In the days after 9/11 George W. Bush gave a speech where he thanked a wide range of countries from Israel to Iran but Dubya made no mention of Canada which had taken 30,000 American travelers when all of the American airspace had been emptied. Why was there no mention of Canada? I'll let former Dubya adviser David Frum explain. Read the entire passage.
[Bush Speech writer Michael] Gerson shuffled in embarrassment. “We just … forgot.”You really can't make this stuff up.
We have to fix this, I pleaded.
It’s too late, he answered. The president has signed off on the text. Evidently the president had forgotten too.
Let’s reopen the text, I urged. Futile. Bush was adamant in his demand for an orderly and conclusive speech process, unlike the endless rewrites of the Clinton White House. Once a speech was deemed closed — it was closed.
I returned home that night depressed and demoralized. As my wife and I prepared to watch the speech, I gloomily predicted to her that the Canadian reaction would be savage — and that I’d get the blame.
She countered: “If that happens, why not just tell them truth?”
To this day, she quotes the reply I gave her all those years ago: “Is the truth really better?”
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