their nook e-reader line, they've had to suspend -- suspender given for the last two quarters. and wall street has not entirely been happy about this. they have also been in the process of trying to sell themselves as of about a year ago. and in early may, they put in a bid for the $17 a share. that it is being elieve the comg due diligence at this point. but it remains to be seen as to whether the deal will close. there are some favorable signs. ..

>> your chance to talk to, e-mail, and tweak the new york times best selling author and syndicated columnist, and culture for three hours starting at noon eastern live on book tv on c-span2. >> next on book tv, michael brown recalls his lead of the agency during hurricane katrina, about an hour and 15 minutes.

>> side. i guess we are ready to begin. the evening. welcome to the national press club. i am on the book and other committee, and we are so honored tonight to have as our guest, michael brown. he will be speaking to you all about his book, "deadly indifference." copies of the book are available for purchase over there were nicola setting. each sale benefits the national journalism library. no outside buds will be allowed. and mr. brown will be signing your copy after he gives his little talk year. you will be happy to do that for you. before i begin please turn your cell phones off which means i have to turn-2. ahead. there are two events coming up at the national press club that

i want to announce. jane 23rd, thursday night, we will have neil damon. he has his book. this will be of all relevant. on august 1st we will have senator bob gramm. he will be discussing his keys to the kingdom in the conference from. i am sure you all know that our guest, 89, served as the first under secretary of homeland security for president george w. bush from 2003-2005. he was also director, deputy director, and general counsel of fema from 2001-2009. at the white house to serve under consequence management committee comprised of cabinet deputies following the attacks

of september 11th and headed the white house transition team for emergency preparedness and response, department of homeland security. he also served on the national security council's deputy committee. also, he is an oklahoma native and attended the university of central oklahoma. the oklahoma city university school of law and holds a jurist doctorate in law. he has taught law at the oklahoma city university and university of denver on legislation, state and local government, and national security. in his book, "deadly indifference," co-authored by ted shorts, michael brown poignantly describes the role of politics and a risk aversion society facing natural or man-made disasters. in his book you will read many excerpts from a journal.

eventually his journal reached several hundred pages, and he thought that one day his wife and possibly his children or grandchildren would read it and would come to understand why he agreed to take a job that took him so frequently away from home. whatever the case, he intended to keep the interest private. four years after leaving the bush white house he used them in writing of this book, deadly indifference. hurricane katrina was a disaster on many levels. every participant has his own version of the almost heroic personal actions taken in a desperate race to beat the storm, protect the people, and that alternately blamed fema. he fills the most people did not know what should have happened and that there are many self-serving spin books written in the aftermath. but mr. brown believes that

people don't know the planning that was involved or the options available and rejected by high officials whose frequent in decision and occasional bad choices change to this serious situation into and needlessly deadly one. secondly, he talks in the book about the lack of available documentation during katrina, but i am willing to let michael brown explain all that to you because he is the author of this book and knows it more than i do. please give me a warm press club will come for michael brown. [applause] [applause] >> i, everybody. thanks for coming out. i appreciated. as you were talking, one of the things that struck me that i really hadn't thought about in terms of this book, between your introduction and the other people in this room there is another story that has not been told that needs to be told about

the china. that is all the people. i heard this, the other day. ask me a question. another reporter asked me the question. on the today show yesterday in an interview with matt lauer when this question came up again about race. how did race and social economics affect what took place at traffic? i am astounded that is she still comes up when you think about the men and women who worked for the federal emergency management agency in the hs and for that matter the entire federal government. i don't know what the number is now, but when i left this was 180,000 people. i'm sure it's at least 200,000. that is just the nature of government. outsell you something. that population within vhs is no different than the general population. i'm sure somewhere in the general population horrendous specific population there might

be a bigot, there might be somebody who is thinking i'd want to help those people. they are poor and stupid. i can just imagine the kinds of things that someone like that might be saying. but what we forget is that those civil servants go down to do a job, and they do it without respect to politics, the racial background, the social and economic background or anything else. and that is something that when i think about some of you that i see here today and i think about matt lauer asking that question yesterday, shame on all this for allowing that to continue to be an issue when this government or our society response to a disaster. i don't want to place any sort of dimness attitude toward them. i mean, let's be realistic. one of the problems that we had

in hurricane katrina was exposed for the first time to everybody in this country. it is a society where it is not like all of you people in this room got here by metro. i flew in today. outfly out tomorrow. i've got enough cash. i have enough cash that if there is an attack tonight or tomorrow i know i will be able to go and negotiate a deal to get a car and somehow have enough cash to be able to buy gas to be able to get back. but when you are of a group that your life revolves around a four block area and you are totally dependent upon public transportation, totally dependent upon that load restore at the end of the block, the school is two blocks this way,

and the church or the synagogue is fox the other way, even if -- even if the mayor had ordered the evacuation of new orleans within the recommended 72 hours prior to it making landfall, asking those folks to somehow get outside of their comfort zone and go to an area where somebody was going to pick them up on a bus and taken to a huey long and put him on a 757 or an amtrak train and taken to houston were taken to atlanta or somewhere else would be like asking any of us to leave this room and go to mars. but recognizing that fact of those folks in that situation is not racist. recognizing that we have a segment of this population that that is how their lives are lived is not racist. that is simply a recognition of the complex population that we

