The President's Choice

AT FIRST GLANCE, Michael Chertoff seems an odd choice for the critical job of homeland security secretary, particularly from his perspective. It is surely an unusual career move: He will be leaving a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals after less than two years to take over the vital but possibly unmanageable Department of Homeland Security, which, as we wrote this week, desperately needs a leader with superb administrative credentials. Although he has run the Justice Department's criminal division, itself not a small bureaucracy, and was a popular U.S. attorney for New Jersey, he has not managed anything on this scale.

Nevertheless, Mr. Chertoff is broadly experienced in Washington, having worked in Congress as well as in the other two branches of government. This bodes well for his ability to transcend ongoing squabbles between DHS and the FBI, between DHS and Congress, and within the department itself. He was immediately endorsed by New Jersey's senators, both Democrats, and has worked well with people across the spectrum, which is why he is likely to be easily confirmed, as he was for the federal bench.

More important, Mr. Chertoff was in the Justice Department at a critical moment, during the turbulent months after Sept. 11, 2001, so he has already been forced to think through some of the most critical domestic security issues, in particular the problems that tighter security poses for civil liberties. Many of the steps the Justice Department took, especially the chaotic detention of illegal immigrants and terrorist suspects in 2001 and 2002, were highly controversial and not ultimately successful. But Mr. Chertoff was more often a voice of moderation in internal debates about some of the administration's most aggressive actions. On leaving the Justice Department in 2003, he publicly took issue with the administration's ad hoc policy toward "enemy combatants" arrested in Afghanistan and elsewhere, calling for a "long-term and sustainable architecture" for handling arrested terrorists. Now he may have an opportunity to help create such an architecture, and to bring a more disciplined set of priorities to the nation's homeland defense.