U.S. Army Lieutenant General Russel Honore talks on a mobile phone at a check point in Cameron Prairie on Sept. 25, 2005, after Hurricane Rita hit coastal communities in Texas and Louisiana.Reuters Photographer/Reuters
Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant-General Russel Honoré is a man known for bootstrapping himself up from humble beginnings into the highest echelons of the world’s most powerful fighting force while overcoming the racial chasms that divided his country.
Now the 73-year-old with a salty vocabulary is back, entrusted with figuring out how to better safeguard a superpower’s seat of democracy. As he goes about trying to improve security inside Washington after the Jan. 6 riot, he has not been mincing words.
“It’s like the Capitol Police was doing security by Zoom,” he said in a televised interview days before his appointment as leader of a review of Capitol security. He added that “I’ve just never seen so much incompetence – so they’re either that stupid, or ignorant or complicit. I think they were complicit.”
Heralded in the headlines 15 years ago as The Ragin’ Cajun, the retired general is best known for helping the U.S. government correct course from its botched initial response to Hurricane Katrina. He has a reputation for setting things right, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called upon him to head Congress’s investigation into the riot.
On Jan. 6, five people died when an angry mob overran the Capitol. Lawmakers were temporarily forced to flee the vote to ratify Joe Biden’s victory in last year’s U.S. presidential election. The insurrectionists, prodded by then-president Donald Trump’s tweets alleging electoral fraud, telegraphed their plans. Yet they encountered faint resistance as they stormed the building.
U.S. federal authorities have criminally charged more than 100 people, but questions continue about why security was bungled so badly. “To protect our democracy, we must now subject the security of the U.S. Capitol Complex to rigorous scrutiny,” Ms. Pelosi said on Jan. 15. “To that end, I have asked Lt.-Gen. Russel Honoré … to lead an immediate review of the Capitol’s security infrastructures, interagency processes and procedures and command and control.”
In 2005, the army dispatched the general, a native of Louisiana, to New Orleans as commander of Joint Task Force Katrina.
The flooded city was still under water, and thousands of people were living in the Superdome sports stadium. Then-mayor Ray Nagin likened his arrival to a gift compared with all the federal failings until that point. The mayor called him a “John Wayne dude,” adding that he “came off the doggone chopper and he started cussing and people started moving.”
But the Ragin’ Cajun nickname the press bestowed upon Mr. Honoré was always off. He is actually Louisiana Creole. Born into a poor Black farming family in Lakeland, La., he has recalled his household having two broken black-and-white TVs – one without audio, the other without video – and stacking them atop each other to watch The Lone Ranger.
“You learn how to fix things,” he told the BBC, as he spoke about how his childhood was also a dissonant picture of Black and white, where much was broken.
The pews in his Catholic church were divided by race; the town had separate toilets and water fountains; and he was bused to a high school for Black students two hours away.
In the late 1960s, he worked his way through college in Baton Rouge and joined the military at the height of the Vietnam controversy. “I guess it was that promise that you would be judged by your capability and your character – and not by the colour of your skin,” he said. Living in an army barracks “was my first glimpse of what it felt like to be treated equally.”
Mr. Honoré's mission to correct lax legislative security is one Canada embarked on not long ago.
On Oct. 22, 2014, a gunman killed a soldier guarding the National War Memorial before storming Parliament. Politicians took cover as security forces shot the man dead in the building’s main corridor. A cellphone video later surfaced showing that the man wanted to terrorize Canada into pulling its troops out of Afghanistan
A review found that an outdated security model had exposed Parliament to just such an attack. One big part of the problem was that the legislature’s three separate security forces suffered from “an ‘us against them’ attitude” and were “quick to find fault with each other and opposed to working together,” the report said.
Mr. Honoré will look at whether such issues are at play in Washington, where the chief of the Capitol Police works with two sergeants-at-arms.
These three officials have resigned since the riot. In an interview with The Washington Post, former Capitol Police chief Steven Sund said he had asked in advance for the U.S. National Guard to be brought in to backstop his officers – but the sergeants-at-arms rebuffed his request.
Layers of investigations are now under way. One unresolved question is whether there is evidence that extremist elected politicians helped members of the mob case the Capitol and navigate its corridors. “If they aided and abetted these crimes – there may have to be action taken beyond the Congress in terms of prosecution,” Ms. Pelosi has said.
Mr. Honoré says he will leave detective work to the detectives. “My job is short. I’m coming in with one suit, one tie and my work clothes – blue jeans, orange jacket and cowboy boots,” he told MSNBC this week. He said his team will examine “the buildings inside the Capitol, the compartments of it, and look at how we harden the Capitol to make sure this never happens again.”
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