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American Morning

Interview with George Bush Sr.

Aired September 18, 2002 - 07:33   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: As President Bush weighs the risks of taking the nation to war, he is likely to consider the advice of his father. And when the elder George Bush decided more than a decade ago to attack Iraq, he had already seen the horror of war close up.
He was a navy pilot during WWII and I recently went with the former president on an emotional journey back to the same Pacific island where he was shot down during the war, a personal journey to reconcile the war.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GEORGE BUSH SR., FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I wake up at night and think about it some time. Could I have done something different?

ZAHN (voice-over): He has spent nearly a lifetime wondering.

BUSH: I have a clear picture of my parachute blowing up onto Chichi Jima.

ZAHN: Hoping to return to the South Pacific, to the site of a combat experience he says forever changed his life.

BUSH: I'm not haunted by anything other than the fact I feel a responsibility still for the lives of the two people that were killed.

When I got out of the parachute, it blew towards land.

ZAHN: Now, 58 years after his navy Avenger was shot down by the Japanese...

BUSH: Because we attacked up here.

ZAHN: ... former President George Bush finally got a chance to go back to answer his own questions.

BUSH: The radio antenna over there...

I wonder why the chute didn't open for the other guy. Why me? Why am I blessed? Why am I still alive? Why did god, you know, let me survive when they didn't?

ZAHN: It happened on September 2, 1944. Twenty-year-old George Bush was a navy pilot flying off the aircraft carrier USS San Jacinto.

BUSH: The mission was to attack a radio station on the island of Chichi Jima.

ZAHN: Chichi Jima is a fly speck in the South Pacific, about twice the size of Central Park, 700 miles from the Japanese mainland. Today, it is a sleepy natural paradise with fewer than 2,000 residents. But it is also home to countless relics of WWII.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's a radio station. See those overhangs over the windows?

BUSH: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: To bounce the bombs off.

BUSH: Oh, really?

Are you surprised after my attack that this thing is still standing?

ZAHN: This is all that remains of the main radio installation on the island. It was the key target of Bush's bomber squadron.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We had three of those black wireless sets in that area there.

ZAHN: It was so heavily fortified, it could not be destroyed until after the war.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And you see the overhang?

ZAHN: In September, 1944, some 20,000 Japanese soldiers were dug in on Chichi Jima. Bush and the American pilots who had been bombing island targets all summer knew exactly what was in store.

BUSH: I think when you see anti-aircraft fire, angry black puffs of smoke, knowing that one of them could kill you, you understand your own mortality.

ZAHN: By September, Bush had flown dozens of missions, crash landed in the water once and had seen death from close range.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As he lands, the pelly (ph) tank catches on fire with the pilot trapped in the cockpit.

BUSH: And I'd seen life and death by then because I was standing on the deck of the San Jacinto one day, my plane having landed. Another plane came in, spun, went in upside down. It cut a petty officer in thirds. The guy was lying there, one leg here, the rest of his torso there. And I was about as far away as that table over there. So it was an exposure to the realities and horrors of war.

So I'd seen that and felt it. And, god, it was horrible.

ZAHN: It didn't help that Bush and his squadron were thousands of miles from home. For many aboard carriers in the Pacific, letters from family brought a measure of comfort. BUSH: Mail day was a huge thing. They called your name out, "Bush!" So you'd reach out, call out your, hand you a couple of letters, you know?

ZAHN: In letters he wrote to his parents and his fiance Barbara, Bush's tone often turned somber. In one, he writes, "I hope my own children never have to fight a war. Friends disappearing, lives being extinguished. It's just not right. The glory of being a carrier pilot has certainly worn off."

BUSH: We had censors so you couldn't say much in your letters because you, our letters were censored by other officers. And I was the censor for a lot of the enlisted men's mail, which gave me a great insight into their lives and lives quite different than this life that we've been privileged to lead.

ZAHN (on camera): Tell me about that, your exposure to these men from all walks of life that became your team.

BUSH: Well, it's too complicated. But it, it was too long ago.

ZAHN: Was it painful to read these letters about these young men's fears, about what they were trying to communicate to their families about their service to their country?

(voice-over): Just as painful are Bush's memories of what went wrong the day he was shot down.

BUSH: We got into this situation where we started our dive and suddenly -- and I saw these puffs all around me, as did every other pilot. And suddenly you just felt the plane go forward like this, going down, it just goes up like that. And I knew that something bad had happened.

ZAHN: Bush managed to direct his plane to the target and release his bombs. But returning to the San Jacinto was not an option.

BUSH: We came down off these mountains. I could tell I was hit. The plane was burning. The cockpit was beginning to fill up with smoke. So we headed out here and it became apparent to me that the plane was, I thought it was going to explode because I could see fire along where the wings fold in the PBF (ph). And the cockpit had tons of smoke in it and I just figured I can't, we can't stay up here.

ZAHN: But on the Avenger, it was impossible for the pilot to see the crew because an armor plate separated the cockpit from the rest of the plane. So when Bush parachuted into the water, he could only wonder if Ted White and Jack Delaney had done the same. Bush splashed down in enemy waters about a half mile from land and eventually was able to inflate a small raft.

