NEW ORLEANS -- Former President George W. Bush accepts much of the blame for the slow response to Hurricane Katrina in his new book, released Tuesday.
But Bush also points to former Governor Kathleen Blanco as another reason chaos reigned in the streets of New Orleans in the days after the storm.
In President Bush's new memoir, Decision Points, he devotes a chapter to Katrina. He talks about the single greatest image of his response, where he’s gazing out the window of Air Force One during a fly-over of the devastation.
In the book, Bush says, "At some point, our press team ushered photographers into the cabin. I barely noticed them at the time; I couldn't take my eyes off the devastation below. But when the pictures were released, I realized I had made a serious mistake."
“It was the darkest period of the presidency for those of us in the White House. I came down here with him many times. He's very candid in the book about where the mistakes were made, flying over, not touching down,” said Dan Bartlett, one of the former president’s closest advisers during much of his presidency.
The image even led some to brand Bush a racist.
On the Oprah Winfrey Show Tuesday, Bush said, “I can see how the perception might be that Bush doesn't care. But to accuse me of being a racist is disgusting.”
The Katrina chapter expresses Bush's clear frustration with then-Governor Kathleen Blanco, who refused to federalize the National Guard for the incident.
“I did not need the federalization of the Guard because that would've taken police powers away from the National Guard. And goodness knows, we needed that,” she said.
Bush said on Oprah, “I said to the governor, give me the authority to send in federal troops. By law, the president cannot send federal troops to conduct law enforcement without a declaration of insurrection."
An insurrection declaration would've given the military police powers.
“He didn't discuss that with me. He didn't discuss it in that frame ever. It was a one-way conversation with the president and his advisers, not including anyone from Louisiana,” Blanco said.
Both Blanco and Bartlett were in New Orleans Tuesday attending a Bipartisan Policy Center Political Summit at Tulane University. Both said politics played a role in the post-Katrina response.
“The fear of politics almost. It was like, I think the governor's people feared that Karl Rove might orchestrate something that would make her look bad, and maybe we were thinking that there were Democrats in there trying to make us look bad,” Bartlett said.
Bush writes in the book, "If I invoked the Insurrection Act against her wishes, the world would see a male Republican president usurping the authority of a female Democratic governor by declaring an insurrection in a largely African American city. That would arouse controversy anywhere."
“I don't think that he lied and I don't think that he was prejudiced. I don't think he intended anything bad to happen to anyone. But I do think there were people in his cabinet who later on trying to save his face started pointing fingers at Louisiana,” Blanco said.
The former governor is now working on her side of the story in her memoir that she hopes will come out sometime next year.
