Disaster response took back seat to terror, he says
By Robert L. Smith
Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
Copyright 2006 Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
He got the attaboy that now no one wants to hear, the slap on the back that leads to the door.
When President Bush, on his first post-Katrina visit to the Gulf Coast, turned to his man on the scene and declared “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” a new meaning entered the national lexicon.
Heck-of-a-job came to signal “A complete and total screwup,” according to Urbandictionary.com, and Michael Brown became a walking symbol of cronyism and incompetence.
You could forgive him for fading away. But Brown, who remains in the disaster business, says he was a pretty good director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
He insists that it was politicians who really messed up Katrina and that, if we let them, they will do it again.
A rejuvenated Brown brought his side of the story to the City Club of Cleveland on Friday. He riveted a crowd that seemed surprised by his demeanor and engaged by his candor.
“We were doomed to failure and I predicted that,” Brown said.
He said he had warned Bush and his top advisers that Hurricane Katrina could be the big one. He had complained for months that FEMA’s strength had been sapped in the new Department of Homeland Security.
But the president was uninterested, the White House obsessed with terrorism, he said. When the Big Easy submerged, Brownie became the scapegoat. And how.
“The kids would call and say, ‘Dad, last night Letterman really beat you up.’ It’s kind of like a lawyer hearing a lawyer joke after a while,” he said.
In a deep voice softened by an Oklahoma drawl, Brown hushed the room with tales of personal regret.
The storm hit Aug. 29, 2005, flooding 80 percent of New Orleans. More than 1,800 people died. Television cameras captured the suffering for all to see.
Brown took much of the blame for the slow federal response, leading to scrutiny of his résumé.
He had joined FEMA in 2001 as legal counsel to his friend, then-FEMA director Joe Allbaugh, who was Bush’s 2000 campaign manager. When Allbaugh left FEMA in 2003, Bush appointed Brown to the top job.
Previously, Brown had spent 10 years directing judges as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.
At a meeting with Plain Dealer editors Friday, Brown bristled to have his qualifications questioned. As FEMA’s top lawyer, he said, he was familiar with all facets of the agency.
Brown, who resigned from FEMA 10 days after the president’s public praise, is now a disaster consultant to private businesses and a man on a mission. Brown said he wants to warn the nation it is unprepared for the next, certain calamity.
“We can eliminate all the terrorists in the world and we will still have the greatest terrorist of all, and that is Mother Nature,” he told the City Club.
He said he regrets not speaking the truth to the American public and telling them the government’s response to Katrina was a mess, and so is the Department of Homeland Security, which is too big and unwieldy to react to natural disasters.
He said he needed to shake Bush from a vacation reverie, a disengagement illustrated by the president’s decision to view the hurricane zone from a passing plane.
Had he gone public with concerns he was screaming in conference calls, Brown said, Air Force One might have landed and given FEMA the resources a president commands.
He said he also learned that most politicians do not want to pay for disaster readiness, so the public must insist. Noting the firefighters sprinkled about the room, Brown said, “They would die to save you in disaster. What will you do so they don’t die?”