Why U.S. must examine virus failure

When in doubt, they say in government, consult. When in despair, shock or sorrow, commission a commission.

So it is in the United States, where blue-ribbon panels have investigated monumental governmental failures over the past 75 years. Their mandate was to examine a great national calamity — such as the contagion overwhelming America today.

The novel coronavirus pandemic is now the worst public health crisis in the country in a century, and today the U.S. is the epicentre of the pandemic. COVID -19 has already killed more Americans than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Like those other catastrophes, it raises questions. It demands an inquiry, eventually, of the scope and scale of its predecessors.

In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt formed a commission to investigate the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1963, Lyndon Johnson investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In 1968, LBJ also investigated the causes of crime and violence. In 2001, George W. Bush examined 9/11.

The mandates were large. Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11, almost exactly 60 years apart, were massive failures of national intelligence.

The attack on Pearl Harbor destroyed much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and thrust the country into the Second World War. The multiple attacks on Sept. 11 killed 2,977 people and pushed the U.S. into Afghanistan, its longest war. The assassination of JFK was a failure of security, and intelligence, too. The violent crime of 1968 stemmed in part from a failure of society to come to terms with poverty and race.

(Commissions have also looked into science, technology, education, women and government reorganization, among other issues).

America’s most prominent commissions, though, have examined its greatest disasters. And that’s why, when this is over, the United States needs a commission to investigate how it has responded to this biblical plague and why it was criminally unprepared.

Questions, questions, questions.

Why did the administration ignore warnings from China, in January, leading Donald Trump to call it “a hoax”? Is it true that China did not share information and the Obama administration was “negligent,” as Trump charges?

Why did Trump dismantle the pandemic office in the White House and underfund other health initiatives?

Why was there so little early testing, unlike in other countries? Why did the Centers for Disease Control spend weeks developing its own test, when there were others?

Why are there not enough respirators, masks and personal protective equipment, leaving heroic doctors and nurses on the front line vulnerable? As the contagion cuts a swath through the land, as hospitals are overwhelmed, the cries for basic equipment are heart-rending.

Why was co-operation between levels of government consistently erratic?

While much of the focus will be on the response of the White House and federal agencies, the investigations should not look at the failure of the administration alone. Congress could have done more than it did, and much of the responsibility lies with Senate Republicans. Their likely defence: When the virus broke in January, they were dealing with impeachment, brought by the Democrats.

But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was the one who called for a declaration of a national emergency in January, prodding the administration to act. Congress will have some answering to do, too. And it will be Congress that will have to create this commission. The president who denied the contagion on March 9 (“It will go away,” he said. “Just stay calm. It will go away.”) is unlikely to appoint a commission to investigate his own paralysis. And certainly not in an election year.

George W. Bush took responsibility for the mishandling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, from which his presidency never recovered. He struck an inquiry. Trump will not do that because he is about conspiracy, not contrition. The commission he established to investigate “voter fraud” in the 2016 presidential election was comic opera. Having found none, it was disbanded.

There will be no commission while this is unfolding. Sooner than later, though, there will be an accounting. Life always presents a bill; these days, so does death.

Andrew Cohen is a journalist, professor and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.