Decision Points

by George W. Bush

  The next morning, we boarded ten-ton military trucks for a tour through New Orleans. The Secret Service was anxious. The drive was one of very few times a president had traveled through a major metropolitan city in an open-top vehicle since the Kennedy assassination in 1963. We had to dodge dangling power lines and drive through deep pools of standing water. Virtually all the houses were still abandoned. Some of their walls were spray-painted with the date they had been searched and the number of bodies discovered inside. I saw a few people wandering around in a daze. Nearby was a pack of mangy dogs scavenging for food, many with bite marks on their bodies. It was a vivid display of the survival-of-the-fittest climate that had overtaken the city.

  Touring the destruction Katrina had done to the city. White House/Paul Morse

  On September 15, Day Eighteen, I returned to New Orleans to deliver a primetime address to the nation. I decided to give the speech from Jackson Square, named for General Andrew Jackson, who defended New Orleans against the British at the end of the War of 1812. The famous French Quarter landmark had suffered minimal damage during the storm.

  I viewed the speech as my opportunity to explain what had gone wrong, promise to fix the problems, and lay out a vision to move the Gulf Coast and the country forward. Abandoned New Orleans was the eeriest setting from which I had ever given a speech. Except for generators, the power was still out in the city. In one of the world’s most vibrant cities, the only people around were a handful of government officials and the soldiers from the 82nd Airborne.

  With St. Louis Cathedral bathed in blue light behind me, I began

  Good evening. I’m speaking to you from the city of New Orleans—nearly empty, still partly under water, and waiting for life and hope to return. …

  Tonight I … offer this pledge of the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives. And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know there is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again.

  I laid out a series of specific commitments: to ensure victims received the financial assistance they needed; to help people move out of hotels and shelters and into longer-term housing; to devote federal assets to cleaning up debris and rebuilding roads, bridges, and schools; to provide tax incentives for the return of businesses and the hiring of local workers; and to strengthen New Orleans’s levees to withstand the next big storm. I continued:

  Four years after the frightening experience of September the 11th, Americans have every right to expect a more effective response in a time of emergency. When the federal government fails to meet such an obligation, I, as president, am responsible for the problem, and for the solution. So I’ve ordered every Cabinet Secretary to participate in a comprehensive review of the government response to the hurricane. This government will learn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina.

  I took those promises seriously. Over the coming months, I worked with Congress to secure $126 billion in rebuilding funds, by far the most for any natural disaster in American history. I decided to create a new position to ensure that one person was accountable for coordinating the rebuilding and ensuring the money was spent wisely. Thad Allen held the role at first. When I nominated him to be commandant of the Coast Guard, I asked Don Powell, a fellow Texan and former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, to take his place.

  I told Chief of Staff Andy Card—and later Josh Bolten—that I expected regular progress reports on our initiatives in the Gulf Coast. Top government officials gathered routinely in the Roosevelt Room for detailed briefings on issues such as how many victims had received disaster benefits checks, the number of Gulf Coast schools reopened, and the cubic yardage of debris cleared.

  I wanted the people of the Gulf Coast to see firsthand that I was committed to rebuilding, so I made seventeen trips between August 2005 and August 2008. Laura made twenty-four visits in all. We both came away impressed by the determination and spirit of the people we met.

  In March 2006, I visited the Industrial Canal levee, which had ruptured and flooded the Lower Ninth Ward. We saw huge piles of debris and trash as we drove to the site, a reminder of how far the neighborhood still had to go. Mayor Nagin and I grabbed our hard hats, climbed to the top of the levee, and watched pile drivers pound pillars seventy feet underground—a solid foundation designed to withstand a Katrina-size storm. Nothing was more important to reassuring New Orleans’s exiled residents that it was safe to return to the city they loved.

  At the rebuilding of the Industrial Canal levee. White House/Eric Draper

  On the second anniversary of the storm, Laura and I visited the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Charter School for Science and Technology. Two years earlier, the school had been submerged under fifteen feet of water. Thanks in large part to a determined local principal, Doris Hicks, MLK became the first school in the Lower Ninth Ward to reopen. As a former librarian, Laura had been saddened by the number of books destroyed in the storm. She started a private fundraising campaign to help New Orleans schools rebuild their collections. Over the years, her leadership and the generosity of the American people helped send tens of thousands of books to schools across the Gulf Coast.

  The story in Mississippi was just as uplifting. In August 2006, I went back to Biloxi, where I visited four days after the storm. Beaches that had been covered with debris a year earlier had been returned to their shimmering white-sand beauty. Seven casinos, supporting hundreds of jobs, had reopened. Church congregations that had been separated were back together again. Few people’s lives had changed more than Lynn Patterson’s. When I met him a year earlier, he was digging cars out of the muck in a neighborhood where all the houses were gone. When I came back to Biloxi, he gave Laura and me a tour of his new home, which had been rebuilt with the help of taxpayer dollars.

