Monday was the big day, all right! The storm made landfall before I even woke up, but since New Orleans is actually up the river about a hundred miles, it didn’t hit there until about breakfast time. I called down to the Shreveport Command Center about 8:30 and got Mike Brown on the line. He sounded tired but functional. “Mike, what’s up?”
“The storm has made landfall south of New Orleans. It dropped down to a Category Three before it landed, thank God! We expect it to hit New Orleans around lunchtime. Everybody is lying low right now. Rescue and evacuation operations are shut down. If you haven’t gotten out yet, you won’t.”
“How bad is that going to be?”
“Sir, I just don’t know. Ray Nagin was sending thousands of people to his refugee centers, and we got most of them onto buses and trucks, but that’s done now. They ran into the night, but it’s just too dangerous now. There’s probably still five thousand people at the Superdome, and I don’t know how many others in the city. We had soldiers breaking down doors and hauling people out and throwing them on buses, and they still wanted to ride it out.”
“Jesus!” I replied.
“It’s worse than that, sir. In one case some soldiers knocked on the door of a house and were shot at from inside. They backed up, but a minute later the house exploded. It turned out to be a meth lab. Elsewhere, there has been some looting. The local cops are even robbing places.”
“Oh, hell! Where’s John?”
“He’s sacked out on a cot in another room. He and I have been running in shifts.”
It sounded like they knew what they were doing, and they were on the scene. “There’s probably not much we can do now until this thing blows over. Have John call me when he wakes up, but leave it at that. You get some rest, too.”
“Yes, sir.”
I hung up. I was still the President of the entire country, not just the Gulf Coast, so I couldn’t simply sit around and listen to the news. I had two budget meetings, a Pentagon briefing, a Congressional lunch, and three photo ops. I followed the events as best I could. Shortly after lunch, Frank stuck his head into a budget meeting and whispered to me, “The levees have begun to fail.”
I wasn’t surprised, not at all. “Frank, remember that Army Corps of Engineers fellow who swore up and down the levees wouldn’t fail.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do me a favor. Give him a call and ask him why his letter of resignation isn’t on my desk yet, and then ask who his number two is over there. Heads are going to roll, and we might as well start now.”
“Yes, sir.” Frank nodded in understanding. He knew by now I had remarkably short shrift with that sort of thing, and he also knew that as Chief of Staff he had to be my hammer at times. I expected accountability. I would back you to the hilt, but the job damn well better be done.
Throughout the day the reports of widespread and massive destruction poured in, from official reports and from the television news. Katrina was going into the history books. Had I done enough? I doubted it. I suspected bodies were going to be piled up like cordwood by the time everything was finished. The damage? Beyond anything this nation had ever seen! I told Frank we would be flying down as soon as the weather allowed.
All day Tuesday the extent of the destruction became known. The southern half of three states was thoroughly trashed. We had about 5,000 refugees and soldiers trapped at the Superdome, and another 5,000 spread around the other shelters. The levees had been breached at dozens of different spots, and most of New Orleans was under water. All the surrounding parishes and counties were destroyed. There was no power, no phones, no television, no running water, no sewer systems, no roads — no nothing! I told Marilyn that if it was us, we’d be sitting on the roof of our house and sharpening our knives, wondering who was going to take the first bite out of whom.
The weather finally allowed us to go down early Wednesday morning. Amusingly, my regular airplane, a 747 variant, was too big to land at Shreveport’s airport. John’s regular ride as Air Force Two was a 757, and it was sufficiently smaller that it could land there. I could either maintain my august dignity and take the 747 to a different airport and fly something smaller to Shreveport, or take a backup 757 direct. Then I was told that Barksdale Air Force Base was across the river from Shreveport, and any runway capable of handling a B-52 could handle Air Force One, so we took my regular 747 there and hop a chopper to Shreveport. We left long before the sun was up, and got into Shreveport at 6:00 AM local time. John and Mike met me at the airport, and we went first to the disaster headquarters, where we met the professionals — FEMA and the military — and the politicians. Governor Blanco and her entourage were there, overwhelmed but trying, and Nagin, with his own entourage, complaining that we weren’t running fleets of helicopters into the city and bitching at full volume about how it was everybody’s fault but his. Also present were a bunch of reporters, there to capture this as a photo op.
The schedule for the day was two-fold, start rescuing people, and start figuring out just how bad the damage was. First though, I had to deal with Nagin, who was making a real ass of himself, and being more nuisance than he was worth. For a guy who had slept through the storm on a bed in a hotel in Shreveport, he was mightily concerned about his constituents back home on the roofs of their houses.
Finally I had enough. “Mister Mayor, will you kindly shut up! I have enough problems without you adding to them,” I exclaimed.
“How dare you speak to me that way?!” He started squawking and complaining some more.
I looked around and saw a National Guard captain over to the side, talking to several Guardsmen. I waved to him and yelled, “Captain! Please!”
Nagin was now hooting as I ignored him. The Guard captain came over and came to attention. “Sir!”
I turned back to Nagin. “Shut the hell up. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” I turned to the captain and pointed to Nagin. “I have had it with this idiot. Get him out of here and put him on the first flight to the Superdome. He can help from the front lines.”
The room went deathly quiet for a moment, except for the clicking of cameras. The captain may have been startled, but he simply acknowledged me and motioned over a pair of Guardsmen from the corner. Grinning, the two National Guardsmen took hold of Nagin’s arms and dragged him out of the room, as he began yelling and screaming. His final words were a loud and clear, “FUCK YOU, BUCKMAN! FUCK YOU!” Most people were shocked by what had just happened, but not all. John, Mike, and Frank had sly smiles on their faces, because they knew what happened when I lost patience with somebody.
I turned to the others and simply said, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem! I got no use for more problems right now! Is everybody clear on that?”
We left the building just in time to see my new friends putting Ray Nagin on a Blackhawk that was spooling up and getting ready to head south. The captain saw me and saluted, and I returned it. I left John behind with Frank, and Mike and I climbed into a different helicopter, along with some agents and a few reporters. The reporters wanted to ask silly questions, so Mike and I simply put on the proffered headsets and ignored them. Minutes later, we lifted off and headed towards Fort Polk, which was about halfway to New Orleans.
Once we were aloft, I heard the pilot, a chief warrant officer named Hastings, say, “This is Army One, and we are airborne!” He sounded like an excited teenager, even though he was in his forties. I had to smile at that.