Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  Sheehan was one of the mothers Bush had met at Fort Lewis with John McCain a year earlier. While she was a critic even then, she had emerged from that meeting talking about Bush’s sincerity and faith. Now as she recounted that meeting, she had a harsher recollection, accusing the president of being disrespectful by referring to her as “Mom” and not knowing her son’s name. Suddenly the grieving mother turned peace activist outside the president’s ranch became a media sensation, an easy story for White House reporters with little other news on slow summer days.

  Sheltered in the ranch, Bush talked with aides about what to do. Should he meet with her? There was some sentiment for that, taking on the issue both to show that he was unafraid and to express the pain he felt for those who had lost loved ones. But he opted not to. He had already met with her once and disliked the idea of giving in to what amounted to a public relations stunt, backed in part by liberal donors and consultants. Instead, he sent Hadley and Joe Hagin to meet with her.

  He could not have picked two more sympathetic or patient members of his staff, and for forty-five minutes they talked with Sheehan outside the ranch, listening to her grievances about the war and the president she blamed for her son’s death.

  “Don’t let the president say that he needs to send more troops to get killed in order to honor the sacrifice of my son,” she told them.

  They promised to convey her message to Bush and made one last attempt to convince her of the president’s sincerity.

  “I know you feel like he doesn’t care,” Hagin told her, “but I can tell you, I sit in these meetings, and he cares very, very deeply.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Sheehan said.

  They reported back to Bush. “We don’t think we made a lot of progress,” Hagin said.

  Bush was bothered she would see him as uncaring.

  Within days, other activists made the pilgrimage to Crawford as the protest captured the public imagination. Bush aides found photographs of his 2004 meeting with Sheehan that seemed to refute her depiction of it, about a dozen images of him hugging her, holding her hand, or putting an arm around her shoulder. Some wanted to release them to the media to undercut her account. “We are not going to do that,” Bush said.

  On August 11, Bush met with Cheney and the national security team at the ranch. Appearing in a short-sleeve shirt before reporters, he used the opportunity to respond to Sheehan.

  “You know, listen, I sympathize with Mrs. Sheehan,” he said. “She feels strongly about her position. And she has every right in the world to say what she believes. This is America. She has a right to her position. And I’ve thought long and hard about her position. I’ve heard her position from others, which is, get out of Iraq now. And it would be a mistake for the security of this country and the ability to lay the foundations for peace in the long run if we were to do so.”

  Amid the violence in Iraq and discontent at home, Bush clung to the notion that the political process would turn things around. Iraqi negotiators were scrambling to meet an August 15 deadline for producing a new constitution. But in the four-page note he got every night from his Iraq advisers, Meghan O’Sullivan and Brett McGurk, Bush read on the evening of Au- gust 12 that there was no way the Iraqis would make the deadline.

  Sure enough, a few days later, the deadline passed with no agreement. It would be two more weeks before they finally came up with an accord. Whether the agreement would bring the country together remained to be seen.

  23

  “This is the end of the presidency”

  President Bush pressed his face against the window, staring out at oblivion. As his jet swooped low over New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the president saw an expansive lake where a city used to be. He saw mile after mile of houses turned into so many matchsticks. He saw highways that disappeared into water, a train plucked off its track, a causeway collapsed into rubble. And he saw the next daunting challenge confronting his presidency.

  It was August 31, and Hurricane Katrina had ravaged the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, laying waste to everything in its path. Hundreds of thousands of people were without shelter, electricity, food, or all three. Just two days earlier, Bush thought the coast had dodged a bullet, only to learn otherwise and belatedly cut short his Texas getaway to fly back to Washington to oversee the crisis response. With rescue efforts still under way, he was told it would be too disruptive to land the plane, but his pilots said they could give him a good look from the air.

  Colonel Mark Tillman, the chief Air Force One pilot, pushed the plane down from its cruising altitude of twenty-nine thousand feet and skimmed seventeen hundred feet above the ground for a thirty-five-minute inspection of the arc of devastation. From the air, New Orleans appeared washed out, a city with virtually no visible signs of habitation. Bush noticed the Superdome with part of the roof peeled back and saw a neighborhood of houses where water reached up to and even above the roofs. As Bush watched, a Coast Guard helicopter hovered so low that its rotor blades whipped up the water below, apparently conducting a rescue mission. “It’s devastating,” Bush told aides. “It’s got to be doubly devastating on the ground.”

  As the jet headed east to the city’s outskirts and beyond, Bush saw that some suburban and rural communities were virtually obliterated. Acres of forest were leveled, trees flattened as if stepped on. An amusement park looked like a model in a bathtub, the hills of the roller coaster emerging from the water. Reaching Mississippi, Bush saw the demolished area around the towns of Waveland and Pass Christian, where wooden houses were smashed into scrap lumber. Bush thought it looked like the aftermath of a nuclear bomb. “It’s totally wiped out,” he murmured. Bush pointed to a church still standing while houses around it were destroyed. In Gulfport and Biloxi, the casinos were partially destroyed. Bush said little as he absorbed the enormity of the disaster.