  In the wake of Katrina, I asked Fran Townsend—a talented former New York City prosecutor who served as my top homeland security adviser in the White House—to study how we could better respond to future disasters. Her report reaffirmed the longstanding principle that state and local officials are best positioned to lead an effective emergency response. It also recommended changes in the federal government’s approach. We devised new ways to help state and local authorities conduct early evacuations, developed backup communications systems, established a National Operations Center to distribute timely situation reports, and set up an orderly process for deploying federal resources—including active-duty troops—in cases where state and local first responders had become overwhelmed.*

  The new emergency response system was tested in August 2008, when Hurricane Gustav barreled across the Gulf of Mexico toward New Orleans. I held regular videoconferences with federal, state, and local officials in the days leading up to the storm. Mike Chertoff and the new FEMA director, former Miami-Dade fire chief Dave Paulison, relocated to Baton Rouge to oversee preparations. Shelters were ready and well stocked. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the talented Republican elected in 2007, worked closely with Mayor Nagin to order a mandatory evacuation. “You need to be scared and you need to get your butts out of New Orleans right now,” the mayor said.

  When Gustav made landfall, the first reports were that New Orleans had dodged a direct hit. I had heard that before. This time, though, the levees held and damages in New Orleans were minimal. A few weeks later, Hurricane Ike smashed into Galveston, Texas. Property damage was extensive—only Andrew and Katrina were costlier—but thanks to good preparation at the state level, many lives were spared. For all the devastation Katrina caused, part of the storm’s lasting impact is that it improved the federal government’s ability to support state and local governments in responding to major disasters.

  Even when the neighborhoods of New Orleans are restored and the homes of Mississippi are rebuilt, no one who endured Katrina will ever fully recover. That is especially true for the tens
of thousands who lost their homes and possessions, and—worst of all—the families of the more than eighteen hundred Americans who died.

  In a different way, it is true of me, too. In a national catastrophe, the easiest person to blame is the president. Katrina presented a political opportunity that some critics exploited for years. The aftermath of Katrina—combined with the collapse of Social Security reform and the drumbeat of violence in Iraq—made the fall of 2005 a damaging period in my presidency. Just a year earlier, I had won reelection with more votes than any candidate in history. By the end of 2005, much of my political capital was gone. With my approval ratings plummeting, many Democrats—and some Republicans—concluded they would be better off opposing me than working together. We managed to get important things done, including reauthorizing the AIDS initiative, fully funding our troops, confirming Sam Alito to the Supreme Court, and responding to the financial crisis. But the legacy of fall 2005 lingered for the rest of my time in office.

  This is not to suggest that I didn’t make mistakes during Katrina. I should have urged Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin to evacuate New Orleans sooner. I should have come straight back to Washington from California on Day Two or stopped in Baton Rouge on Day Three. I should have done more to signal my sympathy for the victims and my determination to help, the way I did in the days after 9/11.

  My biggest substantive mistake was waiting too long to deploy active-duty troops. By Day Three, it was clear that federal troops were needed to restore order. If I had it to do over again, I would have sent the 82nd Airborne immediately, without law enforcement authority. I hesitated at the time because I didn’t want to leave our troops powerless to stop sniper attacks and the other shocking acts of violence we were hearing about on TV. We later learned these accounts were wildly overstated, the result of overzealous correspondents under pressure to fill every second of the twenty-four-hour cable news cycle.

  Ultimately, the story of Katrina is that it was the storm of the century. It devastated an area the size of Great Britain, produced almost nine times more debris than any previously recorded hurricane, and killed more people than any storm in seventy-five years. The economic toll—three hundred thousand homes destroyed and $96 billion in property damage—outstripped that of every previous hurricane on record.

  Yet destruction and death did not have the final word for the people of the Gulf Coast. In August 2008, I visited Gulfport, Mississippi, and Jackson Barracks in New Orleans, the home of the Louisiana National Guard, which had flooded during Katrina. It was striking to see how much had changed in three years.

  In Mississippi, workers had cleared forty-six million cubic yards of storm debris, double the amount Hurricane Andrew left behind. More than forty-three thousand residents had repaired or rebuilt their homes. Traffic flowed over new bridges spanning Biloxi Bay and Bay St. Louis. Tourists and employees had returned to revitalized casinos and beachfront hotels. And in an inspiring sign, every school damaged by Katrina had reopened.

  While many predicted New Orleans would never be a major city again, 87 percent of the population before Katrina had returned. The I-10 bridge connecting New Orleans and Slidell had reopened. The number of restaurants in the city had exceeded the pre-Katrina figure. More than seventy thousand citizens had repaired or rebuilt their homes. The floodwalls and levees around New Orleans had been strengthened, and the Army Corps of Engineers had begun a massive project to provide “100-year flood protection.” The Superdome that once housed thousands of Katrina victims became the proud home of the Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints.

  The most uplifting change of all has come in education. Public schools that were decaying before the storm have reopened as modern facilities, with new teachers and leaders committed to reform and results. Dozens of charter schools have sprouted up across the city, offering parents more choices and greater flexibility. The Catholic archdiocese, led by Archbishop Alfred Hughes, continued its long tradition of educational excellence by reopening its schools quickly. The year after Katrina, New Orleans students improved their test scores. They improved more the next year, and even more the year after that.

