Newsweek’s glimpse of Bush w/ War Families

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.