Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
On the job only since June, John Potter has his hands full handling the postal anthrax scare.
By MARY JACOBY
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 29, 2001
WASHINGTON -- A dozen postal workers stood in a row behind the empty podium, holding miniature American flags. Several senators sat in the audience, also holding little flags.
Together they waited in the richly decorated Senate meeting room for Postmaster General John Potter, late for the ceremony unveiling a stamp to commemorate the events of Sept. 11.
A woman from the Postal Service knelt behind the chair of Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. "He's had to go to the White House for a meeting," she whispered.
The senator's craggy face darkened. The hand with the flag began twitching. He was clearly not happy to be stood up by the postmaster general.
And so it seems to go for Potter in anthrax-panicked Washington these days. A 23-year postal employee who took the reins of the Postal Service in June, this son of a New York City letter carrier now finds himself stretched thin, running from meeting to meeting and making waves all over town.
In the two weeks since anthrax-laced letters were discovered in the mail, Potter has:
Stood by as two Washington postal workers died of anthrax they apparently contracted at an infected mail processing facility that he initially kept open even though a contaminated letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., passed through it.
Held a news conference at that same facility, on Brentwood Road in northeast Washington, only to later advise the reporters and government officials who attended that they now needed to get tested for anthrax.
Fanned worries about the safety of the mail after saying in a television interview, "There are no guarantees in life. The majority of the mail is safe. Could I guarantee it? No."
Spokespeople for the U.S. Postal Service did not respond to requests for an interview with Potter.
But others who know him described a well-intentioned, unpretentious guy on a wild ride he didn't bargain for, struggling to contain a deadly crisis that few ever thought possible.
"This is an unprecedented challenge for any individual or organization," said former Tennessee Gov. Ned McWherter, a member of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors. "I think he's doing pretty well."
"He's very bright, high energy. Which is fortunate because he's working tremendously long hours," said William Johnstone, deputy secretary of the postal Board of Governors.
In hindsight, McWherter said, it's clear Potter should have shut down the mail processing facilities through which the contaminated letter to Daschle passed. It's now obvious that employees should have been tested much earlier.
Last week, authorities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Potter that the letter to Daschle was tightly sealed and it was unlikely anthrax spores had escaped from it.
"Postmaster General Potter was being advised how to proceed by the medical authorities and those that could give him good advice. And he did that," McWherter said.
Potter is the nation's 72nd postmaster general and only the sixth person to be appointed from the Postal Service's rank and file.
He started his career in 1978 as a part-time clerk in Westchester, N.Y. His father used to play basketball with Vincent Sombrotto, who is now the president of the National Association of Letter Carriers.
A Bronx native, Potter now lives with his family in the tony Washington suburb of Potomac, Md.
At his swearing-in ceremony, he spoke proudly of his roots. "My selection as the postmaster general is an endorsement of what the postal family can do when it pulls together," he said. "It's an endorsement that anyone, even a kid from the Bronx, can make it."
His speech is still stamped by New York. He speaks not of "law" enforcement but "lawr" enforcement. Irradiation technology, he has said several times, will "eradicate" and sanitize the mail.
He also is not afraid to state the obvious conclusions that career politicians dance around.
A CNN interviewer asked if Potter could say there is no more risk to letter carriers. Of course not, he said. "Life is full of risk."
The truth? Yes. Reassuring? No.
"You could cross the street and you could get run over," Potter added, perhaps a bit too fatalistically for the times.
A large man who seems to burst from his suits, Potter already had a tough job on his hands before the anthrax scare. He took over a Postal Service that lost $1.65-billion last year and owes the U.S. Treasury around $10-billion.
Since assuming the top job, Potter has reduced employment at the Postal Service by around 20 percent, to a little more than 800,000 employees, said Johnstone.
Now, he faces pressure to keep postal rates from rising while fending off competition from private mail delivery companies and the Internet.
Until recently, he enjoyed generally good relations with rank-and-file postal employees, whom he calls "our postal family."
But now his reputation is tarnished.
Postal workers wonder why he did not immediately shut down the Brentwood mail processing facility in Washington last week when the anthrax-laced letter to Daschle was discovered to have passed through it.
They wonder why he did not immediately test postal workers for anthrax in Washington and in New Jersey, where the letter was mailed.
Such were the thoughts on Vernon Porter's mind Wednesday as the 52-year-old postal worker stood in the Senate, waving the little flag that had been stuck in his hand for the stamp ceremony.
An hour earlier, Porter had been selling stamps from a prefabricated shed in the parking lot of the closed Brentwood facility.
Some postal service executives showed up at his temporary work quarters. "They picked six people out and said, 'Come on down to the Capitol,' " he said.
Now he was standing under a chandelier in a room of marble and royal blue and gold-plated trim. The pin on his shirt was the image of the new stamp: an American flag and the words, "United We Stand."
The ceremony went on without Potter, the senators at no loss for words.
After the ceremony, Porter mused about his boss.
"My thing is, they knew there was a problem," he said. "So why do they close it (Brentwood) after the fact? When that senator got his letter, that's when they should have closed it down."
But what about Potter's argument that he was following the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose experts assured him there was no danger?
Porter made a face.
Did he mean Potter should have thought for himself and closed the facility anyway?
"Bingo!" he said.
AGE: 46.
EDUCATION: Bachelor's degree, economics, Fordham University; master's degree, management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
EXPERIENCE: 72nd U.S. postmaster general, June 2001-present; chief operating officer, executive vice president, U.S. Postal Service, October 2000-June 2001; senior vice president, U.S. Postal Service, January 1998-October 2000; manager, capital metro area operations, U.S. Postal Service, 1995; begins postal career as distribution clerk, suburban New York, 1978.
FAMILY: Wife, Maureen; two children.
QUOTE: "If you just look at the preponderance of mail, we have some very isolated incidents of anthrax in the mail, and so, you know, the majority of mail is safe. Could I guarantee it? No." -- ASSOCIATED PRESS