Today is the 10th anniversary of the worst email in American history. It was sent from Margaret Grant to Paine Gowen. Grant was the Special Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs, which means her job was to coordinate between the President and state and local leaders. Paine Gowen was an aide to Louisiana Governor Blanco.
I don’t know Margaret Grant, and it would be unfair to judge her. We don’t know what conversations took place before she sent the email. We don’t know whether she was ordered to send it. This email is a reflection of the organization Grant worked for, the Executive Branch of the United States in 2005.
On September 2, 2005, four days after Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, Governor Blanco met with President Bush in Louisiana. At that meeting, Blanco handed Bush a list of requests from the state of Louisiana to the federal government. Nobody knows what happened to that letter—it was lost by Bush or somebody Bush gave it to. To make sure the contents of the letter would be available to everybody involved in the relief effort, Governor Blanco had the letter posted on the state website, which means that Bush losing the letter should not have mattered.
The letter from Blanco is pages 54-56 here. As you can see, the letter states that the requests for help Blanco made before Katrina hit had not been met, and the needs had of course increased. The letter asks for a combat brigade then in Iraq to be sent home to Louisiana, an additional staging base for FEMA, permission to use additional frequencies to enhance cell phone communication, firefighters, vehicles, generators, drugs, vaccines, veterinary assistance, and mortuary assistance. The mortuary assistance was necessary because, depending on which study you believe, 971 or 1577 people in Louisiana were killed by Katrina. About half of those deaths were drownings.
On September 7, five days later, Grant sent this email to Gowen:
Could you send a copy of the Governor’s 9/2 letter to the President to 202-456-7015. We received two other letters the Governor sent, one to the President and one to AG Gonzales. We found it on the Gov’s website but need “an original” for our Staff Secretary to formally process the requests she is making. We are on the job but appreciate your help with a technical request. Thx!
That’s right. Eleven days after Blanco made her first formal request for help, nine days after Katrina hit, and five days after Blanco personally handed a letter to Bush, her aide got an email asking for an original so the requests could be processed. The copy of the letter on the website wasn’t good enough, but a fax would do the trick. The freaking White House couldn’t process the letter on the website. Did I mention that this was the White House? During a horrible emergency?
When you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat because you just had a nightmare about President Trump, Carson, Jeb, Rubio, Cruz, Fiorina, Walker, et al, remember that America will survive. We have already demonstrated that we can survive the worst. I’d like to think that even that sorry group wouldn’t demand a fax before saving lives, though that group is so much more interested in ideology than helping people and is so supportive of Bush that we probably should ask them just to be sure.
When people repeatedly refer to negative events as Obama’s Katrinas, there’s a reason why those references are laughably wrong. Namely, Obama isn’t Bush, and whatever event isn’t Katrina. When people refer to Bush as the worst president ever, there are many reasons why those references are sadly correct. If your life depended on Bush, then you were dead.
To quote Grant, “Thx!”
EDIT: Thx for the recs! Also, see Crashing Vor's comment below on the number of deaths, which very well could be higher than my numbers above.
EDITx2: I can't believe I'm heading the rec list on Labor Day. I'm a proud NEA Member. Go rec some pro-Labor diaries.