[StBernard] Michael Brown Visits St. Bernard, the first time

[Westley Annis]

This is from the Vanity Fair excerpt of Tulane University Professor Douglas Brinkley's book, The Great Deluge.  It looks like it is now must reading for St. Bernard residents.

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But perhaps the most cryptic political face-off of the week occurred when Brown did a spot check of devastated St. Bernard Parish. First, he met with parish president Junior Rodriguez. Brown recalled it as "a very vulgar, profanity-spewing encounter with him. Very entertaining. It was surprising to me. So after leaving this meeting with him, who I think is in charge of St. Bernard, somebody pulled me aside and said, 'O.K., you've done this, but you really have to go see Sheriff Jack Stephens.' "

Brown was perplexed. "Well," he recalls being told, "it's almost like a Mafia thing, but they both think they're in charge of this parish." According to Brown, his security guards put him in a Humvee and made a circuitous trek down back roads. "I even joked with one of my aides, 'Hey, they're taking me to go dump me in the river somewhere … ' It was wild." Eventually, Brown was escorted to a forlorn houseboat straight out of The Return of Swamp Thing, with touches of Bonnie and Clyde. Even though Brown had grown up in Oklahoma and had had a hardscrabble youth, he was stunned when he was ushered into the inner sanctum of Sheriff Jack Stephens. "He had commandeered someone's houseboat and I walked in and it was like a scene in a movie. I'd just been in St. Bernard with Rodriguez, where they had minimal supplies, and we're having a discussion about what [provisions] you need. [Then] I go to see this sheriff who is now living on this houseboat and I walk into this huge buffet. It was astonishing to me.… I felt like I'm walking into a Mafia meeting somewhere, and I walk in, and I swear to God, there's … hors d'oeuvres and things, and there's all the liquor you could drink, and it was absolutely fascinating to me."

Brown listened to Stephens's litany of complaints and demands, sizing him up as "a slick politician kind of guy … with all these deputies all around, with these guns everywhere." Observing one of the aides or a policeman continually spitting tobacco into a cup, Brown began plotting an exit strategy. "I turned to my security guys and said, 'There's nothing here for me to do and I don't know why I'm talking to this guy.' … And we boogied out of there."

<"http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/060529roco02?page=7">

You can order the book from Amazon here:
<"http://tinyurl.com/oy5yn">