But Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., named last month to head the Economic Security, Infrastructure Protection and Cybersecurity panel, is a freshman in name only. No average freshman could decorate the walls of his new office with bill-signing pens and personal thank-you letters from President Ronald Reagan for sponsoring key legislation.

That was during Lungren's first 10 years in Congress, beginning with his election in 1978, when as a real freshman he was classmates with such future luminaries as Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney. Leaving Congress in 1989, he eventually served as California attorney general for eight years.

This time around, Lungren was the first freshman singled out in January of this year by President Bush when he welcomed the new class of lawmakers.

"The Vice President and I share something else in common with you, besides having run together in 2004, in that we've all run for the Congress - I'm the only one who never won," Bush said to laughter. "I ran in 1978, came in second in a two-man race. The Vice President won, as did Dan Lungren. Welcome back. . . . Thanks for agreeing to serve your great state and our country once again."

The reason Lungren is back in Congress can also be found on his walls, but it requires a bit of a story.

As he tells it, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, he was working for a law firm, Venable LLP, and was driving in Washington. Listening to CDs in his car, he did not get word that the first plane had hit the World Trade Center until he arrived at the parking lot of his law firm and a woman he had never met told him what was happening. Rumor spread that Washington could be the terrorists' next target.

He was told to evacuate the building, he said, but gridlock prevented him from getting very far, and so he went back inside. He pondered some giant framed copies of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights he had gotten as a member of Congress.

"I grabbed a hammer and some nails and tacked them up on the wall just as my act of defiance," he said.

He knew that day he wanted to return to public service, he said. Now, those same framed founding documents hang in his Rayburn Building office.

Lungren said he was not sure at first he wanted to be on the Homeland Security Committee, despite overtures from its chairman, Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif. Lungren had focused more on the Judiciary Committee, where he could get his seniority restored, and other committees where he could somehow make a difference in protecting the homeland. Until recently, it was an open question whether there would be a permanent Homeland Security Committee, and that gave him pause.

Once it became clear, however, he enlisted. Offered a subcommittee chairmanship, he gladly accepted.

If anyone doubted Lungren's explanation that Sept. 11 made him want to return to Congress - and there were skeptics, he said, who whispered that he was merely clinging to a political career whose time had passed - those doubts may have been put to rest by his committee assignments. His two Judiciary subcommittee posts? Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security and Immigration, Border Security and Claims.

He has set about quickly brushing up on the wide array of topics that his subcommittee will confront.

It is not obvious from the Homeland Security subcommittee's title, but folded into its portfolio is border and transportation security, which composes a major chunk of the Department of Homeland Security. He also will oversee critical infrastructure protection, including both physical security and cybersecurity.

At his first subcommittee hearing last week, Lungren laid out the responsibility of his panel: "In the broadest sense, this Subcommittee will lead the Committee's effort in answering several fundamental homeland security questions.

"Which critical assets and infrastructure require protection and how do we prioritize our investments in a world of finite resources?" he asked. "What are the appropriate homeland security roles and responsibilities of federal, state, and local governments, and of the private sector? And how do we ensure that our investments in securing the homeland do not subtract from, but actually contribute to promoting, our national economic security?"

With less than three weeks on the job and no subcommittee staff yet, Lungren was not ashamed to admit he had more studying to do on those topics.

He wants to focus first on risk assessment.

"At the beginning we have to examine whether or not we've established a true, rational risk assessment mechanism," he said, to make sure homeland security funding is distributed to protecting the right targets.

He's hopeful that rationalizing risks will turn out to be a good marriage of politics and policy.

"We have to be able to show our colleagues that this can stand up to scrutiny such that a member going back to his or her district can explain why they may not be getting something this time."

He confessed to not yet having studied up on cybersecurity, although he playfully acknowledged its importance.

"When I was at Notre Dame, the only people who dealt with computers were geeks, carrying these big old boxes full of computer programming cards," he said of his days at his alma mater. "Those of us that went there, our greatest thought was to jump behind someone and goose them and see all their cards flying everywhere. Now everything is run by computers. It's a huge, huge issue."

