PRESIDENTS ATTENDING FUNERALS

A reader has answered the call, and sent in this site which answers the question I posed earlier -- have presidents really attended the funerals of individual soldiers? And, as I have been arguing all along, it looks as if the answer is in fact no.

There are three exceptions noted here (except for the fact that President Bush, 41's spokesman claims he did attend such funerals, while the historical record, as well as my own memory, contradict him. Wouldn't there be some record indicating such an event? If you've ever looked at Public Papers of the Presidents it's awfully hard to imagine something like this took place without there being a record of it.) The first exception involves the son of a senior staffer, an obviously highly unusual circumstance where the President knew the family, and the second a situation where the President had met the soldier in question (although frankly I am still surprised by it. It still seems both awkward and inappropriate to me.) (This site mentions President Nixon meeting the family of what looks to be the last casualty of the Vietnam war, not only a particularly tragic loss, but an exception that would have proven my rule, in effect -- that the President cannot attend funerals while a war is on-going. Well, at that point the war was no longer on-going, was it? And apparently he did not even go so far as to attend the funeral. This President, note, has been meeting families all along. Something that would not violate any of my symbolic objections.)

All other exceptions fit in the category I keep mentioning where there are large losses taken in a single event, where the President symbolically stands in for the American people and becomes our representative to a moment of collective loss as, for example, he did at the memorial for the Shuttle astronauts or President Clinton did, as mentioned here, for the Memorial after Oklahoma City. He is then, not representing himself as Commander in Chief but becomes, literally, Mourner in Chief, not what the critics are asking of this President right now.

But I have a feeling this is not going to slow the criticism down any.