Katrina: After the Flood

by Gary Rivlin

  Nagin had been monosyllabic with Jimmy Reiss and friends that Saturday. With Farrakhan on Monday morning, Nagin spoke as an intimate. Farrakhan, Nagin said, was keen to hear about how the levees had been breached. They had been dynamited beforeI—was there any wonder some in the black community suspected it had happened again? “Did they bomb the levees?” Farrakhan asked Nagin. Rather than offer an emphatic no, Nagin repeated the official story as he had heard it: the loud, explosive noise people had heard in the Ninth Ward was most likely the sound of water, mud, and debris roaring through the community and demolishing homes. “We’ve yet to see any evidence to the contrary,” the mayor said carefully.

  The two spoke for about an hour. Their meeting ended with Farrakhan offering a friendly warning. You’re now a high-profile black man in America, he said, and therefore a target. “Be very careful,” the minister advised, adding, “Salaam alaikum”—“peace be unto you” in Arabic. “Salaam alaikum,” Nagin repeated, adding a “sir.”

  That night the mayor ate dinner with George Bush.

  NAGIN NEVER CALLED KATHLEEN BLANCO back. Blanco only learned the mayor was in Dallas because her people were picking up chatter about a big, invite-only meeting there. “Five days with my family at that point would have been nice,” she said.

  The two would see one another face-to-face if the president or some other notable was in town and protocol demanded that the mayor and the governor both be there. But otherwise there was little direct contact. “It wasn’t just me,” Blanco said. “He stayed holed up in that hotel room, scared to death . . . having no idea what to do.” Through intermediaries, she offered a helicopter to bring him to the state capital. She passed word that she was in New Orleans a few times a week, helping to oversee the state’s part of the disaster recovery. “If he had gotten himself into Baton Rouge,” Blanco said, “if he would just agree to meet with me.” Eventually, Blanco hosted a lunch for Nagin at the executive mansion, but that meeting had been arranged by their respective communication directors for the television cameras and photographers.

  “It hampered their recovery,” Blanco said. “It meant everything took longer.” And it also harmed the reputation of a governor for whom New Orleans’s fate was also largely her own.

  IN A DIFFERENT WORLD, Blanco might be seen as a kind of superwoman. She alone had taken Katrina seriously among top leadership in the Gulf Coast. That Thursday, Blanco was supposed to be in Atlanta for a meeting of the Southern Governors’ Association. Though she was slated to be sworn in as the group’s chairwoman, she canceled the trip to stay closer to home. By Friday night, Blanco had declared a state of emergency. That was a day ahead of both Nagin, who was worried about the impact of a mandatory evacuation on the city’s tourist trade, and Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, where an estimated three hundred people died in the storm and thousands were left homeless. It was two days ahead of Bush.

  The president mentioned Iraq eight times in his weekly radio address that Saturday but did not bring up Katrina. The National Hurricane Center was doing its job by warning emergency-response directors across the region about the monstrous Category 4 or 5 storm bearing down on New Orleans, yet in Washington, a FEMA supervisor with twenty-five years’ experience bemoaned a lack of urgency inside the agency’s Washington headquarters. “They weren’t ordering buses for [an] evacuation,” he would tell a pair of reporters from the Wall Street Journal. “They weren’t . . . into the fray as FEMA has the power to do.” Nagin spent much of Saturday—five hours—on the set of Labou, a kids’ film being shot on location in New Orleans.II Afterward, he had dinner in Lakeview with his wife and daughter.

  Blanco, in contrast, was counting down the hours to a massive storm. On Saturday, she put both her staff and the Louisiana National Guard on alert and set herself up in the state’s Emergency Operations Center. Concerned that the storm wasn’t being taken seriously enough in New Orleans, she pestered Nagin and instructed her people to enlist the help of any legislator representing a New Orleans district. Her staff also pushed some of the city’s better-known ministers to encourage people to evacuate during their Sunday-morning sermons. On Sunday, George Bush reached Blanco on her cell phone to tell her that New Orleans needed to be under a mandatory evacuation order. She told the president he had reached her at a press conference in the city where Nagin was doing just that.

