Prompted by a quote attributed to Barbara Bush that I believed untrue, I did an Internet search and found that, in fact, while speaking on the “Good Morning America” program on the eve of the Iraq invasion, Mrs. Bush said: “Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it’s gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” (GMA, March 18, 2003).

Peter Jennings is said to have had the rare ability to inquire into a person’s life whose views differed from his own, in order to trace how that person arrived at his or her points of view. Engaging this discipline, is it possible that a woman like Cindy Sheehan, raised in the world that has been Barbara Bush’s, might have made the same utterance about body bags and deaths, and came to the same conclusion about the waste of her mind? And Mrs. Bush, walking in Cindy Sheehan’s shoes, might have come to this same anguished and public plea to end the war that took the life of her son?

That rarefied environment that the very powerful live and move in might make any of us capable of saying things we ought never to have said. But which parent of a soldier serving in Iraq could bear to hear something like this? And which supporters of the president would stand and cheer upon hearing it?

Paul Baribault, Lewiston