He plans to make up for those expertise gaps in the short term by relying on his law training to cross-examine witnesses. And he said he plans on conducting vigorous oversight.

Lungren said he believes the Department of Homeland Security has only a couple of years to get it right, that it cannot wait 30 years to tackle bureaucratic problems like Congress did with a reorganization of the Department of Defense. It is too difficult to properly organize a new bureaucracy well after it is created, he said.

"We need to have vigorous, informed, aggressive peer review," he said. "We can't set ourselves up as a shadow Cabinet, and we can't micromanage. We have to be peers who come in and look at how they're doing, what they're doing and how it matches with their mission, goal or purpose."

Lungren faces potential pitfalls.

For one, he must be careful not to appear to have any conflicts of interest as a former lobbyist who occasionally worked on homeland security issues at Venable, where he was employed from 2001 to 2004. The firm has clients with homeland security business, such as Lockheed Martin, but Lungren said his past employment would not cause any difficulties for his current job.

"I went the opposite direction of the revolving door folks," he said. "I gave up income to come here. It's an upside down story. I have no financial connection to the law firm. It ended at midnight on the last day of last year."

Another deep pothole in the road is the fact that his sprawling subcommittee incorporates subject matter that has been the stuff of turf wars between powerful House chairmen and the new Homeland Security Committee.

For instance, House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Don Young, R-Alaska, had transportation security jurisdiction, and House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe L. Barton, R-Texas, still has a piece of cybersecurity. Both men fought to keep their jurisdiction earlier this year in a rules package.

As might be expected, Lungren said he has no interest in turf battles. In fact, on cybersecurity, he said, "I don't mind sharing it with other people. It's a much bigger job than I can handle by myself."

But he also said he expected his long-standing personal relationships with those lawmakers and others to help smooth over any squabbles. He remembers working with Barton long ago, Lungren said, when he "looked like a little kid. He still has that fresh, young boy face, just with more gray hair on top. We've always had a good relationship."

He said he remembers standing next to Don Young as he fought the Carter administration over Alaska initiatives that he believed hurt his state. "I saw the tears in his eyes," he said. "And I know the man, not just from working with him on issues."

At his best, the "issues" are what Lungren is all about, said a friend of his, Jim Robinson. Robinson, now a senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has worked for Lungren in a variety of roles over his political career.

Always a capable manager, Lungren is at his best when he is debating the issues, conducting oversight and working deals behind the scenes, Robinson said.

"In his heart of hearts, even though everyone was telling him to climb the ladder back in California, what he really loved doing was Congress," Robinson said. "He's back in his element."

In his current role, Robinson said he expects that Lungren will be an "independent thinker" who will be aggressive but disciplined. Lungren will not stand on the soapbox just for the sake of doing it, nor will he be afraid to "call them as he sees them."

Lungren, 58, remembers walking the precincts for Republican candidates at age 6. His father was Richard Nixon's personal physician.

He graduated with a B.A. in English at the University of Notre Dame, and got his J.D. at Georgetown University.

At the Republican National Committee, he held a job where a young Karl Rove, now a senior adviser to President Bush, reported to him. He ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 1976 before winning on his second try two years later.

Although he came in with a freshman class that represented the "angry young man" style of conservative, he said some of that was misinterpreted. He projected his voice on the House floor, unaware that the sensitive microphones made him seem louder and harsher than he intended.

He left Congress in 1989 to take a job as California's treasurer, but he was accused of being overly partisan and could not win Senate confirmation. He bounced back, winning the election to become attorney general and served in that post from 1991 to 1999.

In between, he made a failed bid at the governorship in 1998, a defeat that had most political observers writing him off for good. When he ran in 2004 in the Republican primary to succeed Rep. Doug Ose, who departed after three terms, he faced two well-financed candidates and eventually emerged in a close race that was not decided immediately.

He cruised to a general election victory in a Republican district. As he likes to remind people who have doubted him, he has gone to the political starting gates 18 times and has won in 16 of those tries.

He has a wife, Bobbi, and three children, two of whom have careers in government and politics.

He enjoys horseback riding. He recently rode a Clydesdale across the New Zealand countryside.

Tim Starks can be reached via tstarks@cq.com