Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, the first woman to be elected governor of Louisiana, has died at the age of 76. Blanco, a Democrat, served as Louisiana’s 54th Governor from January 2004 to January 2008. She died around 2:54 CT on Sunday, August 18, 2018.
Governor Blanco will forever be interwoven with the historic winds of Katrina. Both good and bad and both leaving an indelible mark on Louisiana.
With the weight of so many lives hanging on her, Governor Blanco seemed to age almost overnight. A criticism she responded to on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
“Well, there always is that, ‘oh well she’s a woman, it’s more than she can handle,’ you know that kind of business? But I would tell you, I think I was the clear headed one and people from outside of Louisiana are the ones who noted it the most,” Blanco told WAFB in 2015.
In the first hours after Katrina hit and the levees broke, and just as stories about looters in New Orleans threatening people and rescue efforts started to surface, Governor Blanco shocked even those closest to her when she deployed her national guard and gave this warning:
“These troops are fresh back from Iraq. They are well-trained, experienced, battle-tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets... They have M-16′s, and they’re locked and loaded. When hoodlums victimize and inflict suffering on people at their wit’s end, they’re taking away our limited resources, or whatever resources we have, to save babies, or save children and to save good people. I have one message for these hoodlums. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will,” Blanco said at a press conference during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Looking back on Katrina, Governor Blanco shared, having lost a child of her own, there was one encounter with a man that stuck with her as she walked through the disastrous shelter of last resort in the (then) Louisiana Superdome.
“He was just holding his baby up and he was saying, ‘Governor my baby hasn’t bathed in three days, Governor I need to have food for my baby.’ And I said, ‘we’re going to get you to safety, we’re going to get you out of here and we’re going to bring in supplies in the meantime.’ But, it was just heartbreaking.”
When asked if she ever lost her cool behind the scenes in the chaotic aftermath of the hurricane, Blanco told WAFB’s Greg Meriwether, “Did I lose my cool on the air? No, not really. I tried not to do that at any point in time because, so many people were we’re losing their cool, I thought somebody better look like a sane person in Louisiana or nobody’s going to want to help us.”
Both the state and federal response to the historic storm seemed bumbled at times. Something President Bush and Governor Blanco would eventually apologize for. In the midst of the storm Blanco shared with us that privately she had a “come to Jesus moment” with her staff:
“I said, we are wasting our energy. Those who are attacking us are sitting in a nice air-conditioning, comfortable chairs planning public relations initiatives to go after us. We on the other hand do not have the luxury of that. We are fighting to save lives. So, I want you to stop. I want you to stop now and I want you to use your energy to do what our main mission is. And they looked at me and they were pretty upset with me telling them they couldn’t fight the White House and the national media outlets that were challenging us and they said, ‘they are going to destroy you governor’ and I said the truth will prevail.”
In 2011, Governor Blanco, now private citizen Blanco, revealed she had been diagnosed with a rare eye cancer. Her prognosis then was a good one with the caveat the rare cancer could show up again.
And it did, right in the middle of enjoying what she called ‘A life rich with a mega-sized family’ complete with 13 grandchildren.
The aggressive cancer returned to her liver. Before her death, Governor Blanco wrote a letter to Louisiana asking for prayers.
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