Boston Globe Editorial: The lie of the storm

March 5, 2006

TELEVISION IMAGES can be misleading, but not in the case of the shadowy video that showed President Bush sitting quietly in Texas as he heard that Hurricane Katrina, bearing down on the Gulf Coast, was going to be ''the Big One." Dressed in a suit coat even though he was on vacation, he looked like a president but did not act like one. Despite the warning on Sunday, Aug. 28, Bush let several crucial days slip by before he rallied the resources of the federal government to deal with this epochal disaster.

Perhaps he was lulled by the take-charge attitude of Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who, the video shows, accurately gauged the magnitude of the storm and told his subordinates to do whatever was necessary: ''I'll figure out some way to justify it," he said. ''Just let them yell at me." FEMA, however, didn't have resources to cope with a disaster of this magnitude. It would have required an immediate massive response by the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, and only the president could have ordered these bureaucracies into action.