http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051003fa_factThe New YorkerOn September 10, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson had lunch in the Roosevelt Room—the “Fish Room,” as F.D.R. called it—with several aides and half a dozen ambassador of modest-sized countries. Then he returned to the Oval Office for a routine round of meetings and telephone calls—a fairly ordinary, crowded day amid the growing crisis of the war in Vietnam. At 2:36 p.m., according to copies of Johnson’s daily diaries, the President took a call from Senator Russell Long, of Louisiana. The day before, Hurricane Betsy had made landfall on the Gulf Coast. Storm gusts were up to a hundred and sixty miles an hour, and in New Orleans levees had been breached, causing much of the city to flood overnight, especially the neighborhoods of Bywater, Pontchartrain Park, and the largely black and impoverished Ninth Ward. The Army Corps of Engineers later reported as many as eighty-one deaths, a quarter-million people evacuated, and water levels of up to nine feet. Hurricane Betsy was the worst disaster to strike New Orleans since the cholera epidemic of 1849 and the yellow-fever epidemic of 1905.
Russell Long, the son of Huey Long and an old friend of Johnson’s in the Senate, had a simple goal. He wanted to convince the President of the urgency of the crisis and have him come immediately to Louisiana. Their conversation is rich with emotional and political manipulation. Long made it clear to Johnson that to delay, or to send a subordinate, could easily have consequences in the 1968 election:
Senator Long: Mr. President, aside from the Great Lakes, the biggest lake in America is Lake Pontchartrain. It is now drained dry. That Hurricane Betsy picked the lake up and put it inside New Orleans and Jefferson Parish, the Third [Congressional] District. . . . If I do say it, our people are just like . . . It’s like my home—The whole damn home’s been destroyed, but that’s all right. My wife and kids are still alive, so it’s O.K. Mr. President, we have really had it down there, and we need your help.
President Johnson: All right. You got it.
Long: Well, now, if I do say it . . . we’ve lost only one life so far. Why we haven’t lost more I can’t say. . . . For example, that damn big four-hundred-year-old tree fell on top of my house. My wife and kids were, thank God, in the right room. So we’re still alive. I don’t need no federal aid. But, Mr. President, my people—Oh, they’re in tough shape. . . . If I do say it, you could elect Hale Boggs and every guy you’d want to elect in the path of this hurricane just by handling yourself right.
Now, if you want to go to Louisiana right now— You lost that state last year. You could pick it up just like looking at it right now by going down there as the President just to see what happened. . . . Just go, and say, “My God, this is horrible! . . . These federally constructed levees that Hale Boggs and Russell Long built is the only thing that saved five thousand lives.” See now, if you want to do that you can do it right now. Just pick one state up like looking at it—you lost it last time. If you’d do that you’d sack them up. [Louisiana congressman] Ed Willis is sitting on this telephone and he knows like I do that all you’ve got to do is just make a generous gesture, he’d get reëlected, a guy that’s for you.
Johnson: Russell, I sure want to. I’ve got a hell of a two days that I’ve got scheduled. Let me look and see what I can back out of and get into and so on and so forth and let me give you a ring back. If I can’t go, I’ll put the best man I got there.
Long: So now listen, we are not the least bit interested in your best man. . . . I’m just a Johnson man. Let’s—
Johnson: I know that. I know that.
Long: . . . Just make it a stopover. . . . You go to Louisiana right now, land at Moisant Airport. [Imagining a news story] “The President was very much upset about the horrible destruction and damage done to this city of New Orleans, lovely town. The town that everybody loves.” If you go there right now, Mr. President, they couldn’t beat you if Eisenhower ran.
Johnson: Um-hmm. Let me think about it and call you back.
Johnson hung up. He met with Bill Moyers, Larry O’Brien, J. Edgar Hoover, and others. He accepted an award from the leaders of the World Convention of Churches of Christ. Then, at 5:03 p.m., he boarded a helicopter on the South Lawn, and it ferried him to Andrews Air Force Base. From there the President—along with Russell Long and Representative Hale Boggs, the key congressional powers in Louisiana, and officials from the Red Cross and the Army Corps of Engineers—flew to New Orleans on Air Force One. “The President spent a good deal of the time talking w/ Senator Long and Cong. Hale Boggs during the flight,” the diary says. “Also worked in his bedroom w/ [his assistants] on mail that had been taken on the flight. Afterwards, the President napped for about 30 minutes before arrival in New Orleans.”