  When I gave my Farewell Address from the East Room of the White House in January 2009, one of the guests I invited was Dr. Tony Recasner, principal of Samuel J. Green Charter School in New Orleans. Tony started at the school in July 2005, after it had underperformed so severely that it was taken over by the state. Then Katrina hit.

  When I visited in 2007, Tony told me about his innovative teaching methods, such as having students focus on one subject at a time for several weeks. He also told me about the results. Despite the enormous disadvantages facing his students, the percentage of those reading and doing math at grade level had more than tripled. “This school, which did not serve the community well in the past, is now really going to be a beacon of light,” Tony said.

  The spirit of renewal at S.J. Green Charter School is present all across the Gulf Coast. With leadership from people like Tony, a new generation can build a better life than the one they inherited. And the true legacy of Katrina will be one of hope.

  *In the fall of 2006, Congress amended the Insurrection Act to allow the president to deploy federal troops with law enforcement powers during natural disasters. Then, in 2008, they repealed the amendment.

  n July 30, 2008, Mohamad Kalyesubula sat in the front row of the East Room. He was a tall, trim African man. He had a big, bright smile. And he was supposed to be dead.

  Mohamad Kalyesubula in the East Room of the White House. White House/Joyce Boghosian

  Five years earlier, Laura and I had met Mohamad in Entebbe, Uganda, at a clinic run by The AIDS Support Organization, TASO. Located in a simple one-story brick building, the TASO clinic served thousands of AIDS patients. Like most suffering the advanced stages of the disease, Mohamad was wasting away. He ate little. He battled constant fevers. He had been confined to a bed for almost a year.

  I expected TASO to be a place of abject hopelessness. But it was not. A handpainted sign over the door read “Living Positively with HIV/AIDS.” A choir of children, many of them orphans who had lost parents to AIDS, sang hymns that proclaimed their faith and hope. They ended with a sweet rendition of “America the Beautiful.” “I have a dream,” Mohamad told me from his hospital bed. “One day, I will come to the United States.”

  I left the clinic inspired. The patients reaffirmed my conviction that every life has dignity and value, because every person bears the mark of Almighty God. I saw their suffering as a challenge to the words of the Gospel: “To whom much is given, much is required.”

  America had been given a lot, and I resolved that we would answer the call. Earlier that year I had proposed, and Congress had passed, a $15 billion initiative to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, PEPFAR, constituted the largest international health initiative to combat a specific disease. I hoped it would serve as a medical version of the Marshall Plan. “This is my country’s pledge to the people of Africa and the people of Uganda,” I said at the TASO clinic. “You are not alone in this fight. America has decided to act.”

  Three months later, Mohamad received his first antiretroviral drugs. The medicine renewed his strength. Eventually he was able to get out of bed. He took a job at the TASO clinic and earned enough money to support his six children. In the summer of 2008, we invited Mohamad to the White House to watch me sign a bill more than doubling our worldwide commitment to fight HIV/AIDS. I hardly recognized him. His shriveled body had grown robust and strong. He had returned to life.

  He was not the only one. In five years, the number of Africans receiving AIDS medicine had risen from fifty thousand to nearly three million—more than two million of them supported by PEPFAR. People who had been given up for dead were restored to healthy and productive lives. Calling to mind the story of Jesus raising his friend from the dead, Africans came up with a phrase to describe the transformation. They called it the Lazarus Effect.


  In 1990, Dad asked me to lead a delegation to Gambia to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary of independence. A small West African nation with a population of about nine hundred thousand, Gambia was best known in America as the home of the forebears of Alex Haley, the author of Roots. Laura and I had read the Pulitzer Prize–winning book in which Haley traces his lineage back to an African man taken by slave traders in the 1700s.

  Sadly, Gambia did not seem to have developed much since then. Laura and I were driven around the capital, Banjul, in an old Chevrolet provided by the embassy. The main road was paved. The rest were dirt. Most people we saw traveled by foot, often with heavy loads on their backs. The highlight of the trip was the ceremony celebrating Gambian independence. It took place in the national stadium, where the paint was peeling and concrete was chipped away. I remember thinking that high school stadiums in West Texas were a lot more modern than Gambia’s showcase.

  Gambia was in the back of my mind eight years later when I started thinking about running for president. Condi Rice and I spent long hours discussing foreign policy on the back porch of the Governor’s Mansion. One day our conversation turned to Africa. Condi had strong feelings on the subject. She felt Africa had great potential, but had too often been neglected. We agreed that Africa would be a serious part of my foreign policy.

  I considered America a generous nation with a moral responsibility to do our part to help relieve poverty and despair. The question was how to do it effectively. Our foreign assistance programs in Africa had a lousy track record. Most were designed during the Cold War to support anticommunist governments. While our aid helped keep friendly regimes in power, it didn’t do much to improve the lives of ordinary people. In 2001, Africa received $14 billion in foreign aid, more than any other continent. Yet economic growth per capita was flat, even worse than it had been in the 1970s.