On August 29, 2005, just nine months after the tsunami, hell and high water came to the United States. Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast with ferocious winds and waves that flooded the coastal areas of Alabama and Mississippi, and breached the levees of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, inundating 80 percent of New Orleans and neighboring parishes. Katrina and Rita, its smaller but still fierce follow-on, killed more than 1,800 people, destroyed or damaged more than 850,000 homes, and spurred countless acts of kindness and courage—fast rescues of people from rooftops and trees, and from cars with windows rolled up and dwindling oxygen inside; doctors and nurses working all night to care for both their patients and the newly injured in facilities with no power; houses of worship open to people without regard to race or creed; volunteers in the Superdome trying their hardest to make an impossible situation bearable for thousands with no other option for shelter.
When President Bush asked me to join his father again to raise money for relief and reconstruction, I was eager to help. More important, so was my staff. They knew we had to do this and were all in, even though I was about to leave for Asia to advance our AIDS work there and it was just three weeks until the first meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.
For me, Katrina was deeply personal. New Orleans had given me some of my life’s most important memories. It is the first big city I ever saw, when my grandmother took me, at three, on the train to see my widowed mother, who had gone back to finish her nursing education at Charity Hospital, which was now badly damaged by Katrina, closed for the first time since 1815, never to reopen in that iconic building. When I was fifteen, my family took its only out-of-state vacation to New Orleans, with brief stops in Gulfport and Biloxi. All three had been hard hit. I was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in New Orleans just six weeks after my stepfather lost his fight with cancer but not before saying, on his deathbed, that I shouldn’t worry—he was sure I’d be selected. Hillary and I went to a law school hiring convention there, staying in the Cornstalk Hotel—a wonderful little place in the French Quarter marked by the yellow corn decorating its wrought-iron fence. I’d been back several times as governor and president, and in the fall of 2004, after a big meal of local cuisine, I was flying home from New Orleans when I had the chest pains that signaled serious heart trouble and led to my bypass surgery. And I was grateful that a big vote from New Orleans helped me carry Louisiana twice. For all these reasons and more I was eager to get to work.
A week after Katrina struck, Hillary and I flew south to see some of the survivors—not to New Orleans, where we would be in the way of urgent relief work still ongoing, but to Houston, which had taken in more than 200,000 evacuees from the Gulf, as did Baton Rouge, nearly doubling its population in the blink of an eye. Quite a few came to Little Rock. And Chicago took more than 6,000, the largest number of any city outside the South.
When we landed, we connected with George and Barbara Bush, and the rest of the star-studded group—Oprah Winfrey, Jesse Jackson, local ministers, and members of Congress, including Senator Barack Obama, who had called to tell us about raising money in Illinois for the victims who had relocated there. Hillary and I had done an event for his Senate campaign in Illinois, so she invited him to fly down with us. We went to the Reliant Center, an arena next to the Astrodome, where 4,000 evacuees were staying, and began to walk among the rows of cots. My first impression was a humbling reminder that most of Katrina’s victims were poor and working-class people who, having lost all they had, were now in a strange city far from home.
The bright spot was the kids, who lifted our spirits and, more important, gave their parents something to force their pain and loss to take a backseat to thinking about their children’s tomorrows. I think their energetic running around helped the loneliness of the people there without children, too. In Jesse Jackson’s famous words, they were “keeping hope alive.” There were a lot of smiling volunteers from the Red Cross and other groups trying to do the same thing. That’s about all anyone could do in those early days, with hundreds of thousands of people wiped out, not knowing what to do next or whether they would ever go home again. As it turned out, many didn’t.
Talking to the people, getting briefings, and following the thorough print and television reporting convinced me, and President Bush, that we had a lot to do. There was an initial outburst of generosity to support the emergency responses and federal funds would be made available to rebuild homes and restart businesses. But there’s no way government programs would cover all the needs in a timely fashion. Insurance would cover a lot of the losses but, as we learned, not all, and sometimes reluctantly. The colleges and schools would be rebuilt, but what would the teachers do for income while waiting for them to reopen, and while the colleges were losing money in tuition refunds when students transferred to other schools? What about the hundreds of houses of worship, mostly small African American and white Christian churches, but also synagogues, mosques, and temples, whose parishioners had limited resources, much of them already being spent on caring for victims? How would they rebuild? And who would fund the new health challenges, especially the need for more mental health services, which were barely adequate even before they were broken by the storm?
We decided to raise more money and distribute it quickly, concentrating on helping the houses of worship and the colleges, and providing discretionary funds to state and local authorities best able to respond to pressing problems. As I said in a press conference outside the arena, we needed a fund to fill in the blanks and help people who would otherwise be totally overlooked.
