NYT: In Kerik, Bush Saw Values Crucial to Post-9/11 World

[kskiska]

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 - President Bush first met Bernard B. Kerik near the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center on Sept. 14, 2001, a day that instantly changed Mr. Bush's relationship with a city he had never much liked.

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"The president loves cops," said a Republican close to the White House who insisted on anonymity because he did not want the president and his advisers to know he was talking about the collapse of a cabinet nomination. "They're not pretentious, they do a hard job, they don't get paid a lot of money, they're real people and they live in a world that is fairly black and white, with good guys and bad guys. And that's the way President Bush looks at the world."

White House officials did not say how often Mr. Bush saw Mr. Kerik after their first meeting in 2001, but neither man seems to have forgotten the emotion of the day.

"The greatest president we've ever had," Mr. Kerik said at a veterans' breakfast at the Seventh Regiment Armory in Manhattan on Nov. 11, 2001, when Mr. Bush embraced him.

Mr. Bush was especially grateful, White House officials said, that Mr. Kerik agreed to train a police force in Iraq in the summer of 2003 and then campaigned extensively for the president's re-election this fall. As a symbol of Sept. 11, Mr. Kerik had that "9/11 glow," the Republican close to the White House said, and was critical to a re-election campaign based on national security.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/politics/19kerik.html?oref=login