Accepting Responsibility, With an Asterisk

Likewise, from the start of his appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee yesterday, Chertoff interspersed claims of responsibility with assignments of blame elsewhere.

He blamed the weather. "This was a storm of unprecedented magnitude," he said, rattling off statistics.

He blamed the department he inherited, which, "barely two years old, had a lot of work to do." He added: "Frankly, FEMA was strained in past emergencies."

Mostly, though, he blamed subordinates. "I was conscious of the fact that although I'm the secretary, I'm not a hurricane operator," Chertoff explained. "I do not have 30 years of experience managing hurricanes, and I do not see myself in a position to contradict or second-guess operational decisions."

Chertoff did blame himself for one thing: trusting then-FEMA director Mike "Brownie" Brown. "If I had known then what I know now about Mr. Brown's agenda, I would have done something differently," the secretary said. He blamed Brown for misleading him about help from the Pentagon, and for not getting buses to evacuate people.

"Thursday night, I asked myself, 'Are we dealing with a situation where it's not just the inherent overwhelming challenge, but that maybe, despite good intentions, Mr. Brown is really not up to this?' " Chertoff recalled, citing his own "nudging, prodding, poking and ultimately raising my voice" at underlings.

The secretary took a more benign view of his own actions, defending his decision to attend an avian flu conference in Atlanta in the middle of the hurricane crisis. And he defended even some obvious misstatements, such as Bush's assertion that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

"My understanding is he meant what I meant," Chertoff said, "which is that the perception was that, although it would not have been a surprise on Monday morning to learn about breaches of levees, based on what -- speaking for myself -- I knew Monday evening, thinking it was over, I was surprised on Tuesday morning."

The senators were not so quick to absolve Chertoff. Chairman Susan Collins (R-Maine) called him "curiously disengaged." The ranking Democrat, Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), scolded Chertoff for "your failure to take much more aggressive action."

The secretary urged the senators to look on the positive side of accountability. "I do think we have to acknowledge things that succeeded," he advised. "I'm going to take responsibility for what the department did, but I'm also going to take responsibility for identifying solutions for the problems."