  By the time he got back to the White House, Bush had launched himself into crisis management mode, reviewing the massive relief effort being mobilized—navy ships, medical teams, search-and-rescue squads, electrical generators, a mobile hospital, millions of gallons of water. He agreed to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to replace some of the oil and gasoline that would be temporarily cut off and then he marched out to the Rose Garden to reassure the nation that he was back and in charge. “The challenges that we face on the ground are unprecedented,” he said. “But there’s no doubt in my mind we’re going to succeed.”

  The I’m-in-charge, we-will-succeed message that worked after the September 11 attacks did not work this time. The image of Bush staring out the window at the damage and the “doubly devastating” quote relayed to the media gave the impression of a leader flying above the fray, dangerously detached from reality on the ground. While he had been briefed repeatedly in the days leading up to the storm, delaying his return to Washington made it look as if he were dithering while New Orleans drowned, touching off a hail of criticism from his adversaries. “He has to get off his mountain bike and back to work,” declared Representative Rahm Emanuel, a member of the Democratic leadership.

  Now deep in the fifth year of a presidency already marked by one crisis after another, Bush was slow to recognize the scale of the disaster. He and his team were scattered—Bush cutting brush in Texas, Vice President Cheney vacationing in Wyoming, Andy Card celebrating an anniversary in Maine, Condoleezza Rice attending Spamalot on Broadway, and others traveling to Greece for the wedding of Nicolle Devenish and another Bush aide, Mark Wallace. By this point, the team had dealt with so many other crises, they had grown “perhaps a little complacent,” as Scott McClellan concluded.

  To be sure, Bush had received conflicting information. On August 28, before the hurricane hit land, the president walked over to one of the double-wide trailers at the ranch to join a secure videoconference about the storm, studying maps with his reading glasses as experts gave assessments.

  “The forecast we have now suggests that there will be minimal flooding in the city of New
Orleans itself,” Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, told him. But Mayfield emphasized the fluidity of such predictions. “If that track were to deviate just a little bit to the west, it would—it makes all the difference in the world. I do expect there will be some of the levees over top even out here in the western portions here where the airport is.”

  He added, “I don’t think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but that’s obviously a very, very grave concern.”

  Michael Brown, who had succeeded his old college friend Joe Allbaugh as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, put it more starkly. “This is, to put it mildly, the Big One I think,” he said.

  Bush said little on the call other than to thank everyone for their hard work and promise any help the federal government could offer.

  In the days and hours leading up to the hurricane’s landfall, he received updates from Brown, Mayfield, and Joe Hagin, who was with him at the ranch. Brown called and implored the president to convince leaders in Louisiana to order a mandatory evacuation. “I can’t get it through their heads,” Brown told him. As the storm bore down on the coast, Bush called Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco in Louisiana, reaching her on her mobile phone as she was stepping up to a news conference.

  “This is going to be a really, really big storm,” he told her.

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Blanco said.

  “I’m calling to ask you to call a mandatory evacuation,” Bush said.

  “Mr. President, we’re on our way out to do that,” Blanco said.

  But while the city had been encouraging residents to leave for days, the mandatory evacuation order came too late for many to get out. On August 29, Bush left the ranch for a previously scheduled trip to Arizona, where he talked about Social Security and presented John McCain with a birthday cake that melted on the airport tarmac, then headed for California, where he was scheduled to participate the next day in a ceremony marking the end of World War II in the Pacific theater.

  At first, he was told the hurricane largely skirted New Orleans, but Blanco called him that evening and asked for help. “We’re going to need everything you’ve got,” she said.

  Bush told her help was on the way, but it was not clear exactly what she was requesting. Reassured by his aides that the government was on the case, Bush headed to bed.

  At 5:00 a.m. Pacific time on August 30, he was woken at his San Diego hotel and told the situation was far worse than initially thought. He joined a videoconference, along with Cheney, Card, Brown, and Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary.

  “What’s the situation?” Bush asked.

  “Bad,” Brown said. “This was the Big One.”

  Brown sounded harried as he outlined what he knew. “I can tell you, sir, that 90 percent of the people of New Orleans have been displaced by this event.”

  Bush was stunned. “Ninety percent?” he asked. “Are you sure?”

  The president decided to cut short his vacation. But he went ahead with his day’s schedule in California first. While backstage in San Diego, a country music singer gave him a guitar as a gift, and the president gamely strummed it for a moment or two. He did not realize Martha Raddatz of ABC News was backstage at the time, and she caught the all-too-casual moment on film. Exacerbating the lack of urgency, he decided he would stop in Texas for the night before heading back to the White House the next morning.

  For the return flight to Washington, Karl Rove suggested flying over New Orleans to demonstrate concern. McClellan and Dan Bartlett opposed the idea. “He’s going to be at ten thousand feet, and it’s going to make him look out of touch,” McClellan complained on a conference call. The idea seemed to go away. But then the next day, the plane began heading toward the Gulf Coast anyway, and McClellan, feeling worn down by the ongoing fight with Rove over the CIA leak, did not protest again. At least don’t bring the photographers to the front of the plane, Bartlett urged from Washington. But they were anyway, in keeping with the program Rove had set.

