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Article Excerpt
"There is no longer such a thing as strategy; only crisis management," U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sighed after the experience of the Cuban missile crisis. That surely was an exaggeration, but it does drive home the idea that the ability to respond quickly, sensibly, and responsibly to a wide range of major acute emergencies is now a "must have" for government leaders. Responding to emergencies involves the need to make far-reaching decisions quickly in a context of threat and uncertainty. It also involves coping with the collective stress that emergencies generate (Rosenthal, Charles, and 't Hart 1989). Yet crises are not necessarily just "bad news" for incumbent governments: behind the stress and hardship that major emergencies cause looms an often intricate mix of strategic threats, as well as opportunities, that well-prepared and agile leaders are able to discern and exploit. To be able to tackle crises immediately, effectively, and strategically, government leaders need to perform at least three tasks (Boin, t' Hart, and Sundelius 2005):
1. Sense making: Getting a clear and accurate picture of the events, their impact, and significance
2. Decision making/coordinating: Mobilizing, facilitating and, if need be, adjusting the government's preexisting emergency response and recovery system
3. Meaning making: Taming collective stress by authoritatively explaining the crisis, its implications, and the government's responses to the community.
The three tasks are clearly interrelated. Without adequate high-speed sense making, the thrust of the response operation may be tardy, misguided, or disorganized. Furthermore, when the response operation is going badly, leaders lose the credibility they need to be effective at meaning making.
During George W. Bush's two terms as president, the United States was hit suddenly by two national catastrophes: the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the levee breaches in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. They serve here as illustrative, yet "most different" cases, as the timing, perceived adequacy, and popular support for the Bush administration's crisis response varied greatly across these two episodes. In the immediate aftermath of the two catastrophes, the White House's 9/11 response was widely praised, whereas its Katrina response was severely criticized. Bush's personal approval ratings shot up in the aftermath of the 9/11 crisis, whereas after Katrina, they declined markedly, particularly among voter groups such as African Americans and Hispanics. Bush's first address to Congress after 9/11, coming at the end of moving, dignified, and effective local emergency response operations, secured him strong bipartisan support. There was little criticism from the media--left, right or center (see, e.g., Woodward 2008, 429). In contrast, during and after Katrina, Bush bore the brunt of an increasingly harsh public condemnation of the disaster response in New Orleans, characterized by a bipartisan congressional committee labeling the entire Katrina tragedy as "a failure of initiative" (referring to the pre-crisis preparedness and mitigation policies of federal, state, and local governments), but also singling out the (lack of) leadership and responsibility in the emergency response decisions and actions (Select Bipartisan Committee 2005; Sylves 2006).
The detailed narratives of the 9/11 Commission report (2004, 35-42, 325-38), subsequent memoirs, and journalistic accounts (see, e.g., Woodward 2002, 1-109) demonstrate that after President Bush's initial bewilderment upon learning the news (caught on camera in the Florida classroom), he grasped the enormity of what was happening (sense making), was proactive and involved with the government's response process (decision making/coordination), and was extraordinarily successful in rallying domestic and international support for his administration's "framing" of the crisis and the government's preferred response to it (meaning making). Hargrove (1998) claims that presidential leadership is largely about "teaching reality," and in the weeks following 9/11, the president's espoused version of reality was widely accepted and disseminated throughout the United States and, indeed, the world (Landy 2004, 50-53). President Bush's performance projected "dignified authenticity" (Gregg 2004, 93-103) and launched him as a potentially "heroic" (Roper 2004) and even, albeit temporarily, "charismatic" (Bligh, Kohles, and Meindl 2004) leader. In contrast, during the Katrina crisis, Bush struggled, and was publicly criticized for struggling, quite badly at all three tasks (Liu 2006; Preston 2008). While it is admittedly difficult to objectively gauge "performance" and "success," it is clear that the general public and the main monitors of government performance were essentially satisfied during the acute phase of the 9/11 crisis, but loathed Bush's leadership during the acute phase of Katrina.