have in this country and at sometimes, sometimes government leaders fail to recognize that asking somebody to do something is asking them something that is out of the extraordinary for them. so i don't know. it was seeing you guys and thinking about all of the work that all of you do that made me think about that coupled with seeing that interview with matt lauer yesterday. there was a time in 1995, i had just given a speech outside san diego, california. april 18th, and the next morning i got up, went to the hotel restaurant to have breakfast and i noticed on the monitors in the hall like that there was some story about an explosion. i didn't pay much attention to it. i walked back and realize it was in oklahoma city. then i realized this is april 19th. so i went back to my room and tried to call a good friend of mine who is now retired federal

district judge. i could not reach him. he was at the federal courthouse across the alley. i tried to call my good friend and lawyer throughout hurricane katrina. his building was about a block away. could not reach him. could not reach my sister-in-law who worked a couple blocks away. it was my first exposure to howl in the midst of a crisis our inability to communicate with each other -- i am a kid that erupt in the oklahoma panhandle. one of my first house that memories is my father and grandfather opening a cellar door and all of us watching a tornado blow by. we survived. nothing happened to us. it was my first experience with an incident in terms of a disaster. i could not reach my friends and relatives. i learned about a week or so after that disaster.

up the ladder. we got a c-130 and playback. we went over to the old. he did that day or the next day we walked into the boughs of the pentagon. the urban search and rescue team. if you're a dog lover you have to go.

we walked into the hole in the pentagon and came back out. somebody was there to greet me and let me know. after i had been there. we had dinner. all of this stuff is very real to me. most of us will go through life with a personal experience of losing relatives or friends or loved ones. most of us unless we're in the military or having served in vietnam somewhere, we won't go through life being exposed to the kind of death and destruction that can occur either by and mother nature or by mankind. and one of the things that i have learned through my experiences of september 11th

and all the disasters we handled is that there is this deadly in difference in this country, this indifference that says we are superior to mother nature and we are superior to terrorism and superior to everything. and so we don't have to worry about it. as we all sit here in a very comfortable room where, relatively speaking. it is humid. not like denver. we're all sitting here. you all go home. it's going to go home, back to your offices, turn on the television, make popcorn in the microwave as you watch a movie. fire up the computer, get on, and do your writing or every year going to be doing. we take all of that for granted. i want you to go through a little mental exercise. think of where you are right now and draw a straight line to where you're going from here, wherever that is. do you have that in your mind?

i want you to imagine from this point to wherever that point is everything 2 miles wide, one of the left and 1 mile to the ride is you're going visually down the road, everything is gone. everything. i don't mean you see above. i mean it is all gone now is been pushed back by a bulldozer. that is what colin powell and i look devil we got to the tsunami in 2004 and five in thailand and other places. i remember as we had did tetherball in our nose and they're flying through looking at all the destruction at 1. i looked down and saw this one elderly woman desperately just walking along. i'm sure she was in shock, digging through rubble. i had no idea what she was looking for. loved ones, and momento or something. check their world is completely destroyed and turned upside down. we may not think that we're

going to face anything like that. it is the nation's capital, washington d.c. nothing bad can happen here. i have friends in denver. nothing that's going to happen in denver. remind them of the big thompson flood or any time we have blizzards. people in florida during the hurricanes. despite the effort of florida power britney and crews from all over the country to turn the power back on, people and fun were still without power for six weeks. that's not bad today. think about august, september, in d.c. your apartment, your home, your condo, your office, or ever is, no power for six weeks. i don't want to be around you guys. you'll be nuts. you'll be irritable, pain in the rear, some of you might go off the deep end, start shooting or whenever.

there is a very thin line between this technologically savvy society that we have today and mother nature or man either purposely or accidentally creating a crisis where everything we take for granted is gone. i'm afraid that most of us are deadly indifferent to it. we don't like to think about it. my time in d.c. and fema has made me a pervert in respect because now when i travel i think about how i get back, something happens. at think about we were in wholefoods are someplace. i'm looking at this cornucopia of wonderful vegetables and fruits and everything else. people a sitting there and looking at this particular red pepper is just not perfect. they dig through to find the perfect red pepper. what i'm thinking, what to do when it hits the fan and air routes is looking for red pepper? add don't care how lousy it is.

