Senator Mary L. Landrieu offered a devastating critique on Friday in Baton Rouge. "I have been telling him from the moment he arrived about the urgency of the situation," she said. "I just have to tell you that he had a difficult time understanding the enormity of the task before us."

Since then, the news for Mr. Brown has not gotten better. The Times-Picayune, Louisiana's largest newspaper, asked Mr. Bush in an open letter to clean house at FEMA, calling "especially" for the ouster of Mr. Brown. On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff placed the Coast Guard's chief of staff, Vice Admiral Thad W. Allen, in charge of the New Orleans relief effort, clearly a move to beef up management where the problems have been most severe. And on Tuesday, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, in calling for FEMA to be made a separate cabinet-level agency, said its director should have emergency management experience.

Mr. Brown's friends say they have cringed watching the criticism of a man they describe as compassionate and dedicated to difficult work.

Mary Ann Karns, who worked as city attorney in Edmond, Okla., in the 1970's when Mr. Brown was her assistant, said, "He was interested in politics not for glory and not for power, but because he wanted to make things better for people."

Michael DeWayne Brown was born on Nov. 11, 1954 in Guymon, Okla. He and his wife, Tamara, have two grown children, Jared and Amy. His friends say he is an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, an avid hiker and fly fisherman, and a collector of antique maps of the West.

In addition to his brief experience as a city official, Mr. Brown has practiced law, worked for the Oklahoma State Senate and served as counsel to an insurance company. He lost a race for Congress in 1988. But the job he did for a decade before joining FEMA is curiously omitted from his online agency résumé.

From 1991 to 2001, as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, Mr. Brown enforced the rules administered by judges at the association's 300 annual horse shows. His decisions provoked a number of lawsuits, including one from David Boggs, a trainer whom Mr. Brown accused of having cosmetic surgery performed on horses.