(The following article by Christopher Lee appeared in the Washington Post.)
WASHINGTON — Norman Y. Mineta’s voice is nearly a whisper on the phone, raspy from a breathing tube doctors put down his throat for five days after operating on his back last month.
“I sound like one of the Soprano brothers,” the 71-year-old secretary of transportation said in an interview yesterday from his room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Mineta, the only Democrat in President Bush’s Cabinet, has more or less lived at Walter Reed since Nov. 29, and has tried to manage a debilitating back condition and at the same time lead the 160,000-person Transportation Department.
Surgery in August to repair a damaged disk relieved Mineta’s chronic discomfort, but the pain flared up during a Thanksgiving visit with Coast Guard members in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Doctors attributed it to a staph infection, as well as excessive curvature of the spine, and admitted Mineta to the hospital for more treatment, including another operation Jan. 24.
Now the pain is “totally gone,” Mineta said. But doctors have him on a regimen of physical therapy and are checking his progress with MRIs and CAT scans as he struggles to regain strength in his legs and back. “If you had told me that I was going to be from Nov. 29 to this day still in the hospital, I would not have believed it,” said Mineta, who hopes to be released next week.
The former 10-term congressman has put a lot of time and technology into making sure that being laid up is not tantamount to being left out.
Deputy Secretary Michael P. Jackson and Mineta’s chief of staff John A. Flaherty have managed day-to-day operations at DOT headquarters. Mineta has stayed in the mix by contacting aides and lawmakers by telephone, receiving daily intelligence briefings and reviewing the stacks of correspondence, documents and regulations delivered to his room twice a day.
In a suite once used by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mineta has a command post equipped with a secure phone line, a regular phone, a cell phone, a computer, a fax, a shredder, a two-way pager and two television sets tuned to cable news channels.
“I’ve got every kind of gadget a person would like to have to be able to telecommute and do it efficiently,” Mineta said. “It works out real well.”
The recipient of many of Mineta’s missives, Flaherty can testify that his boss knows how to work the two-way pager. “Make no mistake about it, he runs the department. He just runs it from Walter Reed,” Flaherty said.
Jackson has taken on some of Mineta’s ceremonial duties, such as speaking at the department’s Christmas holiday party and presiding over awards ceremonies.
Flaherty said he and Jackson talk with Mineta at least three times a day. And that keeping track of Mineta’s phone traffic has gotten harder since the boss has been in the hospital.
“Unlike when he’s here, he’s calling members [of Congress] without me knowing it,” Flaherty said.
Greg Cohen, vice president for policy and government affairs at the American Highway Users Alliance, said Mineta has gotten his work done from the hospital. “We’re not aware of anything slipping time-wise because of his surgery,” Cohen said. “I don’t know of anyone who would work as hard as he has over these past few months, given what he’s been through.”
Mineta has gotten out occasionally. He went home for Christmas and attended an event at the Kennedy Center in December. He made it to the White House for a Jan. 6 Cabinet meeting.
“He got in and out under his own power using a cane that day,” said Chet Lunner, a DOT spokesman. “But I don’t think he was fooling anybody. He was in a lot of pain when he did that, but he was bound and determined to do it.”
Such forays can be dangerous. Mineta fell twice during a visit home last Friday, prompting doctors to scratch what he had hoped would be his release from Walter Reed this week.
Mineta said the doctor said he needs to build up his strength and leg muscles, “so now they are thinking about next week, the 26th or 27th. But again, these dates aren’t very firm, so we’ll just work at it.”
Mineta had hip replacement surgery at Walter Reed a year ago. And in October 2001, he spent four days in the hospital because of a nosebleed and low blood pressure. Mineta, who was secretary of commerce under President Bill Clinton, said the thought of retiring “does cross my mind every so often, but I’ve had this incredible experience under President Bush, and I have his full support, so I really want to continue on.”
He said he wants to stay on the job at least long enough to see the passage of two major transportation bills that would authorize hundreds of billions of dollars for highway programs and airport infrastructure over the next few years.
The last few months have brought big changes and challenges for the Department of Transportation. United Airlines, the nation’s second-largest air carrier, filed for bankruptcy in December. That same month, the Transportation Security Administration raced to meet a deadline to screen all passenger bags at the nation’s airports.
Meanwhile, members of Congress, grappling with the continuing financial problems of Amtrak, appear to have shifted responsibility for canceling politically popular rail routes from Congress to DOT.
And the creation of the Department of Homeland Security means the Coast Guard and the TSA will leave the Department of Transportation on March 1, taking about 100,000 employees with them.
“It’s most unfortunate that he can’t be actively at the helm during this storm in aviation history,” said Kenneth Quinn, an aviation lawyer who represents aviation security firms and airport owners. “They’ve been rocked by 9/11. They’ve lost over half their crew . . . We all wish him a speedy recovery.”
After Mineta leaves the hospital, he will have to continue recuperating at home for two or three weeks, aides said. Nevertheless, his schedule will include occasional meetings and events. And today, Mineta is slated to attend an awards ceremony for TSA employees at DOT headquarters.
“I can’t wait to see the guy,” said Jackson, Mineta’s deputy. “We like having him around.”