Texas Monthly Talks

Joe Allbaugh

Interview by Evan Smith

August 2006

(Page 2 of 2)

Is there anything you saw Mike Brown or Secretary Chertoff do that made you think, “I would have done that differently”?
Of course. But I’m not comfortable talking about it. That would be me second-guessing those folks, which would be unfair to do because I wasn’t there.

Has the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf after Rita proceeded at the pace that it needs to?
No, absolutely not.

What happened?
I think there are too many parochial interests getting in the way of the global picture. Neither New Orleans nor the state of Louisiana has crafted a plan. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that the levees were going to fail. Everyone knew they were only built to [sustain] a category 3 [storm]. James Lee Witt had tried to engage New Orleans in an exercise [to test the city’s disaster preparedness]. I tried to engage New Orleans in an exercise. It was all blown off. City officials just weren’t interested.

Whom do you blame? The mayor? The governor?
Everyone has a piece of that pie. Citizens even have some responsibility. It’s too easy to hope that the state, local, and federal governments are going to solve every problem out there. That’s not realistic. We have to do a better job as individuals to be prepared for the unexpected. We haven’t done a very good job of it in this country.

In retrospect, the one thing I would have insisted on and hoped for would have been a closer communication between the governor and the mayor. Governor [Kathleen] Blanco invited me to Baton Rouge the Thursday after the storm, and I spent a couple of hours with her that evening. She was in the middle of the ultimate authority, responsible for everything. I urged her to get herself out of that situation and put the appropriate state person in charge so she could be looking at the more global issues, and yet she was doing the day-to-day battling. I think that was a mistake. Normally when these things take place, the state, local, and federal decision makers are in the same room, at the same table. When I went into the operations center, I didn’t see anything like that; everybody was in their own little cubicle.

What did we in the press misunderstand about your role in New Orleans following the hurricane? The thrust of the criticism is that you were somehow profiting off of your prior relationships.
I haven’t profited at all from any relationships. I had a client, [the] Shaw [Group], which happened to be headquartered in Baton Rouge. They’re a very large engineering construction firm, with 15,000 employees worldwide. I was on contract to help with two projects overseas, one in the U.K. and one in China.

What does “help” mean?
Business consulting.

Based on your experience in government.
It was unrelated. When I left FEMA, I made a conscious effort not to pigeonhole myself into disaster response and recovery. I went out with the idea of general business consulting, and it’s been successful thus far.

Are you registered to lobby?
[The Allbaugh Company] is registered to lobby. Everyone believes I’m a lobbyist, but I don’t lobby.

So in the capacity with Shaw that you were referring to …
I was offering strategic counsel on those two deals [when Katrina hit]. Someone said, rightly so, “Hey, we’ve got the former FEMA director on contract. Maybe we can ask him about designing our response team.” What they were trying to do, since they were kind of a hometown company, was to parallel their response and recovery efforts, their team, with what was going on at the state, local, and federal level. They had misdesigned their team, so I helped them remake it. That took a couple of weeks, and then I left town. Well, the press started talking about how I was getting contracts for Halliburton and KBR and Shaw.

Halliburton and KBR didn’t have any role in the rebuilding of New Orleans?
I think they did, but I didn’t have anything to do with it. Nobody ever asked me. That’s the beef I have with the press. They just wrote it and never asked me. I chewed out Chris Matthews one time because he said I was down in the Gulf getting contracts. I got a note back in from Chris that said, “Sorry, Joe, but I was just repeating what I read in the New York Times.” Well, pardon me. Doesn’t he have a responsibility to check the facts?

The work you’ve done overseas for KBR has likewise been criticized.
That’s not the way the world works! People think that George Bush calls federal agencies and says, “Give Joe a contract.” It’s not realistic.

Can you understand why the press might say, “Joe Allbaugh has business in Iraq, so something bad must be going on”?
I’m sure that’s what’s said. It’s that they don’t go the next step and say, “Well, let’s find out.”

You think all this is about them taking a shot at the president.
They take a shot at the president indirectly through me, which is fine. I’m a big guy. I can handle it. It just angers me that our professional journalists have accepted lower standards. I feel like Sergeant Friday: “Just the facts, ma’am.” We can make up our own damn minds.

The president has been in trouble in the polls in the past year. Why do you think that is?
It’s a constant drumbeat from those who aren’t the closest friends of the president to point out what happened with Katrina and Iraq. It takes a toll after a while.

Even you would have to admit that a lot has happened: Katrina, Iraq, Harriet Miers, the investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby.
There’s another guy who’s getting screwed: Scooter Libby.

Why is he getting screwed?
The special prosecutor was out for X, and X was unachievable, but somehow he’s hanging his hat on Y. I think that’s where special prosecutors really get off track. Scooter is an honorable person. I’ve known him for a number of years. Like Mike Brown, he’s being scapegoated. I dislike it intensely.

You don’t believe Scooter may have committed a crime?
If he did commit a crime, then there’s a price to pay. I don’t know the facts, but I’ve seen a lot of rumor and innuendo. In the press you would think he was already tried and convicted. There’s no sense of fairness.

In the previous administration, there were a number of these special-prosecutor investigations and attacks on people without anything backing them up.
I agree. I think special prosecutors are very dangerous, and there have been just as many Democrats harmed by them as Republicans. I don’t like it one bit.

There are people—and [Texas Monthly’s senior executive editor] Paul Burka is one of them—who have written that President Bush is someone they don’t recognize relative to the George Bush they knew as governor. Do you buy any of that?
Oh, I can see where you can buy a part of it. But the responsibilities and the moving parts are so much greater being president than they were being governor of a large state. It’s mind-boggling. It’s hard for people to get their arms around everything that goes on in the president’s life on a daily basis. And expectations were high—popular governor, worked with Democrats. It’s extremely difficult when 535 people are trying to protect their parochial interests. And I’ve never seen so many talk about so much only to do so little; it’s very disappointing.

Moving parts and all that, yes, but is the president personally different?
I don’t see him as different. I see him as the same individual who still cares about the same issues, still has wide-open discussions among staff, still is a borderline policy wonk. No one ever talks about that.

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