Over the next two years, George and I raised more than $130 million from more than 100,000 donors in all fifty states and many foreign nations, and distributed it all: $30 million to thirty-eight colleges—including technical and community colleges—and universities, $25 million to 1,151 houses of worship, $40 million to state-designated groups, and $35.6 million to forty-two local community nonprofit efforts. As with the tsunami, this was a relatively small amount of the overall funds from government assistance and private giving, but our funds were raised quickly and invested in areas that needed immediate help to revive essential activities.
All the services from accounting to legal to printing were donated. By the time we stopped accepting donations in July 2007, New Orleans had regained two thirds of its employment, and in the Gulfport-Biloxi area, employment was 93 percent of its pre-Katrina level.
After the trip to Houston, George and I decided that, when possible, we would be together, but we could do more outside New Orleans if we went to different areas. So he’d go west all the way into Southeast Texas, and I’d go east into Mississippi and Alabama.
Many colleges were in big trouble. They didn’t have and couldn’t raise the money to repair or replace damaged buildings and expensive equipment. They were losing income from loss of enrollment and tuition refunds. And they had to find a way to pay salaries and benefits to retain teachers and staff while the rebuilding was done. We were able to give them $30 million in December, just over three months after the storm.
Tulane had reopened four months after the storm, thanks to its strong financial base and less extensive damage. In the spring of 2005, George and I spoke at the commencement there. We also did an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, a New Orleans native who had been relentless in promoting the revival of her hometown. So had Tulane’s president, Scott Cowen, who in 2008 hosted the first Clinton Global Initiative for university students (CGI U). On our service day, students from all over the United States and several other countries helped clean a devastated section of the city in preparation for new affordable and more storm-resistant housing. I’ll never forget the energy and pride those students showed in doing their part for the cause.
On October 5, before I set out for Gulfport, Mississippi, and Bayou La Batre, Alabama, I had breakfast in Metairie, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans, with thirty-five relief workers at a Piccadilly restaurant. I wanted to thank them, and our host. Piccadilly had to shut twenty-five restaurants because of the flood but had managed to provide or donate more than 100,000 meals to evacuees and relief workers, and to offer all five hundred of its displaced workers the chance to work at one of its 100-plus still open restaurants, which were also collecting thousands of pounds of food, clothing, and other supplies. Piccadilly’s caring and commitment made the breakfast taste even better.
In Gulfport, I met with community leaders and small business owners who were upbeat and pretty far along in their recovery planning. Then I went to a neighborhood that needed more help. Before Katrina, Forest Heights was a nice neighborhood developed twenty-five years earlier by Dr. Dorothy Height and the National Council of Negro Women. Dorothy was a legendary leader and a good friend of Hillary’s and mine until she died in 2010, at ninety-eight and still at work. She left a lasting legacy in community building in the United States and in Africa and was especially proud of Forest Heights.
A significant percentage of these hardworking families had finally paid off their mortgages not long before Katrina struck. Now they had to rebuild on 70 percent of the lots and repair the other houses. Meanwhile residents and relief workers were cleaning up.
I had a fascinating conversation with a woman who had been designated to tell me about the challenges they were facing. She was passionate in saying how worried the families who had just paid off their mortgages were because they had been told their insurance might not cover their losses. Apparently, they had hurricane insurance but not flood insurance. Insurance companies were telling them that even though the hurricane’s winds had caused so much damage to the area, their homes were inundated by floodwaters, so they didn’t have to cover those losses. If insurance companies didn’t cover them, then after twenty years or more of never missing a mortgage or premium payment, those people might never be homeowners again.
I knew the aggregate losses would be large, but I thought in the end the insurance companies would have to pay, and I promised to do whatever I could to help. The homeowners eventually sued the insurance companies and won in district court, but in 2007 the decision was overturned by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, who ruled against the homeowners, saying regardless of what caused the flooding, their policies strictly excluded covering it. Other lawsuits against the Army Corps of Engineers were also unsuccessful. Making matters worse, many of the homeowners later got some relief from a federally funded program to elevate homes in flood-prone areas, only to be sued by the government for “misusing” the funds to repair the homes. Happily, in February of 2023, Louisiana dropped the suits, freeing the homeowners from having to repay the grants.
