The first request from the White House for disaster assistance for Haiti came to Defense early on January 13, and I was told the president wanted a “highly visible, very fast response.” He said the deployment didn’t have to be perfect, “just get them there as soon as possible.” He also wanted to keep tabs on how well we were doing and so asked for daily morning and afternoon reports on our progress. Two U.S. Coast Guard cutters were the first U.S. assistance to get to Haiti on the thirteenth, and that evening two U.S. Air Force C-130 aircraft from the Special Operations Wing landed with emergency supplies, medical units, and communications gear. A team of thirty military engineers, operations planners, and communications specialists also arrived that first day. I had immediately directed several Navy ships to head for Haiti, including the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson. Additional Air Force personnel were deployed to reopen the international airport in Port-au-Prince, and I approved “prepare to deploy” orders for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division to Haiti, about 3,000 soldiers. There were sixty-six U.S. military personnel on the island at the time of the earthquake, and they reported that the port was unusable, there was no fresh water, medical care was urgently needed, and many mortuary officers would be needed to deal with fatalities. We began moving heaven and earth to get ships, aircraft, equipment, and people there as fast as possible. I told the commander of Southern Command, General Doug Fraser, “The president considers this our highest priority. Whatever you need, we will get it to you. Don’t hesitate to ask.”
All this wasn’t good enough. When we briefed the president in the Oval Office that night on our actions and plans, he, Donilon, and others were impatient. Mullen and I tried to explain that there was chaos on the island, roads were blocked, air traffic control at the international airport was down, and the port facilities were largely destroyed. Our first priority was to get the airport operating so it could handle a volume of air traffic far beyond its previous capacity. Donilon was especially aggressive in questioning our commitment to speed and complaining about how long we were taking. Then he went too far, questioning in front of the president and a roomful of people whether General Fraser was competent to lead this effort. I’ve rarely been angrier in the Oval Office than I was at that moment; nor was I ever closer to walking out of that historic room in the middle of a meeting. My initial instinct was to storm out, telling the president on the way that he didn’t need two secretaries of defense. It took every bit of my self-discipline to stay seated on the sofa.
By the fourteenth, the Air Force team had cleared the runway at the airport and begun setting up twenty-four-hour-a-day air traffic control. At dawn on January 15, five C-17 cargo aircraft with more communications and air traffic management equipment, as well as 115 Air Force personnel, landed at the international airport and assumed responsibility for restoring air traffic control and expanding the airfield’s capacity. From January 16 to 18, 330 aircraft landed at the airport, many times the field’s pre-earthquake volume. Half of the flights were civilian relief aircraft, and more than eighty were from other countries. (Our effort at the airport would later be characterized as the largest single-runway operation in history, with 4,000 takeoffs and landings—one every five minutes—in the first twelve days after the earthquake.) The Vinson arrived on the fifteenth, with 600,000 emergency food rations and nineteen helicopters. The same day the deputy commander of Southern Command, Lieutenant General Ken Keen, arrived on the island as head of a joint task force to coordinate the U.S. military effort. Over the weekend, several more large U.S. ships arrived with more helicopters and Marines. Within days of the earthquake, we had 17 ships, 48 helicopters, and 10,000 sailors and Marines on the island or off the coast. In Washington, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Dr. Rajiv Shah, was appointed overall U.S. coordinator of the relief effort. In this endeavor and in others, I always gave Shah high marks for competence and compassion. He was also easy to work with.
On the other hand, to my chagrin, the president dispatched the NSS chief of staff, Denis McDonough, to Haiti. He arrived on the fifteenth, accompanied by Navy Captain John Kirby, who was press spokesman for the Joint Staff. After the Iran-Contra debacle, I considered NSC involvement—or meddling—in operational matters anathema. I had nothing personal against McDonough, just that such staffers are almost always out of their depth, and the chain of command is blurred when you have someone from the White House in the field who claims to speak for the president. McDonough’s purported task was to coordinate communications, but his presence was seen as much more than that. Even Jim Jones, who probably had no say in the decision to send his own subordinate, seemed to recognize this was a bridge too far. He called me a day or two after McDonough’s arrival on the island and asked me only partly in jest, “Is our screwdriver too long?” I confided to my staff that I thought this was yet another example of a White House consumed by the crisis of the day and bent on micromanaging—still stuck in campaign mode a year into the presidency.
Our military efforts to assist Haiti were complicated by history and the situation on the island. There was deep suspicion of us in Haiti, for good reason. In 1915, amid political chaos and six Haitian presidents in four years, not to mention Imperial Germany’s domination of the island’s international commerce, President Woodrow Wilson sent in 330 Marines to safeguard U.S. interests. The United States, for all intents and purposes, ran Haiti until the Marines departed in 1934. In September 1994, President Clinton sent 20,000 troops to Haiti to oust a military junta and restore the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to office. Just prior to the arrival of the troops, Jimmy Carter arranged a deal under which the junta gave up power and its leader left the country. Shortly thereafter U.S. troops escorted Aristide into the capital to reclaim his presidency. The U.S. forces left some six months later. And then in 2004, President George W. Bush sent in 1,000 Marines after the ouster of Aristide (amid allegations that the United States had orchestrated or at least abetted his removal), a force quickly augmented with troops from France, Chile, and Canada.
I had this history in mind as we quickly assembled a huge military force to render assistance. Others remembered the history as well. About the same time the Vinson arrived offshore, the French “minister of state for cooperation” publicly accused the United States of again “occupying” Haiti, citing our takeover of air traffic control; both he and the Brazilian foreign minister complained about our giving preferential treatment to U.S. aid flights. There was other international political pushing and shoving over our growing military presence on the island and our control of the airport, and other allusions to our past history in Haiti, but my real concern was the potentially negative impact on Haitians of U.S. Marines and soldiers patrolling the streets and performing security duties. I thought our relief effort gave us the opportunity to improve the long-tarnished image of the U.S. military in Haiti, and I didn’t want to blow the chance by taking on missions that might involve the use of force against Haitians.