New Orleans Mayor Backs Off Criticism

The public speaking style of New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin could be charitably described as informal, if not freewheeling. He is also known as a man who, for a politician, can be surprisingly candid and emotional.

On Thursday night, with his city underwater, with thousands of his citizens feared dead, with looters besieging hospitals, with snipers on rooftops, with bodies floating in floodwaters, with people still marooned on rooftops, with tens of thousands of refugees threatening to riot -- on this night, under these pressures, the mayor exploded.

In an interview with a local radio station, Nagin accused the federal government, including President Bush, of failing to respond quickly enough to the catastrophe inflicted upon his city by Hurricane Katrina.

In remarks later rebroadcast nationwide, he criticized Bush directly, saying “his flying over in Air Force One does not do ... justice” to the crisis.

Less than 24 hours later, the mayor found himself aboard Air Force One, face to face with the president at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.

He repeated his criticisms, he said in an interview last night, and got a positive response from the president.

“He said he was fully committed to getting us the resources we need,” Nagin said in the stifling heat of the tattered Hyatt Regency hotel next door to the Louisiana Superdome. “I told him I knew we could work together, and he said he understood.”

In their two hours together, first aboard Air Force One and then during a flyover of the city in the president’s Marine One helicopter, Nagin said Bush did not mention the radio tirade until the mayor himself brought it up.

“I told him: ‘I said some things yesterday that may have offended you, and if they did, I apologize. But if you were in my shoes, what would you do?’ ” Nagin said. “He said he had heard I had said some things, but that he really didn’t understand all of it. And then he said: ‘You and I are OK.’ ”

Nagin grinned and added: “The president loves frankness.”

Dressed in a white T-shirt and slacks, his bald head beaded with sweat, Nagin told reporters at the hotel that Bush was “very attentive, very serious, very determined to make sure this city gets what it needs.”

He said Bush acknowledged that he too was dissatisfied with the progress of assistance to the beleaguered city.

He said he told Bush that if he and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco did not “get on the same page as far as chain of command is concerned,” New Orleans would continue to slide into anarchy.

The mayor said no one at the federal or state level had set clear lines of command responsibility. There was little coordination or communication among the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security at the federal level and the governor’s office and Louisiana National Guard at the state level, he said.

Nagin said Bush asked to speak to Blanco alone, then later told the mayor that officials “would have a chain of command firmly established.”

The mayor said he also told the governor that he was sorry if his comments had offended her. She responded that everyone lost their temper at times, and that there were “no hard feelings,” he said.

Asked if his radio interview, in which he unleashed profanities and vulgarities, had produced the reaction he was seeking, Nagin replied, “I guess it had some effect and got things to a turning point.”

The mayor had told WWL-AM host Garland Robinette that federal officials were “feeding the public a line of bull, and they’re spinning.”

He said of Bush and Blanco: “Somebody needs to get their ass on a plane and sit down, the two of them, and figure this out.”

At one point, he seemed to suggest that federal officials faced eternal damnation, saying, “You know, God is looking down on all this, and if they are not doing everything in their power to save people, they are going to pay the price.”

In the interview Thursday night, Nagin said his frustrations had boiled over before the radio interview, when he spoke with a refugee who was so disillusioned that she wanted to give up her baby.

“I had just had it,” with delays in federal and state assistance, he said. “I always feel that in politics, you have a bridle on. Well, I took the bridle off. And I tell you, it felt pretty good.”

Nagin himself has been criticized as having been slow to declare a mandatory evacuation, and as having dithered while deciding whether to set up the Superdome as a refugee center -- while telling refugees to go there only as a last resort.

Nagin, 49, is a lanky, amiable former communications company executive who has held elective office for three years. He took a considerable pay cut after his surprise election victory in 2002 on a campaign to clean up New Orleans’ notoriously corrupt and insular political structure.

The son of a mother who worked at a lunch counter and a father who was a clothing factory worker and a night janitor at City Hall, Nagin was born in the city’s Charity Hospital, one of several medical facilities that have run low on power and medical supplies.

The vast majority of people trapped in New Orleans are poor and black, and Nagin is African American. But he has had a testy relationship with the black community.

He has weathered complaints, for instance, that he has targeted poor blacks during his anti-corruption crusade to please supporters in the white business community here. A Democrat, he was roundly criticized for endorsing Bush.

He has made his mark by portraying himself as an anti-politician, a genuine human being who speaks his mind and doesn’t mind showing his emotions.

His radio remarks seemed to buoy many refugees who stood in the hot sun at the Superdome on Thursday afternoon, waiting in seemingly endless lines to board buses bound for Houston.

“The mayor told it straight -- it’s about time somebody told the truth,” said Louise Marvel, 46, who said she listened to the interview on a portable radio she grabbed from her apartment in the city’s lower 9th Ward just before floodwaters rushed in.

“It took the mayor to get on the president’s back and force him to come down here and explain himself,” said Eldridge White, 39, a truck driver who said he had been marooned at the Superdome since Sunday.

John Joslini, 51, a Reno resident who said he was vacationing at a downtown hotel when the hurricane hit, said he would vote for Nagin if he could.

Warren Cosey, 41, was less charitable. “Oh, man, he was crying like a baby,” he said.

Next to Cosey in line was Verdell Berry, who complained that he and the other refugees had not seen the mayor all week.

“He never came in and addressed the crowd or nothing.”

Cosey shook his head. “If he would have come in here, they would have killed him,” he said.

Times staff writers Scott Gold and Richard Fausset in New Orleans contributed to this report.