Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was onboard and so was Representative William Jefferson, the first African American to be elected to Congress in Louisiana since Reconstruction. Jefferson was a powerful member of the Ways and Means Committee. If Louisiana were to receive billions of dollars in federal aid, Jefferson would be a key conduit through which the cash would flow. Jefferson sat next to Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson on the plane. Both African-American leaders—one a Democrat, the other a Republican—urged President Bush to “reach out” to the black community. “Alphonso and I felt it was important for the President to put his feet on the ground in New Orleans,” Jefferson said. “He was going to visit the 17th Street Canal, which was fine, but that was upscale and white. We thought he needed to meet the folks that were hurt…. But [the security advisors]thought it was too dangerous for him to be seen in a possibly angry crowd.”6
Jefferson found President Bush to be in a tough, no-nonsense mood regarding Katrina. He was extremely focused. He didn’t like hearing that relief efforts were slowed down. At one point during the day’s travels along the hurricane-ravaged area of the Gulf Coast, President Bush saw a fire burning down below. “What’s that?” Bush snapped. When Michael Chertoff explained that there were some isolated fires along the Gulf Coast, Bush exploded in anger. “Put the fire out, now!” he said. “I want that fire out.”7 Brown might have become the public whipping boy for Katrina, but President Bush was taking his frustration out on Chertoff.
During the hurricane, Alabama was hit hardest in its southwest corner, which juts like a lobster’s claw into the Gulf of Mexico, forming Mobile Bay. The hurricane slammed into the area on the west side of Mobile Bay; the storm surge was forced up the bay and into the city of Mobile. Downtown streets had up to eleven feet of water.8 The storm destroyed piers along the coast, but no section was as badly damaged as Dauphin Island, a barrier island dotted with homes. Much of it was uninhabitable after Katrina. “We got hammered,” Mayor Jeff Collier of Dauphin Island said. “Boats were flying around like planes or something.”9 The death toll from the storm in Alabama, however, was low. Two people were killed in an automobile while driving during the storm. For most people in the state, Katrina was a trial, but not a catastrophe.
In Mobile, the President set up shop in a hangar at the Coast Guard Aviation Training Center at Mobile Regional Airport. Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Jim Elliott had done a phenomenal job sending out cutters and helicopters to storm-ravaged areas immediately after Katrina passed. “We know how to join with other organizations to get the job done,” Elliott recalled. “We were out the door as soon as the winds died down.”10
“We had carefully coordinated our approach to rescuing four or five days in advance of Katrina,” Walter Dickerson, director of Mobile County Emergency Management, recalled. “Police, Fire, Coast Guard…we made sure we had twenty-first-century communications together. Mobile County was the exact opposite of Orleans Parish.”11
Waiting for the President in Mobile, full of bear hugs, was Haley Barbour. The two politicians were extremely tight. When President Bush was elected governor of Texas, Barbour was the bare-knuckled chairman of the Republican National Committee. They had forged a genuine liking for each other. All week long, while other Republicans jumped ship, criticizing Bush’s Katrina performance. Barbour remained loyal, with not one iota of frustration aimed at Bush. Barbour was a disciple of Ronald Reagan’s eleventh commandment: a Republican shall not criticize a fellow Republican. He knew President Bush to be a deeply compassionate man, one void of prejudice or hatred. “When he got to me, he cried,” Barbour recalled. “Tears just ran down his cheeks. It made me cry.”12
Michael Brown of FEMA was also on hand to meet President Bush, along with Alabama Governor Bob Riley. Their hugs were of the stiff, professional kind. Aside from members of the press, the only other people present were a few dozen Coast Guard officers, state officials, and local politicians. First, Bush was briefed on the situation. Governor Riley then spoke to the press, reporting that the town of Bayou Le Batre had lost 3,000 houses to the hurricane. Dauphin Island lost 60 percent of all homes. The governor described the state’s initiatives to provide help to those affected. He spoke positively about the involvement of FEMA, even though he wasn’t specific. The good feeling in Alabama made for a heartening beginning for the tour: Alabama had been hit, but not nearly to the extent of the other two states. Nonetheless, the “largely upbeat assessment” he’d been given probably put Bush in a good mood, and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The journey had yet to begin, after all.
President Bush seemed relieved to enter into the congratulatory atmosphere in the hangar. It was something like a men’s locker room, and he could give as good a halftime speech as anyone. Unfortunately, it wasn’t halftime—not even for his tour. Mississippi, as he might come to see, was in far worse shape than Alabama. As Joe Scarborough of MSNBC later described Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, the region was a “total loss…nuclear winter. As bad as it gets. Beyond war zones. There’s rubble in war zones. There is nothing in Waveland.”13 And Louisiana, given the breached levees in New Orleans, was in worse shape than that.
In his remarks to the press, Bush started by citing the search and rescue work of the Coast Guard, but in oddly vague terms, almost as though it was presidential boilerplate:
Well, first I want to say a few things. I am incredibly proud of our Coast Guard. We have got courageous people risking their lives to save life. And I want to thank the commanders and I want to thank the troops over there for representing the best of America.
