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The federal government is now the lead responder when a major natural disaster strikes and the president frequently visits the scene, performing the role of consoler in chief. Both of these developments are relatively recent: before the 1960s, disaster response was dominated by subnational governments and the Red Cross, while the federal role was discharged mostly by mid-level bureaucrats. This article argues that the Johnson presidency was a decisive turning point in terms of the first development and that Johnson also broke new ground by making a regular habit of visiting disaster scenes. However, it attributes the latter pattern more to LBJ's unique political approach than to external pressure, arguing that the expectation that presidents will provide emotional support to disaster victims has developed more recently.
Keywords: Great Society, disasters, Lyndon Johnson, Hurricane Betsy
Accused of inadequate presidential leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, George W. Bush was measured by some pundits against a standard that his fellow Texan Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) had purportedly set some four decades earlier, in response to the last big hurricane to have struck New Orleans-Hurricane Betsy (see Remnick 2005; Williams 2005; Alpert 2012). Bush had seemed initially disengaged, had been slow to visit the scene, and when he did so had merely circled overhead in Air Force One, rather than experiencing the suffering firsthand. Johnson, by contrast, had touched down at Moisant airport within hours of Betsy, met its victims, and personally directed the federal response. When he acknowledged the shortcomings of his response in his memoir, Decision Points, even Bush seemed to acknowledge that LBJ's activist approach had constituted the proper presidential approach to disaster (Bush 2010, 309).
This article considers a related but broader question, namely the extent to which Johnson's tenure altered the federal approach to natural disaster politics more generally, and in particular the presidential role. Before the Great Society, indeed long before the 1960s, it had already been established that the federal government had some role to play in responding to disaster, but it was normally of subsidiary importance: the principal responsibility usually lay with state and local governments and with the American Red Cross (Davies forthcoming). Meanwhile, presidents generally had little to contribute: dealing with disaster was a...