Decision Points

tapped an unlikely duo: Dad and Bill Clinton . Katrina was actually their encore performance. After a massive tsunami struck Southeast Asia in December 2004, they had teamed up at my request and raised more than $1 billion for the victims. As they traveled the world together, the formerpresidents—41 and 42, as I called them—developed a bond. Dad rose above the disappointment of 1992 and embraced his former rival. I appreciated that Bill treated Dad with deference and respect, and I grew to like him. When I asked them to lead another fundraising drive after Katrina, they agreed immediately. Mother called me afterward. “I see you’ve reunited your father and your stepbrother,” she quipped.

    With Dad and Bill Clinton in the Oval Office.
White House/Eric Draper
    Unfortunately, the spirit of generosity did not carry over to everyone. At an NBC telethon to raise money for Katrina victims, rapper Kanye West told a primetime TV audience, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Jesse Jackson later compared the New Orleans Convention Center to the “hull of a slave ship.” A member of the Congressional Black Caucus claimed that if the storm victims had been “white, middle-class Americans” they would have received more help.
    Five years later, I can barely write those words without feeling disgusted. I am deeply insulted by the suggestion that we allowed American citizens to suffer because they were black. As I told the press at the time, “The storm didn’t discriminate, and neither will the recovery effort. When those Coast Guard choppers, many of whom were first on the scene, were pulling people off roofs, they didn’t check the color of a person’s skin.”
    The more I thought about it, the angrier I felt. I was raised to believe that racism was one of the greatest evils in society. I admired Dad’s courage when he defied near-universal opposition from his constituents to vote for the Open Housing Bill of 1968. I was proud to have earned more black votes than any Republican governor in Texas history. I had appointed African Americans to top government positions, including the first black woman national security adviser and the first two black secretaries of state. It broke my heart to see minority children shuffled through the school system, so I had based my signature domestic policy initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, on ending the soft bigotry of low expectations. I had launched a $15 billion program to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa. As part of the response to Katrina, my administration worked with Congress to provide historically black colleges and universities in the Gulf Coast with more than $400 million in loans to restore their campuses and renew their recruiting efforts.
    I faced a lot of criticism as president. I didn’t like hearing people claim I had lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefitthe rich. But the suggestion that I was a racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low. I told Laura at the time that it was the worst moment of my presidency. I feel the same way today.

    During Week Two of the Katrina response, Mike Chertoff recommended that we make a personnel change. State and local officials had been complaining about the slowness of FEMA, and Chertoff told me he had lost confidence in Director Mike Brown . He felt the FEMA director had frozen under the pressure and become insubordinate. I accepted Chertoff’s recommendation to bring in Vice Admiral Thad Allen—the chief of staff of the Coast Guard who had done a brilliant job leading the search-and-rescue efforts—as the principal federal officer coordinating operations in the Gulf Coast.
    On Sunday of that week, Day Fourteen, I made my third visit to the Gulf Coast. I choppered onto the USS
Iwo Jima
, which had docked in the Mississippi River
.
Two years earlier, I had deployed the
Iwo Jima
to free Liberia from the dictator Charles Taylor . It was surreal to be standing aboard an amphibious assault ship overlooking a major American city suffering the wounds of a violent storm.
    The next morning, we boarded ten-ton military trucks for a tour through New Orleans . The Secret Service was anxious. The drive was one of very few times a president had traveled through a major metropolitan city in an open-top vehicle since the Kennedy assassination in 1963. We had to dodge dangling power lines and drive through deep pools of standing water. Virtually all the houses