by Obama Barack
I also spent a good deal of time that day with Bobby Jindal, the former congressman and health policy expert in the Bush administration who had leveraged his sharp-edged conservatism to become the nation’s first Indian American governor. Smart, ambitious, and in his late thirties, Jindal was viewed as an up-and-comer within his party and had been selected to deliver the televised GOP response to my first joint session address. But the Deepwater incident, which threatened to shut down vital Louisiana industries like commercial seafood and tourism, put him in an awkward spot: Like most GOP politicians, he was a champion of Big Oil and an equally fervent opponent of strengthening environmental regulations.
Scrambling to get ahead of any shift in public sentiment, Jindal spent most of his time pitching me a plan to rapidly erect a barrier island—a berm—along a portion of the Louisiana coast. This, he insisted, would help keep the impending oil slick at bay.
“We’ve already got the contractors lined up to do the job,” he said. His tone was confident, verging on cocky, though his dark eyes betrayed a wariness, almost pain, even when he smiled. “We just need your help to get the Army Corps of Engineers to approve it and BP to pay for it.”
In fact, I’d already heard about the “berm” idea; preliminary assessments from our experts suggested that it was impractical, expensive, and potentially counterproductive. I suspected that Jindal knew as much. The proposal was mainly a political play, a way for him to look proactive while avoiding the broader questions the spill raised about the risks of deepwater drilling. Regardless, given the scope of the crisis I didn’t want to be seen as dismissing any idea out of hand, and I assured the governor that the Army Corps of Engineers would give his berm plan a quick and thorough evaluation.
With the weather too foul to fly Marine One, we spent much of the day driving. Sitting in the backseat of the SUV, I surveyed the patchy membrane of vegetation, mud, silt, and marsh that spread unevenly on either side of the Mississippi River and into the Gulf. For centuries, humans had fought to bend this primordial landscape to their will, just as Jindal was now proposing to do with his berm—building dikes, dams, levees, channels, sluices, ports, bridges, roads, and highways in the service of commerce and expansion, and rebuilding time and again after hurricanes and floods, undaunted by the implacable tides. There was a certain nobility in such stubbornness, I thought, part of the can-do spirit that had built America.
Yet when it came to the ocean and the mighty river that emptied into it, the victories of engineering turned out to be fleeting, the prospect of control illusory. Louisiana was losing more than ten thousand acres of land every year, as climate change raised sea levels and made hurricanes in the Gulf more fierce. The constant dredging, banking, and rerouting of the Mississippi to ease passage for ships and cargo meant that less sediment washed down from upriver to restore the land that was lost. The very activity that had made the region a commercial hub and allowed the oil industry to thrive was now hastening the sea’s steady advance. Looking out the rain-streaked window, I wondered how long the road I was traveling would last, with its gas stations and convenience stores, before it too was swallowed by the waves.
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A PRESIDENT HAS no choice but to continually multitask. (“You’re like the guy in the circus,” Michelle told me once, “just spinning plates at the end of a stick.”) Al-Qaeda didn’t suspend its operations because of a financial crisis; a devastating earthquake in Haiti didn’t time itself to avoid relief efforts overlapping with a long-planned, forty-seven-nation nuclear security summit I was chairing. And so, as stressed as I was about the Deepwater disaster, I tried not to let it consume me. In the weeks following my Louisiana visit, I carefully tracked our response, relying on detailed daily briefings while also attending to the ten or twelve other pressing matters that demanded my attention.
I visited a manufacturing plant in Buffalo to discuss the economic recovery and continued to work with a bipartisan fiscal commission that was looking for ways to stabilize the long-term U.S. deficit. There were calls to Merkel on Greece and Medvedev on the ratification of START, a formal state visit from President Felipe Calderón of Mexico focused on border cooperation, and a working lunch with President Karzai of Afghanistan. Along with the usual terrorist threat briefings, strategy sessions with my economic team, and a slew of ceremonial duties, I interviewed candidates for a Supreme Court seat that had opened up after Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement in early April. I settled on the brilliant young solicitor general and former Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan, who, like Justice Sotomayor, would emerge from the Senate hearings relatively unscathed and be confirmed a few months later.