I want to congratulate the governors for being leaders. You didn’t ask for this, when you swore in, but you’re doing a heck of a job. And the federal government’s job is big, and it’s massive, and we’re going to do it. Where it’s not working right, we’re going to make it right. Where it is working right, we’re going to duplicate it elsewhere. We have a responsibility, at the federal level, to help save life, and that’s the primary focus right now. Every life is precious, and so we’re going to spend a lot of time saving lives, whether it be in New Orleans or on the coast of Mississippi.
A little later, the President did cite a specific case with which he was familiar. The fact that it concerned a millionaire rankled many of those Gulf South victims who were left without a penny by the storm.
We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we’re going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we’re going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is—and it’s hard for some to see it now—that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house—he’s lost his entire house—there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.
Out of New Orleans is going to come that great city again. That’s what’s going to happen. But now we’re in the darkest days, and so we got a lot of work to do. And I’m down here to thank people. I’m down here to comfort people. I’m down here to let people know that we’re going to work with the states and the local folks with a strategy to get this thing solved.
President Bush thanked the people of the three Gulf Coast states for the compassion they’d exhibited in the aftermath of Katrina, and he made reference to others integral to the recovery. “Again, I want to thank you all for…” President Bush said, with his voice trailing off in midsentence, as it tended to do, “and Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job. The FEMA director is working twenty-four—They’re working twenty-four hours a day.”
Again, my attitude is, if it’s not going exactly right, we’re going to make it go exactly right. If there’s problems, we’re going to address the problems. And that’s what I’ve come down to assure people of. And again, I want to thank everybody.
And I’m not looking forward to this trip. I got a feel for it when I flew over before. It—For those who have not—Trying to conceive what we’re talkin
g about, it’s as if the entire Gulf Coast were obliterated by a—The worst kind of weapon you can imagine. And now we’re going to go try to comfort people in that part of the world.14
The President seemed as though he was suffering from jet lag—except that Washington was in the same time zone as Mobile. Sportily dressed, in a button-down shirt, he was quite open about the fact that he was on the Gulf Coast to thank people, the kind of “to-do list” item that one keeps to oneself, unless one cannot think of another thing to say. That was President Bush’s basic problem on Friday morning: he didn’t actually have anything to say. Or maybe he was emotionally overwhelmed and was keeping a stiff upper lip. The DVD made by his aides had yet to sink in, apparently. It would seem fair to let him off the hook for one bad speech, but his words were crucially important that morning to everyone on the Gulf Coast and beyond. Saying that he was “down here to thank people” and then doing so did not represent the forward sweep of a leader, which was what the nation needed desperately at that critical juncture. USA Today commented that in the past, “President Bush has shown that he can be empathetic, sensitive and decisive. But those qualities eluded him for days after Hurricane Katrina, and the lapse could become a defining moment of his White House tenure.”15
And so the President dutifully thanked people, but in general terms. Only one person was singled out. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” became the catchphrase associated with President Bush’s leadership in the Katrina disaster. Michael Brown was patently not doing a heck of a job, whether through his own failings or the lack of cooperation from others. The FEMA operation was itself an unmitigated disaster. The phrase became emblematic of the President’s ignorance about the situation and his tendency to take a casual attitude toward it. It was inappropriate to use the nickname at that time, especially for a man struggling at his job. The only person in the world, in fact, who called the FEMA director “Brownie” was the President. As for his doing a “heck of a job,” it’s hard to imagine Dwight D. Eisenhower in the midst of D-Day referring to a subordinate in such a jocular way, or in congratulating him before the battle was through. “There was a time when FEMA understood that the correct approach to a crisis was to deploy to the affected area as many resources as possible,” Senator Mary Landrieu said that afternoon, requesting that President Bush appoint a cabinet-level official to quarterback the Katrina response. “In order to resolve this dire situation we must return to the successful tactics of the past.”16
The “Brownie” remark generated widespread criticism at the time. It remained in common parlance, an expression that served to describe anyone doing a horrendous job, especially when the speaker didn’t care one way or the other. If a person was making a mess of fixing his or her own car, for example, the new American idiom was to say with a smile, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” It wasn’t much of a legacy for either man. “I was there for the Brownie comment,” Jefferson recalled. “My take on it was that the President was following [Bob Riley’s] lead, trying to put on a good partisan air.”
