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Tavis: Dennis Brinkley's an acclaimed historian and professor of history at Tulane University. His bestselling books include 'Tour of Duty,' which detailed, of course, John Kerry's Vietnam war service. His latest is "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.' A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the text go to the Historic New Orleans Collection in the French Quarter. He joins us tonight from New York City. Professor Brinkley, nice to have you on the program, sir.

Dennis Brinkley: Thanks for having me, Tavis.

Tavis: This is a thick text. It's dense. And yet, it only covers a particular period of time, yes?

Brinkley: That's right. It's one week before the storm hit, Saturday, August twenty-seventh, to Saturday, September third, when the 82nd Airborne came. And I'm looking at what happened in New Orleans for that crucial, horrible week when Katrina hit, and then that immediate aftermath, both in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Tavis: I'll tell you something funny, and maybe funny is the wrong word, but what got my attention when the book first arrived on my desk, I looked at it and when I realized it covered basically a one-week period, I thought to myself, if there was this much going on in New Orleans (laughs) that represented, and the density of this book, the problem might not be as bad as it was.

Brinkley: Well, it's in the detail, what happened that week. And I started realizing that first off, the media that first week was getting a lot of things wrong. For example, at the Superdome, there weren't hundreds of murders. People there were just looking for food and water. They were stranded, they were displaced, and you had four deaths in the Superdome.

One drug overdose, one suicide, and two elderly people, which was unacceptable. But the people weren't mobs, or people weren't just looters in New Orleans. These were people trying to find in a lot of, most cases, just basic provisions. And I wanted to document the New Orleans police force, city corruption, but also talk about what President Bush did, or the lack of what the Bush administration did in their response to Katrina.

Tavis: To that point, let me ask you, before we get into the text, and I don't ask this question out of stupidity, I certainly hope not, stupidity or naïveté. But what is the value of looking back specifically at the first seven days when there's many people who would argue so much did, in fact, go wrong. What's the value of writing a book focusing specifically on that seven days?

Brinkley: Well, it's about storytelling. And only through the sharing of stories can you start a healing process, can you cope with trauma, or can you cope with grief. I talk about people in this book that suffered things that none of us wanna suffer, and others who are first responders. A woman named Mama Dee and the Soul Patrol who organized boats. They're stuck in there, and saving people's lives out of housing projects.

Or Reverend Willie Walker, who had the Noah's Ark church, and went in and saved hundreds of people. So you get these stories, everybody in the south, the Gulf south, has Katrina stories. And I've tried to do oral histories, pull them together, and offer some analysis. Usually as an historian, I'm a little more removed from my story. I was there for Katrina.

I saw the government ineptitude at all levels, city, state, and federal, and I was angry that that happened, and I realized I needed to do this and start talking about it and tell what I knew, and start investigating for myself instead of just sitting there in New Orleans and complaining. I wanted the facts. And the government response is even worse than I thought, with the exception of the U.S. Coast Guard, did an amazing job.

And Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries state conservation boats, these guys did amazing. But it was Louisianans saving Louisianans and Mississippi saving Mississippians, because the federal response was so slow.

Tavis: Put a pin in that, we'll come back to that conversation in just a moment. Before I jump too far ahead, though, let me just back up with two questions. I mentioned earlier at the top of the conversation that you and your family in fact rode the storm out in New Orleans. So one, tell me what happened to your family when the hurricane hits, or certainly in the aftermath, and then I wanna talk about how you did the research. The city is in tatters, and you're out gathering facts for a book.

Brinkley: Good question, the second part of it. The first part of it, my wife, I have two kids, a two and a half year old, a one and a half year old. We stayed in New Orleans. I have a press pass, so I was able to get through some roadblocks that others wouldn't. But once the storm hit, we thought New Orleans was lucky, kind of. It was a horrible storm. But then the word came of the three major levee breaches.

Seventeenth Street Canal, London Avenue Canal, Industrial Canal. We got out. We had a vehicle, we were lucky. We weren't one of the people without cars. We loaded up and we headed to Houston, Texas. Found a room, stayed there, and then I turned around, once my family was safe, came back, and started working and doing some first responding work, and getting to see the climate of the police department in disarray.

Who was stepping forward to try to help people, who wasn't. As for how I did my research for this book, first off, at Tulane University, we created a Katrina Oral History Project. I spent a lot of time not only in New Orleans, but going to the Astrodome and talking to the people of the diaspora. Not since the dustbowl of Oklahoma during the Great Depression have we had so many displaced people.

And I knew that the detail of their stories were going to be important to get on tape now, because it's not about their journey, how they made it to Texas, and how they lost a loved one, or how water flooded their house and they had to pop a hole through the attic, and how all the detail was fresh in their minds. So, I tried to start interviewing as many people as I could as close to the timeframe.

After that, I spent time looking for primary sources. I've uncovered letters, diaries, different sorts of written documents which I present in this book for the first time, to start this new collection of primary source material. And then finally, journalists drawing on the Mr. Dyson, a great professor, he's been on your show before, wrote a wonderful book recently.

But there've been a series of good articles in the 'New Yorker,' 'Vanity Fair,' 'Rolling Stone,' 'New York Times,' 'Times-Picayune' coverage. And then I would interview the journalists. Suddenly, in Katrina, journalists became first responders. So, somebody like Brian Williams of NBC and his cameraman, Tony Zimbato, Zimbato was the person that, Brian Williams was the first one to record the hole in the Superdome.

And Tony Zimbato is the one who went in the convention center and saw all these people with no water, no food, and videotaped the corpses. And he said, I wanted a video record of history, that we're not gonna shy away from the dead, and we're not gonna have Katrina amnesia. We're not gonna be Katrina revisionists and say, it wasn't so bad. The government response wasn't that bad.