But no matter how many other plates I had spinning in the air, at the end of each day my mind would be pulled back to the Deepwater spill. If I squinted hard, I could tell myself there’d been some progress. BP had successfully shut off the smallest of the three underwater leaks, using robots to fit a valve on the ruptured pipe. Admiral Allen had brought a semblance of order to the cleanup efforts on the ocean surface, which by mid-May had grown to nearly a thousand vessels and an army of close to twenty thousand BP workers, members of the Coast Guard and National Guard, shrimpers, fishermen, and volunteers. Valerie did such an outstanding job of staying close to the five governors whose states were threatened by the spill that, despite their party affiliations, most had only good things to say about the federal response. (“Me and Bob Riley have become best buddies,” she said with a smile, referring to the Republican governor of Alabama.) The lone exception was Governor Jindal; Valerie reported that on several occasions, he’d make a request for White House help on some issue, only to put out a press release ten minutes later blasting us for ignoring Louisiana.
Still, the oil kept coming. BP’s robots couldn’t close the jammed blowout preventer, leaving the two main leaks unsealed. The company’s first effort to place a containment dome over the leaks also failed, due to issues caused by frigid temperatures so far down. It became increasingly obvious that BP’s team didn’t know exactly how to proceed—and that none of the federal agencies that typically handled spills did either. “We’re used to dealing with an oil slick from a tanker accident or a busted pipe,” Admiral Allen explained to me. “Trying to seal a live oil well a mile under the surface…this is more like a space mission.”
It was an apt analogy—and the reason I decided to turn to Steve Chu for help. Despite the title, the secretary of energy doesn’t normally have jurisdiction over oil drilling. But we figured it couldn’t hurt to have a Nobel Prize–winning physicist involved in our response, and after discovering the underwater leaks, we asked Chu to brief the team on the science involved in shutting them down. Despite Carol’s warning to be succinct, his Situation Room presentation ran about twice as long as he’d been allotted and involved thirty slides. Most of the room was lost after the fifth one. Rather than waste all that brainpower on us, I instructed him to head down to Houston, where BP’s response team was headquartered, to work with the engineers there on a possible fix.
Meanwhile, public attitudes about the disaster began to shift. Throughout the first few weeks of the spill, BP bore the brunt of the blame. Not only did Americans tend to be skeptical of oil companies, but BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, was a walking PR disaster—stating in the media that the spill involved a “relatively tiny” amount of oil in “a very big ocean”; arguing in another interview that no one wanted to see the hole plugged more than him because “I’d like my life back”; and generally living up to every stereotype of the arrogant, out-of-touch multinational executive. (His obtuseness reminded me that BP—previously known as British Petroleum—had started off as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company: the same company whose unwillingness to split royalties with Iran’s government in the 1950s had led to the coup that ultimately resulted in that country’s Islamic Revolution.)
As the crisis passed the thirty-day mark, though, at
tention increasingly turned to my administration’s possible culpability for the mess. In particular, news stories and congressional hearings fastened on a series of exemptions from standard safety and environmental guidelines that BP had received from the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the subagency within the Interior Department responsible for granting leases, collecting royalties, and overseeing offshore drilling operations in federal waters. There hadn’t been anything unusual about the exemptions MMS had granted to BP on the Macondo well; when it came to managing the risks of deepwater drilling, the agency’s officials routinely ignored their staff scientists and engineers and deferred to industry experts they believed to be better versed in the latest processes and technologies.
Of course, that was exactly the problem. Before I had taken office, we’d heard about MMS’s coziness with the oil companies and its regulatory shortcomings—including a well-publicized scandal toward the end of the Bush administration involving kickbacks, drugs, and sexual favors—and we’d promised to reform the place. And, in fact, as soon as he’d taken over the Interior Department, Ken Salazar had cleaned up some of the more egregious problems. What he hadn’t had the time or resources to do was to fundamentally reorganize MMS so that it had the capacity to tightly regulate such a well-heeled and technologically complex industry.
I couldn’t really fault Salazar for this. Changing practices and culture inside government agencies was hard, and rarely completed in a matter of months. We were confronting similar issues at agencies charged with regulating the financial system, where overstretched and underpaid regulators could barely keep up with the sophisticated, constantly evolving operations of massive international financial institutions. But that didn’t excuse the fact that no one on my team had warned me that MMS still had such serious problems before recommending that I endorse Interior’s plan to open up additional areas to exploratory drilling. And anyway, in the middle of a crisis, no one wanted to hear about the need to put more money into federal agencies. Nor did they want to hear about how raising civil servants’ salaries would help those agencies improve management and compete with the private sector to attract topflight technical talent. Folks just wanted to know who had let BP drill a hole three and a half miles below the ocean’s surface without knowing how to plug it—and the bottom line was, it had happened on our watch.