The woman was obviously intelligent and well spoken but there was something else striking about her, something that strengthened my resolve to do more about a problem unrelated to Katrina. She was in a wheelchair with one leg partially amputated, a frequent consequence of diabetes. Type 2 diabetes, given the same dietary and lifestyle habits, is 1.8 times more likely to occur in African Americans as in those of European descent (1.6 times more likely for Hispanics, and two times more likely for Native Americans and Pacific Islanders). Diabetics are also more at risk of heart attacks, strokes, and cancer. With the rate of childhood obesity high and rising, the increased incidence of type 2 diabetes loomed large in America’s future. This vibrant woman embodied the consequences for so many others if we didn’t change course. That was a cause I soon embraced through the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a story I’ll tell later in the book.
I went back to Forest Heights once more the following March to assess the ongoing recovery effort and to urge survivors to apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) if they were eligible for it. The EITC was created in 1975 to provide a refundable tax credit to lower-income workers. It had been praised by Democrats and Republicans alike for being both pro-family and pro-work. The credit was doubled in my 1993 economic plan, and by the time Katrina hit, it provided up to $4,400 a year for people with two or more children if their incomes were $35,000 a year or less. Families with one child and single workers got less. A large number of survivors were eligible for the EITC, but you had to apply and they didn’t know anything about it. A couple of years earlier I had set up an effort in New York to address this after I read a news report that more than 100,000 people in New York City alone had earned the refund but hadn’t applied for it.
I didn’t want that to happen here. These people really needed the money and were legally entitled to it. To help them get it, the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund approved a $750,000 grant to Operation HOPE’s Project Restore HOPE/Gulf Coast Recovery. Operation HOPE was established and run by John Hope Bryant, a remarkable man who started his first business at age fourteen in California, found financial success in his twenties, and walked away from unlimited earning potential to follow his true passion: promoting financial literacy and economic empowerment among low-income people. I had seen him in action in New York and knew he could make a real difference here. John was in Forest Heights, along with H&R Block volunteers, who were doing survivors’ tax filings for free while John was helping eligible people apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit and giving his economic literacy and financial counseling course to adults and schoolkids alike. His passionate empowerment message gave renewed hope and confidence to a lot of people after Katrina. I’ll always be grateful to John for all he did for them.
After Mississippi, I flew on to Alabama to visit Bayou La Batre, a small town on the Gulf Coast. Its boats brought home shrimp, oysters, and crabs to be processed and sent across the country. I met Mayor Stan Wright, Governor Bob Riley, and a number of families affected by the storm. More than thirty boats were blown out of the water and needed to be removed, then repaired or replaced as soon as possible. Bayou La Batre wasn’t your typical small Southern town. It was 53 percent white, 10 percent African American, 15 percent Vietnamese, 10 percent Laotian and Cambodian, 2 percent Latino, and a small number of Native Americans and others. We stood near the boats washed way up on the shore on both sides of the open meeting ground. Their names reflected their owners’ roots. The boats on my left had traditional Southern two-word handles, something like Mary Ann and Betty Sue. On the right were two Vietnamese boats, Thanh I and Thanh II. Unlike many troubled places I visited at home and around the world with different groups living in close contact, these people weren’t at each other’s throats. They weren’t interested in burning each other’s churches or Buddhist temples. They were hardworking, down-to-earth, family-oriented folks who just wanted to go back to work.
And they shared a big problem: they were being screwed over by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had told them the agency would pay to remove just three boats, because only they posed a health threat to nearby houses. Six weeks after my visit, FEMA said the other twenty-nine stranded vessels would have to be removed by the owners or they could pay FEMA to remove them at $60,000 a boat. The FEMA coordinator even stopped the U.S. Coast Guard, which had done a great job there from day one, from removing the boats without charging the families after it had already signed a contract to do so.
I was dumbfounded. I told President Bush about it and we agreed to give whatever it took to remove the twenty-nine boats and get everybody going again. We got the money to the governor in April 2006 and the job was completed on September 23. The last boat recovered was an eighty-foot trawler fittingly named Riptide, flying an American flag near the mast.
New Orleans was so badly hit that it received a large percentage of the grants. Xavier University, with damages in excess of $30 million, reopened just four months after the storm, with 75 percent of their students. They applied for and won a Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund grant of about $1.9 million to restore their buildings. So many public schools were destroyed that the city decided it was best to quickly approve a large number of charter schools, so we gave money to New Schools for New Orleans to help recruit and place teachers, recruit school board members, and provide free legal services. In September 2006, forty public schools opened, enrolling 40,000 students.
The Children’s Health Fund, led by Dr. Irwin Redlener, was providing mental health and primary health services to people in New Orleans and throughout the region through mobile health clinics. The fund made a grant to them, too. I saw one of the mobile units helping people who thought no one had noticed their children’s injuries.
