What was their tug-of-war all about? Much of it concerned public perception. President Bush had the authority to federalize the Louisiana National Guard. He could have invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807, which gives the President the right to “suppress insurrections,” a particularly touchy issue in the Deep South. Since World War II it had been invoked three times, race relations being intrinsic to each case: in 1957 in Little Rock, and 1963 in Oxford, both revolving around desegregation, and in 1992 during the Rodney King race riots in Los Angeles. Nicholas Lemann wrote in The New Yorker, “The Insurrection Act of 1807 outlines the script that the administration evidently wanted Governor Blanco to follow: a governor asks the President to federalize local law enforcement in order to suppress an insurrection; the President issues a proclamation ordering the ‘insurgents to disperse’; they don’t; the cavalry rides to the rescue…. But the President has the option of sending in troops without being asked when the law isn’t being enforced or the rights of a class of people are being denied—which was clearly the case in New Orleans, not just because crime was rampant, but because so many people were trapped in hellish conditions.”68
Governor Blanco was flabbergasted by Nagin’s performance on Air Force One: taking the long shower, pounding his fist, using cuss words with abandon. He was unprofessional and, she feared, unglued. He seemed to have made a prearranged pact with Andy Card, acting jovial with him like he was already firmly in the Bush camp. He was praising President Bush ad nauseam, despite the fact that the day before he had criticized the federal response on the radio. He simply told everybody in Louisiana what they wanted to hear—except Blanco. “We always sensed that he was used as a tool, as a buffer,” Blanco said in a December 2005 interview. “It was bizarre, you know, that little [get your asses down here] remark he made on national TV and I saw it again recently when I was looking at the copies of my public comments. When we met on Air Force One, Nagin was falling apart. He was near nervous breakdown.”69
Quite naturally, Nagin saw himself in a different light. His version of the Air Force One meeting with Bush cast himself as the balanced, fair-minded voice of reason. Even though he had denounced Bush on WWL the evening before, Nagin insisted that the President knew that all those remarks were just straight talk. “But he was well aware of it,” Nagin told CBS’s 60 Minutes. “And I pulled him aside with the governor. I said, ‘Look. That was uncharacteristic of me. But consider being in my shoes. What would you have done? And if I said anything disrespectful to the office of the President or the governor, I apologize. But tell me, What we gonna do now?’”70
According to Nagin, President Bush accepted his quasi-apology. “The President basically said, ‘Mr. Mayor, I know we could’ve done a better job, and…we’re gonna fix it.’” According to Nagin, Bush insisted that the New Orleans mayor be deadly honest with him, without pulling any punches. “He said to me, ‘I think I’ve been hearing a lot of stuff that…may not be true,’” Nagin recalled. “‘I wanna hear from you. Tell me the truth, and I will help you.’ And I looked in his eyes, and he meant it. And when he meant it, I told him the truth.” Nagin claimed Bush was “brutally honest” and “we talked turkey.”71
Even though Blanco didn’t fully respect Nagin and thought him a man of bad faith, she telephoned him after the meeting and inquired about his mental health. “I called him that night and said ‘Ray, you need to get out of town. You need to go sleep somewhere.’ What was going on was that he was locked up on the twenty-fourth [sic ] floor of the Hyatt and anyone who wanted to see him had to climb twenty-four [sic ] flights of stairs and he was afraid to come out. But he’d come out once a day or something like that and go make some crazy remarks to the media and then go hide. He was, like, going through a near nervous breakdown.” Whether Blanco’s advice was heeded or not, the mayor did soon leave the Hyatt. The governor recalled, “Well, then he left for five days! In the heat of everything that was going on, he’s screaming about no leadership and he’s a total void. I never made any public comments about that and still would have a hard time…. I don’t want to talk about him. It doesn’t serve me well to talk about him, best I don’t talk about him.”72