  The television coverage that night was brutal, in Bartlett’s mind probably the worst of the entire presidency.

  “MR. PRESIDENT, I definitely need more troops.” Blanco was on the phone and desperate for help. She had called the White House that Wednesday looking for Bush, only to be shuffled off to one aide after another. Finally, she and the president connected, and she asked for forty thousand troops. “I just ballparked it; I just did that in my head,” she said later.

  Without the military, the federal government was ill-equipped to respond to a disaster of this scope. FEMA did not own a single fire truck, boat, or helicopter; it was mainly a check-writing, contracting agency that financed frontline rescue work by states and localities in the days after an initial crisis. But Louisiana and New Orleans leaders were overwhelmed and as far as Bush could tell unable to cope without extraordinary help. On one videoconference, Michael Brown told Bush that Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans was behaving like a “crack head” and that Blanco was out of her league.

  Bush was fully engaged at this point in leading the government’s response. But having pushed every legal boundary in the wake of Septem- ber 11 to respond to what he saw as the threat to the country, four years later he now went in the other direction, allowing himself to be stymied by legal arguments about the extent of his powers. A nineteenth-century law called the Posse Comitatus Act barred the federal military from exercising police powers on American soil, and Bush was told by advisers that the only way to circumvent that would be to invoke another antiquated statute known as the Insurrection Act or have a state government agree to hand over control of the National Guard.

  Donald Rumsfeld resisted sending in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, arguing that Americans might bristle at seeing soldiers in the streets.

  Rice, back from New York, retorted, “They’ll welcome the sight of the military.”

  Some White House officials were angry enough that they thought the president should tell Rumsfeld to issue deployment orders by noon or resign.

  Rumsfeld was backed up by Lieutenant General Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard bureau, who argued that federalizing the effort would be “overreach constitutionally” and “a colossal mistake” logistically; instead of helping, he told Bush, such a move would actually hinder the operations of the thousands of guardsmen already streaming into the region from states around the country.

  Bush was aggravated but did not take on Rumsfeld. Nor did he call on the carpet Brown, the FEMA director whose background as stewards and judges commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association did little to prepare him for managing a national catastrophe. Brown at one point on television did not even realize thousands of people had taken refuge at the convention center in New Orleans without food or water. Bush watched with exasperation as rescue efforts faltered. “What the hell is taking so long?” he asked. “Why can’t we get these people out of the Superdome?” If the media could get to the convention center, Bush railed, how come rescue workers couldn’t? A volatile situation was made worse by false media reports about gunmen, scaring rescue workers away from the Superdome and other locations.

  Bush decided to fly to the region on September 2, this time landing to examine the damage up close. As he prepared to leave the White House to board Marine One, Bartlett suggested he express his impatience in front of the cameras waiting on the South Lawn, reasoning that the public wanted to see him as frustrated as they were.

  “Tell ’em,” Bartlett said.

  Bush agreed. “The results are not acceptable,” he told reporters sternly, before boarding the helicopter.

  Despite oft-repeated denials, Bush did, in fact, read newspapers, although he tended not to watch much television news. To make sure he fully understood just how bad the situation was, Bartlett put together a DVD of newscasts for the president to watch on the flight down to the region to give him a sense of what the rest of the c
ountry was seeing—and how much more dire the situation was than it seemed through official channels. Bush was shocked and angry.

  At one point, Bush saw a fire burning on the video.

  “What’s that?” he snapped.

  Some isolated fires had broken out along the coast, Michael Chertoff told him.

  “Put the fire out now!” Bush said. “I want that fire out.”

  When he reached Mobile, Alabama, Bush doffed his suit coat, rolled up his sleeves, and met privately with regional leaders. Walking to an airport hangar, Governor Bob Riley of Alabama praised Brown and the federal workers.

  “Your guys, Mike Brown, everybody is doing a heck of a job,” Riley told Bush.

  Evidently, the words stuck in Bush’s head, because when he went back out in front of cameras a few minutes later, he repeated them.

  “Brownie,” he said, “you’re doing a heck of a job.”

  Bush had gone from “not acceptable” to “heck of a job” in just a few hours. Just as he deferred to his generals in Iraq, Bush by inclination was not ready to question how his people on the front lines on the Gulf Coast were performing. But he cemented an impression of disconnect with a gaffe that would harden into one of the worst moments of his presidency.

  Bush then flew to New Orleans, where he met with local leaders aboard Air Force One parked on the tarmac at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. Mayor Nagin, exhausted and sweaty, used the plane’s shower. The conversation that ensued was frenzied and unconstructive. Senator Mary Landrieu was distraught, talking through tears and seeming in emotional meltdown.

  Bush tired of her. “Would you please be quiet?” he said sharply.

  Nagin was frazzled too and “near nervous breakdown,” Blanco thought. He lost his temper and slammed his hand down on the conference table, demanding that the president and the governor coordinate. Bush tried to cut through the emotion and figure out the chain of command.