Before, after, during: Michael Chertoff's post-Katrina arguments.

• Author: Srader, Doyle
• Position: Report

BEFORE, AFTER, DURING: MICHAEL CHERTOFF'S POST-KATRINA ARGUMENTS

On August 23, 2005, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters that if avian influenza broke out in the United States, responsibility would be distributed between a number of agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), but that "The Department of Homeland Security has the responsibility for managing an incident" (as cited in Nesmith & McKenna, 2005b, para. 32). When told that HHS made a similar claim to primary decision making authority, he replied, "We are reviewing the plan now" (para. 33). His spokesperson, Russ Knocke, added, "At the management level, we would have the ball" (para. 34). Chertoff's decision was a logical outgrowth of the "shift in paradigm" represented by adoption of an all-hazards approach to emergency response: "At both federal and state levels of government, it [all-hazard mitigation] cuts across long-established boundaries of jurisdictional authority, forcing ... a significant increase in interagency cooperation" (Erickson, 2006, p. 232).

If done well, this had the potential to streamline operations and close gaps in expertise at critical moments; but the promise of a bold stride toward organizational elegance was cold comfort to professionals who found themselves unexpectedly attached to a new boss not mistakable for the old boss: "Public health officials expressed dismay" (Nesmith & McKenna, 2005a, para. 2). Dr. Georges Benjamin, director of the American Public Health Association, fired back,

They don't have the infrastructure at Homeland Security, or the technical expertise, to handle [a pandemic] ... HHS and CDC need to be manning[sic] that process.... To the extent it is coordinated with other federal agencies, Homeland Security, I am sure, will be in charge of interagency coordination* But at the end of the day, the command decisions for this ought to be made by public health practitioners. (as cited in Nesmith & McKenna, 2005a, para. 3, 11)

Dr. Arthur Kellerman, chief of emergency medicine at Emory University, concurred:

It's hard to imagine that Homeland Security, which has not worked on epidemics, could engage with an issue of this level of complexity, coming up to speed almost from scratch.... Pandemic flu is a naturally occurring health threat of the first order, and the people who need to be at the center of that should be health care professionals first and foremost. (as cited in Nesmith & McKenna, 2005a, para. 13-14)

Had Chertoff's assertion of authority come in the middle of an ordinary week, it might have passed as a run-of-the-mill Washington, DC turf fight. However, just forty-eight hours later, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency at the approach of what David Liebersbach, immediate past president of the National Emergency Management association, would call "the 9/11 of natural disasters" (as cited in Judd & Borden, 2005, p. 1A): Hurricane Katrina. Over the next several weeks, the lines of command and models of decision-making in the United States federal government's public health agencies would seize headlines and saturate political commentary at all points on the ideological spectrum.

As the levees crumbled and New Orleans flooded, Chertoff began a slowly mounting parade of press availabilities, trying to reassure television audiences that Washington was not ignoring the plight of stranded New Orleans residents. Throughout those appearances, Chertoff relied upon an argumentative strategy that might have been successful in the days before he claimed ownership over the avian flu response, but now drove him into direct conflict with the professionally-sanctioned reasoning patterns of the public health officials over whom he asserted authority. The argument field mismatch was not obvious at the outset, but under pressure to defend himself from the agency's history-making set of missteps, Chertoff very sharply, if unintentionally, marked the gap between his argumentative orientation and the field assumptions peculiar to epidemiology.