While questions about MMS kept reporters busy, what really turned public attitudes was BP’s late-May decision—which I supported in the interest of transparency—to start releasing live, real-time video feeds of the leaks coming from the company’s underwater cameras. The early images of the burning Deepwater Horizon rig had received wide coverage. But footage of the spill itself—consisting mostly of overhead shots, faint streaks of crimson against the blue-green ocean—hadn’t fully captured the potential devastation. Even when oil-sheened waves and blobs of oil known as tar balls started reaching the outer shores of Louisiana and Alabama, camera crews didn’t have a lot of arresting visuals to work with—particularly since, after decades of offshore drilling, the waters of the Gulf weren’t all that pristine to begin with.
The underwater video feed changed all this. Suddenly people around the world could see the oil pulsing in thick columns from the surrounding wreckage. Sometimes it appeared sulfurous yellow, sometimes brown or black, depending on the lighting from the camera. The roiling plumes looked forceful, menacing, like emanations from hell. Cable news networks began broadcasting the footage in a corner of the screen around the clock, along with a digital timer reminding viewers of the number of days, minutes, and seconds since the spill had begun.
The videos seemed to confirm calculations that our own analysts had made, independent of BP: The leaks were likely pumping out anywhere between four and ten times the original estimate of five thousand barrels of oil daily. But more so than the frightening numbers, the images of the underwater gushers—along with a sudden increase in B-roll footage of pelicans coated in oil—made the crisis real in people’s minds. Folks who hadn’t been paying much attention to the spill suddenly wanted to know why we weren’t doing something to stop it. In the dentist’s office, Salazar found himself staring at the video feed on a ceiling-mounted TV as he underwent an emergency root canal. Republicans called the spill “Obama’s Katrina,” and soon we were under fire from Democrats as well—most notably former Clinton aide and longtime Louisianan James Carville, who, appearing on Good Morning America, issued a blistering, high-volume attack on our response, directing his criticism specifically at me: “Man, you got to get down here and take control of this! Put somebody in charge of this thing and get this moving!” A nine-year-old boy in a wheelchair who was visiting the Oval Office through the Make-a-Wish Foundation warned me that if I didn’t get the leak filled soon, I was “going to have a lot of political problems.” Even Sasha came into my bathroom one morning while I was shaving to ask, “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?”
In my own mind, those dark cyclones of oil came to symbolize the string of constant crises we were going through. More than that, they felt alive somehow—a malevolent presence, actively taunting me. To that point in my presidency, I’d maintained a fundamental confidence that no matter how bad things got, whether with the banks, the auto companies, Greece, or Afghanistan, I could always come up with a solution through sound process and smart choices. But these leaks seemed to defy a timely solution, no matter how hard I pushed BP or my team, and no matter how many meetings I held in the Sit Room, poring over data and diagrams as intently as I did in any war-planning session. With that feeling of temporary helplessness, a certain bitterness began creeping into my voice—a bitterness I recognized as a companion to self-doubt.
“What does he think I’m supposed to do?” I growled at Rahm after hearing of Carville’s broadside. “Put on my fucking Aquaman gear and swim down there myself with a wrench?”
The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we’d done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels.
Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I’m struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I’m surprised because the transcript doesn’t register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps:
That MMS wasn’t fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do.
That the government didn’t have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn’t like paying higher taxes—especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn’t happened yet.
That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who’d done Big Oil’s bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they’d be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to l
ose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures.
And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn’t have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it.
I didn’t say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to “get this fixed.” Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they’d done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn’t have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I’d misdirected my anger and frustration.
It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.
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FOR THE NEXT six weeks, the spill continued to dominate the news. As efforts to kill the well kept coming up short, we compensated by making more of a show of my personal involvement. I made two more trips to Louisiana, as well as visits to Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Working with Admiral Allen, who’d agreed to delay his retirement until the crisis was over, we found ways to meet every governor’s request, including a scaled-down plan for Jindal’s berm. Salazar had signed an order that effectively dissolved MMS, dividing responsibilities for energy development, safety regulation, and revenue collection between three new independent agencies. I announced the formation of a bipartisan commission tasked with recommending ways to prevent future offshore drilling disasters. I held a full cabinet meeting on the crisis and had a heart-wrenching visit with the families of the eleven Deepwater workers killed in the explosion. I even delivered an Oval Office address on the spill—the first such address of my presidency. The format, with me sitting behind the Resolute desk, felt stilted, of another era, and by all accounts I wasn’t very good.
