The New Yorker: HIGH WATER

[Dover]

HIGH WATER
How Presidents and citizens react to disaster.
by DAVID REMNICK
Issue of 2005-10-03
Posted 2005-09-26


On 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 ambassadors 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 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. 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.

Cont'd


http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051003fa_fact

[hobbit709]

1. The worst part of this

that the illegitimate bastard in the WH tries to compare himself to LBJ