Even at the airport, Johnson began to get a sense of the damage wrought by Betsy. “Parts of the roofing of the terminal were torn away and several of the large windows were broken,” the diary reads. “The members of the Presidential party had seen from the air a preview of the city—water over 3/4 of the city up to the eaves of the homes, etc.” At the urging of the mayor of New Orleans—a diminutive conservative Democrat named Victor Hugo Schiro, whom Johnson referred to as “Little Mayor”—the President decided to tour the flooded areas. His motorcade stopped on a bridge spanning the Industrial Canal, in the eastern part of the city, and from there the Presidential party saw whole neighborhoods engulfed by floods. They could see, according to the diary, that “people were walking along the bridge where they had disembarked from the boats that had brought them to dry land. Many of them were carrying the barest of their possessions and many of them had been sitting on top of their houses waiting for rescue squads to retrieve the families and carry them to dry land.” Johnson talked with a seventy-four-year-old black man named William Marshall and asked about what had happened and how he was getting along. As the conversation ended, Marshall said, “God bless you, Mr. President. God ever bless you.”
In the Ninth Ward, Johnson visited the George Washington Elementary School, on St. Claude Avenue, which was being used as a shelter. “Most of the people inside and outside of the building were Negro,” the diary reads. “At first, they did not believe that it was actually the President.” Johnson entered the crowded shelter in near-total darkness; there were only a couple of flashlights to lead the way.
“This is your President!” Johnson announced. “I’m here to help you!”
The diary describes the shelter as a “mass of human suffering,” with people calling out for help “in terribly emotional wails from voices of all ages. . . . It was a most pitiful sight of human and material destruction.” According to an article by the historian Edward F. Haas, published fifteen years ago in the Gulf Coast Historical Review, Johnson was deeply moved as people approached and asked him for food and water; one woman asked Johnson for a boat so that she could look for her two sons, who had been lost in the flood.
“Little Mayor, this is horrible,” Johnson said to Schiro. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.” Johnson assured Schiro that the resources of the federal government were at his disposal and that “all red tape [will] be cut.”
The President flew back to Washington and the next day sent Schiro a sixteen-page telegram outlining plans for aid and the revival of New Orleans. “Please know,” Johnson wrote, “that my thoughts and prayers are with you and the thousands of Louisiana citizens who have suffered so heavily.”
Hurricane Katrina was more devastating than Betsy. The death toll is sure to be many times as high and the physical damage far more extensive and enduring. And yet to see the city of New Orleans a week after the flood, to see the ruin, was to be shocked much as Johnson was forty years ago. Ne Orleans is never abandoned easily. Driving along St. Charles Avenue, through toxic puddles that once belonged to the Mississippi River or Lake Pontchartrain, you saw painted sign on a door reading, “Still here Cooking a pot of dog gumbo.” Another, next to a branch of the Whitney National Bank read, “I am sleeping inside with a big dog, an ugly woman, two shotguns and a claw hammer.” By the time Hurricane Rita had reflooded parts of the city, there was almost no one left in town.
The last holdouts, especially the poorest among them, wore a look of delirium. They seemed to sense that to leave now, with no savings, with no resources, meant to leave forever. On a desolate corner in the Ninth Ward, I sat on a curb with an old woman who had been refusing rescue for more than a week. She wore a soiled housedress. She was very old and could not have weighed more than seventy-five pounds. “I’ll be here to the end,” she said. There was a bottle of warm beer in a paper bag at her feet. She didn’t drink from it. She was just dazed by the sun and the heat and the emptiness of her street. She was firm in her belief that all her neighbors, now in shelters in Lafayette, Houston, Pensacola, God knows where, were the lost ones. “Plain fools,” she said. The street smelled of low tide in a tidal swamp. She said, “They’re jealous of me. I got forty-four dollars’ worth of meat in that icebox inside, and they ain’t gonna take it from me. Nobody gonna lock me out of my home.”