Brown later claimed that the “Brownie” remark triggered malice toward him. Everybody who loathed President Bush saw the demolition of Brown as a way to get at the President. “That was my tipping point,” Brown recalled, “because at that point he used the nickname with me, it caused the mainstream media to go, ‘Who the hell is that? Who is this guy, this guy from FEMA?’”17
It was the Time story on September 8, 2005, that really put the new Katrina scapegoat on the hot seat. The article was brimming with allegations that Brown had padded his résumé and exaggerated his role in previous jobs. The FEMA director was, according to Time, touched by fraudulence.18 Months after Katrina, Brown continued to claim that Time had smeared him to embarrass the Bush administration. This defiant anti-Time attitude was perhaps Brown’s way of coping with becoming disdained by millions of Americans overnight. Brown said, “When someone asked my lawyer what was not true about the Time story, he said, ‘Well, if you read from the very beginning to the end, the story is not true.’ My résumé has gotten me confirmed by the Senate twice and a full-fledged FBI investigation [to secure] my top-secret clearances and so the only thing that I can conclude [is] that I’m a conservative Republican, but I’m not a right-wing nut. It really became apparent to me at that point that this was their way—Time’s or the reporter’s way—to get to the administration, to get to the President.”19
As the first week led into the second, resentment of FEMA only grew. Whether you were black or white, rich or poor, an evacuee or in the bowl, FEMA had become a dirty word. Like the Johnny Cash song “I’ve Been Everywhere,” just name the Gulf Coast town—Pearlington, Waveland, Ocean Springs, Biloxi, Pascagoula, Dauphin Island—and they were unified around a single beef: FEMA. Now President Bush, who had been missing in action for four days, avoiding the smell of death, was saying that Michael Brown was doing a “heck of a job.” It was too much for decent Gulf South folks to bear. Who was this guy Brown? Why was President Bush so chummy with him? The long knives were being pulled out. Following the Time article, Democrats and Republicans, storm victims and TV couch potatoes, all agreed: Brownie had to go. Everybody but Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, who on Friday stuck to the line that FEMA had done a “magnificent job.” When pressed on how that was so, Chertoff answered, “You can’t fly helicopters in a hurricane. You can’t drive trucks in a hurricane.”20
II
President Bush next flew to Biloxi, a “low chopper ride,” as he said, which gave him a chance to see damage along the way. Air Force One, meanwhile, went on to New Orleans, the final stop of the Gulf Coast tour. Arriving in Biloxi in late morning, the President toured devastated areas in the company of Governor Haley Barbour and Biloxi Mayor A. J. Holloway. At a press conference afterward, President Bush was more detail-oriented than he had been in Mobile, although the troop deployments he mentioned in the region were out-of-date. (“We need to get troops,” Bush said. “We had 1,200 troops arrive yesterday, I’m told. We’re going to have 1,200 today.” In fact, more than 10,000 troops made it to the coast on Friday.) He was also able to field questions in a serious way. The helicopter tour may well have sobered his attitude. Still, the President had only seen the devastation from above. His other senses weren’t assaulted, as they were for those on the ground. That finally changed in Biloxi. After walking through the rubble, President Bush told the press that the damage was “worse than imaginable”21 and added “I am satisfied with the response. I am not satisfied with all the results.”22
To President Bush’s credit, he met and hugged Katrina victims in Biloxi, even if they were prescreened by the Secret Service. “I don’t have anything,” a trembling Mississippi woman said, clearly shaken. “Well,” President Bush told her, “they’ll help you.” “We have nowhere to go,” she said. “I know,” he said, trying to reassure her. “I know.” “And I came here looking for clothes,” she told the President. “Well,” Bush said, “they’ll get you some clothes.”23
As they walked together through the blasted-out Biloxi neighborhood, arms around each other, it seemed that the President cared. It was the only moment on Bush’s Gulf South trip in which he was, for a fleeting hour, shining the flashlight in his face, reassuring the Gulf South that the President cared. Unfortunately for the President, the Mobile “Brownie” comment superseded these more heartfelt Biloxi moments when Bush hugged and cried and commiserated with everybody he met.
Surrounding the Biloxi rubble photo-op were angry voices, though. “You can smell the death,” said Phyllis Upshire-Davis, who lived outside Biloxi. She had nearly lost her life and had to identify the body of her neighbor, who had come to check on her just before the storm.24 As of Friday morning, the death count in Harrison County alone was fifty-six. The total number of storm-related deaths in Mississippi was one hundred. Both numbers were still rising. More than a half-million people were without power in southern Mississippi, and restoration of electricity wasn’
t expected for three weeks. Some 17,000 people were staying in temporary shelters;25 at least twenty times that number were staying in hotels or with relatives. Food was scarce along the coast. Reclaiming the neighborhood was extremely difficult, since roads were blocked with debris and draped with loose electrical wires. Traffic clogged whatever avenues were available. Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, discovered that driving from Montgomery, Alabama, to the coast, normally a three-and-a-half-hour trip, took eleven hours. “I filled up my motorcycle tank in Montgomery and headed down to Biloxi to check up on a niece,” he recalled. “There would have been no way to make it in a car. Police from all over America clogged up the highway. And, man, the nails were everywhere. It was flat-tire city along the coast.”26
Another problem facing the coast was the fact that it depended for immediate aid on areas to the north that were not ordinarily supposed to be gravely affected by hurricane damage. Hattiesburg and Jackson were not decimated by any means, but both cities had enough wind damage from Katrina to complicate efforts to send large-scale assistance to the coast. The final disaster on the Mississippi Gulf Coast was looting. Law enforcement officers had to be taken off rescue duty in Mississippi to maintain the peace. It was not captured on film, it was not covered much in the press, but Mississippi was, just like New Orleans, in danger of losing control of its neighborhoods, from Pass Christian to Ocean Springs.
The Great Deluge Page 67
