In too deep

Douglas Brinkley's epic account of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath stops short of laying blame where it belongs: On President Bush.

By Allen Barra

Read more: Books, New Orleans, Louisiana, Allen Barra, Reviews, Book reviews, Hurricane Katrina

June 27, 2006 | Douglas Brinkley's "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast" is 716 pages long; by the time you've finished it, you may feel a bit as if you've been deluged. I wish I could say that's a compliment.

It could have been no easy task for Brinkley to sift through the mountains of documents, reports and news accounts (to say nothing of his own personal interviews with flood victims, police and officials) and prepare a book this thick in the less than nine months following what was perhaps the worst natural disaster in American history. One wants to applaud him for, if nothing else, an extraordinary effort of concentration and stamina. But chapter by chapter, almost page by page, a question seems to hover over "The Great Deluge": Why, exactly, did a book this massive need to be published so soon? (I do think I have an answer -- more on that in a bit.)

Though the book takes in the destruction of the Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana coasts, it's obvious that Brinkley's heart and soul are invested in New Orleans, the city where, as he phrases it, "Eccentricity was embraced as a virtue." The "was" stands out as a kind of Freudian slip, for even as Brinkley expresses optimism about New Orleans' bouncing back, one senses that the city that produced Louis Armstrong and inspired Tennessee Williams, the city "built on a kind of isolation from the mainstream," is gone forever.

Brinkley prepares us for the disaster with a hard look at a New Orleans that tourists never see. New Orleans has (or had, before Katrina) a higher proportion of people living below the poverty line, between 25 and 30 percent, of just about any major city in the U.S. In New Orleans, "Blue-blood tradition and big business had pushed the poor off to the side and kept them hidden. Once whites left for the suburbs" -- before Katrina, African-Americans constituted slightly more than two-thirds of the population -- "public schools in New Orleans became an abomination." Given the city, state and federal government's absurd refusals to heed warning after warning about the instability of the levees, clearly New Orleans was a calamity waiting to happen, and its full weight fell upon the people who could least afford to resist it. Many of them were so poor that "they didn't hear about Katrina on television, for a simple reason: they didn't own a [TV] set."

Brinkley's background and buildup to the hurricane and subsequent flood are superb, worthy of David McCullough's classic, "The Johnstown Flood," which was clearly Brinkley's model (though he refers to it only once). But McCullough's was a work of reflection, written 98 years after the fact. As Katrina's floodwaters begin to reach rooftop levels, roughly 200 pages into "The Great Deluge," Brinkley's objectivity slips away and he starts to lose his grip on his narrative. His exasperation with the ineffectualness of officials at every level is justified: "Incredibly, no one was in charge, no one was fully responsible for overseeing just who was doing what to the levees." The worse the situation gets, the more the book seems to spin out of control, as if the subject is too large and too emotionally charged for Brinkley, who is looking for a human face to pin the blame on.

And the face turns out to belong to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who at various times seems befuddled, bewildered and distracted, and at all times appears incompetent. Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco fares somewhat better. Both she and Nagin were "neophytes" when dealing with the U.S. Coast Guard and Louisiana National Guard, but "[s]he did, however, try to look like a politician in charge. Nagin wasn't even managing that much." FEMA director Michael Brown is dismissed by Brinkley as "[s]elf-centered and comically suave  a cuff-link shooting Republican dandy."

It turns out that, in Brinkley's account, the real villain of Katrina is Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, who seems to have been chosen by the Bush administration solely for the lack of compassion the job would require. Brinkley lets loose on Chertoff: "While fellow citizens were dying, screaming for help, clutching chunks of floating wood and palm fronds trying to stay alive, Chertoff, the one American who could have helped the most, turned a casual, cold indifferent eye to their plight." I have no doubt that Chertoff deserves all the grenades Brinkley or any other historian can lob at him, but arrogant and unresponsive as he was, it seems as if he is being used here as a buffer -- or perhaps "levee" is a more appropriate term -- to prevent the most severe criticism from reaching its source. That levee can't hold back the weight of evidence that the principal blame for Katrina falls not on any member of the bureaucracy -- or even all of the bureaucracy taken together -- but on the president.

Next page: No matter how poorly Nagin reacted to the crisis, he is too small a figure to place at the center of such a mass tragedy