a just one or red pepper. the last strawberry, the last red pepper. i looked out across this room and see the cartoon balloons over your head. some of your thinking, that can happen. this guy is nuts. just-in-time delivery. trucks can get to all foods, they can get to safely, they can't get to it bigger share stores because the bridges are out, roads are gone. they can't get there. it is a case for a dare to. we have enough crap in the refrigerator. we will survive. give it a week or give it six weeks or longer depending on the incident. how many of you in this room are ready for that? now, i see the look cartoon bubbles again. it will never happen. it will be that long. i can get along for three or four days. no big deal. folks in florida, folks in new

orleans, folks in biloxi, the fires completely wiped out their homes. ask the people at ground zero. how long now your ready? qaeda one you all to become sick and think about it all the time, but my challenge to you is this. think about the risk wherever you live, or every worker and how prepared you are to deal with that risk? i know in washington the first spot is the biggest risk is a terrorist incident. how many of you were here on september 11? how was it, but i heard the stories about people trying to get from this area across the bridges. some people trying to get to the plane and it's taking them eight or ten hours. he didn't have to be

september 11th. dirty bomb, some guy that has just given away too long and takes out a substation. happens to be just the right substation. a blackout in of three your four. it was a squirrel or something that took it out. all it has to be. everybody thinks about that, fema which owns no planes, trains or automobiles de mardi test will be there in new york minute. their 300 plus million people. there is a finite number of firefighters. a finite number of medical assistance teams. a finite number of health care workers to my final number of electrical crews to repair power lines. they can't be everywhere at one time. even if they get to your

neighborhood first, you might be the guy at the end of the block. it might be five days before he gets to the end of your block. my challenge is twofold. one is to use hurricane katrina as an example of everything that can go wrong. no disaster is perfect. that's why we call the disaster. they went relatively well. katrina was one of those incidents were everything that could go wrong went wrong. mistakes at all levels of the government, within the population, and they all came together in one disaster. so the lesson from "deadly indifference" is for political leaders, policymakers, and others to read and understand the some of the rules and regulations and everything else we have created. lessons to be learned, lessons for us to learn about have to deal with the. but the second point is probably

even more important. that is for us as individuals to understand that katrina is not an aberration from and not a one time incident. we have started to do the planning for ten catastrophic events that we thought might occur but we should be ready for. of course we never got to the other nine. to an even really finish the first one. so the challenge is for all of you to read this and get beyond all of the myths, all of the anger, all of the misunderstandings about hurricane good training and to understand what it is to live in our society as citizens of this country. thank you all for coming out. i'm going to shut up and answer questions from you. thank you. questions?

>> i have an anecdote. >> okay. >> you mentioned, i did -- i am an author. i did a little rest. he didn't like it. he went on television the next day and call me a blond net job. go go go my name and see what you come up with. c'mon. look. i have been grilled by the united states congress and senate. i think there are some people in this room smarter than that. fire away. >> a latter-day saints community. church groups coming in to help? how did they set those up?

>> most people who work with me know how i feel about the non-government organizations. i think there are the most effective and the most rabid responders a you can have. you know why? they are not burdened by rules and regulations. they're able to go where they want to go. why is the ticket within a secure area and within the perimeter they can do whatever they want to do. they're the most effective at beating in taking care of people. they should be an example for us. my theory is in this, we have these rules and regulations. so that we can have accountability. i think it is just the opposite. we have the rules and regulations so we can avoid accountability. we have the rules and regulations so that the easiest answer for us to give is i can't do that because it is against the rules. i would like to do that, but it's against the rules. that is no accountability. as opposed to -- and not sure of congress would ever do this, but give the fema director and the

people working on this price is the kind of flexibility that they need, and i know this is why we've got to give them the kind of flexibility that they need so that they can do what needs to be done just so that they can take care of victims and make things work. now, why do i think that won't work? because congress is best that one thing, second-guessing. it would be -- i can guarantee you that if they did give that kind of discretion and flexibility to the people in the field there would be -- i can see the hearing now. well, i got growth. one time. after it which committee it was, but we had four hurricanes in florida. hurricane scene. we didn't know whether it was going to hit miami dade our west palm beach. so i made the decision, and looks to me like the best thing to do is declare a disaster area, approve the governor's request and include miami-dade

county. that we have everything covered in don't have to wait around. we can make things happen. so fema went into action. some assistance to people in miami dade county. no, my god, all hell broke loose. well, he was trying to of tussaud's. seriously? seriously? do you think i could ever get some of those people in those precincts of those areas to ever vote for george w. bush? there was no way. i don't care how much money you to read them. we were trying to be proactive and make certain that wherever in the code of probability, wherever it it hits that we would be able to do what we need to do. we immediately. even though i think we ought to have that flexibility, it is a double-edged sword, and i'm not sure that any future undersecretary or secretary would be able to deal with that because congress just cannot help themselves in that regard.

yes, sir. >> you talk about policy. the belief things have changed and that we are ready for that? and other natural disasters are still occurring. now them and we were for training? >> i don't think so. the reason is twofold. there was some a stereotypical reaction to katrina in the aftermath, and that was we will never let this happen again. so politicians have since learned that what you do is you throw everything, including the kitchen sink at a disaster instead of being specific and targeted an good stewards of taxpayer money. now we just everything because we don't want to ever be caught with our pants down again. we are also facing a budget crisis in this country where every $0.40 of every single dollar we spend is borrowed.

