GovernmentExecutive.com

Every time Rich Falkenrath steps out of his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, he confronts a little piece of the homeland insecurity he's paid to contemplate.

Down the corridor, offices have been emptied of all inhabitants, save the workers who are fortifying the old War Department's otherwise stalwart walls and windows facing 17th Street, a busy north-south artery in downtown Washington.

Is this project really necessary? a visitor inquires. With incredulity in his widening blue eyes and a small frown playing across his broad face, Falkenrath replies, "You can pack a lot of explosives into a truck."

Trucks, airplanes, power plants, ports, chemicals, mail sorters, bacteria, viruses, nuclear devices, box cutters - a million vulnerabilities and a million ways to take lives. This is the dark world that Falkenrath inhabits, and the basis for endless internal meetings, travels to applaud worthy security plans emerging from the states, and public appearances to nudge the slow-motion crawl of Bush's Department of Homeland Security proposal on Capitol Hill.

Falkenrath, 33, had no government experience before joining the National Security Council as a nuclear proliferation strategist in 2001. Contacts, including Robert Blackwill, a former NSC aide to George H.W. Bush, helped him tap into the Bush-Cheney campaign and transition, where Falkenrath, a Republican, assisted the foreign-policy thinkers known as the "Vulcans." Falkenrath, then executive director of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, calls Blackwill, once a board member and now ambassador to India, a "mentor."

Today, as senior director of policy and plans, with eight colleagues under his supervision, Falkenrath helps Director Tom Ridge and the president's year-old Office of Homeland Security try to prevent the worst from happening again. It's a job that would keep most sensible people up at night, yet Bush's special assistant, described by friends and former colleagues as equal parts intelligence and unabashed ambition, says the firestorm of challenges has been both a thrill and an education. He considers himself an authority on national security, not terrorists, and he says his White House assignment is to constantly "look ahead a couple months."

After 9/11, al Qaeda's success generated a job well matched to Falkenrath's academic experience. He had made a name for himself in the mid-to-late 1990s by penning and co-authoring a handful of respected papers and books that analyzed the threat of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and examined the nation's dismal state of domestic preparedness against terrorism. Tragedy instantly showcased the youthful academic as prescient about the danger, if not about the means of attack. Falkenrath soon became a member of Ridge's new team. "Richard brings to the office an interesting merger of intellectual power and practical political judgment on how to get things done," Ridge says. "His strategic vision, attention to detail, and work ethic are invaluable to this office and the country."

Falkenrath, who once seriously pondered law school, helped the White House counsel's office draft Bush's order creating the Homeland Security office. He helped construct, and later explain, the president's national strategy for homeland security, a goal-focused document released this summer to mixed reviews. One of his responsibilities was to think through what the government should be doing for domestic security. Falkenrath is a big believer in "net assessment," which he describes as "the relationship between the strength of the enemy and the strength of the friendlies." He says the key to strategic policy making and assessing "the real dangers" is comprehending the "nexus of threat and vulnerability."

Falkenrath was a blood brother in the super-secret White House study of a Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, which Bush embraced last June as the centerpiece of his defense against terrorism. Falkenrath, a student of the literature, was aware that other authorities, including some in Congress, thought a new federal department was in order. It was not an idea he previously advocated, Falkenrath says, until a tight clutch of the president's senior aides spent about a month deciding - without consulting the affected departments - that a dramatic overhaul was both desirable and feasible.

Months before, Falkenrath had drafted a proposal to consolidate the government's disparate border authorities. The idea leaked, got picked apart, and died, leaving Ridge looking weak. The West Wing decided that a bigger change, backed by the president and using secrecy and surprise, would be the key to momentum. Even so, the legislation has met many hurdles.

"I became convinced of the merits" of a mega-department that could be the "engine of implementation" for the policies of the administration and Congress, Falkenrath says. "I underestimated the importance of organization in my earlier writing, and I just learned more. I watched it firsthand." Falkenrath also confesses that when writing at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, he knew nothing about how the Executive Office of the President operates. "I wasn't really prepared for how the White House really works."

Falkenrath now is focused on implementing policy, and he has an important role in devising the president's proposed fiscal 2004 budget for homeland security, working alongside the Office of Management and Budget. Bush's spending blueprint, due to Congress in February, will be organized around the "critical mission areas" in his national strategy: intelligence and warning; borders and transportation; domestic counter-terrorism; critical-infrastructure protection; catastrophic threats; and emergency preparedness and response. Departments and agencies have been advised to fit their funding requests into those categories, he says.

Falkenrath has jettisoned his academic faith that effective domestic preparedness can be measured in federal dollars. That position contrasted sharply with Bush's revenue-neutral promises for a Department of Homeland Security in fiscal 2003, and the president's aide now is quick to embrace the administration's "fiscally conservative" approach. "I'll readily concede one point, which is that I've learned a lot - between the things that I've written before and the things I've said and believe now."

Falkenrath's friends say he knows when he needs to know more. But being mistaken clearly is not part of his self-image. During an interview, when asked to elaborate on whether he now considered some earlier recommendations for federal funding to be superficial, Falkenrath replies that he does not wish to "cast aspersions" on his co-authors, apparently referring to the two with whom he collaborated on the 1998 book, America's Achilles' Heel: Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Terrorism, and Covert Attack. When he admits he did not initially know enough to recognize the value of a domestic security department, he adds, "I don't know who could have, frankly."

Falkenrath has many admirers - and also an assortment of detractors - from his pre-Washington period. The critics readily commend his intellect but deplore his style. "He's the kind of guy who kicks down and kisses up," said one former colleague. "He's cutthroat and in a hurry." Adds another observer: "He doesn't have enough self-doubt." Asked about this footnote to his curriculum vitae, Falkenrath sounds surprised, sorrowful, and then wonders aloud who the critics might be.

Justice Department prosecutor Rachel Harmon, who first met Falkenrath when they were Marshall Scholars 11 years ago, calls him "probably my best friend." Her husband, Robert D. Newman, who is now at the State Department, is also a friend of Falkenrath's and one of his two co-authors on America's Achilles' Heel. "Rich is not a guy who is trying to make anyone happy," Harmon explains. "He is who he is, and he's pretty up front about it."

Falkenrath is a realist, someone who will "make the world - make his own opportunities," Harmon adds. In high school, Falkenrath's liberal Democratic mother realized that her more conservative son briskly walked his own path. He kept bound journals of his pursuits and thoughts well into adulthood; ran a stock market investment group in college; earned his Ph.D. in two years; and taught his friends about the time value of money. He met his social-worker wife, Penny, when she gave him a lift after one of his Kennedy School lectures. After a first date, he confided to Harmon he had met the woman he would marry. "Single-minded" is his friend's admiring description.

That sort of determination and energy is essential in the White House, says Graham T. Allison, who, as director of the Kennedy School's Belfer Center, hired Falkenrath. There is a real urgency, he adds, to preventing attacks that use nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and that requires knowledge of security abroad as well as within the United States. His former executive director, Allison says, "has a good sense for this."

But what works with counterterrorism may not work as well with a rod and reel, adds a teasing Allison, who enjoys fly-fishing, a sport about which Falkenrath is newly enthused. "He aspires to be patient enough to be a fly fisherman," his former boss confides. "Rich is learning the values of contemplation as well as the chase. He probably still counts fish."