Newsweek is certainly to be commended for this piece, which allows some little sense of balance to the manipulative, Michael Moore-ish production now going on in Crawford, Texas. Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas bring us an unflinching story, gleaned from interviews with grieving families who have met with President Bush. Some support him, some do not, but none of the families report the sick sort of joviality and cold indifference with which Mrs. Sheehan now charges President Bush. Because the president does not exploit the these people’s grief for politically expedient “photo-ops” (see how much he cares! Watch him bite his lip!) the press is always barred from witnessing the meetings. Here are what the families say:
President Bush was wearing “a huge smile,” but his eyes were red and he looked drained by the time he got to the last widow, Crystal Owen, a third-grade schoolteacher who had lost her husband in Iraq. “Tell me about Mike,” he said immediately. “I don’t want my husband’s death to be in vain,” she told him. The president apologized repeatedly for her husband’s death. When Owen began to cry, Bush grabbed her hands. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” he said, though his choking voice suggested that he had worries of his own. The president and the widow hugged. “It felt like he could have been my dad,” Owen recalled to NEWSWEEK. “It was like we were old friends. It almost makes me sad. In a way, I wish he weren’t the president, just so I could talk to him all the time.”
Bush routinely asks to see the families of the fallen when he visits military bases, which he does about 10 times a year. It does not appear that the White House or the military makes any effort to screen out dissenters or embittered families, though some families decline the invitation to meet with Bush. Most families encourage the president to stay the course in Iraq. “To oppose something my husband lost his life for would be a betrayal,” says Inge Colton, whose husband, Shane, died in April 2004 when his Apache helicopter was shot down over Baghdad. Bush does, however, hear plenty of complaints. He has been asked about missng medals on the returned uniform of a loved one, about financial assistance for a child going to college and about how soldiers really died when the Pentagon claimed the details were classified.
At her meeting with the president at Fort Hood, Texas, last spring, Colton says she lit into Bush for “stingy” military benefits. Her complaints caught Bush “a little off guard,” she recalls. “He tried to argue with me a little bit, but he promised he would have someone look into it.” The next day she got a call from White House chief of staff Andrew Card, who said the White House would follow up. “My main goal was to have him look at my son, look him in the eyes and apologize,” says Colton. “I wanted him to know, to really understand who he has hurt.” She says Bush was “attentive, though not in a fake way,” and sometimes at a loss for words. “He didn’t try to overcompensate,” she says.
I don’t know…to me, President Bush sounds like a man doing a very tough job, and trying to keep faith with these people - to be as honorable as he can be, and as real as he can be. The remark that he “didn’t try to overcompensate” sounds to me like a sign of a man with a healthy sense of who he is and what he is doing.
The most telling—and moving—picture of Bush grieving with the families of the dead was provided by Rachel Ascione, who met with him last summer….
Ascione wasn’t sure she could restrain herself with the president. She was feeling “raw.” “I wanted him to look me in the eye and tell me why my brother was never coming back, and I wanted him to know it was his fault that my heart was broken,”…Ascione was worried that her family would be “exploited” by a “phony effort to make good with people in order to get votes.”
Ascione and her family were gathered with 18 other families in a large room on the air base. …”I’m here for you, and I will take as much time as you need,” Bush said. He began moving from family to family. Ascione watched as mothers confronted him: “How could you let this happen? Why is my son gone?” one asked. Ascione couldn’t hear his answer, but soon “she began to sob, and he began crying, too. And then he just hugged her tight, and they cried together for what seemed like forever.”
Ascione’s family was one of the last Bush approached. Ascione still planned to confront him, but Bush disarmed her in an almost uncanny way. Ascione is just over five feet; her late brother was 6 feet 7. “My whole life, he used to put his hand on the top of my head and just hold it there, and it drove me crazy,” she says. When Bush saw that she was crying, he leaned over and put his hand on the top of her head and drew her to him. “It was just like my brother used to do,” she says, beginning to cry at the memory.
Before Bush left the meeting, he paused in the middle of the room and said to the families, “I will never feel the same level of pain and loss you do. I didn’t lose anyone close to me, a member of my family or someone that I love. But I want you to know that I didn’t go into this lightly. This was a decision that I struggle with every day.”
As he spoke, Ascione could see the grief rising through the president’s body. His shoulder slumped and his face turned ashen. He began to cry and his voice choked. He paused, tried to regain his composure and looked around the room. “I am sorry, I’m so sorry,” he said.
