Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?

by Alyssa Mastromonaco

  About a week before Sandy made landfall in the United States, we started talking with the National Weather Service, and we were getting reports that this was NOT A DRILL. A major storm was looking to impact the most densely populated part of the country less than two weeks before an election. Hurricane Sandy crossed over Puerto Rico on October 25, and by October 28, Governor Andrew Cuomo had ordered the MTA, which includes the New York subways, to close through at least October 30.

  We needed to keep a lot of things in mind. We couldn’t campaign anywhere that we might divert resources (police, first responders, ambulances) from storm prep or distract from evacuations. It was better for the president not to be on the East Coast at all, especially since the storm was going to blow through DC. If the storm were super bad in DC, he would have been stuck, so it was better to keep moving.

  As much as I love campaigns and traveling with the president, it was on me to stay and literally weather the storm. In every crisis, you need a captain—a person who is constantly gathering all the available information, who knows the whole story and all its component parts, in order to make decisions holistically and keep everyone involved aware of what’s going on.

  As Sandy was bearing down on New York and New Jersey, it was still raining in DC, but the worst part of the storm had passed. Still, everything in DC was shut down—it was like a ghost town—and we could only get to work by having members of the military pick us up in Suburbans.

  There was no point in having everyone in the office risk their lives so they could be in the White House—we have cell phones and wifi—so I told most people to stay home. But there was a handful of us left, and we all worked together from the comms office in the West Wing; there’s no instant messaging in the White House, and it was easier to communicate this way. We tracked the storm’s developments using the NY1, New York Post, New York Daily News, and CNN Twitter feeds (my first real interaction with Twitter) and shouted what we knew at one another. If I saw an official in Jersey City tweeting that he wasn’t getting Red Cross trucks, someone else got on the phone with the Red Cross. And lo and behold, soon, the Red Cross trucks arrived on the scene.

  During a natural disaster, the White House has several jobs. First and foremost, we try to make sure people understand the severity of what is about to happen without overreacting. In a post-Katrina world, the easiest thing to do on the eve of a major storm would be to evacuate, right? Not necessarily. If you order evacuations too often—and then the storm ends up being just a lot of rain—people will stop listening to the government. Evacuating is a big deal for a family, emotionally and logistically and financially. You never want people to become desensitized to or dismissive of what the government is recommending, but it is imperative to convey the gravity of the situation and make sure everyone understands the appropriate precautions to take. Once the storm passes, we act almost as a whip operation—ensuring that all administrative agencies are working as quickly and efficiently as possible to get help where it’s needed.

  Since I was running point for the White House, the campaign’s message to me was not subtle: “DO NOT FUCK THIS UP.” (There were far more important reasons than the election to not fuck it up, but you get a picture of what I was dealing with. When it comes to natural disasters, there’s zero tolerance for presidential mistakes, so I really didn’t need some passive-aggressive email to remind me of our responsibility.)

  We were updating the president by phone every few hours on conference calls with the FEMA administrator, Craig Fugate; Secretary for Homeland Security Janet Napolitano (JNAP); John Brennan, who at the time was deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counterintelligence to the president; and me. We would update POTUS on what phase of the storm we were dealing with, how many people were without power, how many homes had flooded, what stage of response we were entering, and our latest communication with local officials. As Fugate, JNAP, and John realized how I was approaching this—with email updates to senior staff every few hours (when people know they’re getting regular updates, they don’t send you random questions constantly, and you can actually focus on what needs to get done in the interim) and thorough regular contact with state and local agencies—they started having me run the calls, which gave me a lot of confidence. They were trusting me with the process.

  The thing you realize when you’re dealing with something like this is that there is a very fine line between too many hands and not enough. I concentrated on listening to local officials, taking seriously what they were asking for and what they said they needed. It was very hard to make decisions that were impactful and responsive but not overly emotional. Listening to people describe what was happening to them, their homes—you want to wave a wand and fix it all. But there are so many stories and so many people—you have to stay focused.

  I primarily dealt with the governor’s offices in New York and New Jersey. I must say this: Governor Chris Christie’s office was pure professionalism. I loved working with them. They were always very clear about what they needed, and they wanted us to add local mayors on the calls with the president so they could tell him what was happening in their communities directly. Fugate, JNAP, Valerie Jarrett, Cecilia Muñoz (head of the president’s Domestic Policy Council), and I all joined these calls. They were extremely productive and helped us understand where we needed to prioritize our response.

