AMERICA - A Duty of Office, the President of the United States

"From Oval Office to Disaster Site, Presidents Offer Compassion After Catastrophe" PBS Newshour 5/27/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In recent months, President Barack Obama has comforted Newtown families, memorialized Boston bombing victims and toured Oklahoma tornado destruction.  Presidential historian Michael Beschloss and Alexis Simendinger of Real Clear Politics analyze with Gwen Ifill the role of presidents during times of national distress and tragedy.

GWEN IFILL (Newshour):  Now a look at the time-honored, but seemingly more frequent role of president as consoler in chief.

FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:  America today is on bended knee in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here.

GWEN IFILL:  They are the increasingly familiar moments of searing loss, when presidents give voice to the nation's grief.

FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:  I can hear you.  The rest of the world hears you.  And the people ...

And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

GWEN IFILL:  Three days after 9/11, President George W. Bush stood on the rubble at Ground Zero in New York.  Six years earlier, in April 1995, President Clinton comforted mourners in Oklahoma City after 186 people died in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON:  We pledge to do all we can to help you heal the injured, to rebuild this city, and to bring to justice those who did this evil.

GWEN IFILL:  The presidents act as stand-ins for a nation's anguish.  In Jan. 1986, hours after the destruction of space shuttle Challenger, it fell to President Reagan to remember the seven astronauts killed that day.

FORMER PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN:  We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye, and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to such the face of God.

GWEN IFILL:  And five days after President Kennedy was assassinated in Nov. 1963, the newly elevated President Lyndon Johnson went before a shaken Congress and country.

FORMER PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON:  No words are strong enough to express our determination to continue the forward thrust of America that he began.

GWEN IFILL:  Yesterday, President Obama returned to the task, traveling to Moore, Okla., where 24 people died a week ago in a massive tornado.