of find a citation, but there is a 2008 article in one of the homeland security charts about all of the equipment we had given to a fire fighters to be prepared for an attack. in my understanding, that equipment was not deteriorated to the point where it was pretty unusable. i see some heads shaking yes. so, no, we are not ready. after every disaster, a typical big bell curve. disaster occurs. everybody spends up. politicians go into action. everybody does their stuff. the media goes away and we are back down to complacency. i mean, we are silly if we don't think that radical islamist want to attack this country. they don't like the fact that we are in a room like this, rumple of republicans. you're supposed to laugh at

that. youtube did. sure. thanks a lot. we have men and women, conservatives and liberals, democrats and republicans, a mixture of people in this room. there is not what these terrorists -- that is what they want to attack. they don't like our way of life. we become complacent. mother nature will continue to do what she wants. the catastrophic disaster planning geologists' would tell us of the organ-washington coast there is the likelihood of another tsunami occurring in that we are on the end of the 3,000 year time with those occur. i don't know whether that genes five hours or five years or 50 years or 500 years. we are somewhere in that timeframe. there will be as tsunami at some time, maybe not in our lifetime. now, imagine that. take that line you had in your mind from here to your home and office and imagine it's going from seattle to portland. do you think we are ready for

that? no, we aren't. but more importantly, i don't think citizens are ready my hope would be that if something bad happens in your neighborhood or business or whenever that you wouldn't be shellshocked, you wouldn't stand around with the dumb luck in-your-face. you at least park cognizant of the fact that something could have happened and have done some animal preparation for a. if you were to do that then your better off than 98 percent of the people in this country. most of the people in this country will wait for, unfortunately, someone to come and rescue them, someone to come and take care of them. it is a huge mistake. it's just cannot occur. sorry. >> what do you think of the tornadoes and floods? >> for those of the in the room

the don't know gregg, is the current director. i've known him since he worked in florida. he is doing something that i think is dead sea on his part and i hope the continues to push. that is the attitude that i think he's using the 72 our mantra sang you need to be ready to be on your own for 72 hours. that has two effects. it lowers expectations a little bit. if we had gone to the point in this venture people thought -- really, i think people think -- may be as to ask. how many planes to you think fema ounce? firetrucks? ambulances? we own one ambulance. might have a fire truck. otherwise we don't own anything. the only thing we have is a checkbook and the power of the presidency when a declaration is declared, the ability to hopefully coordinate the federal

government response. beyond that they don't to scott. they don't come and rescue. get it out of your head. when the dow 911 it goes to a local fire station or police station. if it is a really big crisis i guarantee you that local fire station and police department will be overwhelmed within 12 hours. mutual aid will kick in and people start trying to backfill and everything else. i want you to remember this, 300 plus million people. you will come save you? unless you have your own personal firefighter, your own personal urban search and rescue team network. you're on your own. doing a wonderful, magnificent job in that regard of lowering expectations and at the same time the inverse of that is making people realize that you have a personal responsibility, and that responsibility is not just your family and neighbors but also to those firefighters

that will eventually show up and try to rescue. if you are not ready and if you haven't done what you need to do to take care of yourself and the firefighter gets hurt or killed trying to do his or her job to take care of you, shame on you. >> how many employees does fema have? to they have offices all over the country are just here? >> the current number is four, 4,000. gap. like 35 under so when i was there. it's now about 4,000. 4,000 full-time. disaster assistance employees a lot of a they call them now that come in and do stuff. remember, those people are not fire fighters. they are not rescue workers. they're not people that come and with a level a suit on and all this equipment to come in and rescue you from the burning building or a flooded house. as a people to administer

programs, it checks out to make sure that people coordinate among the states and communities, those sorts of things, implementing programs, doing planning and exercises. all that. >> of this. >> offices in -- ten. to now. see how quickly i forget. ten regions and they are spread out all over the country. it was at one time. when i was there the operating budget -- let me give you this figure. i notice is changed. that is the caveat. when i was there at the operating budget was about $3 billion. sounds like a lot of money. the operating budget of vhs was $48 billion. just to give you a comparison, that is where we fit within the department of homeland security. 3,000 employees, 3500 at the

time versus 1,800,200,000. it is a miniscule federal agency, very effective, but ms. school. in this town money and in police are the currency of the stabbed. the problem in this town is that fema has always been, scene of the cane relegated to the backwaters and became relegated to the model f -- c a liberating it is. you can say all these things. you don't give a rat's. it became relegated to the monolith of the department of homeland security. so imagine being in a budget meeting with vhs. you're arguing over -- you have three and a half billion dollars for operating, and you are begging for an additional half billion dollars or half billion

versus everybody else arguing over the tens of billions of dollars. it is just a fact. this is where fema is. this is why my argument continues. that is an argument that i will continue to bang my head. nobody listens to cares. that's fine. >> you're not in the federal government. how do you have society changes thought about what fema does? it seems like every time something happens in this country, a disaster, fema is and here yet. we can't talk to anyone or did anyone to come. how do we as a society change that? people of their in the country realize that they are at the local fire department or the ambulance service. >> you have to want to change it. every disaster have affects at least one united states

