Washington – President Bush said Tuesday that he bore responsibility for any failures of the federal government in its response to Hurricane Katrina and suggested that he was unsure whether the country was ready for another catastrophic storm or terrorist attack.
“Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government, and to the extent that the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility,” Bush said. “I want to know what went right and what went wrong.”
Asked if the country should be concerned about the government’s ability to respond to trouble, Bush said: “I want to know how to better cooperate with state and local government, to be able to answer that very question that you asked. Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack or another severe storm? And that’s a very important question.”
Bush has resisted publicly acknowledging mistakes or shortcomings in the past. His taking of responsibility, however conditional, was evidence of the political fallout from the government’s handling of the storm.
The White House announced that Bush would address the nation from Louisiana on Thursday night, during the president’s fourth trip to the region since the hurricane and his first major speech on the disaster.
On Friday, which he has designated a national day of prayer and remembrance, he is planning to speak at the Washington National Cathedral. T.D. Jakes, a conservative African-American television evangelist, is scheduled to deliver the sermon with some evacuees from New Orleans in attendance.
Even as Bush traveled to New York on Tuesday afternoon to begin a round of meetings with other world leaders gathering at the United Nations, White House officials were weighing policy proposals and working on drafts of the speech that Bush will give Thursday night.
Administration officials said Bush was likely to commit to rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, with a particular focus on housing.
The storm has so commanded the attention of the White House and of Washington that Bush’s remarks on the hurricane overshadowed his news conference with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, which on a normal day would have been a major event about a war that has come to define his presidency.
A Republican ally of Bush who has been briefed on the administration’s thinking said the White House’s hope for the rest of this year was to deal with the hurricane and to win confirmation for Judge John Roberts as chief justice and for a second nominee, not yet selected, to the Supreme Court.
Next year, the ally said, Bush will return to such issues as overhauling the tax code and immigration laws.
After the outcry over scenes of poor, black victims of the hurricane suffering and dying, White House officials continued to try to shore up support on Tuesday among the president’s conservative African- American supporters, who have not all rallied to Bush’s side.
The White House has invited black preachers and leaders of charitable organizations to meet with the president Friday.
In saying he took responsibility for any failures of the federal response to the storm, Bush stopped short of acknowledging that he or anyone else had made mistakes.
He has in the past resisted efforts to draw him out about errors in judgment and regrets. In April 2004, he was asked what his biggest mistake had been, and he responded that he was sure he had made some but that he was unable, on the spot, to say what they were.
Asked again about mistakes during one of his debates last year with Sen. John Kerry, Bush admitted to having made some bad personnel choices, though he avoided being specific. In his remarks Tuesday, Bush distinguished between criticizing the way the government responded and the way individuals responded to the hurricane.
Meanwhile, an investigation by Knight Ridder Newspapers showed that even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials.
Documents state that Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown, now resigned, had only limited authority to do so until about 36 hours after the storm hit, when Chertoff made him “principal federal official” in charge of the storm.
It was Chertoff, not Brown, who was in charge of managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster, according to the National Response Plan, the government’s blueprint for how agencies will handle major disasters or terrorist incidents.
But according to a memo, Chertoff didn’t shift that power to Brown until late afternoon or evening on Aug. 30, about 36 hours after Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi.
Knight Ridder Newspapers contributed to this report.