ARGUMENTATION AND PUBLIC HEALTH CRISES

Stephen Toulmin (1958) began by sketching local neighborhoods of argument, which he labeled "fields," to escape from the problem of explaining the difference in evaluative criteria applied to different argumentative encounters. In the beginning, the first among equals in Toulmin's exploration of argument fields was the field of law. To simplify matters, he invited his readers to "forget about psychology, sociology, technology and mathematics ... and take as our model the discipline of jurisprudence. Logic (we may say) is generalised jurisprudence" (p. 7). Later, his allegiance shifted from law to medicine, as he moved from modeling all of argument to describing a framework of moral reasoning that did not require application of universal principles, eventually settling on casuistry (Jonsen & Toulmin, 1990; Toulmin, 1981). Attending to the construction of ethics to explore both moral reasoning and the structure of argumentative logic, Toulmin singled out medicine as the archetype of ethical reasoning that other fields had followed: "Once again, in other words, it was medicine-as the first profession to which philosophers paid close attention during the new phase of 'applied ethics' that opened during the 1960s--that set the example which was required in order to revive some important, and neglected, lines of argument within moral philosophy itself" (Toulmin, 1982, p. 746). Subsequent argumentation scholarship, drawing ties between Toulmin's nostalgia for casuistry and more recently described dialogic elements, announced the shift in bolder terms: bioethics was "positioned as a paradigmatic case of practical moral reasoning" because "the cumulative wisdom of medical practice shares with common law 'long and rich histories,' and is a logical extension of Toulmin's earlier attention to jurisprudential reasoning" (Bracci, 2002, pp. 151, 155).

This rearrangement of the outer contours of ideal argumentation is symptomatic of a maddening instability in the concept of argument fields. In the early 1980s, the entire 1981 Alta conference and the Spring 1982 issue of this journal, as well as assorted other writings (Rowland, 1982; Wenzel, 1982; Willard, 1982; Zarefsky, 1982; Ziegelmueller & Rhodes, 1981) grappled with the frustrating slippages in Toulmin's concept, but reached little that could be called consensus. While scholars of argument often encounter disjunctures in reasoning that are recognizable as boundaries between fields, it remains beyond our grasp to map any field entirely; our geography of argument remains as sketchy as fifteenth century maps of the world which simply left out sizable swaths of unexplored territory. It may be more helpful to speak instead of argumentative plates, contiguous zones of reasoning that end in unstable points of abrasion, driven, if slowly, by subterranean forces of change that create powerful and at times disastrous eruptions when they give way under pressure.

The question, then, of who held decisionmaking authority in efforts to prepare for pandemic outbreaks of disease was fraught with argumentative pitfalls not widely recognized:

An emerging infectious disease may seem on the surface very different from cases that involve controversial decisions about potential health hazards and at least two parties with opposing interests (usually the public vs. industry or government). However there are political and ideological aspects to all health interventions; at issue are questions such as who has the power to define terms, make decisions, dictate actions and declare one issue more important than [an]other. (Holmes, 2008, p. 355)

Perhaps it is no accident that the name of a mode of public argument-crisis argumentemployed more and more frequently, and with higher stakes, in a world buffeted by forces ranging from climate change to technological revolution, has etymological roots both in medicine and the forensic genre of rhetoric: "The word crisis comes from the Greek krisis, which was used as a medical term by Hippocrates to describe the turning point in a disease, and from krinein, meaning to judge or decide" (Seeger, Sellnow, & Ulmer, 2003, p. 7). Recognizing a crisis, analyzing it, selecting a response and executing it are all profoundly challenging tasks that place formidable demands on the actors' communicative competence. Pauchant and Mitroff's (1992) seminal work on crisis management distinguishes a crisis from an incident, conflict or accident by reserving the former term for affairs that recode fundamental building blocks of meaning: for them, a crisis "physically affects a system as a whole and threatens its basic assumptions, its subjective sense of self, its existential core" (p. 12). Seeger, Sellnow, and Ulmer (2003) elaborate:

Communication relates to all aspects of organizational crisis, including incubation in precrisis, manifestation in crisis, and postmortem and ultimate recovery during postcrisis. From this perspective, communication is epistemic, allowing organizational participants to come to know and understand various aspects of the system and its environment, including the existing dynamic relationships and their risks. (p. 19)

In particular, a number of argument scholars have addressed the ways a shared understanding of, and response to, a crisis are shaped through argumentative processes (e.g., Grabill & Simmons, 1998; O'Leary, 1997; Ploeger, 2002), and research framing Hurricane Katrina as a case study of crisis communication has reached print (Cole & Fellows, 2008; Venette, 2008), but those researchers' paths have not crossed, and Chertoff's media tour addressing charges of failure has not been unpacked as an argumentative artifact.

An essential and thoroughly discussed feature of crisis communication is the element of time, including both advance warning...