  Blanco had grown up with hurricanes in Cajun country in the southwestern corner of the state. Born Kathleen Babineaux, she was from Grand Coteau, Louisiana, a tiny hamlet where French was still the primary language. Her grandfather owned the area’s country store, and her father sold and cleaned carpets. She grew up hunting (in her run for governor, her campaign would release photos of her dressed in camouflage and holding a rifle to burnish her bona fides among rural voters) and attended an all-girls Catholic school that included group prayer several times a day. When she earned a degree in business education from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette, she became the first Babineaux to earn a four-year degree.

  Raymond Blanco was the head coach of her brother’s high school football team. In 1961 when they first started dating, she was nineteen and Raymond twenty-six. He showed up three hours late for their first date, but she recognized that he had a big heart so there was a second. “He was everybody’s caretaker,” she said. He had gotten a job as defensive coordinator for the University of Southwestern Louisiana football team by the time he proposed with a $500 engagement ring he could buy only because he had gotten hot playing blackjack at an illegal casino along the highway. The newly married Kathleen Blanco took a job teaching high school, but that lasted less than a year. She was pregnant and the rule was that a public school teacher couldn’t be showing in the classroom. She would remain a stay-at-home mom for the next dozen years, raising six children. The family finances improved when, in 1969, to help quell campus unrest, Raymond became the university’s dean of students. To earn extra money, Raymond, whom everyone still called Coach, did political commentaries for a local Lafayette television station and worked as an adviser on political campaigns.

  The governor-to-be first got involved in politics in the early 1970s, when the couple still had kids in diapers. At first it was short commitments, such as the time she volunteered to work on Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential run, but by her late thirties, she was working as regional deputy director for the US Census Bureau. When the incumbent state representative announced his retirement in 1984, Blanco, with Coach’s encouragement, started passing out candidate petitions. She won, and at the age of forty-one, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (the maiden name was added to remind locals of her Cajun roots) was representing Louisiana’s Forty-Fifth District in Baton Rouge. Four years later, she won a seat on Louisiana’s powerful Public Service Commission, the first female commissioner atop this statewide agency that oversees everything from utility and garbage-collection rates to towing outfits and bus companies. She was still halfway through her six-year term when she announced her intent to run for governor, but then suspended her campaign three months later. She wasn’t ready, she declared. Four years later, in 1995, she was elected to serve the first of two terms as lieutenant governor. She’d take over as governor after a close election against Piyush “Bobby” Jindal in 2003.

  Jindal was practically half Blanco’s age when the two faced off. A Rhodes Scholar, he had been only twenty-four years old when the Republican governor picked him to head the state’s health and hospitals department. By twenty-eight, he had been appointed president of the Louisiana university system, and at twenty-nine Bush nominated him to be an assistant secretary of health and human services. With Karl Rove’s blessings, Jindal resigned his post in the Bush administration in early 2003 to return to Louisiana to do his part to hold the governor’s mansion for the Republicans in November. He was thirty-two years old.

  Blanco was a politician easy to underestimate. She is short, thickset, and soft-spoken. But she was also politically shrewd and used Coach to pa
ss along her threats. Winning wouldn’t be easy in a state that leaned conservative. Jindal’s dark skin might hurt in some of the state’s more conservative precincts, but then so would her gender. It would be a close election—and winning meant everything had to go right in New Orleans, where she would need a big turnout to win.

  Nagin was a “lifelong Democrat,” or so he described himself. And Blanco was not just a Democrat but a fellow centrist representing the same moderate, pro-business wing of the party. She had cast herself as the good-government reformer who would disinfect the statehouse much as Nagin had done when seeking to take over City Hall. Blanco was calling for universal pre-K across the state, which would only help a parish whose public schools were 94 percent black and failing a frighteningly high percentage of its students. Another of her campaign pledges was to beef up funding for public hospitals and clinics around the state after Jindal had slashed budgets as secretary of the state’s health department. Yet rather than endorse his fellow Democrat, Nagin asked both her and Jindal to write why they thought they deserved his support. Jindal responded within forty-eight hours with what Nagin described as “an elaborate, well-thought-out response.” Two weeks passed before Blanco sent him a two-paragraph letter that stressed their shared party affiliation.

