One person not often seen on the streets, at the Superdome, or on a rescue boat of any kind was Mayor Ray Nagin. Occasionally he’d pop up inside the Superdome, clinging to the exit doors, then disappear. Since the storm had approached the Crescent City, Mayor Nagin had been cloistered in the Hyatt, lording over the Superdome. From the get-go he was terrified for his own personal safety. And for good reason. At the storms peak, many of the windows of the Hyatt blew out. The high-rise was a jagged, ripped concrete-and-steel monstrosity, swaying in the feverish winds. Frightened, Nagin refused to make City Hall a command center. Terry Ebbert, the New Orleans director of Homeland Security, ostensibly ran the city. I went over to the Superdome numerous times, Ebbert recalled. I didn’t carry a weapon. I walked all around without a real problem.
Unlike Ebbert, Nagin was apparently repelled by the idea of speaking at the Superdome, to offer the evacuees both information and a morale boost. He refused to give a pep talk, blaming the city’s communications breakdown for his decision. His primary post-storm initiative was to get a generator hooked up to the elevator so he wouldn’t have to walk all those stairs. A timid Nagin had squandered a historic opportunity for a bullhorn moment. With a touch of guts he could have walked over to the Superdome with Teddy Roosevelt exuberance and tried to calm the jittery crowd. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, riots broke out in thirty-one American cities, but Robert F. Kennedy, shirtsleeves rolled up, fearlessly marched into the midst of an angry African-American mob in Indianapolis, easing their confusion and hurt with words of uplifting encouragement. RFK had seized the golden moment that Maureen Dowd wrote about. At the Superdome in New Orleans, scared citizens needed Nagin. But he feared that if he mounted a soapbox at the Superdome, he’d get shot, lynched, or bloodied up. He made the costly mistake of viewing the displaced persons as malcontents. He had squandered the golden moment, putting his own personal safety ahead of those poor and elderly in trouble.
Douglas Brinkley
The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. HarperCollins 2007. p.66, 67
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