Fema boss Michael Brown, in a starched white shirt, briefs President George Bush and other officials on Hurricane Katrina. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty
CVs always get a bit of a polish when you apply for a new job. That brief disastrous part-time role becomes valuable experience, points fall off the driving licence, and even the odd GCSE grade can get promoted.
But the rest of us aren't even touching America's disaster chief when it comes to chutzpah, writes David Fickling.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) director, Michael Brown, who was today taken off the job of overseeing the Hurricane Katrina relief effort amid criticism of his agency's laggardly response to the disaster, spent most of his working life as a lawyer.
So when it came to writing his official biography someone must have thought it would be a good idea to bung in something a bit more related to emergency management.
Fortunately there was his stint as "assistant city manager with emergency services oversight" in Edmond, Oklahoma, to fill the gap. The White House thought this credential good enough to list it when they announced his appointment to the job in 2001.
But when Time tracked down the background to his claims it emerged that he had in fact been assistant to the city manager, rather than assistant city manager. That's quite a difference: "The assistant is more like an intern," an Edmond official explained. "Department heads did not report to him."
Brown's former boss, Mike Dashner, gave a testimonial which would leave any victim of Hurricane Katrina feeling reassured. "He was my administrative assistant. He was a student at Central State University," he said. "Mike used to handle a lot of details. Every now and again I'd ask him to write me a speech. He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt."
Things reach Jeffrey Archer levels of fantasy when you turn to Brown's profile on FindLaw, an American lawyers' directory. The profile states he was an "outstanding political science professor, Central State University". But a university spokesperson said "he was only a student here".
So how did Brown manage to get his job? It can't have hurt that his former college chum Joe Allbaugh had previously been Fema director, nor that Allbaugh was a former Bush campaign manager.
Surely, though, such an official would have a cracking team behind him keeping the wheels of disaster management turning smoothly? Not according to the Washington Post, which found that five of the top eight officials at the agency were good ol' boys whose previous experience focused heavily on their connections with the 2000 Bush campaign and Republican politics.
But at least cleaning up after the biggest disaster in modern American history isn't a challenge on a par to the job that Brown was fired from before joining Fema – overseeing the selection of judges for horse shows.
