posted on May 7, 2004 06:33:37 PM new
There is a lot of truth in these words...
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The Apology: Bush, Eisenhower, Francis Gary Powers, and Elian Gonzalez
Posted by Ira Simmons
Friday, May 07, 2004
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Intertwined with my anger over President Bush's apology for alleged prisoner abuse in Iraq was the recall of another unfortunate American military incident that occurred during my baby boom youth. But unlike the present occupant in the White House, the Republican president at the time never, ever, considered issuing an apology.
It was May 1, 1960. and U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was on a secret intelligence mission co-sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Air Force when his plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made hay over the incident and demanded an apology that U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower would not give. A highly anticipated Cold War Paris Summit meeting between Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Prime Minister Harold MacMillan of Great Britain, and French President Charles DeGaulle was cancelled. Powers later apologized during a public trial and was sentenced to ten years in a Russian prison, but in 1962 was released in an exchange for convicted Soviet spy Rudolph Abel.
So Eisenhower did not apologize for getting his hand caught in a cookie jar. And neither did President John F. Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs Invasion or Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon for the My Lai massacre. Perhaps this apology business began with Watergate and came to fruition with Monica Lewinsky, but it is a lousy way of doing business on the world stage. War means never having to say you're sorry. Especially when the cause is just.
George W. Bush has managed to maintain a base of conservative supporters not necessarily because of his domestic agenda--especially his stance on illegal immigration--but primarily because he is considered more suitable to lead the War on Terror than the Vietnam War Peacenik that happens to be his Democratic opponent. But after Thursday's apology to the King of Jordan, you have to wonder if there is really any difference.
It is often claimed that contemporary America has a short attention span. On April 22, 2000, Attorney General Janet Reno's goons grabbed little Cuban immigrant Elian Gonzalez in a pre-dawn raid. It was an event not forgotten by Miami's Cuban community over the next six months of that election year, and was the likely reason that Al Gore lost Florida and the White House to George W. Bush. With May 6, 2004, less than six months from Election Day, the conservative community may also have bitter lingering memories.
As a footnote to this story, Francis Gary Powers died in 1977 in a helicopter crash while working for a Los Angeles television station. On May 1, 2000, the fortieth anniversary of the U-2 incident, the Federal Government posthumously awarded his family the medals denied to Powers while he was alive.
Let the record show that the Powers family has not thrown those medals over a wall during an anti-war protest!
"The Secret Service has announced it is doubling its protection for John Kerry. You can understand why — with two positions on every issue, he has twice as many people mad at him." —Jay Leno
