Katrina: After the Flood (17 page)

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 pass 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 communications 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.

For her part, Blanco didn’t know what to do about Nagin. “I won,” Blanco said. “I don’t care what happened in the past. I’m the governor and all I want is a good working relationship with the mayor of the state’s largest city.” Yet short of ordering her counterpart into intensive therapy, what could she do? To the monumental challenges confronting postdiluvial New Orleans, add a governor and a mayor who were barely speaking. Said Blanco, “Nagin had a long-standing problem with trust. Way before the storm.”

NAGIN ACCUSED BLANCO OF
costing lives because she hesitated when the president tried to convince her to federalize the state’s National Guard. Yet no effort was made to federalize the Guard in Mississippi, despite the chaotic conditions there. The governor of Mississippi was Haley Barbour, the ultimate GOP insider. He had served as chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1994 when the party won the House for the first time in forty years and then cashed in as a big-time
Washington lobbyist with a client list that included R.J. Reynolds, Philip Morris, and United Health. Of all the southern states, only Louisiana had a Democratic governor.
^IV

A House committee, chaired by a Republican, concluded that there was no advantage in “federalizing” the disaster. Indeed, troops were deployed to New Orleans the next day without Blanco’s signature. But it gave the White House a talking point that could at least help muddy the waters and maybe shift the blame. “The president will not let any form of bureaucracy get in the way of protecting the citizens of Louisiana,” the White House’s Dan Bartlett told the
Washington Post
for an article appearing on the paper’s front page on that first Sunday after the flooding. As of Saturday, a “senior Bush official” claimed, Blanco
still
had not declared a state of emergency. The
Post
needed to print a correction noting that the governor had done just that nine days earlier.

Nagin proved an integral part of the White House strategy. The “ultimate pimpmobile,” an impressed Nagin had said of Air Force One. That one long shower seemed to have bought the White House endless goodwill to the point Nagin was repeating their talking points. “She’s putting politics ahead of people,” Nagin said when asked about the disagreement between Bush and Blanco over the deployment of troops. Karl Rove couldn’t have written the script better himself. The South’s sole Democratic governor was feuding with the high-profile black mayor at the center of the Katrina story. A little more one-on-one time between Nagin and the president, and they might ensure that Blanco was a one-term governor. Louisiana was a purple state that they could turn solid red.

Including that first meeting on Air Force One, Bush visited New Orleans five times in five weeks. The second visit came ten days later and on the same day that Nagin flew home from Dallas. The White
House arranged for Nagin to join Bush for a briefing on the USS
Iwo Jima
, a giant naval assault ship now docked a few blocks from the Convention Center. After that, Nagin and the president stood on the back of an open-top military truck for a three-hour tour of the ravaged city. The two had dinner together on the
Iwo Jima
with Thad Allen, FEMA’s new point man in the Gulf, and Lieutenant General Russel Honoré. The White House had sent Honoré, Louisiana-born and the Pentagon’s second-highest-ranking African American, to New Orleans to coordinate military efforts in the Gulf region.