congressman, two u.s. senators and the governor. what is there motivation to change? that perspective or image. it gives them an incredible photo opportunity to stand and hand out a check, hand out, you know, money to rebuild the school or a hospital. there is no incentive whatsoever for them to chase that. instead what you have to do is you have to, which is very difficult, you then have to say the experiences like hurricane katrina. all the respect to the people, i understand there were hot and miserable and that they wanted water. there was water there. i understand that they wanted food. not the greatest male in the world. there were safe. a camera lens focuses about this wide. all you hear is that somebody is hot and miserable and nobody's

going to save you. baskets extrapolated out to the entire country. oh, my gosh. why aren't they there? and the asked, should they be there? and if they should be there what of those people doing? maybe the question should be asked, well, in the community you live what you doing to help get them out of there? how did they get there in the first place? it is the willingness to have the discussion that i hope this will generate about what is the role of government and what is the role of individuals when it comes to a crisis? now, i understand that the people were miserable. i get that. but i want to compare them to a woman that i saw. she had nothing. there was no government to give her water. there was no disaster medical

assistance teams there to help.

>> i don't know if anderson talks to my staff. talk to somebody. desperately wanted to get in one of the urban search and rescue team goes to go see people being rescued. staff came to me and ask me the question. no, you're not going to do that. no, you're not going to put cooper in a boat to go see your rescue. they go up to a house. the boat holds six people pet before rescue people and now you have anderson and the cameraman. what am i supposed to do, put

them on the roof and take these four people of the rough and take them back and come get anderson? no. what i didn't do is get ahead of the story, say anderson can i get in the boat, but here is what we will do, we will go find another boat and time anderson to the rescue boat so that he is not taking of space and he can watch. instead i just said no and that was it. he did what any good journalist would do. he went out and got his own boat and went out. he didn't go with the rest booktv.org. he went out ahead of us. he found people. look. there's nobody here. nobody is here to save these people. let me save you. it feels like a roll the thing. and what anderson didn't realize was that he just got a head of the movement. that bill was just one house back coming to save those folks.

that isn't what gets portrayed. of the other thing that we did, which we didn't do a good job of, we embedded a reporter before katrina. a reporter for the wall street journal at the time. probably one of the more objective reporters because he had spent his seems like a month, probably a couple of days, spent quite a bit of time with me in illinois and other places learning and understanding hello works. we should do more of that. frankly i think the media should do more of it. the media ought to recognize, i get it. i get it. if he believes it leads. if you can get that one person in that camera screen to scream and yell about something, that is what you're going to talk about. i get it. what you ought to do this consumers of the news, those of you not in the media, when that camera lenses focus right there, remember that there is a story behind the camera, behind the person they're interviewing, on

both sides. those four perspectives that you are getting. so you shouldn't, you shouldn't, people in this room, because you're all smarter than the average population, you should not just the these willy-nilly consumers of the news. you need to be more discerning consumers and realize that, yeah, when anderson is doing a picture or story of somebody being taken off the roof, why is it somebody there, don't just take it face value. ask yourself, well, is there somebody there? maybe there one door over. >> the new director of fema has expectations. that's a good thing. unrealistic expectations. but in the standard somewhere. you can't achieve that standard.

>> and he makes a good point. it is realistic, given the expectations down to a realistic level. that is when the teams go. the amazing thing. we have the louisiana department of fish and wildlife, the urban search and rescue teams, individuals with boats, the coast guard rescuing more people, quickly off lifting, taking them from the rooftops to dry ground. there might be an overpass on one of the interstates. we eritrea's in to be as effective as possible and save as many people as possible. what is the result? somebody on one of the overpasses dice and i get sued. i get sued personally because we have been mostly negligent mike triaging one. seriously? by sitting people and putting them on dry land, they can start

carrying. someone dies in that process, we are grossly negligent. that is where we have the expectation is that our way out of line. we just have to realize that we can save everybody. >> it sounds like your next book should be those disasters that were not planned out or the nine after. write a book for a person who is interested in making sure that they're not reliant on fema or the government to help them in a crisis situation. have lived in california for a long time. i keep food in my garage. because of mother-in-law says when there is an earthquake can be to have a couple 5-gallon containers of water, no food for three or four days, a first-aid kit. my mom was in new orleans. hurricane plan was a cooler in

the attic with all their important documents in a ziploc bag, take a close because they needed those important documents, up pickax so that when they're up in the attic is there home is in the water that they can act the way up to the roof so that they can get rescued. she had it all thought out, and that was a perfect plan. >> did that happen? >> she did not get flooded. she got out of town. she get in and out of town. it was mayhem. it was horrible. she didn't know whether she had a house to come back to or not. >> the publisher? >> people would read it and think. and a snowstorm. pretty much locked in people for the better part of the week. we had the storm where people could not get home.