  New York was not quite the same. The governor’s office wanted to funnel all local communication through them, and I thought that could be bad. Local elected officials are on the front lines during a crisis, and being able to tell their constituents that they spoke directly to the president is very comforting and reassuring. People in disaster situations often don’t have power or TV or Internet, so hearing their county executive on the radio saying they spoke to the president makes them feel like they are being taken care of. Also, in a state like New York, if you were in Long Island or Queens or Brooklyn, wouldn’t you assume that Manhattan would be the priority for all the resources? The borough presidents should be the ones to tell POTUS about the flooding in Red Hook, Brooklyn, that had wiped out more local businesses than they could count, or the brutal scene unfolding in Breezy Point, Queens, where a six-alarm fire had burned 130 homes to the ground. I really felt the president needed to hear from the borough presidents and county executives.

  So I went rogue. We added the local elected officials to the conference call ourselves and only told the governor’s office at the last minute. The worst that could happen was that the governor would be pissed. After he heard the updates, and the gratitude, from the local teams, I don’t think he was.

  Thank God we did. We heard how deeply fucked the gas situation was all over New York. There were lines down the street for gas even though most of the gas stations were still closed; they were far short of the number of utility workers they needed to start restoring power. The storm was winding down, but the huge effects it would have were becoming clear. They didn’t have enough cherry-picker cranes to start fixing power lines. Amtrak and New Jersey Transit would not be operating anytime soon.

  I had to become a quasi expert on transportation infrastructure and refined fuel in a handful of days. We got a call together with Mike Froman and Gene Sperling from the White House Economic Team and John Porcari, the deputy secretary of transportation, and found out trains between New York and New Jersey couldn’t start running until Substation 41 was fixed. Substation 41 was responsible for supplying power to the North River Tunnels, New York Penn Station, Amtrak, and New Jersey rail, and it was completely flooded. I asked why it hadn’t been fixed. Because of the flooding, Amtrak needed divers to go and check it out, but there was some issue with their divers and they hadn’t gone down yet. I asked if the Army Corps had divers. Turns out they did. I asked why they couldn’t go. They could! So we sent them. And the trains (slowly) started running again.

  We had a meeting in the Situation Room with the departments of Energy, Transportation, Interior, Homeland Security
, and Defense. People looked tired; we had been eating a lot of grilled cheese and all looked in need of a proper salad. A lot of puffy vests and fleeces. There are a few couches in the West Wing, but no one was napping; we were all still running on adrenaline. We were trying to think of all the things we might not have been thinking about—always a good thing. I had an idea, but it seemed so small that I was nervous to blurt it out. Are we running any PSAs with information on how to contact FEMA for assistance?

  For some people (like me), gathering the courage to speak up in meetings is a skill that requires practice. There are always the normal fears—that you’ll sound stupid, that everyone else has already thought of what you’re about to say and has moved on, that what you thought was a foolproof plan will have an obvious hole in it. And then there are the fears that you develop when your meetings are with the most important and powerful policy makers in the country. (They’re actually pretty similar, but these meetings have added stakes: If your idea is bad, millions of people could see the consequences.)

  Also, I didn’t ever pontificate. I liked to know there was a real purpose behind what I was going to say. After going back and forth with myself a little bit—mostly because it seemed so basic that I assumed someone might respond, “Duh, of course we did that”—I decided to bring it up.

  Everyone was like, “Wow, yes, we should do a PSA”—not a dumb idea at all. Within a few hours we had the first lady record it, commissioned an electronic billboard in Times Square to broadcast information about how to get help, and got all the hotels in the area to use the electronic screens in their lobbies (where they normally post what kinds of conventions or meetings are happening) to telegraph the information as well.

  Over the course of the next 48-hour marathon, we continued to take in information and generate updates, talking with the agencies and delegating follow-up on certain issues. During this time, there was not a single phone call or email that went unanswered for more than a few minutes. It was a full cross-government effort. When we scheduled a conference call for 11:00 PM, everyone was right on time.

  Soon, a crisis arose. We had bought millions of barrels of refined fuel only to realize we needed to figure out how to deliver them. There were countless calls and meetings dedicated to coming up with loopholes or ways to amend treaties to allow barges with foreign fuel into New York Harbor, and then we had to get it off the barges and into the gas stations. We eventually sent C-17s—military transport aircraft—to California to bring more trucks and utility equipment to the East Coast to transport the fuel. After that we found out most gas stations didn’t have generators, which means they couldn’t actually accept the fuel we had bought and transported to fill the cars that were lining the roads and highways. Quickly, state and local officials determined which gas stations served the most people and they got them generators until power was more widely restored. We were either going to be heroes or I was going to get fired.

  I went to Rockaway, Queens, with Craig Fugate. Fugate is one of the most impressive people I worked with during my time at the White House. Always calm, smarter than I thought possible, philosophical, humanitarian, a logistician and educator, and just really great. We heard from local clergy that people were getting scared at night because it was so dark—most places still didn’t have electricity—and there was a lot of low-grade crime, mostly looting. Fugate called New York–based production companies and got the giant lights they use to film in the dark delivered to Queens. Then we heard that people were being given the runaround by insurance companies—people who had flood insurance were being told it didn’t matter because the damage to their homes had been done by wind, not water. Fugate got on the phone with the biggest providers in the area to make it clear that this was not the time for added hurdles. We also heard that many people were worried about going to FEMA for help because they thought they could get tagged for back taxes, parking tickets, or other things they simply couldn’t afford to pay. We sent FEMA Corps, a trained group of volunteers, door to door with iPads to help people sign up for assistance and answer all their questions.