The period to which Governor Blanco was referring was Wednesday, September 7, through Monday, September 12. While the streets of New Orleans were still flooded, Mayor Nagin left for Dallas and leased a house. He exaggerated that his own New Orleans home on Park Island Drive had been severely damaged (it wasn’t). Although Nagin didn’t deny spending almost an entire week in Dallas, he was perplexed as to why Blanco and others were upset over the hiatus. “Why would a governor of the state of Louisiana be ticked about that?” he asked. “I don’t get that. I mean, I took care of my city as best I could. I got it organized. I got rescues. I didn’t leave [for Dallas] until that last bus left New Orleans…. Why does that upset somebody?” Like Blanco, Police Chief Eddie Compass was stunned that Nagin simply abandoned New Orleans at its darkest hour. In NOPD circles, Nagin’s handle had been “New Orleans One.” Since the police were furious that Nagin had leased a house in Texas while New Orleans was 80 percent underwater, he became known in NOPD circles as “Dallas One.”73 A few police officers made signs saying “Dallas One” as a protest, posting them around the Wal-Mart and Tchoupitoulas Street. “I pulled the signs down,” Compass recalled. “I knew what it meant. I told the guys it just wasn’t good for the city.”74 Meanwhile, Nagin found the time on September 5 to tell NBC News, “It wouldn’t be unreasonable to have 10,000 deaths.”75 It was the most irresponsible statement any politician made during the Great Deluge. Just imagine the pain such a dire forecast brought to displaced people frantically trying to find a loved one. A leader doesn’t hype the casualty toll. It shatters morale and increases panic. Ironically, even with Nagin exaggerating the numbers, many assumed he was, in fact, lowballing the real figure.
There were 1,351 deaths attributable to the hurricane: 2 in Alabama,76 2 in Georgia, 16 in Florida,77 228 in Mississippi,78 and 1,103 in Louisiana.79 The numbers edged upward in late September as more bodies were found. Officials had to make judgment calls to determine whether particular deaths would have occurred in due course or were the direct result of Katrina, the evacuation, or the stress of the aftermath—it could be very hard to say. Don Moreau, operations chief in one of the regional coroner’s offices assigned to work on Katrina deaths in Louisiana, gave the example of a man with a terminal disease who died as he was being evacuated under trying conditions. The coroner was supposed to decide whether it was a “Katrina related” death. “Short of 1-800-ASK-GOD,” Moreau said, “I don’t know how to determine that.”80
In the December interview, Governor Blanco cited Nagin’s exaggeration of the death toll as pandering to the press; he was ready to tell anybody what they wanted to hear. “I felt like those Nagin statements made it more difficult for everybody,” Blanco said. “When he said ‘10,000 dead,’ then the media would be asking me, every time I went up, ‘How many people do you think died?’ And I would have to respond, ‘We have no way of knowing that right now. We have no confirmation. We’re still in lifesaving mode.’”
When pushed to explain Nagin’s motivation for such an exaggeration, Blanco, accentuating the near nervous breakdown, offered a plausible answer: “I think I can guess what happened to Nagin, but he’d have to tell his part, is that after a time, you have a tendency to want to satisfy people when they ask you the same question, day in and day out. He probably just threw it out, like estimates of 10,000. I never did that because I felt like I had no way of knowing it. We still had to do lifesaving missions before we started on body recovering and then the reports would have to be done. I just know and understand the dangers of overstating in the big national and international media and I just try to use facts as much as possible without speculating. They love you to speculate. Then you own the number. I think Ray is saying now that he threw the number out as a possibility and then it became his number. I didn’t let them tag me with a number.”81
The events that followed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina were spun into legends even as they were happening. Rumors were folded into the news cycle and repeated as fact before they could be corroborated or checked. Stories of rampant murders at the Superdome were later discounted: there were no murders at the Superdome. There was a tale of twenty-two people found in Jefferson Parish, tied together by a rope, drowned in the storm’s fury: it wasn’t true, even though it was reported in newspapers all over the country. The most upsetting case of rumor-mongering, however, would come from a surprising source. On the Tuesday after the storm, Police Superintendent Eddie Compass met Oprah Winfrey, who was visiting the city of New Orleans on a mission. On her September 9 show she said, “As this catastrophe unfolded, I watched, like all of you, and I felt helpless, and I wanted to do something. So I picked up the phone and I called some of my friends and said, ‘Let’s go down there and see what we can do.’” While in New Orleans, finding “stories you haven’t heard,” Oprah did get a true scoop. In talking with Compass, she heard his emotional account of a friend and fellow officer who committed suicide. She asked him if there were still dead people in the houses. “Oh, God, thousands,” Compass said.
