- called a "burn bag" -- which was delivered to the FBI on Wednesday morning.

By the end of the day -- which brought news of the presence of anthrax in New York Gov. George Pataki's New York City office, as well as preliminary results that the Florida and NBC anthrax strains appeared to be the same -- Hastert had announced that the House would adjourn early. The Senate closed its three main office buildings while remaining open for votes in the Capitol building itself on Thursday.

On Wednesday morning, Daschle told reporters the alarming news that since the anthrax letter was opened Monday, health officials had ruled that "31 people now have had positive nasal swabs."

He rushed to point out that "there is a huge difference between a positive nasal swab, which only indicates exposure, of course, and infection," stating that no one had yet tested positive for infection. The 31 people were eventually identified as five Capitol Hill police officers, 23 Daschle staffers and three staffers for Daschle's office neighbor, Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisc. -- though some of those numbers continued to be challenged throughout the day.

But hundreds of Senate staffers remained nervous as they awaited the results of the anthrax nasal swab tests, many of which were scheduled to be ready Thursday.

Next page: Good reason to be nervous