they ran out of gas on, on the side of the road. some potential for letting people know. stay in your office. you're safe. why would you leave a place that is safe? >> one of the things we did after september 11th, talking about at the introduction, we talked about if there was a smallpox attack or a dirty bomb within the national region. the thought was we are in really good shape here because everybody will go out. it would go to baltimore or somewhere else. i remember sitting there scratching my head thinking, okay. so now we're going to send all those people out to those places. what's going to happen to the infrastructure and everything there? of those people were going to go further out and we would just keep pushing everything got as far as we can. we never thought about beyond. we never thought beyond somebody

going up to pittsburgh. we didn't think about that. i think the same thing is true here. there is this idea. i think it is valid in one sense that if we figure out a way to take care of ourselves where we are, the dirty bomb hits d.c. depending on what time of year, i might want to stay exactly where i used to live. probably the safest place in the ncr even though it is only within 8 miles or so of the national mall. a dirty bonn doesn't mean anything to me as long as the wind is blowing the opposite direction. again, it back to the idea of understanding the risk. understand the risk of real live. do the basics of being prepared. >> of read the book. >> good. >> notwithstanding the federal feasibility.

the bureaucracies, the cobweb down to the individual level. the senator, governor, and dogcatcher. for the first time no one really understands that. the level of bureaucracy. we have to deal with it. in a crisis situation. but you spend a lot of time reading that in plan language. the first time that i've seen that put on paper. >> one of the things that amazes me. my talk-show were giving lectures around the world, people don't understand, unless you work in washington they don't really understand the convoluted system that we have, which i think is a great system. federalism basically precludes us, the federal government, from walking in and saying, oh, hi, governor. about my weight. here is what we're going to do. i took the attitude that the

governor was the one in charge and all i was there for was to find out what the governor needed. that is why one of the stories i have in the book is about being on air force one and trying to convince the president to federalize the response of louisiana. that, in essence, means we would invoke the insurrection act and takeover law enforcement and everything. my argument for doing it was because of these pier are crises we just can't make things happen fast enough. we can't get through the dysfunction with in the federal government, let alone the destruction at the state and local level. the president agreed to do that. the most amazing decision. she figured out what that meant and said no. it worked out because he was able to figure out a way to work through the bureaucracy.

he was a good old boy. it made it work. this command. >> i've covered various disasters. you know, you're not the first fema director. just here a month or so ago. talking about our buck. isn't ready that the supposed to do that? why is this messes not get to people? >> there are two very significant reasons. first and foremost, it may be great, but is the government. it's from the government. on the way to the airport. i couldn't tell you what is

said. don't care. to listen to it. we become cynical about the government telling us what to do and rightfully so. i think there is another more important message, and that is it is difficult, if not impossible for many people to even think about this, and it goes back to, once again, even those who are the poorest among us in this country are still better off than 90 percent of the rest of the world. because of that we become very complacent comfortable. we have a belief that we are because, dammit, we are americans. it's just not true. i don't know how to get that across other than i will continue to stand up, lecture and people pay me well-to-do these lectures and talk about

them. i spoke to a group of ceos. this been a couple of years ago. i forget where somehow i came up how ready they work in terms of the continuity of operations and have a continued to get back into business as quickly as possible. one cbs attitude was i had the most loyal group of people. i will come up against anybody else in this room. i challenge him. okay. how do you know that? well, if something bad happens we have all these plants. i will be able to get into the office and do x, y, z. people continued in work remotely. i'm looking and thinking, man, man. you get paid a couple of a gazillion dollars a year in don't have a clue, you don't have a clue that your employees may be the most loyal people in the world and they would walk across fire for yen, but if they can't get to the office when

they fire up the computer and it doesn't do anything weather is no connection to the internet and no way to connect wireless, or their home has been destroyed, what do you think they're going to care about, taking care of their home and family or, oh, yeah, that's the of that i'm loyal to. i have to go to work tomorrow. that is a difficult thing for even a ceo to think about. it's not a priority because he is worried about next quarter's, word about next quarter and so, again, the proverbial you know what is the san. nobody can come. there is a balance here. there is a balance. we can be more prepared, but no matter how prepared we are something bad can and may happen to us. nobody likes to think about that. it's human nature.

>> talking about the problem here being that expectations are just blown out of proportions when it comes to what fema can and cannot do and how quickly it can and cannot do it. talk a lot about changing people's expectations. is that to say that what fema is capable of doing right now is enough and if not, how would you like to see that changed? >> more than enough. their mission on not to be expanded because that feeds into higher expectations. the natural tendency, the inherent natural tendency in this country, you can pick any agency. what i thought about tsa. there is an article out today about how they would expand the program and start doing all these checkpoints. it's insanity. if fema were to start increasing its capacity to actually do response and to actually start rescuing more and more people, that will cause inherently

people to become more complacent and more dependent upon the government. so where fema is at it ought to just stop. this should not have any edison capacity. it ought to maintain where it is and not create. that will be very difficult because, as we see in d.h. as they continue to expand and grow and try to become more pervasive. it is the inherent nature of government. >> if something happens in california would it be a pot of federal government to have them support? grow and assume more responsibility, but at the state level have them continue? is that is so it is? >> an earthquake. but even have -- as the way should be. california, even though they are broke, california has done a

very good job, in my opinion, preparing for the big one hitting. having said that, think about how the population along that line has increased just in our lifetime. so now if that big one occurs during our lifetime no matter how well prepared california's they will not be able to respond as effectively without the help of other states and the federal government. just not enough assets in california alone to rescue the number of people that will be separated from the rest of the state somewhere between the fall in the pacific ocean. without power, without food, water, transportation, communication. it will be able to do squat. at that point you will have to have all the other states japan and more than likely have to have the federal government chipped in in terms of military assets to do things. now, military assets? another problem. they're stretched.

