The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  A private man by nature, Bush was never a particularly accessible president, nor an outwardly sensitive one. The average U.S. president looms as a patriarchal figure, but Bush conducted himself like the last of the Victorians: jocular, yet remote and undemonstrative, divulging drips of information only when absolutely necessary. Under the right circumstances, Bush’s rough-and-ready Texas demeanor gave the impression of a tough, self-contained cattle rancher blessed with a decisive Harry Truman bent. Many Americans were attracted to his central Texas swagger and enjoyed seeing him drive a Ford F-250 or clear brush with his Scottish terrier, Barney, at his side. But he often waited before being decisive. He was a practitioner of the prolonged pause. It was as if his certitude was learned—not inherent in his makeup.

  After the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Bush was unseen during the first eleven hours, making only brief statements and effectively ceding the public leadership role in the crisis to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York. When President Bush emerged from his isolation, it was in a role in which he was comfortable: the Crawford aggressor, intent on revenge. With local New York and Washington officials handling the immediate emergencies of their cities (and FEMA doing a good job assisting in relief), President Bush seized the leadership role that interested him most: commander in chief. A “war on terrorism” was waged, first against Afghanistan and then against Iraq. It was a bold offensive move. A Bush doctrine was even formulated, which stated that the United States had the option of presumptive military strikes in its superpower arsenal. If the White House thought the United States would be attacked, it would attack first. This took deterrence to a whole new level. You had to admire President Bush for being a man of steely conviction, even if you thought his policies were wrong. Munich-like appeasement was not in Bush’s nature, and diplomacy was not his forte. But you had to give him this: if you even threatened to punch, he punched back harder. As he told White House aides on the eve of his 2006 State of the Union address, 9/11 was “tattooed” on his mind—always.19

  A hurricane, though, offers no target for revenge. You could bomb terrorist havens outside Kabul or hunt for weapons stockpiles in Baghdad, but all you could do after a hurricane was shake your clenched fist at the sky. The damage was done and what remained were the unglamorous details of putting daily American lives back together, without a martial snare drum or a Sousa band. After Katrina, the Gulf South region—and the United States as a whole—needed compassion. What it got instead was the incompetence of George W. Bush, who acted as though he were disinterested in a natural disaster in which there was no enemy to be found. More than any other event, Bush’s slow response to the Great Deluge made Americans ask if he was a “bunker” commander in chief, unfastened from the suffering of the Gulf South, relying too much on cautious paper pushers such as Brown and Chertoff for advice. The gutsy president, it seemed, couldn’t find his gut, much less his heart, in his reaction to Katrina. He was starting to be called the “bubble president.”

  III

  On Tuesday, however, President Bush’s primary consideration shifted to the military—and, by extension, to the war in Iraq. With appearances scheduled in Southern California, he had spent Monday night at the historic Hotel Del Coronado, a seaside resort just outside San Diego. On his agenda were several photo ops, including one to honor Navy medics who had helped victims of the December 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. The keynote event, though, was to be a speech honoring World War II veterans who fought on flyspeck islands like Midway, Guadalcanal, and Tarawa. In going through with the appearances, Bush seemed to be sadly out of touch with the plight of approximately two million of his Gulf South constituents. First thing on Tuesday, his staff at the White House met about the impact of Hurricane Katrina. They concluded that the President would have to take action on the crisis, cutting short his vacation, flying to Washington after one last night in Crawford, and directing the response of the White House, or at least appearing to do so.20 At 5 A.M. Pacific time, Joe Hagin, the deputy chief of staff who was traveling with the presidential entourage, ordered that the President be woken up. The scene, a red dawn on the Pacific, was less dramatic than it might have been: Bush calmly told Hagin that he had already decided that he would forgo the rest of his vacation to focus on Katrina. It was only three days, after all. A public-relations-savvy Bush may have remembered the flak his friend Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, had taken for remaining on vacation on the Black Sea four years before, when the submarine Kursk had sunk with the loss of all 118 on board.

