By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 19, 2006; A03
NEW ORLEANS, May 18 -- He gets asked at campaign stops, in candidate forums and televised debates.
What about the book, Mayor?
"Bogus" he replies, or "total distortions." And sometimes he gets mad.
Rarely has a work of history figured so prominently in a mayoral election here or anywhere else. "The Great Deluge," by Tulane University historian Douglas Brinkley, covers a week of the Hurricane Katrina debacle and depicts New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin as too vain, too stunned and too paranoid to have been effective in the city's crisis.
Relying in part on accounts from Nagin's political rivals, the book has been characterized by his supporters as a campaign attack timed to sink his bid for reelection on Saturday. "The Great Deluge" began appearing in bookstores this month.
Brinkley, the author of several best-selling history books, says the book was meant to coincide not with the election but with the June 1 onset of hurricane season.
Brinkley said that nobody was misquoted and that Nagin should blame himself that the book has become such a prominent part of the campaign.
"Nagin denounced the book without reading it," Brinkley said Thursday. "If he had ignored it, I don't think it would have become an issue. People love the food fight -- it was suddenly the Tulane professor from Uptown versus the mayor. It got framed as a square off.
"It only made my sales jack up," Brinkley said. "My publisher is very happy with Mr. Nagin."
On Saturday, voters here will elect Nagin or Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu in a race that many analysts say is too difficult to call because of the displacement of voters. One poll does show Landrieu with a substantial lead.
Many voters say there appear to be few substantial differences in the approaches the two men have outlined for recovery. Both candidates have rejected calls for abandoning some neighborhoods that are considered extremely vulnerable to another inundation. Both have acknowledged that the city's rebuilding will depend in part on federal aid.
The leadership abilities of the candidates have become a central issue instead, and that is one reason Brinkley's account of Nagin has proved to be a sensitive subject.
It is not the first time that Brinkley has found himself -- and one of his books -- in the middle of an election debate. His 2004 book on John F. Kerry's experience in Vietnam, "Tour of Duty," provoked questions about the Democratic senator's time in the war. It was criticized by Republicans for overstating Kerry's record and prompted a rebuttal book, "Unfit for Command."
Brinkley's latest work on Katrina is sweeping and only sparsely mentions Nagin. But when it does, it is often in disparaging terms. When Nagin showers too long aboard Air Force One, Brinkley likens him to a "primping teenager." When Nagin was considering a mandatory evacuation, Brinkley writes that he was "hesitating like a school boy afraid to receive his report card."
Even Nagin's angry radio appearance during the crisis, in which he advised the federal government to "get off your [behinds] and do something" -- remarks that many here found inspiring, given the gravity of the situation -- is described as pure theater because Nagin knew federal troops were on the way.
"It was the perfect, phony, cause-and-effect gambit," Brinkley wrote.
The book says Nagin broke down and cried after the radio interview and that his communications director, Sally Forman, was worried.
"I tried to get him to calm down," she is quoted as saying. "I kept saying, 'It's OK, It's OK.' "
Forman quit the administration earlier this year when her husband, Ron Forman, entered the mayoral race. He finished third in the primary.
Landrieu also figures in the bleak portrait of Nagin. In the book, Landrieu finds Nagin holed at the downtown Hyatt.
"All Nagin would say, staring straight ahead, as if in a trance, was 'We're looking for a command and control structure,' " Brinkley wrote.
Nagin questioned Brinkley's motives.
"I could see the venom coming out of him," Nagin told the New Orleans Times-Picayune, describing Brinkley's appearance on a local television show.
Brinkley defended using some of Nagin's political rivals as sources, saying that they were present for many of the events he was reporting on. He also conducted a 47-minute interview with Nagin as the book was being completed.
Acknowledging that the book had become "kind of a carnival side attraction" to the campaign, Brinkley said he did not know what effect it will have on the election. The book came up in a nationally televised debate between Landrieu and Nagin this week on MSNBC, and is on the cover of the Gambit Weekly newspaper here.
At one bookstore near the university, booksellers said it is a hot item not only of commerce but of conversation, as well.
"My sense is that people who would have been voting for Nagin are reading it and they're on the fence now," said Denise Bonis at Octavia Books, who had read an excerpt in Vanity Fair. "I thought I had a pretty good idea of what happened that week. I was a little surprised."