So, just like Zimbato and like Spike Lee, who's doing a four-hour documentary for HBO, who was on the ground right away, I, as an historian, was starting to collect my primary source material from the get-go.

Tavis: All right, let's jump into the book, then. There are some people, namely, or chief among them, Ray Nagin, the current mayor of the city, as we speak, at least, not happy with you. You call him hesitant, perplexing, rattled too easily. You call him a show boater. You talk about his strange behavior after the storm. I've seen already what has to say about the book, and he ain't too happy with you, Doug Brinkley.

Brinkley: No. Well, the truth hurts. And my job is to tell the truth, unvarnished. I'm not in politics. I'm a scholar, and I'm presenting facts. And the bottom line, and the problem that Mayor Nagin has is he abandoned the City Hall EOC and he went into the Hyatt. And when all these people were doing first responder work, he had a Hyatt strategy. He stayed in the twenty-seventh floor.

Not once did Mayor Nagin go into the Superdome where you know all those people were, and stand up, and give them a speech, and give them a sense of hope, and talk to them. Not once did he go to the convention center and talk to the people down there. Instead, he let them stay, day after day after day. And I'm very hard on President Bush and Michael Chertoff on this book, but if you're gonna be hard on them, you have to be equally hard on Mayor Nagin.

And he was there, and he refused to first respond because he was, in my opinion, after interviewing people, worried about his own personal safety over trying to be a leader in a time of crisis.

Tavis: Right, so that's what you think of Ray Nagin. What about Michael Chertoff?

Brinkley: He was a complete void. I don't know what happened, I try to explain his logic, it's illogical. Sunday before the storm hit, on the twenty-eighth, they were told that the levees might top. He seemed indifferent to things. He stayed at home in Washington D.C. on Sunday. Monday of the storm, he flies to a conference in Atlanta for avian flu, totally disconnected to the plight of the region.

And basically, on Monday and Tuesday, saying people are, the media's exaggerating what's going on down there, and it's not that big a deal. He was, I think, the person out of this entire story that, in government, needs to resign. Because I think when you look at his lack of response to Katrina, and I'm sure he's a good man, and I know he's a legal scholar and he's brilliant.

But when it comes to dealing with a crisis at home, which is what Homeland Security's supposed to do, he's the one who oversaw FEMA. He grounded Michael Brown in Baton Rouge, and he became legalistic and bureaucratic, and started actually working against the supplies coming in from private sector people. I'm criticizing the Bush administration, and many conservatives don't like that.

But I'll also say the business community of America responded very well. They were being stopped by the federal government from trying to bring in supplies, bring in water. And so, by anybody's standards, Michael Chertoff was a disaster during that disastrous week.

Tavis: What's your sense, then, of why Chertoff essentially got off the hook, and Brown was hung in effigy?

Brinkley: Well, because there's been an in-fight in the White House, and they needed to find a scapegoat. The first scapegoat the Bush administration went after was Kathleen Blanco. That started immediately on Wednesday after the storm.

Tavis: Of course, Blanco, the Governor of Louisiana.

Brinkley: Absolutely. And she's a Democrat, and they've decided that we'll blame the state. Blanco kind of stood off the blame game. She, of course, did not respond herself very well and was terrible on the media, but she did win her showdown with President Bush and did not allow the Louisiana National Guard, state police, and others to be federalized, because it would have made it as if Louisianans were not doing anything to save themselves, when it was the federal government that was nowhere to be found.

Except for the Coast Guard. I must keep stressing that. They did great. So once that didn't work with him, they needed a new scapegoat. And 'Time' magazine did a story on Michael Brown that was devastating. It talked about questions in his resume.

Tavis: Right.

Brinkley: Then it was the White House, or Homeland Security who leaked Brown's emails that he wrote. These kind of childish comments about look how beautiful my tie is, and is somebody walking my dog, and where should I eat tonight? And while people were dying and suffering. And so, Brown's emails got released by them, and he became the all-purpose piñata, the scapegoat of it all.

Well, Brown decided that his best hope in life after being just pounded was to tell the truth about what happened. And in this weird twist in history, it turns out that he was the one warning the administration of what was going on there, while Michael Chertoff, his boss, was shutting him down, and not allowing him to do his job properly.

Tavis: I've got about 45 seconds here. You've written a 700 plus page book. This is unfair to ask you in 30 seconds. But you have what to say about President Bush?

Brinkley: Really, disappointing leadership that week. I think the tragic mistake was it was in August, Karl Rove was gone on vacation, you had Dick Cheney fishing. He went out to California. I don't think they felt the storm was very bad, at first. He lost a bunch of days. But the big mistake was when he flew over and didn't put his boots on the ground, didn't smell the death in New Orleans, came up to Washington, and he didn't show up on Air Force One, or come down to put himself in the Gulf south until Friday.

The storm was on Monday. He waited days and days and days. It was unacceptable leadership, and I think it's Katrina that's the beginning of President Bush's numbers dipping in the polls. I'm not sure he can recover from that lack of fast action. There was an ineptness that occurred that week that's sticking to his legacy.

Tavis: I think it's fair to say that you will find, rather, in this new book by Douglas Brinkley, "The Great Deluge, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, And The Mississippi Gulf Coast,' you will find that he argues that there's a lack of leadership on every level where this storm is concerned, save, as you heard him say three times tonight, save the Coast Guard, and more important, save the people of Louisiana and Mississippi. A lack of leadership on every level. Fascinating read. A good piece of history here, I think. Doug Brinkley, nice to have you on the program.

Brinkley: Thank you so much, Tavis. Appreciate it.

Tavis: My pleasure. Up next on this program, a look at foster care during this National Foster Care Month. You do not wanna miss this conversation with Regina Louise. Stay with us.