Michael Chertoff's Gut Feeling Must Be Like His Memory of Katrina: Bereft of Honesty or Shame.

On Sunday September 4, 2005, six days after Katrina drenched New Orleans, Michael Chertoff appeared on the Sunday talk shows. Both Tim Russert and Wolf Blitzer asked the Director of Homeland Security why he flew to a conference in Atlanta on Tuesday August 30, one day after the levees broke. Chertoff defended his obliviousness with a key phrase, which he repeated for good measure:

[I]f you look at what actually happened, I remember on Tuesday morning [August 30] picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged The Bullet.'.
...
Tuesday morning, I opened newspapers and saw headlines that said 'New Orleans Dodged The Bullet,' which surprised people.

Meet the Press September 4, 2005

I remember seeing newspaper headlines that said, you know, New Orleans dodged the bullet, on Tuesday morning, and even as everybody thought New Orleans had dodged the bullet Tuesday morning, the levee was not only being flooded, which is, I think, what most people always assumed would happen, but it actually broke.

Late Edition September 4, 2005

Well that was a headline deserving of instant notoriety. Comparisons to the 1948 Chicago Tribune headline "DEWEY WINS!" would have been inevitable.

What paper printed such a headline? What reporter strung the words "New Orleans," "dodge(d)" and "bullet" in a single sentence? None, according to a search on Factiva, which is a pretty comprehensive search engine. None would dare publish anything so ridiculously cruel.

Remember, every major newsroom uses wire services and television monitors. On August 29, 2005 at 3:05 pm EST, Dow Jones Newswires printed the headline, "Levees In New Orleans Breached As Katrina Passes." And just after 7:00 pm EST, well before most papers go to print, CNN's Jean Meserve reported live:

I am looking over a scene of utter devastation. In an entire neighborhood, water has come up to the eaves of the houses and am told this is not the worst of it. That beyond this, part of the upper Ninth Ward, I'm told the main part of the ward further down is even worse. The water is over the houses. This is a life and death situation. I think by the end of the night we're going to find a lot more death than we ever imagined.

Dodged the bullet?

So my gut feeling about Michael Chertoff is that he would say anything.

No one ever confronted Chertoff with his transparent and audacious lie. Only The Wall Street Journal corrected his falsehood albeit gently:

No major newspaper printed a headline that literally said New Orleans "dodged a bullet," as Mr. Chertoff claimed. But some did say the city had escaped a direct hit -- which was true, but misleading -- while others focused on the levees along the Mississippi River. Meanwhile, it was the levees along canals extending south from Lake Pontchartrain that gave way.

But by then The White House was already in full repetition mode, picking up where Chertoff left off.

And if you'll remember, all the media reports, or a number of media reports at that time, that Monday even all the way to the Tuesday papers, were talking to people and saying that New Orleans had dodged a bullet. So I think that's what the President is referring to, is that people weren't anticipating those levees, after the hurricane had passed New Orleans, breaching. Many people weren't. And you can go back and look at the news coverage at that time.

... Because all you have to do and I'll be glad to provide you some of the coverage from that period and what people were saying at that point. There were literally reports saying that New Orleans had dodged a bullet or that the worst case scenario didn't happen. Well, it did. And that's what the President was referring to.

Scott McClellan White House Briefing, September 9, 2005
And of course the decider:

When that storm came by, a lot of people said we dodged a bullet. When that storm came through at first, people said, 'Whew.' There was a sense of relaxation, and that's what I was referring to. And I, myself, thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people, probably over the airways, say, "The bullet has been dodged."

... So, in other words, we anticipated a serious storm coming. But as the man's question said, basically implied, wasn't there a moment where everybody said, 'Well, gosh, we dodged the bullet,' and yet the bullet hadn't been dodged

President Bush Discussing Hurricane Relief in New Orleans September 12, 2005

Yeah, my gut feeling is that Chertoff would say anything. My other gut feeling is that he says what he's told to say.