  Bush wasn’t going to pull a Putin. He knew he couldn’t stay away from the White House on a prolonged vacation in Texas or California while three states—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama—were desperate for federal help. A worried Bush scheduled a meeting of White House domestic advisors for the following day, Wednesday. That would give them all a chance to return from their own vacations.21 But there was one high-profile holdout: Vice President Dick Cheney stayed in Wyoming, fly-fishing for trout in gurgling streams. Professor Stephen Hess of George Washington University, picking up on the vice president’s absence from Washington, quipped, “Maybe Cheney’s been ducking this one because he wants to keep his shirt clean.”22 The quick-witted Paul Begala, a Democratic pundit, saw a PR-minded rationale for Cheney’s nonappearance. “Nobody’s going to confuse Cheney with a warm and fuzzy guy,” he said. “You’re not going to send him to be commander in chief. He’s the type of guy who would look at them and growl, ‘Life’s tough. Get back to work.’”23

  In Atlanta on Tuesday, Chertoff, listening to presentations about the flu, was apparently unconcerned with the massive flooding in New Orleans—even though he had been told by Brown the night before about the 17th Street Canal breach and even though reports on television on Tuesday morning were showing live footage of a city and a region falling into the very pits of inhumanity. During the first thirty-six hours after Katrina hit, Chertoff seemed, as Jimmy Duckworth would say, “out of the game.” The same was true of Cheney. As for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield, he had spent Monday evening enjoying a Padres baseball game in San Diego at Petco Park. Later, in October, when Chertoff testified on Capitol Hill about his lackluster leadership during the early days after the hurricane, he was lambasted by both Democrats and Republicans. “I have a feeling that the Department of Homeland Security is dysfunctional,” Congressman Christopher Shays (R-Connecticut) scolded Chertoff. “I get the feeling that you were a little detached from this. It’s kind of like Pontius Pilate washing his hands.”24

  Out in Southern California President Bush began his morning speech at the North Island Naval Air Station. Most of his words were about V-J Day and the United States postwar occupation of Japan, but he did make a reference to the hurricane damage along the Gulf Coast, saying, “Right now, our priority is on saving lives, and we are still in the midst of search-and-rescue operations. I urge everyone in the affected areas to continue to follow instructions from state and local authorities. The federal, state and local governments are working side-by-side to do all we can to help people get back on their feet.”25

  In San Diego around noon, Mark Wills, a country music singer known for the hits “19 Something” and “Don’t Laugh at Me,” presented Bush with a guitar bearing the presidential seal. The President took it and strummed a fake chord as cameras clicked away. It was an odd juxtaposition: the photograph of Bush playing air guitar, while Americans were seeing inexplicable agony in pictures from the Gulf Coast. Even President Bush’s most loyal supporters were wondering about his disconnect from reality, and the media hammered him. Commenting on MSNBC, Howard Fineman of Newsweek recalled another presidential picture—one taken in 1965, when, within hours of Hurricane Betsy’s destruction along the Louisiana coast, Lyndon Johnson had taken the initiative to fly immediately into New Orleans. “With no electricity in the darkness there,” Fineman wrote, “Lyndon Baines Johnson held a flashlight to his face and proclaimed, ‘This is the President of the United St
ates and I’m here to help you!’”26

  One person who believed President Bush’s promises was Mayor Ray Nagin, who in the coming days would communicate regularly with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, bragging to Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson that he was a new buddy of the man. They were going to rebuild together, baby. “We have the highest levels of government in the United States, including the President of the United States,” Nagin said on Tuesday morning, “focused on this issue and ready to send resources. They have told us to put together our wish lists.”27 The mayor was still holed up in the Hyatt Hotel, trying to turn it into a command center for New Orleans’s recovery. Even so, he didn’t know what he was up against, either in terms of the extent of the disaster or the degree of disunity and disorganization in the ranks of the various agencies charged with recovery operations. His telephones were dead and he had little contact with state or federal officials. “The madness of C. Ray is killing us,” Clancy Dubos of Gambit Weekly wrote months after Katrina, evaluating Nagin’s performance in office. “He should seriously consider resigning—but I doubt that he could muster either the intellectual honesty or courage to take such a step. His ego is too monumental, his myopia too mind-numbing, his detachment from reality too complete.”28

