I'm So Sorry

MSNBCThe grieving room was arranged like a doctor's office. The families and loved ones of 33 soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan were summoned to a large waiting area at Fort Bragg, N.C. For three hours, they were rotated through five private rooms, where they met with President George W. Bush, accompanied by two Secret Service men and a photographer. Because the walls were thin, the families awaiting their turn could hear the crying inside. 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 likes to play the resolute War Leader, and he has never been known for admitting mistakes or regret. But that does not mean that he is free of doubt. For the past three years, Bush has been living in two worlds—unwavering and confident in public, but sometimes stricken in private. Bush's meetings with widows like Crystal Owen offer a rare look inside that inner, private world.

This is a very good description of a President that really cares.

Last week, at his ranch in Texas, he took his usual line on Iraq, telling reporters that the United States would not pull out its troops until Iraq was able to defend itself. While he said he "sympathized" with Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, he refused to visit her peace vigil, set up in a tent in a drainage ditch outside the ranch, and sent two of his aides to talk to her instead.

He had already talked to her, and gotten a much different response, but then the Anti-War groups started using her. I dont blame Bush for not meeting with her again.

Privately, Bush has met with about 900 family members of some 270 soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The conversations are closed to the press, and Bush does not like to talk about what goes on in these grieving sessions, though there have been hints. An hour after he met with the families at Fort Bragg in June, he gave a hard-line speech on national TV. When he mentioned the sacrifice of military families, his lips visibly quivered. All war presidents find ways to deal with the strain of sending soldiers off to die. During the Vietnam War, LBJ used to pray after midnight with Roman Catholic monks. Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, prayed with the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church on the eve of the first gulf war. For George W. Bush, these private audiences with the families of dead soldiers and Marines seem to be an outlet of sorts. (They are perhaps harder for Laura, who sometimes accompanies Bush and looks devastated afterward.) Family members interviewed by NEWSWEEK say they have been taken aback by the president's emotionalism and his sincerity. More complicated is the question of whether Bush's suffering is essentially sympathetic, or whether he is agonizing over the war that he chose to start.

That is a low shot, but I guess the liberals at Newsweek required it.

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 missing 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.

Lorie Byrd blogged When the editorializing is taken out of the article, it is actually quite interesting and informative. I would even say it is a fascinating behind the scenes look at the President. But to say that the President is expressing his apologies for what he did by sending troops to Iraq, as I read the article to be saying, is just crap. I have told people that have lost loved ones to cancer, and other illnesses, that “I’m so sorry.” Does that mean that I was apologizing? I was expressing sorrow over their loss. The Newsweek reporter who put in the lines about the President apologizing was obviously projecting his or her opinion about what they believed the President had to have meant. Don’t take my word for it, though. Read the article and be the judge.

TheAnchoress blogged 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..... 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 other one-on-one accounts we have heard.