Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—and the
same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford,
Texas, retreat back to Washington—a White House advance team toured
the devastation in an Air Force helicopter. Noticing that their
chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the
advance men said to the pilot, “We’re not taking you away from
grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?”
“No, sir,” said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida’s
Hurlburt Field Air Force base—roughly 200 miles from New Orleans—which
contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. “I’m just
here because you’re here,” the pilot added. “My whole unit’s sitting
back at Hurlburt, wondering why we’re not being used.”
The search-and-rescue helicopters were not being used because Donald
Rumsfeld had not yet approved their deployment—even though, as
Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, the cigar-chomping commander of Joint
Task Force Katrina, would later tell me, “that Wednesday, we needed to
evacuate people. The few helicopters we had in there were busy, and we
were trying to deploy more.”
[...]
The next day, three days after landfall, word of disorder in New
Orleans had reached a fever pitch. According to sources familiar with
the conversation, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff called Rumsfeld that
morning and said, “You’re going to need several thousand troops.”
“Well, I disagree,” said the SecDef. “And I’m going to tell the
president we don’t need any more than the National Guard.”
The problem was that the Guard deployment (which would eventually
reach 15,000 troops) had not arrived—at least not in sufficient
numbers, and not where it needed to be. And though much of the chaos
was being overstated by the media, the very suggestion of a state of
anarchy was enough to dissuade other relief workers from entering the
city. Having only recently come to grips with the roiling disaster,
Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning.
According to several who were present, the president was agitated.
Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked,
“Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what’s on
television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World
nation I’m watching? What the hell are you doing?”
Rumsfeld replied by trotting out the ongoing National Guard
deployments and suggesting that sending active-duty troops would
create “unity of command” issues. Visibly impatient, Bush turned away
from Rumsfeld and began to direct his inquiries at Lieutenant General
Honoré on the video screen. “From then on, it was a Bush-Honoré
dialogue,” remembers another participant. “The president cut Rumsfeld
to pieces. I just wish it had happened earlier in the week.”
But still the troops hadn’t arrived. And by Saturday morning, says
Honoré, “we had dispersed all of these people across Louisiana. So we
needed more troops to go to distribution centers, feed people, and
maintain traffic.” That morning Bush convened yet another meeting in
the Situation Room. Chertoff was emphatic. “Mr. President,” he said,
“if we’re not going to begin to get these troops, we’re not going to
be able to get the job done.”
Rumsfeld could see the writing on the wall and had come prepared with
a deployment plan in hand. Still, he did not volunteer it. Only when
Bush ordered, “Don, do it,” did he acquiesce and send in the troops—a
full five days after landfall.