The American President - no matter who he is - has the most difficult job in the world. This American President has chosen to take a difficult path that no one else in the world was willing to trod. Whether his instincts to bring the Middle East into liberty and the 21 century were the right instincts, or his theory that to do so will eliminate terrorism as a means to movement, will not be known for decades…but he was willing to take the steps - to try - even if it cost him his office. And he has taken on the additional burden of (in a manner of speaking) sitting shivah with these families, facing the tragic costs of his decision, head-on.
This piece by Newsweek fails to mention anywhere in it that President Bush has already met with Mrs. Sheehan, and that is a shame. But I am so grateful for it, because so little that is written in the Mainstream Press affords Bush any sort of humanity.
I have a lot of firefighter friends. Some of them met with President Bush on that terrible first anniversary, at ground zero, and they’ve shared what it was like - how he made himself utterly available to them, for as long as was necessary. Having heard their stories, I tend to believe them - and these folks profiled in Newsweek - over another one-on-one account we have heard.
Tip of the hat to: Irish Pennants Mr. Kelly with whom I simply must, one day, take a Guinness!
UPDATE: Lorie Byrd makes the excellent point which I did not make - that as welcome as it is to see a halfway decent article on Bush, it is only a “halfway” decent article, given that Newsweek tries hard to make the “I’m Sorry’s” sound like Bush is sorry for “the war he chose to start…”
Right-thinking people know he means he is sorry for their pain and loss. There is a distinction, and yes, it would have been good if Newsweek had tried to make it.
August 14th, 2005 at 6:30 pm
Anchoress, your tribute to President Bush and the families that have lost loved ones in the wars is most touching. Tears are still streaming from my eyes. I believe the president to be a very real and caring person doing an impossible job the best way he knows to do it and he would spare every soldier his life if he could.
August 15th, 2005 at 1:06 am
[...] The Anchoress provides a counterbalance for the Ms Sheehan carnival. [...]
August 15th, 2005 at 1:27 am
[...] UPDATE Sun, 08/14/05 10:23: The Anchoress does not believe the article is perfect but says: [...]
August 15th, 2005 at 2:03 am
The President’s constitution did not cost him his office. It earned him a place in history in the pantheon of great world leaders. That cannot be erased by juvenile idiots or grief whores, nor all the memory holes of Yahoo.
Bravo, Anchoress! Bravo.
August 15th, 2005 at 2:58 am
I am sure President Bush feels their pain, he’s a very emotional man. I wonder if HE ever wonders whether it was wrong to start this war. I for one don’t think he had evil intentions. However, I am not sure anymore whether it was the right decision, with corpses, American and otherwise, piling up and no end in sight.
August 15th, 2005 at 7:13 am
[...] Others blogging on this story this morning: Iowa Voice Michelle Malkin The Anchoress Polipundit - Lorie Byrd Judith Weiss Trackback URL:http://brightandearly.1southernyankee.com/2005/08/what-others-saw/trackback/ [...]
August 15th, 2005 at 9:11 am
I would love to see Newsweek do another piece contrasting President Bush and his visits with family of Americans lost in Iraq with how President Johnson reacted when he met family of Americans lost in Vietnam, if in fact he ever did. I lived in the DC area during Johnson’s presidency working for DOD, and can tell you that with Johnson everything was a PR moment, especially the one trip he did take to Nam. I don’t remember if he ever met with families of Nam casualties. In any case, I am sure the contrast between Bush and Johnson would be huge.
August 15th, 2005 at 10:18 am
The Un-Sheehans
Only the leftward fringes could concoct and image of George Bush as some uncaring, greedy monster who doesn’t really feel the pain and loss of those who have sacrificed loved ones in this ongoing War on Terror. The NYPost has a short story out …
August 15th, 2005 at 10:38 am
This Is Embarrassing To Watch
Is this how one honors her dead son?
Many mothers have lost sons and daughters. Some in war, some in sickness and some in accidents. Unfortunately, there have been too many in my family who have lost children. I think except for my mother every…
August 15th, 2005 at 1:54 pm
Being sorry for the war doesn’t mean he still had to do it. I’m sorry when I ask my engineers to do the impossible, give me information they don’t have instantaneously. I’m sorry when I have to tell a charity that I can’t give that month. There are lots of things I am sorry for at times- doesn’t mean I think I made the wrong decision, just an acknowledgement of the pain that decision cost. “I’m sorry we had to fight this war”. He may be sorry for this war- I hope he is- but not in the way it’s been framed. As an acknowledgement of the heavy, heavy cost being borne by these families for a war he thought necessary to fight. To me, it would indicate that he “gets it” and that in turn would lead me to give him the benefit of the doubt on why he flet it was necessary. If he gets the cost, so to speak, he must have been convinced it was worth it.
