Terrorism Scores A Big Victory

Welcome to Fort Washington, U.S.A.

Try to overlook the metal detectors, sharpshooters, iron fences, electronic sensing devices, radar, guard dogs, concrete bollards and army of cops.

Shake off the illusion you’re in Moscow or Beijing.

We’re living in the age of the terrorist, the kook bomber, the wacko with a truck of explosive fertilizer.

And it’s damned dispiriting.

Sure, Pennsylvania Avenue looks surreal in front of the White House now. No cars move. Boxed in by concrete barriers and cement tubs of geraniums and by police cars, it could be an empty Kmart parking lot.

For almost 200 years, this has been America’s Main Street. Victorious armies marched here. Presidents reviewed inaugural parades. Aunt Matilda and Uncle Bert drove slowly by, snapping photos.

Nothing could panic us enough to close this boulevard fronting the White House to traffic - not the assassinations of four presidents or two world wars or a civil war.

But now, in an edgy, jittery peacetime, America’s Main Street has been imprisoned by concrete and cops.

It has the artificial weirdness of an industrial suburban park. The concrete beams, hastily forklifted in, look like a construction site gone bankrupt. Rollerbladers, cyclists and tourists ramble in the unreal space.

Mark up one for terrorists - the world’s safer for skateboarders.

“It’s like a fortress,” said Conception Picciotto, who has kept a peace vigil in Lafayette Park for a dozen years. “Piece by piece, they’re taking away freedom.”

Granted, shutting down Pennsylvania Avenue to traffic may be a sane precaution. And the inevitably maddening gridlock, daily jamming 26,000 cars onto side streets, creates no sympathy in most of America. Let the bureaucrats suffer.

But taking a disorienting walk along the almost silent avenue, I couldn’t escape resentment that history has been stripped away, that terrorists have triumphed.

And a suspicion that Somebody at the Top overreacted.

It long has been a cover-your-butt reaction by Washington’s security bureaucracy to cordon off public buildings with more cops, metal detectors and concrete. For years, Congress has fought off attempts to box in the Capitol with a metal fence, presumably without spotlights or machine-gun nests.

After Ronald Reagan had been shot in 1981, Secret Service experts tried to persuade him to close Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Not on my watch,” said Reagan.

So how did security zealots persuade President Clinton to barricade the nation’s most historic avenue?

Their arguments sound like Catch-22 illogic or a Bob Newhart routine.

Last fall, a suicidal pilot crashed a light plane against the White House while the phone was broken between the Secret Service and airport radar operators.

A nut-case pedestrian who envisioned the White House “rising in a mist” decided to save it by raking the mansion with semiautomatic bullets.

Notice that neither attack came from a car.

Presto, Secret Service honchos and a commission of experts decided to shut off car traffic.

The Oklahoma City terrorist bombing gave them a way to sell the decision to the public. Although the White House is 100 yards from the street, experts scoffed at a checkpoint for explosivestoting trucks.

Secret Service Director Eljay Bowron repeated on NBC’s “Today” show the arguments he had used to persuade Clinton to shut down the Avenue of Presidents: “We don’t want to wait until after an explosion to close Pennsylvania Avenue. I’ve been convinced for some time it wasn’t ‘if’ but ‘when.”’

Clinton, who bristles at his security cocoon and jogs publicly, bought the pitch. He insisted: “I will not allow the fight against terrorism to build a wall between the American public and me.”

His bravado sounds tinny. Security wizards admit it’s nearly impossible to stop a terrorist, perhaps armed with a nuclear device, who is willing to sacrifice his own life.

You can imagine the Unbrave New World:

Will federal Washington - from the Supreme Court past the State Department - be barricaded by concrete and tanks against all but members of Congress and bureaucrats dangling dog tags? Tourists could eyeball their government only on closed-circuit television.

Will the next president live in an anti-aircraftguarded bastion at Camp David or the Mount Weather nuclear hideout, ducking into the White House only for rare functions?

Walking among the concrete barriers, I struggled to imagine that this was the White House that Thomas Jefferson had thrown open daily to browsers. Even until World War II, lovers strolled the driveways.

I thought of Pvt. Tom Presnell, of the Minnesota First Volunteers, who had blurted at the White House door that he wanted to shake Abe Lincoln’s hand.

“To my utmost surprise, who should step out but President Lincoln,” Presnell wrote in his Civil War diary. “Extending his hand, Mr. Lincoln said, ‘Well, here I am, my man; you can do that now.”’

Never again. Terror has won.

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