Although there were no looters now and very few residents, the streets were still being patrolled in fantastic numbers by—and this is a random sampling—the New Orleans Police, New Orleans swat teams, the New York City Police Department, the Sacramento Fire Department, the Greenbelt, Maryland, police, private Blackwater security contractors, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the 82nd Airborne, National Guardsmen, San Diego lifeguards, Surf Zone Relief Operations, and, in yellow T-shirts, Scientology Disaster Response teams. The Scientologists pitched a tent outside Harrah’s Casino with a sign reading “Something Can Be Done About It,” and offered massage “assists” to the police.
Eddie Compass, the superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, was holding court in front of Harrah’s. I got to know Compass years ago, when he was an up-and-comer in the department, and Jack Maple, who helped set the New York department right in the early Giuliani administration, came down as a paid consultant for the N.O.P.D. Maple was a natural for New Orleans; he was his own Mardi Gras float. He was fat and funny and wore a homburg, spectator shoes, and sharp suits, and smoked a huge Mexican cigar. In many American cities, the combination of tech-era prosperity and the sort of innovative policing techniques that Maple had helped to develop were driving crime rates down. Yet Maple, like so many consultants before him, could do little about the poverty and corruption in New Orleans. He died a couple of years ago, and now Eddie Compass, who has barely aged, was saying that he missed him. “We could use the Fat Man now,” he said. “Everything else we tried failed.” Five hundred of his officers—roughly thirty per cent—did not initially report in the crisis. “Either they went home to take care of their families, went missing, or, God forbid, worse.” Two of his officers, including his spokesman, committed suicide during the flooding. The jails, like everything else, weren’t functional, and he was keeping nearly two hundred prisoners—looters, mainly—in a makeshift lockup in the local Amtrak station. At first, Compass had no help. Now the streets were so militarized—and so depopulated—that the city resembled a war zone with no enemy.
“Right now,” he said, “New Orleans may be the single safest city in the United States.”
Hurricane Katrina destroyed the structures comforts, and protections of civilization, and the poorer you were, the more exposed you were to high water. Stripped of electricity, air-conditioning, medicine, safety, food clean water, doctors, transport, firm ground—stripped of everything that seemed necessary to live in New Orleans—people were left with a gesture of political correctness. Within a day of the bowl of the city filling, TV commentators had instructed viewers that the people fleeing town were under no circumstances to be called refugees “These are Americans!” Not Bosnians, no Kosovars, not Bangladeshis—Americans And yet, of all the New Orleanians I met—in the city, or in the Cajundome, in Lafayette, in downtown Baton Rouge, in the churches and parks of New Iberia, at the Astrodome in Houston—none gave a damn for the terminology. They’d fled danger and no they were homeless, with few prospects or none at all
At a house where I was spending the night, I sat out on the porch until early morning listening on a transistor radio to the most powerful signal on the airwaves: WWL, 870 AM. It was a strangely efficient way of scanning the misery that had hit the Gulf Coast. The host was Garland Robinette, a sonorous broadcaster with a long history in town as a television anchor. Robinette’s show was a catchall for rumors, the debunking of rumors, interviews, speculation, and a kind of regional disaster therapy.
“This is Alexandra in Algiers Point. I’m still looking for my sister, Lee Ann. If you hear anything, please call. . . .”
“Elise, you’re still looking for your family?”
“The people of the Allstate National Catastrophe Team are standing by at 1-800-54-STORM.”
“Ray from Houma” called to say that at Louis Armstrong Airport two people posing as fema officers were telling people they had to pay fifteen dollars each to get on any buses leaving New Orleans. People traded information about gas, electricity, food supplies, and rental properties throughout the South. There were news bulletins: the floodwaters are highly contagious, contaminated with E. coli, rotting flesh, spilled petroleum. Washington is sending fifty-two billion dollars. Watch out for fake Web-site charities: there are “so many the F.B.I. can’t keep up with them.” Here’s how to get generators and chainsaws from John Deere. Here’s how to begin filing insurance claims.