  Nagin phoned Blanco just before the press conference he held to endorse Jindal. He described Blanco as “ranting and raving” and quoted her as telling him, “You’re making a big mistake and there will be hell to pay.” (She said she was angry but made no threats.)

  The endorsement ended up meaning next to nothing. Nagin had no organization to help Jindal produce votes. Blanco won with 52 percent of the vote in no small part because she trounced Jindal in New Orleans. She was sworn in as governor in January of 2004, which gave the state’s new chief executive and the mayor of Louisiana’s largest city another twenty months to dislike one another before Katrina hit.

  FOR THE WHITE HOUSE, a bad week turned into two. Bush was supposed to be the compassionate conservative who was several notches more progressive on race than the typical Republican. As president he had given the country its first African-American secretary of state in Colin Powell and its second with Condoleezza Rice. Yet following Katrina, commentators spoke of a president who had said no every time he was invited to address the NAACP and were dissecting a record on race that left many blacks wishing for a Republican more like his father. “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” the rapper Kanye West said on network television during a hurricane-relief telethon held on the Friday after Katrina, while people were still stranded in New Orleans. Even the president’s mother caused him headaches during a photo op at the Houston Astrodome. There, where thousands of rescued New Orleanians were living temporarily, Barbara Bush said of a crowd who had lost their homes, possessions, and perhaps even a loved one or two, “So many of the people in the arena here were, you know, underprivileged anyway. So this is working out for them.”

  Polls revealed that the White House had a problem. Maybe it was no surprise that 85 percent of black respondents said the administration could have done more to help the relief efforts, but 63 percent of white respondents in a Pew poll agreed. Fidel Castro had volunteered to send fifteen hundred doctors and twenty-six tons of medicine to New Orleans. Russia offered four planes stocked with food, medicine, and rescue equipment. Around the globe, people were questioning the administration’s basic competency given the bad news out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, the United States of America, the most powerful nation on earth, the lone remaining superpower and the first country a foreign leader might call if in need, was the globe’s biggest charity case. It would fall to Karl Rove, the political mastermind whom some insiders dubbed “Bush’s brain,” and Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, to devise a strategy that would contain the damage and perhaps rescue the remainder of the president’s second term.

  That first weekend after Katrina, Rove and Bartlett established a war room inside the White House. Coached emissaries were offered to all the Sunday news shows, and the pair devised a schedule that had cabinet secretaries showing up regularly on the Gulf Coast. The administration’s commitment to the people of the region would be punctuated by frequent visits by the president. Over the weekend, Rove and Bartlett assembled top congressional Republicans to work on talking points. One attendee told the New York Times that Rove admonished them not to take the bait from Democrats. This is no time to play the “blame game,” they were told to say, when a great American city was facing ruin.

  The administration dumped Michael Brown while Nagin was still in Dallas. One week after the “heckuva job, Brownie” pat on the back, the FEMA director was summoned to Washington and stripped of responsibility for the Katrina-relief efforts. In his place the president appointed Vice Admiral Thad Allen, the Coast Guard’s chief of staff. Three days later, Brown resigned.III Bush’s job approval stood barely at 40 percent—and seemed in free fall. (Gallup found that Bush’s approval rating was down to 25 percent in October 2008, a few months before the end of his second term.) “It was the darkest period of the presidency for those of us in the White House,” Dan Bartlett said.

  Was it any wonder with a president sinking in the polls that Republican operatives were whispering in the ears of reporters, pundits, and other parts of the chattering class that if you wanted to know who was to blame for this mess, you should take a good look at this woman Rove described “as simply not up to the challenge.” Kathleen Blanco had beaten a good man, Bobby Jindal, for governor. Let her share in the misery of a PR disaster that was big enough for more than a single politician to be at fault.

