Meeting the Families

To listen to the folks down at the Wacko Woodstock, you'd think President Bush was some kind of heartless guy who won't even spend 10 minutes of his vacation with a grieving mom. Of course that grieving mom has a far left agenda she's trying to push with this little bit of political theater, but that fact seems to be missing from most press reports. The other thing that the press reports seem to regularly miss are Sheehan's changing stories about her previous meeting with Bush.

I knew from the start that the charge that Bush refuses to meet with soldier's families would never stick because he's been around too long and had too many of those meetings for that charge to go undefended. Now Newsweek (of all places) runs a story supporting the President and setting the record straight about his efforts to meet with grieving families:

The 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.

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.

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.

It's not all smiles and handshakes. As the article says, war dissenters are not screened out and the president has taken his share of slings and arrows in these meetings. Read the whole thing - it basically makes the Sheehan spectacle look like the cheap publicity stunt that it really is.

UPDATE: Here's another account of a meeting with the President that's worth reading.