August 15th, 2005 at 1:58 pm
Newsweek - Breaking: President Bush is not a heartless automaton
A couple of useful correctives to the Sheehan reporting today —
From Newsweek, we learn that President Bush may not be a cruel, heartless, unfeeling robot after all:
In emotional private meetings with the families of soldiers killed in Iraq a…
August 15th, 2005 at 2:22 pm
Phony, warmongering death cultist Chimpy McHitlerburton forces Newsweek to publish a puff piece hinting that Resident Shrub has a heart
Rove probably had pictures of both Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas, the two Nesweek "reporters" responsible for this abomination of invidious Rethuglican rebranding, pleasuring farm animals or little boys. How else to account for this three-…
August 15th, 2005 at 4:14 pm
So this is what it looks like when someone goes off the deep end.
This on Drudge –
BUSH PROTESTING MOM CALLS FOR ‘ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE’; VOWS NOT TO PAY TAXES
Anti-war protestor Cindy Sheehan, whose soldier son Casey was killed in Iraq, is calling for Bush’s “impeachment,” and for Israel to get out of Palestine!
“You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you’ll stop the terrorism,” Sheehan declares.
Sheehan, who is asking for a second meeting with President Bush, says defiantly: “My son was killed in 2004. I am not paying my taxes for 2004. You killed my son, George Bush, and I don’t owe you a penny…you give my son back and I’ll pay my taxes. Come after me (for back taxes) and we’ll put this war on trial.”
“And now I’m going to use another ‘I’ word - impeachment - because we cannot have these people pardoned. They need to be tried on war crimes and go to jail.”
The 48-year-old California mom remains tented up in a ditch along the one-lane road that leads to Bush’s Texas ranch.
As her protest entered its second week, hundreds of people with conflicting opinions about the war in Iraq descended on the area.
TIME mag reports in new editions on Monday: Sheehan gets support from her surviving son, Andy, in principle, but he recently sent her a long e-mail imploring her, “to come home because you need to support us at home.”
August 15th, 2005 at 10:25 pm
I don’t doubt Bush is sincere in his grief. I am sure he believed this war was necessary. I don’t doubt his motives. But all that does not preclude that this war may turn out to be a huge mistake. The absence of WMDs already makes its necessity seem dubious, since after all that was the main reason given for starting this war. I just hope that, despite being unnecessary, at least some good will come of it, so all the thousands of American dead and wounded will not have died and been maimed in vain.
August 16th, 2005 at 12:09 am
all that does not preclude that this war may turn out to be a huge mistake
Freedom for a long-oppressed people is never a mistake.
August 16th, 2005 at 1:09 am
Preparing Ourselves For Presentation
Getting ready for our Cotillion dance is not an easy task. We can’t just throw a blurb up on our site, we must properly prepare ourselves and it is a long and tedious task. In preparing for today’s dance, it…
August 16th, 2005 at 1:15 am
Preparing Ourselves For Presentation
Getting ready for our Cotillion dance is not an easy task. We can’t just throw a blurb up on our site, we must properly prepare ourselves and it is a long and tedious task. In preparing for today’s dance, it reminded me of how much effort we gals p…
August 16th, 2005 at 4:06 am
I believe totally in George Bush.
When I see him give a press conference or speech, I get the vibes of a guy who is running a business(which he is, CEO of the United States) and is really into managing it. He is completely human and utterly concerned about every last detail, including the wellbeing of those who do the firm’s business(especially our military).
He is a sincere man who genuinely cares about all of us and when he talks he does so plain spokenly, like your next door neighbor.
I know he’s giving us his all as POTUS and I wish he could do a 3rd term. THIS is a great President and in my lifetime(I’m 50 as of recently)the only other President in his class has been Ronald Reagan.
August 16th, 2005 at 4:55 am
SNIFF
Our president grieves….
August 17th, 2005 at 11:57 am
Must Read
The Amazing Anchoress lays it all out for us again.
…
August 19th, 2005 at 2:41 am
Back in the ’60’s, when the evening news was inundated with stories of so-called college students protesting the Viet-Nam war, I was accused of “seeing Commies under the bed” when I said that, if you watch those newsclips, you’d see the SAME HANDFUL OF PEOPLE among the protesters, and accused them of being Communists exploiting the people who really believed in what they were doing. Now we find out that this “Peace” organization (I can’t remember the whole name right now) that Mrs. Sheehan has hooked up with boasts among its members The Communist Party in America. And now they have started that old game of anti-war protests again. Gee. Looks like those Commies really WERE under my bed, after all—and everyone else’s, too! (I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark Rudd started showing up again, if he’s still around, though of course he wouldn’t be using that name. I think he’s still wanted on some criminal charges or other stemming from some riots that arose from those ’60s demonstrations where he was present…;D)