Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [333]
On September 4, 2005, I visited New Orleans. The devastation was terrible. Water had risen to the heights of roofs. Whole neighborhoods were underwater. U.S. military and Coast Guard helicopters were rescuing people stranded on top of their houses. We flew over the Seventeenth Street Canal levee that had been topped, allowing the swollen waters of Lake Pontchartrain to flood one of America’s great cities.
As the federal government mobilized to assist Katrina victims, its performance was overshadowed by media coverage of the wrenching drama that had unfolded on the ground. Along with more than eighteen hundred lives, the storm had torn away the veneer of civilization in some places. The state and local governments that had kept a lid on anarchy, crime, and violence had dissolved. There were reports of murder and gang rapes. Reflecting the panic on the ground, some reporters and their anchors in the studios became advocates, sharing in the harsh condemnation of the emergency aid workers, the federal government, state and local leaders, in fact, anyone who might bear any responsibility. This chain reaction in the media left a damaging impression that the officials coping with the disaster didn’t care and that our government was incapable of mounting an effective response.10
Eight months After Katrina I wrote a memo to the President: “The charge of ‘incompetence’ against the U.S. Government should be easy to rebut, were people to understand the extent to which the current system of government makes competence next to impossible.”11 After five years back in government, wrestling with natural and man-made disasters as well as two wars, it became clear to me that our government institutions were proving inadequate to the challenges of the twenty-first century and the information age. Efforts After 9/11 to refashion and create institutions such as DHS and the director of national intelligence (DNI) had led to suboptimal results: new layers of bureaucracy with the underlying challenges not well addressed.*
We needed to refashion our government institutions and develop new capabilities to respond to the challenge posed by terrorism and other non-conventional threats. For example, we were losing, or at least not winning, the battle of ideas against Islamist extremists. The State Department and other departments and agencies were not fulfilling their promises of political and economic support for reconstruction in places like Iraq and Afghanistan for a variety of reasons, including a lack of both funds and deployable personnel. The threads of national power—military, financial, intelligence, civic, communications—were sometimes working at cross-purposes, much as the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force had in the era before the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in 1986 mandated the creation of a joint force.13
The idea that our government might not be up to the new challenges had preoccupied my thoughts for some time.14 Just what to do about it occurred to me in an unlikely place from an unlikely source: a Democrat who had inherited the U.S. presidency in 1945.
In the spring of 2006, I visited the Harry S. Truman presidential library outside St. Louis, Missouri, to deliver a speech comparing our struggle against violent extremists to the decades-long challenges of the Cold War.15 Before my remarks, I spent some time touring the library. It was a treasured opportunity for someone who admired the blunt, no-nonsense midwesterner. I was taken into his private office, which was largely untouched since his death. Inside I glimpsed