Compass’s prediction that thousands of dead bodies would be found in homes was far off. It was perhaps an understandable bit of unintentional hyperbole. Unfortunately, the police superintendent didn’t stop there.
“Inside the Superdome,” Oprah Winfrey said to her audience, “he had seen horrors that will haunt him the rest of his life.”
“We had little babies in there,” Compass said. “Some of the little babies getting raped…”82
In the South, “babies” can refer to children of any age and at least one child rape was confirmed at the Convention Center (which Compass ought not to have confused with the Superdome). Compass had no right, however, to exaggerate whatever reports he may have heard into “little babies getting raped.” He was losing his grip on reality, and within two weeks Nagin forced him to resign.
“Hindsight is easy,” Compass later said in an interview. “I screwed up during Katrina. Communication was very bad. There was so much misinformation. Marlon Defillo was handling communications for the police; Marlon and I came to the conclusion that ‘no comment’ was worse than talking to the media. It was damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Terry Ebbert told me to do the interviews because Nagin wasn’t in shape to.” In a 2006 interview, Nagin made it seem that Compass was the one unable to cope with “the pressure he was under.”
Compass’s babies-getting-raped exaggeration grew out of deep concerns he had for his own family. “My wife was eight months pregnant,” Compass recalled. “And it was reported [falsely] that my twenty-four-year-old daughter was raped at the Ritz-Carlton. The communications were horrible. The reports I was getting of pedophiles raping small kids made me sick. My whole life is about helping the kids. So I broke down crying with Dr. Phil and Oprah and all that. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have reported rapes—I gave too much information. Some of it was wrong information. I admit I made mistakes. But I was working twenty hours a day and trying to show the media that the police department had nothing to hide. We would report what we knew.”
Compass was at City Hall when he received an e-mail from Nagin basically firing him. “He asked me to come up with a thirty-five- to forty-day exit strategy,” Compass recalled. “I was in my room with Colonel Ebbert and Marlon Defillo when I read the e-mail. It’s sad when your boss, and supposed friend, treats you like that. Jesus Christ! I just couldn’t believe it, you know. Those guys really had to calm me down.”83
V
On Friday, while President Bush held his Air Force One summit, Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Duckworth was still in “all hands on deck” high alert at the Coast Guard’s temporary headquarters in Alexandria, Louisiana. Every hour, he was sending Coast Guard boats into the bowl of New Orleans. Meanwhile, Coast Guard helicopters, under the leadership of Lieutenant Shelly Decker (Air Desk) evacuated nuns out of the Ursuline Academy on Nashville Avenue and medical personnel from Memorial Hospital on Napoleon Avenue. On average, the Coast Guard rescued 5,500 people a year; by Friday it had already surpassed that mark. One junior Coast Guard pilot, in fact, saved more than 50 people in a twenty-four-hour period. With President Bush in the area, “everybody under the sun,” according to Duckworth, was pitching in with boat and helicopter rescues. “DOD had started to come,” he recalled. “Air Marine, private patrolling-type helicopters, every description in the air, flying people everywhere.”84The sky was filled with Hueys, Blackhawks, Chinooks, and Apaches. But it was the Coast Guard that led the way in the air and in the water after Katrina. It was because they were doing what they had been trained to do on a daily basis—save lives. By September 7 they had rescued 24,135 people by boat and helicopter, plus another 9,400 from eleven hospitals.85
Duckworth knew what these new federal troops were thinking—that television “did not do justice to the destruction and devastation that we saw.” Although Duckworth was, for the most part, anchored to Alexandria, he had taken a Vietnam-era artillery observation plane on a mission earlier in the week, hovering over Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard parishes at about 1,000 feet. The antiquated plane had a propeller in both the front and the back. He was particularly worried about the people still stranded in Chalmette. He wanted to deploy LCACs—100-foot-long and 50-to-65-foot-wide behemoths—into the parishes, but he wasn’t sure they could fit over the levees. Instead of rescuing ten people at a time the LCACs could bring in at least sixty people per launch. “My plan was to go down to Lower St. Bernard to see if we could get the LCACs up the Violet Canal because, I thought, if we could get them up the canal we could get them onto St. Bernard Highway and we could get into the neighborhoods and rescue thousands,” Duckworth recalled. “I asked my pilot to fly over the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet and follow it down so I could find the Violet Canal and follow it back. And we did that. I could not believe the devastation to the MRGO levee. It was just basically not even there. Just a fucking ant pile. The Bayou Bienvenu Flood Control Structure just looked like it had been stomped by a giant, just completely in disarray.”86