A few days after the storm, WWL joined in a consortium of rival stations to form United Broadcasters of New Orleans, and they were now reaching thirty-eight states and thirteen countries. The moment that brought WWL the most attention was Robinette’s interview with Mayor Ray Nagin while people were still trapped in the Superdome and in the Convention Center, and Washington, particularly the White House, seemed to be on extended summer vacation. Unlike Lyndon Johnson, President Bush was slow to respond to the emergency—so slow, in fact, that his staff felt compelled to prepare a DVD of network newscasts to impress upon him the scale of the floods, the chaos, and the suffering. “God is looking down on all this,” Nagin said, “and if they are not doing everything in their power to save people they are going to pay the price. Because every day that we delay, people are dying and they’re dying by the hundreds, I’m willing to bet you . . . Don’t tell me forty thousand people are coming here. They’re not here. It’s too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let’s fix the biggest goddam crisis in the history of this country.”
One morning, I set out on Interstate 10 for St. Gabriel, a small town fifteen miles south of Baton Rouge, where federal officials had converted a warehouse into a morgue. As rescue workers found more bodies in attics and hospitals and nursing homes, they sent most of them to St. Gabriel. The death toll was a matter of speculation, and yet twenty-five thousand body bags were on their way to Louisiana. On the road, I listened to an interview on WWL with Kathleen Rhodes Astorga, of the Rhodes Funeral Home chain, in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
“We do jazz funerals, celebration-of-life ceremonies, all kinds of funerals,” she said. “We just want it to be with dignity and respect.”
The host lowered his voice to a timbre indicating solemnity and said, “These people have drowned, spent days in the water. Do you, um, think people should just go with your judgment on whether there should be a closed casket and put a picture on it?”
Rhodes agreed. “Thinking closed casket is not a bad idea,” she said.
I pulled up to the St. Gabriel morgue. A fence surrounded the place, and the policeman at the door politely rebuffed any questions. “All I can tell you is nothing,” he said. “And all I can give you is this.”
He handed me a sheet of paper:
Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT) Process
*As deceased victims are located by local emergency workers and volunteers they are taken to the collection site. A collection site is a place where FEMA DMORT staff collects preliminary information to help identify the victim. Information collected includes:
Address or location of victim
Any documentation associated with victim
GPS coordinates
Personal effects
*From the collection site, they are taken to the Disaster Portable Mortuary Unit (DPMU) with dignity in a very respectful manner utilizing a police escort.
Ordinarily, WWL’s studios are on the fifth floor of Dominion Tower, an office building near the Superdome. But the windows blew in during the storm, and WWL broadcast for a few days from a former waste-disposal plant, in Jefferson Parish. Finally, the station moved its operations to a studio in Baton Rouge. One afternoon, I came by to meet with the news director, Dave Cohen, a man in his thirties who wore a dirty white undershirt and shorts that would soon be better incinerated than washed. Every few minutes, his cell phone would bugle him to attention. His ring tone is “When the Saints Go Marching In.” He’d reach for his hip pocket in a panic. “Yes! This is Dave!” His house, in Metairie, just west of New Orleans, was flooded, but nothing, he said, like the Ninth Ward.
Because his station was the most immediate, moment-to-moment source of information in the region, I asked Cohen how it had felt to be inside the hurricane. “Friday before the storm, we were feeling good,” he said. “The National Hurricane Center said that this would really hit the Florida panhandle, not us. We were barely in the ‘cone of error’ in New Orleans. So I kicked off for the day on Friday at one o’clock and went to the gym. But at around four my pager started going haywire. Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center, had changed his prediction. There was a hundred-and-fifty-mile shift to the west.” It was going to be a problem to get people in the city to adjust. “In New Orleans, people go home at lunch on Fridays,” Cohen said. “All year round. And Friday night was a football night. The Ravens were in town to play a preseason game against the Saints at the Superdome. It was also a big high-school football night, the jamboree games, which kick off the season. People were out drinking, having a good time. They were consuming very little media. But by Saturday morning we were told there was mandatory evacuation for Plaquemines Parish, to the southeast, and some coastal areas, though not yet New Orleans. On Saturday, Ray Nagin was still saying that we have time to watch this. A lot of people were clueless. They had no idea there were evacuations.
“We’ve always talked about the worst-case scenarios in Louisiana,” Cohen continued. “They talk about ‘slosh models’—computer-generated models on what would happen. The geography is obvious. If you are walking along the riverfront in downtown New Orleans, you are looking up at the Mississippi River. You look up at Lake Pontchartrain, up at the canals. When the water flows in, you have a city that becomes a tidal lake, with sharks and manatees and all the rest.
