The New Acting Administrator of FEMA Wrote a Novel. It’s Not Good.

If all you had to go on was Richardson’s speech, you might be surprised to learn that he harbors the soul of an artist. A lifelong painter, Richardson is also the author of a roughly 400-page novel, published in 2019, called War Story, which he’s described as being “about 80 percent” autobiographical. Given the relatively sparse information available about Richardson, the book—while a work of fiction—offers a window into the mind of the man now responsible for the country’s federal disaster-response infrastructure. If Richardson is anything like his self-aggrandizing lech of a protagonist, War Story doesn’t inspire confidence that he’s either qualified to run FEMA or a pleasant, well-adjusted person.

Having spent most of the last decade as a government contractor in Northern Virginia, Richardson was previously appointed by the Trump administration as assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office. Richardson has no apparent experience with FEMA, emergency management, or disaster relief. He was first commissioned as an officer in the Marine Corps in 1991, serving (according to a C.V. on his LinkedIn page) in Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq, before leaving the military in 2013. Loosely, War Story is a fictionalized account of his time as an adviser to the Iraqi Army in Anbar Province in 2006. Besides that job, the protagonist, Clarence “Clay” Steerforth, shares several other autobiographical details with Richardson: He is a D.C.-area resident, a cigar smoker, and the son of an artist who taught him to paint from a young age. Steerforth goes to war not because he has to or because he’s especially committed to the cause, but because he’s “dreamed of the adventure of war since childhood.” He stayed in the service through peacetime thanks to the decent pay and the “prospect” of combat. When a war actually begins, Steerforth experiences “great pain being left out,” so volunteers to go. As he tells his artist friend John, “I can’t live with myself … removed from war.”

In War Story, Iraq is a place for Steerforth to realize his calling as a fighter, following—by his own account—in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and the Roman and British Empires: “Now my own war was here, right in the middle of Satan’s front yard where so many had endured or been consumed.” When Steerforth sees a dead body killed on one of his unit’s first patrols, the crimson and white of the deceased’s blood and brains on black asphalt reminds him of Francis Bacon paintings. He doesn’t, of course, mention the estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilians who were killed in the Iraq War, a conflict widely criticized then and now as a reckless, illegal war of aggression.