  Joseph B. Treaster of the New York Times, reporting from City Hall, noted that Nagin just never seemed to be around. Terry Ebbert was in charge. When asked why he thought that was the case, Treaster, careful in his choice of words, said, “Well, it’s more comfortable in the Hyatt than City Hall.”29

  What Nagin spent the day doing was awaiting the federal cavalry, pointing fingers at everybody but himself, and swearing. Swearing a lot. Swearing all the time. Everything was Blanco’s fault. He peppered his language with “asses” and “shit” and “damn” and “man.” It was “Ray Speak” gone wild. “Analyze my ass,” he told Gordon Russell of the Times-Picayune, “analyze everyone’s ass, man.” As for his failures, it boiled down to communications. “I got cell phones from as high up as the White House that didn’t work,” he said. “My BlackBerry pin-to-pin was the only thing that worked. I saw the military struggle with this, too. No one had communications worth a damn.”30

  Being in New Orleans at midday on Tuesday was dispiriting. The break in the 17th Street Canal had widened to 500 feet by Tuesday afternoon. It was a widemouthed spigot pouring water from the lake into the city, rendering the city’s thirteen fully manned pumping stations worthless. Even if the pumps did their job and pumped water out of the city (at a rate of 29 billion gallons a day), the stations sent water into the lake—and then it came right back. The only rational decision was to shut down the pumping stations, several of which then flooded themselves, making them unusable. The lake won, and it wasn’t even finished throwing its punches. The canals, meant to drain New Orleans, became, as the Times-Picayune put it, “major vectors for filling it with water, wrecking neighborhoods and killing many of the 1,000 people who perished” after Katrina hit.31

  The entire city was seething in despair. The whole state was, as well: an estimated 22 million tons of debris lay scattered all over Louisiana, not including the 350,000 automobiles and 35,000 boats destroyed by Katrina. Pick a building, block, or coastal parish and something bad had happened there. Dillard College and Xavier University were severely flooded. Outside of the D-Day Museum a woman was raped. Tom Planchet of WWL-TV reported that on Tuesday 11:30 A.M. “Canal Street was literally a canal.” He elaborated: “Water lapped at the edge of the French Quarter. Clumps of red ants floated in the gasoline-fouled waters downtown.”32 The French Quarter survived without much flooding because of its location: it was on slightly higher ground, and it was alongside the Mississippi River, where the levees did not break.

  Because the breached levees of Lake Pontchartrain caused so much destruction, the fact that the river levees held firm failed to make headlines. Down in Plaquemines Parish the levees withstood masochistic winds of 115 mph with unremitting waves topping over ten feet. Also unreported at the time were runaway barges slamming into the levees over and over again. A number of “I” walls built on top of the Mississippi River levees for added security were damaged, but the main levee itself absorbed all of the storm’s punishing blows. “While Katrina was making short work of many hurricane protection levees in the region, the levee system designed to guard the area from the ravages of the country’s mightiest river survived the hurricane remarkably well,” Bob Marshall wrote in the Times-Picayune. “And engineers familiar with the two different systems said there are lessons to be learned from the comparison that could help protect New Orleans in future storms, lessons that reach all the way to the will of Congress.”33

  Because the Mississippi River levees didn’t breach, the fine old residential sections of the city known as Uptown received only wind damage, sparing the homes of blue bloods, academics, corporate leaders, trial lawyers, and real estate developers. Worried more about looting than flooding, the Uptowners decided to create their own community watch. Private police were shipped in to provide protection for the district. (They knew better than to count on the NOPD.) In the cases of most residents, the personal hurricane stories concerned dramatic escapes to Aspen and Sun Valley or how they flew in private helicopters, evacuating their poodles, de Kooning paintings, and old family portraits of soldiers in Lee’s army. To many Uptown residents, dislocation meant staying at their second home in West Palm Beach or Cape Cod or Natchez longer than planned. The relatively unscathed Uptown and French Quarter sections became known as the “sliver by the river.”34

  IV

  Just after 3 P.M. on Tuesday, Senator David Vitter participated in a nationally televised news conference from Baton Rouge, during which he made one of the more ill-advised statements heard in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. (Unfortunately, many remarks would vie for that inglorious designation.)

