FAMILIES OF THE Sept. 11 attack victims have earned the right to celebrate a tremendous victory. By refusing to give up and go away, they shamed the Bush White House and some foot-draggers in Congress into creating an independent, bipartisan commission, charged with conducting a wide-ranging inquiry into why the nation was left so vulnerable to the terrorist attacks.

But President Bush's appointment last week of Henry Kissinger to chair the commission makes clear the crusade for a genuine investigation rather than a political whitewash is not over. The families will have to convert their highly effective lobby into a watchdog group to keep after the Kissinger commission with the same tenacity that forced its creation.

Mr. Kissinger is not so much a bad choice as a safe one for the administration. As secretary of state and national security adviser for President Nixon, he was an inside power player mostly intent on promoting his own agenda.

His penchant for secrecy fits right in with the tip-lipped Bush crowd, but doesn't bode well for what should be an unflinching public examination of the flaws and foibles of America's defenses.

He's got the skill and the stature to get to the bottom of how so many things went wrong with the shaping and execution of U.S. policy to allow a mass attack on Americans on their own soil. Yet his record suggests he won't aggressively pursue topics that could prove embarrassing to Mr. Bush or complicate foreign policy.

As co-chairman, Democrats named former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who burnished his foreign policy expertise in recent years as a peace negotiator in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

Less of a lightning rod for critics than Mr. Kissinger, Mr. Mitchell was nonetheless a fierce partisan during his Senate tenure and chief nemesis to the president's father, George H.W. Bush, when he was in the White House.

The commission is directed by law to issue its findings within 18 months and recommend steps to make sure attacks like those of Sept. 11 never happen here again. But it's difficult to imagine that two such political men won't consider the impact of their report on the 2004 presidential election, which will be well under way.

Thus, the Kissinger-Mitchell combination has the potential for stalemate without somebody banging on the commission from the outside demanding progress.

That's where the Sept. 11 families come in. Since the immediate aftermath of the disaster, their faces and voices have been the most difficult for politicians to ignore.

They are surrogates for the thousands of murdered Americans who were just going about their business, never suspecting that their government had left them utterly unprotected from a massive attack that had been years in the planning.

And the families are already about the task of making sure the commission fulfills its charge. They are promoting candidates for other seats on the 10-member panel, scheduling meetings with Mr. Kissinger, planning to attend the commission hearings and suggesting lines of inquiry.

But even after the commission reports, relatives of those killed in the attacks won't consider their job done.

For them, says Stephen Push, whose wife died in the plane crashed into the Pentagon, making sure that every lesson possible is learned from the tragedy "is the work of a lifetime."