FEMA's Michael Brown Takes Offense at His Katrina Legacy

Aug. 24, 2010— -- Five years after Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast, the man who has been vilified for the federal government's bungling of the response effort wants to try to set the record straight.

As Hurricane Katrina approached, Michael Brown said Friday in a rare interview, "I remember telling the White House, 'I don't think you guys get it.'

"'This is going to be the big one that I've been fighting to get money for, that we've all been worried about. I think this could be it, and nobody seems to care.'"

Brown, who was criticized for being out of touch and unaware of the devastation and suffering in New Orleans, is defensive about the blame he still gets for his actions in the hurricane's aftermath.

But a skeptical Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who now chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security, said there's plenty of blame to go around.

"Clearly, Mr. Brown was head of FEMA," said Thompson, the committee's ranking Democrat in 2005. "Clearly, protocols were in place that indicated things that should have been done."

Brown, 55, now living in Colorado and hosting a radio talk show in Denver, said he is writing a book to tell his side of the story.

He said he was singled out by the Bush administration because he was the low man on the totem pole in Washington, as head of FEMA. "Bush wasn't going to fire [former homeland security chief Michael] Chertoff for the screw-ups. He's going to fire me."

But in the days before Brown publicly resigned, he had become the national face of the bungled response. He appeared on national television and radio explaining that the response was going well and that the government was doing all it could to help the people of New Orleans.

On the ground in Louisiana, however, the military had not arrived, bodies were lying in the streets and survivors were struggling to stay alive. "I regret not having gone public when things weren't working, said Brown, who was out of a job two weeks after Katrina hit.

"I mean, I tried to tell the president and everybody else how screwed up things were but it just wasn't soaking in."