The following is an excerpt from our January issue:

By: Jonathan Lindberg

It did not take long for the greatest natural disaster in American history to turn into the greatest political disaster of a lifetime. Even before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, blame was already being handed out by participating factions and fingers were being pointed. Eighteen months and not much has changed.

Hurricane Katrina struck on a Monday. It was not until Saturday that the last of the storm victims were evacuated and the levees were filled. By that time, over thirteen-hundred people were dead, over eighty-percent of New Orleans had been flooded, and countless crimes, murders, and rapes had taken place in the city once referred to as the Big Easy.

The political landscape did not fare much better. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin had fled the city by weeks end on the brink of a mental breakdown He chose the drier confines of Dallas to recuperate while the city he led dried itself out.

Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was enduring his own departure. He became the whipping boy for the media, over-anxious for someone, anyone to blame. Brown represented everything wrong with an agency made inept by bureaucratic red-tape.

There was Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco who took on the unfortunate role of a deer-caught-in-the-headlights, completely overwhelmed and under-prepared for the magnitude of Katrina. It was to her office that the White House tried to shift the initial blame.

And then there was President Bush, who had the unfortunate timing, along with much of his staff, of being on vacation before, during, and after Katrina. It was not until Thursday, three days after landfall, that President Bush seemed to catch on to what had just happened along the Gulf Coast. By that time, in the minds of most Americans, it was too late.

There seems to be an almost unexplainable naiveté to lay the blame for this natural disaster, centuries in the making, at the feet of one man. However, when it comes to Katrina, there is plenty of blame to go around. Eighteen months later, we have our first major work examining the calamities of Katrina, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (William Morrow, 624 pages), written by historian and long-time New Orleans resident Douglas Brinkley.

Beyond the blame, Brinkley has the ability to both praise and criticize, often in the same paragraph. The result is an even-handed approach to a terrible disaster, a refreshing contrast to the bitter and almost shrill reporting we saw all-too-often from our cable and network news outlets following the hurricane.

Still, in Deluge, Brinkley does settle scores. In fact, one can almost feel the veins popping out-the-side-of-his-neck when he writes of Mayor Nagin. In Deluge, Nagin is painted as timid and immature, holed-up in the downtown Hyatt during and following Katrina.

It is this same outrage Brinkley might have expressed toward FEMA head Michael Brown, had the media not gotten to him first.

Though a Katrina-like disaster will always remain bigger than any one person, the impotent and almost baffling leadership displayed by Bush-appointee Michael Brown serves as the exception.

In times of crisis, the words and actions of a leader can either inspire or outrage. With Brown, the latter would seem to apply far-too-often. It was not that Brown dropped-the-ball during Katrina. Rather, Brown seemed as if he were in another world.

On Monday morning, as Katrina was pounding the Gulf Coast, swallowing New Orleans, and sweeping away thousands of lives, Brown was emailing back-and-forth with staff about his appearance (literally) on the morning talk shows

“You look fabulous, and I’m not talking about the makeup,” one FEMA colleague emailed back to Brown. Brown responded, “I got it at Nordstrom’s. Make sure LeaAnne knows! Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?”

In another email, Brown is told, “Please roll up the sleeves of your shirt. Even the President rolled up his sleeves to just below the elbows. In this crisis and on TV you need to look more hard-working. Roll up the sleeves!”

That the length of sleeves was seen by FEMA as part of the solution was part of the problem itself. That Michael Brown had to be told to look more hard-working seems to be the other.

Still, all that is in the past. The hurricane has come and gone. Michael Brown was fired. Ray Nagin was re-elected to another term.

Yes, the City of New Orleans lives on, but only as a shell of its former self. Hundreds-of-thousands who fled from Katrina will never return. Parts of the city will never be rebuilt.

And the history of Katrina goes on. It is being told every day.