military assets available right now is the big one occurred right now and somebody calls gates and says that we need 50 blackhawks and 27 should ducks and whatever else we need in california to help respond, what do you think secretary gates is going to do? he is probably going to say, let me go to my being counters, not in the sense of how do i pay for this, but how many do we have and where are the? is realizing where we are at this moment in time and what kind of assets we have to respond to something like that. it doesn't exist. >> to the difference between scope and scale wrists is what goes on every day verses that troop catastrophic events. >> paul's point is the scope of san andreas, the big one in

california is going to be tremendous. it will be tens of -- katrina, to give it a little perspective, we were worried about housing a hundred thousand people. imagine in california, how do you house 10 million people? ready put them? i know. i have a bright idea. 10 million fema trailers. wouldn't that be great? 1099 trailers. where we going to house them? ten cities. we will put ten cities up. brilliant idea. right? party can do what i thought, i will bring cruise ships and and put people in cruise ships. that is the scope of -- the scope like that. you cannot scale up. ..

>> all the electronics and everything. there's a great -- i don't want to push a second book during my discussion, but there's a great book called one second after or one minute after, i forget the title. but it describes the breakdown of society. well, the likelihood of an emp event occurring is not necessarily great right now, so it's not likely to occur, but

the scope of that would be beyond, it would be absolutely beyond anything the united states could do. so scale and scope. always a give and a take. that's why wherever you live what you have to do is you have to evaluate the risk of where you live. i think the risk of a blackout occurring almost anywhere in this country is pretty realistic. a squirrel, a drunk, al-qaeda, hezbollah, any of those groups may try to -- they may eventually figure out you want to bring the country to it knees, have a coordinated attack on substations around the country and take the grid down. or better, yeah, i think it would be brilliant. do a cyber attack on the atms. [laughter] how many of you could go for more than three or four days without your debit card or credit card? [laughter] i know some people in this room can't live without their credit card or debit card. [laughter] scope and scale. scope and scale. other questions?

the -- you guys are good. these are good questions. how are those interns doing back there, are they doing all right? >> for the last six years, there's been a lot of criticism of your experience and your credentials. can you talk a little bit about, you know, what are the competencies needed to lead an agency like fema? you don't have the same kind of experience, but every one of those leaders has come from a different place, and how did you kind of leverage your life experience to do that job? >> let me ask you, was i qualified? [laughter] right answer. good answer. i think the most important thing for a president to look at in any kind of a position, unless you're going to be head of the nuclear regulatory commission or head up the missile defense agency or something, is to be able to do two things; instill

in the people who work for you that you will take them to a level of excellence where they can achieve what they want to achieve in their particular area. you have to have a sense of organizational management and understand the interplay between the political leadership and the civil service leadership. you have to understand all of those things. it's about managing an organization. it's not about the specific technicalities of understanding x, y and z. beyond that, though, i think i was probably more fortunate than any other fema director in the history of the agency. i came in the proverbial mail room. i came in at the bottom. the general counsel where i had to learn all of the rules and regulations and how every department and every part of that organization worked, what their capabilities were, what their legal responsibilities were, how they worked,

everything. and then got to work my way up the ladder. i think it was the best experience and probably better experience than any other fema directer ever had. if you can't manage, if you cannot manage the bureaucracy and you cannot manage the organization -- i don't care how technically smart you are, you will fail. it's about understanding that those people work here day in and day out have the experience -- sometimes that experience and understanding that the civil service has is tunnel vision, and you have to get people to look outside their comfort zone. but you know that can be very difficult. but that's all about trying to lead people. and i, and i, i would say based on the people in this room and the people that have continued to communicate with me since i left the organization that i was very successful. >> would you not say that t a lot of -- it's a lot of

on-the-job training since each disaster is so different and the responses are so different? >> it's not only that, it's also recognizing that if i need a brain surgeon to fill that job, to have that expertise and i need a nuclear physicist to do this job and that part is having the sense to know you need to have the experts in this field around you so that when you need the nuclear physicist, you got it there to get the things done. absolutely. and every disaster is different. every disaster is both -- god, this is going to sound like a lawyer. on the one hand, on the other hand. every disaster is truly different in the sense that you have different nuances and different things, but every disaster is exactly the same. and by that i mean you take 9/11. this, god, i've said this until i'm blue in the face. the thing that irritates me about 9/11 and this whole dichotomy between terrorism and natural disasters is what would fema and the federal government have done differently on 9/11 had there just been a failure of the air traffic control system