Henry Juszkiewicz and the Gibson Guitar company launched Music Rising, led by Bob Ezrin and my friend, U2’s brilliant guitarist The Edge, to get instruments back into the hands of the city’s musicians. They made and sold 300 guitars out of wood collected after the storm. All told, they raised $7 million, including $500,000 from our fund. The money enabled them to replace the instruments lost by professional musicians, 2,700 in New Orleans alone, and to help schools and community centers throughout the Gulf. Among those receiving instruments were the veterans of the French Quarter’s famous Preservation Hall, who had played to natives and tourists for decades without making much money, just to keep Dixieland jazz alive. I first heard them when I was fifteen and was so glad we helped them get going again.
We stopped accepting funds in July 2007 and closed the fund on December 31. To support the grantees until their work was completed and continue to inspire future investment, two of our last grants went to Living Cities and the Foundation for the Mid South, two strong philanthropies we trusted to carry on the work.
Afterward, I kept up with the long-term recovery efforts through our partners in the Clinton Global Initiative who made their own commitments, including the previously mentioned AmeriCorps affiliate, City Year, which started a program for Louisiana based in New Orleans that’s still going strong.
The annual CGI meeting in 2009 featured two Katrina guests, a single working mother and one of her two children. Having lost their home in the storm, they had recently settled into a new one in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. It was built to better resist floods and hurricanes and was much more energy-efficient. The crowd gasped when the mother reported that she’d just received her electric bill for July, at the time the hottest July on record: $27! Americans still haven’t done enough to increase energy efficiency in buildings new and old. There are some really good models in New Orleans.
The federal government also invested a lot of money after some rigorous debate in Congress over “how much and what for.” One of the most ardent supporters of more funding and greater flexibility was the junior senator from New York. Working with Senator Mary Landrieu from Louisiana, Hillary reminded her colleagues that the Gulf Coast senators had been there for New York after the death and destruction of 9/11, and they had to be there for the Gulf Coast now. The Republican Majority Leader, Trent Lott, who had once warned that Hillary would come to the Senate unless “maybe lightning will strike and she won’t,” said that no senator outside the affected states had done more for the people of the Gulf Coast than Hillary had. She had even cast the deciding vote in the Senate on funding a rail line in Mississippi that had to be rebuilt.
Soon, we would need to recapture that spirit, to finish the recovery and strengthen the resilience of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and fight severe drought and wildfire problems in the West.
In 2015, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, who later served ably as coordinator for implementing President Biden’s big infrastructure bill, hosted a week-long conference, Katrina 10: Resilient New Orleans, to discuss how far the city had come in the decade after Katrina and what still needed to be done. The mayor also released a Resilience Strategy to keep the progress going. There was a lot of optimism tempered by understanding that the city wasn’t all the way back, that uncertainty remained about its vulnerability to future storms, and that not enough housing, especially for African Americans and other low-income residents, had been built to meet the resilience and energy efficiency standards enjoyed by the single working mother’s family I had welcomed to the CGI meeting several years earlier.
About the same time, the Kaiser Family Foundation did a survey asking the citizens of New Orleans what they thought about the progress made in the ten years since the storm. There was general agreement that the recovery had come a long way in restoring the economy, schools, public services, and unique culture of the city. They gave high marks to local government, said the federal government had been of real help after getting off to a shaky start, and felt the state hadn’t done enough. A big majority of people were still concerned about the crime rate, but thought the city was moving in the right direction. Most of them were also optimistic about the future, although African Americans and low-income residents were less positive about how far they had come and their future prospects, reflecting the persistence of racial disparities in opportunities that long predated Katrina. The conference, in a series of panels filled with knowledgeable people, made a serious effort to address those issues. President Obama, President George W. and Laura Bush, and I all visited locations during the week to see what had been achieved and to cheer them on. On the last day, I gave a talk in which I tried to sum up what most of us were thinking and feeling:
There’s a difference between being happy and being satisfied…. What your very best efforts did should make you burst with pride…but it should not stop you from trying to erase the last manifestations of the color line, of the economic differences, of the education differences, of the healthcare differences…. You’ve got a lot to celebrate tonight, but the celebration must be leavened by rededication. The people who died left behind memories and loved ones and legacies that deserve to be fully redeemed by erasing the lines that divide us. My take on this is: Have a good time, New Orleans—you earned it. Give yourself a pat on the back—you earned it. Laugh tonight and dance to the music—you earned it. Tomorrow wake up and say, “Look at what we did, I bet we can do the rest, too.”