  On our way back to DC, I asked Fugate why no one seemed to be taking from the pile of clothing donations I had seen at a Red Cross location. He explained to me the survivor-versus-victim mentality: If you had lost everything and were told you could dress yourself in hand-me-down jeans and shirts that didn’t fit, would that make you feel empowered, more in control? No. A $75 gift card can be much more helpful in propelling someone forward. So when corporations asked what they could donate, he was not shy about asking for gift cards.

  As people slowly started getting back on their feet and communities began to function again, we sent Cabinet secretaries to affected areas to assess the state of recovery. We deployed the small business administrator, Karen Mills, to Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan, Westchester, and Connecticut to understand what businesses needed to reopen; she also told people about the benefits of our Disaster Loan Program, which offers financial assistance to homeowners, small business owners, and small agricultural cooperatives in declared disaster areas. Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, visited the hospitals in Manhattan that had lost power during the storm and thanked their staffs for their hard work. Secretary Shaun Donovan from the Department of Housing and Urban Development went to talk to people in the Bronx and Queens about what housing options were available to them. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman convened a meeting of private and public utility companies from across the country and determined a way for them to work as a unit in times of natural disaster; they also established a 24/7 ops center at the Department of Energy. Pretty good stuff. For every visit, there was local press coverage that got out the information we knew people needed. Slowly but surely, we were seeing more calm.

  Two days before the election, a nor’easter was forecast for the New York metro area. Bruce Springsteen and Jay Z were hitting the road with the president for final Get Out the Vote events. My love for Bruce Springsteen is second only to my love for the Grateful Dead, but I was in DC monitoring the storm, still resolving Sandy issues, and working with the Cabinet on their trips to damaged areas. I was very disappointed to be missing the events, but I knew my place was in the office, blasting “Land of Hope and Dreams” after everyone else had gone home.

  On one of these nights, I was sitting at my desk and the phone rang. The caller ID showed that it was Jack Lew, the White House chief of staff. We had done a storm update about an hour or so earlier, so I didn’t know why he was calling. When people are traveling with POTUS, they often call because something has gone wrong and they want to air their frustrations on the unsuspecting person on the other line. “Who thought this was a good idea?” etc. I really wasn’t in the mood for whatever the issue might be. Also, I had been seeing the pictures on TV all day, and I didn’t want a pity “What’s going on in the office? I’m trying to sound like I’m not having the time of my life!” call. I answered with a listless, slightly cranky, “Hey.”

  But it wasn’t Jack on the line. A voice said, “Alyssa?”

  OH MY GOD. I knew the voice.

  He didn’t immediately say, “It’s Bruce Springsteen,” but he sounds just like his music—it was like a saxophone could come in at any minute. He thanked me for my work on Hurricane Sandy on behalf of the people of New Jersey.

  Because I am a real tool, I was so shocked and flustered that I told him he probably had better things to be doing on Air Force One than talking to me. I said I appreciated his call, and then we hung up.

  On Election Day, I walked down to the AME church on 15th Street to vote. I talked to Rahm Emanuel while I was waiting and called Secretary Donovan to give him a heads-up that I had suggested to the president that he be named head of the Sandy Recovery Task Force and that POTUS might be calling him shortly—sorry, not sorry. While the job would be hugely satisfying in many ways, the months after a disaster are also when people start to become annoyed that thin
gs are taking so long.

  That night, Anita Decker Breckenridge, the personal aide to the president, and I went to BLT Steak for a (very) early-bird dinner. We had a few fall-inspired cocktails and shared a steak. I was asleep by 10:30 PM and never saw POTUS’s election night speech. It was clear he would win, and the beauty of YouTube is that I knew I could watch the speech the next day—all I wanted to do was lay my head down on the pillow. Maybe this sounds anticlimactic, but I really thought we were going to win, and it was nice to have a moment of rest. A lot of the dudes wanted to be out in Chicago to bask with POTUS, but I didn’t feel like my part in the campaign wasn’t going to be acknowledged just because I wasn’t there.

  A few weeks later, the New York Times printed a story about the White House staff in which someone made an offhand comment about the scope of my job. The article was about the selection process for Obama’s new chief of staff, and I got a passing mention: “Alyssa Mastromonaco, relatively young at 36, has managed Mr. Obama’s logistical and travel arrangements since he first started running for president six years ago, and will remain as deputy chief of staff for operations, responsible for overseeing scheduling, personnel and much more.”