HIGH WATER.

On September 10, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson had lunch in the Roosevelt Room--the "Fish Room," as F.D.R. called it--with several aides and half a dozen ambassadors of modest-sized countries. Then he returned to the Oval Office for a routine round of meetings and telephone calls--a fairly ordinary, crowded day amid the growing crisis of the war in Vietnam. At 2:36 p.m., according to copies of Johnson's daily diaries, the President took a call from Senator Russell Long, of Louisiana. The day before, Hurricane Betsy had made landfall on the Gulf Coast. Storm gusts were up to a hundred and sixty miles an hour, and in New Orleans levees had been breached, causing much of the city to flood overnight, especially the neighborhoods of Bywater, Pontchartrain Park, and the largely black and impoverished Ninth Ward. The Army Corps of Engineers later reported as many as eighty-one deaths, a quarter-million people evacuated, and water levels of up to nine feet. Hurricane Betsy was the worst disaster to strike New Orleans since the cholera epidemic of 1849 and the yellow-fever epidemic of 1905.

Russell Long, the son of Huey Long and an old friend of Johnson's in the Senate, had a simple goal. He wanted to convince the President of the urgency of the crisis and have him come immediately to Louisiana. Their conversation is rich with emotional and political manipulation. Long made it clear to Johnson that to delay, or to send a subordinate, could easily have consequences in the 1968 election:

Senator Long: Mr. President, aside from the Great Lakes, the biggest lake in America is Lake Pontchartrain. It is now drained dry. That Hurricane Betsy picked the lake up and put it inside New Orleans and Jefferson Parish, the Third [Congressional] District. . . . If I do say it, our people are just like . . . It's like my home--The whole damn home's been destroyed, but that's all right. My wife and kids are still alive, so it's O.K. Mr. President, we have really had it down there, and we need your help., President Johnson: All right. You got it., Long: Well, now, if I do say it . . . we've lost only one life so far. Why we haven't lost more I can't say. . . . For example, that damn big four-hundred-year-old tree fell on top of my house. My wife and kids were, thank God, in the right room. So we're still alive. I don't need no federal aid. But, Mr. President, my people--Oh, they're in tough shape. . . . If I do say it, you could elect Hale Boggs and every guy you'd want to elect in the path of this hurricane just by handling yourself right., Now, if you want to go to Louisiana right now-- You lost that state last year. You could pick it up just like looking at it right now by going down there as the President just to see what happened. . . . Just go, and say, "My God, this is horrible! . . . These federally constructed levees that Hale Boggs and Russell Long built is the only thing that saved five thousand lives." See now, if you want to do that you can do it right now. Just pick one state up like looking at it--you lost it last time. If you'd do that you'd sack them up. [Louisiana congressman] Ed Willis is sitting on this telephone and he knows like I do that all you've got to do is just make a generous gesture, he'd get reelected, a guy that's for you., Johnson: Russell, I sure want to. I've got a hell of a two days that I've got scheduled. Let me look and see what I can back out of and get into and so on and so forth and let me give you a ring back. If I can't go, I'll put the best man I got there., Long: So now listen, we are not the least bit interested in your best man. . . . I'm just a Johnson man. Let's--, Johnson: I know that. I know that., Long: . . . Just make it a stopover. . . . You go to Louisiana right now, land at Moisant Airport. [Imagining a news story] "The President was very much upset about the horrible destruction and damage done to this city of New Orleans, lovely town. The town that everybody loves." If you go there right now, Mr. President, they couldn't beat you if Eisenhower ran., Johnson: Um-hmm. Let me think about it and call you back.

Johnson hung up. He met with Bill Moyers, Larry O'Brien, J. Edgar Hoover, and others. He accepted an award from the leaders of the World Convention of Churches of Christ. Then, at 5:03 p.m., he boarded a helicopter on the South Lawn, and it ferried him to Andrews Air Force Base. From there the President--along with Russell Long and Representative Hale Boggs, the key congressional powers in Louisiana, and officials from the Red Cross and the Army Corps of Engineers--flew to New Orleans on Air Force One. "The President spent a good deal of the time talking w/ Senator Long and Cong. Hale Boggs during the flight," the diary says. "Also worked in his bedroom w/ [his assistants] on mail that had been taken on the flight. Afterwards, the President napped for about 30 minutes before arrival in New Orleans."

Even at the airport, Johnson began to get a sense of the damage wrought by Betsy. "Parts of the roofing of the terminal were torn away and several of the large windows were broken," the diary reads. "The members of the Presidential party had seen from the air a preview of the city--water over 3/4 of the city up to the eaves of the homes, etc." At the urging of the mayor of New Orleans--a diminutive conservative Democrat named Victor Hugo Schiro, whom Johnson referred to as "Little Mayor"--the President decided to tour the flooded areas. His motorcade stopped on a bridge spanning the Industrial Canal, in the eastern part of the city, and from there the Presidential party saw whole neighborhoods engulfed by floods. They could see, according to the diary, that "people were walking along the bridge where they had disembarked from the boats that had brought them to dry land. Many of them were carrying the barest of their possessions and many of them had been sitting on top of their houses waiting for rescue squads to retrieve the families and carry them to dry land." Johnson talked with a seventy-four-year-old black man named William Marshall and asked about what had happened and how he was getting along. As the conversation ended, Marshall said, "God bless you, Mr. President. God ever bless you."

In the Ninth Ward, Johnson visited the George ...