This article asks, why? Why did a president who displayed such effective crisis leadership in his first major crisis fail to replicate it four years later? There are obvious answers to this question. A pivotal one is that 9/11 and Katrina were simply different types of crises. Proponents of this answer will point to differences in the kinds of pre-crisis warnings, crisis triggers, crisis impacts, response and recovery challenges, and intergovernmental balance of responsibilities. Some will say that Ray Nagin was no Rudy Giuliani, and that the crisis management capacity and political clout of Louisiana was much less than that of New York. All that is true. But it begs the fact that both were quickly felt to be not ordinary emergencies but national catastrophes, and that, given that definition of the situation, the entire country was looking to the White House for leadership in both instances--not to micromanage the on-the-ground responses, but to effectively assist local and state authorities and to demonstrate that the government cared, was in control, and was providing the people with a plausible pathway out of the misery of the moment. The country clearly felt it had received such leadership immediately following September 11, 2001, but equally clearly rejected Bush et al.'s response to the emergency along the Gulf Coast in August and September 2005.
We argue that the answer to Bush's differential effectiveness as crisis leader must not be sought just in his own personal performance, but perhaps even more so in the performance of the configuration of advice he relied on. We argue that what we call a "robust advisory configuration," combined with early, intense, and proactive presidential involvement in the crisis management process, made Bush shine in September 2001; the lack of both helped turn the response to Katrina into the "bureaucratic nightmare" (Bier 2006) it became.
Taking the dependent variable to be the perceived quality and adequacy of President Bush's crisis leadership performance in the eyes of relevant stakeholders (including the public and policy actors), we compare and contrast the makeup and modus operandi of the advisory configurations surrounding Bush during both crises. Although the events were of different natures (terrorism versus natural disaster), we consider the cases comparable to the extent that both presented the same president with similar sets of daunting challenges common to most major crisis events. Our argument unfolds as follows:
First, we construct a conceptual framework for the analysis based on our reading of the literature on advice to government leaders in conjunction with the crisis management literature. Then we apply the framework to examine Bush et al.'s sense making, decision making/coordination, and meaning making in both crises. We conclude by identifying key challenges of building crisis management capacity around heads of government such as the U.S. president.
Advisory Configurations and Crisis Leadership Performance
Leaders have always needed assistance, and consequently there is a very old and now sizable literature on advice giving and advisory systems for heads of government, going back to Machiavelli (Goldhamer 1978). Traditionally, a lot of attention was focused on the delicate art of advice giving: how to "speak truth to power," when doing so may be unwelcome and therefore risky for the advisor (cf. Meltsner 1988). More recently, advice has been seen increasingly in terms of the institutional capacity of governments: What sources and channels of information and expertise are at their disposal?
In parliamentary systems, much of the relevant research falls under the rubric of (prime) ministerial advisors and offices, with a key issue being the balance between personal staff, the government bureaucracy, and external streams of policy advice to ministers (Bakvis 1995; Campbell and Wyszomirski 1991; Tiernan 2007). Or it ties in with the broader issue of the balance of power in parliamentary systems--for example, raising the much-debated specter of "presidentialization" of the prime ministership, among others, by the expansion of advisory capacity in prime ministers' administrations (Poguntke and Webb 2005).
In presidential systems, but also particularly in the United States, the literature focuses on two areas: the design and management of advisory systems so as to serve the needs and style of their chief clients, as well as to enhance the quality of presidential decision making (George 1980; George and Stern 2002; Hess and Pfiffner 2002; Hult and Walcott 2004; Johnson 1974; Mitchell 2005; Patterson 2000; Walcott and Hult 1995, 2005); and leaders' actual performance in cases where presidential decision making really matters, particularly foreign and security policy (Burke and Greenstein 1989; Haney 1997; Hoyt and Garrison 1997; Janis 1982; Kowert 2002; Pfiffner 2005; Preston 2001; Yetiv 2003), down to the level of highlighting the nature and predicaments of particular advisory roles in the White House makeup, such as chief of staff (Sullivan 2004; Walcott, Warshaw, and Wayne 2001) or national security advisor (Burke 2005). Both strands of the literature apply to the Bush administration (Burke 2004; Haney 2005; Kettl 2003; Kumar 2003; Rudalevige 2005; Vaughn and Villalobos 2006).
Toward a Conceptual Framework
Two lacunae exist in this literature that are relevant to our research question. First, when gauging the capacity and effectiveness of advisory arrangements surrounding heads of government, the literature rarely acknowledges the continual flux of...
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