Bush Tells of Crying Before Declaring War

President Bush told an audience of Southern Baptists Thursday that tears ran down his cheeks one day last January as he prayed just before ordering the start of the war against Iraq.

For Bush, who said he tries to keep his emotions in check in public and who appears uncomfortable when questioned in interviews and other settings about personal values, it was an extraordinary display: His voice choked up, he stumbled over his words and he paused to run his fingers across an apparently moist cheek as he recounted the deeply personal moment.

The audience--thousands of religious leaders and laymen at the 134th annual convention of the Southern Baptists--interrupted his remarks, which were not included in his prepared text, with a prolonged standing ovation.

“For me, prayer has always been important, but quite personal. You know us Episcopalians,” Bush said, pausing as a ripple of laughter spread across the audience. “And, like a lot of people, I’ve worried a little bit about shedding tears in public or the emotion of it.”

With the Baptists in the Georgia World Congress Center listening intently, the President continued his account of the private prayer session that he and First Lady Barbara Bush and a minister held at the presidential retreat in northern Maryland just before the start of the Gulf War on Jan. 17:

“As Barbara and I prayed at Camp David before the air war began, we were thinking about those young men and women overseas. And I had the tears start down the cheeks, and our minister smiled back.”

As his voice broke up, he paused for a moment, caught his breath and then resumed his confession of sorts. “I, I no longer worried how it looked to others,” he said.

At that, he brushed his cheek. As the audience applauded, he blurted out, in an acknowledgment that his eyes were becoming watery again, “There we go . . . .”

Catching himself, he went on:

“I think that, like a lot of others who had positions of responsibility in sending someone else’s kids to war, we realize that in prayer what mattered is how it might have seemed to God.”

Later, on the flight home from Atlanta, he offered a further look at the emotions that welled up before the war began and told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was not embarrassed to have shed tears in public.

“I do that in church. Well, embarrassed, maybe, in public. It’s kind of a first, or maybe a third. But I, I felt very emotional about the war and about having to send other people’s sons and daughter halfway across the world and commit our troops to battle. So I was trying to speak from the heart,” he said.

“Maybe I’m not too proud of myself, but I felt strongly. I’ll never forget that day. I knew what was over the horizon in terms of our air war. I sat there with the tears coming down my face, and that’s the way it was. Why not say it?”

He continued:

“I just wondered . . . all the talk about body bags. I’m a human being. I felt great responsibility to the American people and to the families. I still feel it. I feel very strongly about those kids who gave their lives for this country. So, if I show some emotion, that’s just the way I am.”

The President, who also visited a child care center here, found a friendly audience at the Southern Baptist Convention as he ran through his agenda on social and domestic issues. He called for speedy passage of his anti-crime legislation and restated his opposition to federal funding of abortions except when the procedure is needed to save a woman’s life.

He called on Congress to approve a constitutional amendment that would reverse a Supreme Court ruling and permit voluntary prayer in schools; and he denounced efforts of school officials in Norman, Okla., to block a fifth-grade student, Monette Rethford, from conducting voluntary prayer groups “under a shade tree during recess.”

“No teachers involved, no disruption of the school activities--just Monette and then, from time to time, a handful of friends,” Bush said. “Yet, school officials told Monette that her prayer group was illegal on school property--an ‘unlawful assembly.’ ”

The First Amendment to the Constitution, Bush said, “was written to protect people against religious intrusions by the state--not to protect the state from voluntary religious activities by the people.”

“The day a child’s quiet, voluntary group during recess becomes an ‘unlawful assembly,’ something’s wrong.”

Bush also entered the controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts’ funding of work that, he said, was “totally sacrilegious.”

“We don’t want censorship,” Bush said, but he denounced “just plain sacrilegious junk peddled as art.”

The President said the chairman of the endowment, John E. Frohnmayer, whom he appointed, “is in a very difficult position and, in my view, he’s doing a good job.”

“I’ll spare the American people one vivid offensive example that comes to my mind and is so bad that I don’t want to tell you what it is, and I think most of you know what it is,” he told reporters aboard the airplane.

Among exhibitions that created controversy for the NEA has been a traveling show that received endowment support and that included a photograph by Andres Serrano of a crucifix in a jar of urine.

In another church-related matter--the ordination in Washington, D.C., of an Episcopal priest who is a self-acknowledged lesbian--Bush said, “I think the churches, the regional churches and the branch churches, have a right to do what they want.”

But he added, “Perhaps I’m a little old-fashioned, but I’m not ready for that.”