Richard Falkenrath

he good days for Richard Falkenrath start at half past 6 in the morning and end a little before 8 in the evening. "The bad days are 6:15 to 10:00," said Falkenrath, who serves on the White House Homeland Security Council as deputy assistant to the president and deputy homeland-security adviser.

A former assistant professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Falkenrath, 34, joined the newly formed Office of Homeland Security in fall 2001 as senior director for policy and plans, after working as director for proliferation strategy on the National Security Council.

Falkenrath receives a daily intelligence briefing at 7 in the morning. Then, in the afternoon, he often huddles in the White House Situation Room to get a status report from various agencies working on homeland security. And Falkenrath frequently attends briefings at the FBI, the Homeland Security Department, and the CIA. "The day flies by until about 6:30 or so, when the scheduled meetings seem to die out-and then I turn to all the paper that appeared on my desk while everything else was going on," said Falkenrath, who earned a Ph.D. in war studies at King's College (London) after attending Occidental College in Los Angeles.

The long hours are tough, he said, but the stress is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the job. "You are constantly asking yourself, 'Have we done enough?,' " Falkenrath said, describing the office's work to simultaneously prevent and prepare for terrorist attacks. "You live every day with the possibility that today is the day for another one. And you will not only have to deal with the aftermath of an attack in the field, but with the reality that, despite all the efforts that we're making nationwide, we would have failed at our highest priority-prevention."