and that's why the planes went into the tower instead of a bunch of yahoos flying into the tower? what would the fema response have been differently on that date? nothing. it would have been exactly the same. so until we get through our heads that a disaster is -- every one's unique, they're all basically the same. you have to respond, you have to recover and to all those things in every single disaster. >> i wanted you to know that you were at fema be for about five years, two years as a directer and no one even knew who you were until katrina which meant you must have been doing a good job. >> just trying to get stuff done. [laughter] >> with anybody else? is. >> yes, sir. >> are there maybe other countries that we could model responses to disasters, other countries that do a better job maybe? for example, israel deals with disasters on a daily basis, and their population has more training in military, same as

switzerland. and they, i mean, i think every house in switzerland has a bunker. and in england they, many disasters, and their knowledge of what to do and be prepared is maybe a little bit more -- >> there are things in countries all over the world that we can emulate and that we can learn from. and one of the persistent problems we have in this country is our unwillingness to recognize that maybe someplace else does it a little better, and there's something we can learn from another country. i'm not sure we can really emulate or adopt everything that another country does. we would never be able to adopt the israeli strategy of how -- we'll never get that mindset. at least maybe -- i hope, i hope we don't have a reason to get that mindset in this country. let me put it that way. but you raise a good point. i pointed this out to a group the other day. they were talking about, you know, we really need to you the

federal government because they need to be able to respond better and get more boots on the ground. i immediately thought back to i spent a significant amount of time during my tenure here in russia. a dictatorial, autocratic, authoritative government, they do some really good stuff. intercom is very good at some things. but you would think in a -- i'm going to use the word exhumist, but i really mean more of an authoritative government -- even in that authoritative, communist-like system that they have, they cannot do it. they cannot come in and rescue everybody in moscow. when the breslin attack occurred, they were calling us about advice of what to do and how to respond. not the breslin attack, but the theater. yeah, the theater. yeah. so there are things that we can learn. but there is an inherent unwillingness in this country to

look beyond our shores for things we can do differently. >> what's, what's the future of public service? because i think, you know, you definitely have political views about government's role, and be i think right now we're hearing a lot of kind of anti-bureaucrat, anti-government talk. what do you think the future is? >> well, in what sense? >> >> you know, what's the role of government and public servants and actually meeting these types of vital needs, and is a lot of. >> criticism -- of this criticism warranted in what the private sector responsibility should be? >> or devolving it closer to where those who are most affected, devolving the oil and the response down this is what i would rather see. i mean, i think fema has a great role in terms of training and exercises and helping them develop policies and structures and ways that state and local governments respond. so what i want to do is i want

to separate the concept of fema responding versus fema be training and exercising and helping those at the state level government learn it. i think there's a great role in that response, in that respect. i started out this whole discussion about some of the people in this room. there's a lot of expertise at the federal level that state and locals don't reach out to because we have taken -- and this is an editorial comment, clearly, it's editorial -- because we have taken the whole concept of response and recovery of how we deal with disasters both natural and manmade, or i'll throw in terrorism, and we have allowed terrorism to permeate all of that. so it has become a clash of cultures, in my opinion, a culture that says we have to stop, stop, stop terrorism. at all costs, we stop any act of

terrorism. that's well and good. you're going to fail. you will fail. because you cannot even if you have a place state, you cannot stop acts of terrorism. ask the chinese, ask the malaysians, ask anybody. i don't care what form of government you have, you cannot stop it. so we have to somehow get over the idea, this kind of goes back to the different kinds of disasters, that regard he of the type of disaster that occurs, helping state and local governments become more effective at how they respond and recover from that. and i think that's the role the federal government has, developing some sort of continuity, of best practices around the country. of helping state and locals, um, i, for example, i don't know if this analogy's going to work or

not or if it's going to lead to too many problems. i'm going to try it and see if it works. the department of education, in my opinion, total waste of money because we're sending all this money into d.c., and as it filters through the bureaucracy and goes back out to the states, that dollar that i send to washington for the department of education finally gets back to denver, it's now about 20 cents or 30 cents. so it's not very effective. so instead of really trying to help state and locals, they're just doing mandates and stuff. well, what if we had the money that comes into fema through the general fund, and instead that money is taken because we had this group of expertses in this small, nimble agency who's able to go out to all the different states and localities and figure out ways to -- i can't believe we're still going to say this almost ten days after 9/11 -- how to communicate better after a disaster to actually have interoperable communications. still don't have that, right?

how do we figure better ways -- i'm sorry, we still don't have it. i don't care what any administration says, we still don't have it. how do we figure out a better way to encourage and recognize that to get local fire departments to recognize it's in their best interests, that not -- in the denver, in the front range, there's denver, fort kohl lens, colorado springs, why should the city and be county of denver have the best of every piece of equipment they can have? why not spread that around in the lakewood and woulder and colorado springs and fort collins and all these cities along the front range come together as a unit and just make sure they have the kind of capability east with equipment, training and everything else so they can respond up and down the front range. there's one or the that can drive that, and that's fema. and i think if we got into more of a culture of doing that, that would ato