  Vitter, a forty-four-year-old Republican serving his first year in the U.S. Senate, had been wandering around the Baton Rouge EOC since Monday, with essentially nothing to do. The other politicians at the press briefing—Governor Kathleen Blanco, Senator Mary Landrieu, Lieutenant Colonel Pete Schneider of the Coast Guard, and Bill Lokey, the coordinating officer for FEMA—took turns describing the worsening conditions in southeastern Louisiana. “I know there’s been a lot of concern about the levee breaches,” Schneider said. “We had a conference call just about an hour ago with Colonel Wagner with the Corps of Engineers. He has been up in a helicopter surveying the entire situation, and they’re diligently working on a plan that is going to close these breaches…. They realize the gravity of the situation. They’re not sparing resources on getting this fixed. And we’re confident that the Corps will come up with a solution to this problem quickly.”35

  Senator Landrieu made the salient point that the flood reports pouring into the EOC were ninety minutes old. Everything was in flux, and an hour was an eternity. The water level, she said, had probably changed significantly since the last report. As she trailed off, Vitter clumsily leaped in, wanting to be part of the media action, brimming over with the last vestige of Louisiana’s damning obliviousness to reality. “In the metropolitan area in general,” Senator Vitter said, speaking of the floodwater, “it’s not rising at all. It’s the same or it may be lowering slightly. In some parts of New Orleans, because of the 17th Street breach, it may be rising and that seemed to be the case in parts of downtown. I don’t want to alarm everybody that, you know, New Orleans is filling up like a bowl. That’s just not happening.”36

  How wrong could a United States senator be? What planet was he on? New Orleans was filling up like a bowl. Lake Pontchartrain was gushing into the streets, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water every second. If you went to Lakeview, the water was twelve to fifteen feet high. Neither the levees nor the pumps were working. “A sunken city,” John Zarrella of CNN had earlier described the situation. “Most of New Orleans is now under water. And it will likely be days, maybe weeks, maybe mont
hs before the Big Easy dries out.”37 The delicate bowl analogy had come to fruition. The water was omnipresent in many of Orleans Parish’s wards. After offering his disclaimer, Vitter listened as Governor Blanco responded to the next question by saying that in the vicinity of the Superdome, the water was knee-deep and steadily rising. Vitter could only sheepishly stand by, smiling like Gomer Pyle—clueless. “Truth to tell,” Terry Ebbert, New Orleans’s director of Homeland Security, explained to Times-Picayune reporter Dan Shea about the same time Vitter was in denial, “we’re not far from filling in the bowl.”38

  Giving Vitter the benefit of the doubt, CNN deemed his erroneous remarks “an oddly discordant statement.”39 Just an hour before Vitter made his gaffe that New Orleans wasn’t “filling up like a bowl,” Dr. Greg Henderson of Washington, D.C., stranded in the city while at a convention, e-mailed his family explaining the dire situation along Canal Street, which was “underwater.” Although he himself was fine, he lamented that Charity and Tulane hospitals, both just blocks away, had flooded, and patients were unable to receive proper medical care. “The city now has no clean water, no sewage system, no electricity, and no real communications,” Henderson wrote. “Bodies are still being recovered floating in the floods.” In harrowing detail, he described how looters had made Styrofoam rafts to float down streets, how armed cliques of renegades were discharging weapons, and how a French Quarter bar had been made into a makeshift clinic. “Infection and perhaps even cholera are anticipated major problems,” Henderson said. “Flood and water shortages are imminent.”40