Upon flying toward the river from the intersection of the MRGO and the Violet Canal, Duckworth was stunned by the horrific vastness of the four serious oil spills, that of Murphy Oil being the largest. A Coast Guard pollution control group worried about the potential health risks from the benzene. It came to the conclusion that the four oil spills combined were on the order of approximately three-quarters the size of the notorious Exxon-Valdez spill that occurred in Alaska in March 1989. “All of a sudden my eyes started burning, and I thought there was a hydraulic leak in the plane or something,” Duckworth recalled. “It was just really, really bad vapors, and I looked down and saw the oil that was down there in the Murphy tank. There was oil everywhere and what was happening was vapors from the oil baking in the sun came up one thousand feet, so it was hard to keep your eyes open at that.”87
But Duckworth was too busy to worry about benzene exposure. He had FEMA to deal with. Task Force Katrina, under General Honore’s command, wanted the Mississippi River opened ASAP. That would take Coast Guard/FEMA cooperation. Duckworth was game, but he quickly learned that FEMA’s primary problem was its complete ignorance of Louisiana geography. “I worked a lot with FEMA during the outset and the biggest challenge that I saw for FEMA was having an appreciation for the nuances of New Orleans and the surrounding area,” Duckworth said. “The fact that the river doesn’t necessarily run north–south was a big deal. The East Bank can be the North Bank. Where is this in relation to that? Oh, it’s not just the Port of New Orleans, it’s the Port of Plaquemine, St. Bernard–New Orleans, Port of South Louisiana. FEMA didn’t seem to have full appreciation for that, for locale. And I found myself and some of my fellow operators who are from New Orleans, we found ourselves acting as translators for a lot of FEMA people to help get them to understand what it’s going t
o take to do something, what are the logistics involved in getting from this point to that point. You can’t drive there, you’re going to have to go by boat, etc. But, to be fair, there was no way FEMA could have absorbed the magnitude of the destruction. I’m not a Michael Brown apologist, but I will say that had Douglas MacArthur been in charge of the preparation and response for Katrina, it would have made an ass out of him.”88
On Friday, Duckworth cracked a smile for the first time since Monday. Things were looking up: the National Guard reinforcements, President Bush’s Gulf South tour, the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division en route, the FEMA and Blanco buses, the Kaiser-Hill company sandbags, the fact that Fats Domino was found alive. The light rays were starting to shine through.
Meanwhile, the community of Alexandria just kept rolling out the Southern hospitality. A citizens’ group was barbecuing nightly dinners for the Coast Guard, with casserole dishes appearing around the clock. The police department was using its squad cars as taxis for the Coast Guard, shuttling some officers back and forth to Baton Rouge. All the city restaurants had a “Feed the Coast Guard for Free” program. Schoolkids plastered walls with signs reading “Thank You” and “Well Done.” The Alexandria International Airport became a staging area, allowing tons of equipment and matériel to be flown in. American flags appeared on front lawns. “Looking back on it,” Duckworth said, “one of the things that really helped out the crew was when you’re walking off watch and you’re all hot and tired and there’s a little lady walking in with a cake. That happened over and over.”
Throughout the Great Deluge, Lieutenant Commander Duckworth kept detailed notes of what the Coast Guard was doing. His journal was filled with time charts, mission plans, basic math, telephone numbers, accomplished goals, and persistent problems. On Friday Duckworth made a note that he later pointed to as a key to the government’s troubling response during the first week after Katrina. The note read:
The Great Deluge Page 70