WASHINGTON -- Christie Whitman must have known it was going to be a rotten day when she saw the protesters who had gathered to scream at her as she arrived to testify before Congress yesterday.

Many of them worked at Ground Zero after Sept. 11, searching for friends, clearing rubble and coughing on the dust that carried a nasty brew of toxins into their lungs.
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The former governor and former head of the Environmental Protection Agency was cast as villain, a woman so sinister that she would hide information from rescue workers about the risks we now know they were taking.
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What emerged from these hearings was something very different. Not Whitman as monster, but Whitman as wimp -- a person so eager to please the White House that she simply did not do her job.