  BLANCO MADE HER MISTAKES after the flooding. On the Monday Katrina hit New Orleans, FEMA hosted a noontime videoconference for officials who were part of the rescue efforts. By that time, Blanco’s chief counsel had told her about the collapse of part of the Seventeenth Street Canal levee, yet she dismissed it as an “unconfirmed report” and then emphasized, incorrectly, “We have not breached the levee at this point in time.” Yet she also stressed that overtopping—rather than any breaks in the defense system—meant flooding so severe in some New Orleans neighborhoods that “we have people swimming.” Midweek, at a press conference to announce that three hundred National Guardsmen from Arkansas were joining the fifteen hundred Guardsmen already in the city, she reminded everyone that these soldiers had recently returned from Iraq. They were there, she stressed, to prevent looting, not aid in the rescue. “They have M16s, and they’re locked and loaded,” she said. “These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.”

  Yet Blanco performed admirably that week. She ordered any and all available employees working for the state’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to New Orleans, which meant around two hundred boats working the floodwaters in and around New Orleans. She assigned one of her top people the job of recruiting shrimpers, oystermen, tour operators, and anyone else who might have a craft that could help reach people trapped by water. By midweek, the city needed buses more than boats, but that wasn’t for a lack of effort on Blanco’s part, who brought up the issue incessantly in conversations with federal officials. On Monday night, she called the president and told him, “We need everything you’ve got.” By Wednesday, she was asking the White House for forty thousand troops. Seeing that the state’s shelters were overflowing, she convinced Texas governor Rick Perry to open the Astrodome as an emergency shelter. Maybe her savviest move was the decision several days after Katrina to hire James Lee Witt—the man who had remade FEMA under Bill Clinton—to help Louisiana navigate the opaque byways of the Washington bureaucracy in the months ahead.

  Blanco blamed Karl Rove for the beating her reputation took in the weeks after Katrina. She saw his fingerprints all over the president’s gambit on Air Force One when the president told her she would need to stand down from her command before he sent in federal troops. Within days, Bob Mann, Blanco’s communic
ations director, was receiving phone calls from reporters repeating unflattering quotes about his boss. Each was attributed to “unnamed senior White House officials.” Even her play-it-down-the-middle chief of staff, Andy Kopplin, who had held that same position for her Republican predecessor, saw partisan politics at play. “There was an unfortunate attempt to politicize the response to Katrina to help a president getting terrible press,” Kopplin later said.

  Nagin, too, saw Rove playing politics with the disaster. For days the mayor was worked up over his appearance on Meet the Press, when Tim Russert flashed an aerial photo of a hundred Orleans Parish school buses underwater. “This was classic Karl Rove,” Nagin complained to people around him. And how do you think Russert learned that the city ignored Amtrak’s offer to send extra trains to help with the evacuation? The last five Amtrak trains to leave New Orleans on the Sunday evening before Katrina carried no passengers—“ghost trains,” the Washington Post called them. “Karl Rove is good, real good,” Nagin said.

  Yet isolated in the Hyatt, Nagin imagined that Blanco was his true tormentor. He fumed when he learned around a week after Katrina that the sandbag-carrying helicopters he had ordered to plug the Seventeenth Street Canal breach had temporarily been hijacked by the governor’s people so they could save a politically connected pastor and members of his congregation. Nagin described it as “diverting helicopters from plugging levee breaches to perform political favors.” The New Orleans police desperately needed help, but Blanco, Nagin said, was “secretly assigning” National Guard troops “to areas in the state not in crisis.” Sometimes he blamed Blanco for failures that were the federal government’s fault if not a consequence of one of his own blunders.

  “I kept hoping and praying the governor would snap into action,” Nagin said. “Unfortunately, she never did.” He accused Blanco of using Katrina to fulfill the threat she had delivered during the governor’s race.