President Bush agrees to meet Alex's family during 2007 visit

June 15, 2007

On Air Force One, after it took off from Andrews Air Force Base, Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts could see that the president of the United States was ill.

Some sort of inner ear thing he picked up in Europe, President Bush told Roberts.

The plane banked southwest, toward Kansas. Bush had walked to the middle cabin to say hello; the two men had been friends for years, and allies in the bitter debates over the war, which on this day had lasted four years and cost more than 3,000 American dead.

More than 100 Americans died in April, including Sgt. Alex Funcheon from Wichita, whom Roberts had heard about after the Army's casualty assistance officer, Sgt. Charles Austin Hilt, contacted his staff.

Bush's Republican allies were deserting him.

I want to pick your brain on several things, but I'm not feeling too good here; I've got a cold, Bush told Roberts. I'm going to take a nap and then talk with you if that's OK.

"No problem, Mr. President," Roberts replied.

Roberts took a seat, and for a few minutes, as the big blue-and-white plane flew over mountains and prairies, he reviewed what he wanted to mention to Bush.

Roberts had agonized over war long before Bush ordered the Iraq invasion in 2003, long before terrorists flew planes into New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.

For many years Roberts had served as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The nation's intelligence people had briefed him repeatedly. The briefings, and the apathy he encountered when he tried to warn other people, weighed him down with worry.

He'd spent years "almost jumping up and down," as he put it later, trying to get President Clinton's people, and then Bush's people, to realize something big and terrible was brewing overseas, probably a direct attack on the U.S. In Kansas, especially after the USS Cole warship was attacked by suicide bombers in 2000, Roberts included in every speech in every town a warning that something big loomed and that the U.S. was not preparing adequately.

Then one morning Roberts drove to work at the Capitol watching smoke rise from the Pentagon; when he reached the Capitol, he was hustled to a safe place and learned, from intelligence briefings, that the Air Force was scrambling F-16s to shoot down any passenger plane approaching the city.

When he spoke, later that Sept. 11, about F-16s scrambling to blow civilians out of the sky, the horror of it choked him up.

A year and a half later, in early 2003, Bush ordered the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And now, in 2007, the war had turned into a dreary routine of roadside bombings and casualty reports.

The president reappeared.

Can't sleep, Bush said. We might as well talk.

They walked up front, sat down in Bush's Air Force One office -- a small, well-lit space with a desk, an extra chair and a couch, room enough for a half-dozen or more people. Bush called out the door to a steward: Could you make me a peanut butter and jelly? Then, they talked about war and government.

OK, Bush said, after a pause. Is there anything else you want to bring up?

"Yes," Roberts said. "There's a family that lost a young man in Iraq, and they'd like to meet you. They've talked with your staff, but it would be a favor to them and a personal favor to me if you could meet them."

Bush hesitated.

What kind of a family are they?

"They just want to meet with you because they lost their son. They don't want to do anything to embarrass you."

OK. Sure. I'll make that the last thing I do there today, I'll meet with them.

"Thank you. That will mean a lot to them and to me," Roberts said.

• • • 

As Air Force One banked over Wichita in a sunny sky, Roberts had no illusions about how meeting Sgt. Funcheon's family would touch Bush: It would touch him deeply, because Bush was a decent man. But it would not change his mind about the war.

"He doesn't like the criticism," Roberts would say later. "He doesn't like the 'Hate Bush' crowd. And he knows he's right. He's sure of it. When you get to know him, you see he's got this tremendous resolve that what we've done is right, that it's necessary, that we went in there to try to bring stability to the Middle East."

Roberts knew Bush met frequently, without fanfare, with families of dead soldiers.

"I hate to say it, but he's good at it," Roberts would say later. "Good at it in the sense that he appreciates their sacrifice. And that it is for something."

When the plane landed, Roberts descended the steps with Bush and watched the president shrug off the head-cold sluggishness. On the Boeing tarmac, under a warm sun, Bush stripped off his blue suit jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and shook hands with a wall of people along a fence line, Boeing employees who had come out to cheer him enthusiastically. Much of the work on Air Force One had been done here.

The Funcheons -- Bob, Karen and Gloria -- were at home, steeling themselves for the meeting. Bob had put on a gray dress shirt, and chose deliberately to not put on a necktie.

"I wanted Bush to see me casual," he said later. "It was a quiet message to him -- that we are equals."

Coming Thursday: A meeting on Air Force One