“By ten on Saturday night, Nagin was really concerned. He got a call from Max Mayfield saying that he should evacuate the city. And on Sunday morning Nagin issued a mandatory evacuation order. Sunday night, there were gale-force winds. We were told that if you weren’t out by now it was too late, that—and this was the quote—‘preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion.’ We were broadcasting all of Sunday night. The power went out in the city. The eye of the storm wasn’t even near us, but our windows in the downtown studio started cracking. And on Monday morning, while Garland Robinette was on the air, the windows blew in.
“Landfall was at 6 a.m. on the coast,” he went on. “We feared that it would get to New Orleans at exactly 90 longitude, 30 latitude, and it got to 89.6. At 1 a.m., it went due north, and it felt like Christmas had come early. It was staying at 89.6 at 2, 3, 4 a.m. with one-hundred-and-fifty-mile-per-hour winds, but still it did not look like the worst-case scenario. Roofs were flying off houses, cars moved around in the wind, there were rapids in the streets, but still . . . On Monday night, there were reports that water was coming over the Seventeenth Street canal, which separates Orleans Parish and Jefferson Parish, to the west. The water was coming over in the dark. The levee itself is in Lakeview, an upscale lakefront neighborhood near where I-10 and I-610 split. At six in the morning, we were told that the levee had been ripped apart and water was pouring in. I went on the radio and said that eyewitnesses had said ‘The bowl is filling.’ So I said, ‘Get out if you are to the east of the Seventeenth Street canal. That’s the whole city. It’s as bad as the Mississippi River breaking through. Lake Pontchartrain is emptying into the city of New Orleans. The water is rising and it’s not going to stop. Get out now.’
“We started getting amazing phone calls: a woman in her house with a two-year-old on one shoulder, a five-year-old at her side, no formula, no food, ‘What do I do?’ And what can I tell her? I’m just a guy on the radio!”
Like so many other news people in town Dave Cohen had been preparing forty-years-later reports on Hurricane Betsy when Katrina hit. Although L.B.J. and the local officials of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana responded to their crisis with far greater coördination and speed than thei successors in 2005, the memories of Betsy remain bitter, and not only because of the suffering and destruction it caused. A Edward Haas has made clear, Betsy was followed within days by widespread rumor that Mayor Schiro had ordered floodwater pumped out of his own well-to-do subdivision, Lake Vista, and into the Ninth Ward. At the time of the flood, Schiro was in a race for reëlection with another Democrat the city council president, James E Fitzmorris, Jr. There were also stories that he had ordered the levees breached. Thomas E Allen, of Hunt Foods & Industries, an ally of the Mayor’s, wrote to him to say that two of his African-American servants “brought this tale to my wife yesterday and said that all of the Negroes were talking about it and were angry with you about it.” Haas quote Schiro’s secretary, Marguerite Guette, who told the Mayor, “An old 71-years of age colored man by the name of Williams, who says you have helped him all of his life and who lives at 2630 Republic Street, called to say that he is very concerned about a rumor that is going around that may ruin you with colored voters. The rumor is that you cut the Industrial Canal to drown the colored people so that they would not vote in the coming election.” An aide to the Mayor later reported that people claiming to be relief workers and Schiro supporters delivered bags of “supplies” to flood victims in the Ninth Ward. People opened the bags only to find spoiled food and soiled, useless clothing.
Four years ago, a play staged in New Orleans called “An Evening with Betsy” explored the old conspiracy rumors. And although among historians Schiro earns high marks for his handling of the flood (if not for his obstinate views on race), the rumors persist. “That theory is why older people in the Ninth Ward still keep hatchets in their attics,” Dave Cohen had told me. “They remember what it was like to be trapped, with the water rising and no way to get to the roof.”
The pattern in Katrina’s wake is similar.
Everywhere I went in Louisiana and Texas to talk to evacuees, many of the poorest among them were not only furious—furious at the President and local officials, furious at being ignored for days—but inclined to believe, as many did after Betsy, that the flooding of the city was, or could have been, a deliberate act.
Author