ARTICLE

June 2003

A Personal Interest in Security

by Harold Kennedy

Rear Adm. Jeffrey J. Hathaway, the Coast Guard’s assistant commandant for operations policy, acknowledges that he has a personal interest in homeland security.

On September 11, he was temporarily assigned to the U.S. Navy, serving as director of the Navy Command Center in the Pentagon. When the hijacked airliner slammed into the building, 42 out of the 50 people working in the center were killed. Hathaway survived, because he happened to be out of the building, “caught in traffic on the 14th Street Bridge,” he said.

“I can tell you that the events of September 11 refocused my life,” he told National Defense. He volunteered for a job as director of the Navy’s new Interagency Support and Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection Division. He served in that job until February of this year, when he returned to the Coast Guard.

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