BUSH: I was crying, throwing up and swimming like hell. I could have made the Olympics that day because we had to get out of there. And it was going like this in the life raft and I was scared to death and thinking of my family and, you know, whatever else you do when you're a scared kid. (END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAHN: And this is the first of three pieces we did together with best selling author James Bradley. He wrote "Flags Of Our Fathers," about the Iwo Jima flag raising. And next fall he'll release a book about navy pilots in the Pacific during WWII and eventually, Bill, all of this will be neatly wrapped together in an hour long documentary that will appear on CNN about a year from now.

BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Amazing...

ZAHN: Believe it or not, in spite of what you've seen today and what you're going to see over the next two days, we still have a lot of work to do to completely reprise what happened on that September day.

HEMMER: Yes, it's so interesting how you asked about the relationships of his men that he was with and he said it was too complicated, almost getting choked up and choked back. And he did not want to relive that memory.

ZAHN: And he talks about that sense of responsibility he felt for men and then later on as president almost as a custodianship, and he'll talk about that tomorrow.

HEMMER: Good deal.

Thank you, Paula.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com







Aired September 18, 2002 - 07:33   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: As President Bush weighs the risks of taking the nation to war, he is likely to consider the advice of his father. And when the elder George Bush decided more than a decade ago to attack Iraq, he had already seen the horror of war close up.
He was a navy pilot during WWII and I recently went with the former president on an emotional journey back to the same Pacific island where he was shot down during the war, a personal journey to reconcile the war.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GEORGE BUSH SR., FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I wake up at night and think about it some time. Could I have done something different?

ZAHN (voice-over): He has spent nearly a lifetime wondering.

BUSH: I have a clear picture of my parachute blowing up onto Chichi Jima.

ZAHN: Hoping to return to the South Pacific, to the site of a combat experience he says forever changed his life.

BUSH: I'm not haunted by anything other than the fact I feel a responsibility still for the lives of the two people that were killed.

When I got out of the parachute, it blew towards land.

ZAHN: Now, 58 years after his navy Avenger was shot down by the Japanese...

BUSH: Because we attacked up here.

ZAHN: ... former President George Bush finally got a chance to go back to answer his own questions.

BUSH: The radio antenna over there...

I wonder why the chute didn't open for the other guy. Why me? Why am I blessed? Why am I still alive? Why did god, you know, let me survive when they didn't?

ZAHN: It happened on September 2, 1944. Twenty-year-old George Bush was a navy pilot flying off the aircraft carrier USS San Jacinto.

BUSH: The mission was to attack a radio station on the island of Chichi Jima.

ZAHN: Chichi Jima is a fly speck in the South Pacific, about twice the size of Central Park, 700 miles from the Japanese mainland. Today, it is a sleepy natural paradise with fewer than 2,000 residents. But it is also home to countless relics of WWII.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's a radio station. See those overhangs over the windows?

BUSH: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: To bounce the bombs off.

BUSH: Oh, really?

Are you surprised after my attack that this thing is still standing?

ZAHN: This is all that remains of the main radio installation on the island. It was the key target of Bush's bomber squadron.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We had three of those black wireless sets in that area there.

ZAHN: It was so heavily fortified, it could not be destroyed until after the war.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And you see the overhang?

ZAHN: In September, 1944, some 20,000 Japanese soldiers were dug in on Chichi Jima. Bush and the American pilots who had been bombing island targets all summer knew exactly what was in store.

BUSH: I think when you see anti-aircraft fire, angry black puffs of smoke, knowing that one of them could kill you, you understand your own mortality.

ZAHN: By September, Bush had flown dozens of missions, crash landed in the water once and had seen death from close range.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As he lands, the pelly (ph) tank catches on fire with the pilot trapped in the cockpit.

BUSH: And I'd seen life and death by then because I was standing on the deck of the San Jacinto one day, my plane having landed. Another plane came in, spun, went in upside down. It cut a petty officer in thirds. The guy was lying there, one leg here, the rest of his torso there. And I was about as far away as that table over there. So it was an exposure to the realities and horrors of war.

So I'd seen that and felt it. And, god, it was horrible.

ZAHN: It didn't help that Bush and his squadron were thousands of miles from home. For many aboard carriers in the Pacific, letters from family brought a measure of comfort. BUSH: Mail day was a huge thing. They called your name out, "Bush!" So you'd reach out, call out your, hand you a couple of letters, you know?

ZAHN: In letters he wrote to his parents and his fiance Barbara, Bush's tone often turned somber. In one, he writes, "I hope my own children never have to fight a war. Friends disappearing, lives being extinguished. It's just not right. The glory of being a carrier pilot has certainly worn off."

BUSH: We had censors so you couldn't say much in your letters because you, our letters were censored by other officers. And I was the censor for a lot of the enlisted men's mail, which gave me a great insight into their lives and lives quite different than this life that we've been privileged to lead.

ZAHN (on camera): Tell me about that, your exposure to these men from all walks of life that became your team.

BUSH: Well, it's too complicated. But it, it was too long ago.

ZAHN: Was it painful to read these letters about these young men's fears, about what they were trying to communicate to their families about their service to their country?

(voice-over): Just as painful are Bush's memories of what went wrong the day he was shot down.

BUSH: We got into this situation where we started our dive and suddenly -- and I saw these puffs all around me, as did every other pilot. And suddenly you just felt the plane go forward like this, going down, it just goes up like that. And I knew that something bad had happened.

ZAHN: Bush managed to direct his plane to the target and release his bombs. But returning to the San Jacinto was not an option.

BUSH: We came down off these mountains. I could tell I was hit. The plane was burning. The cockpit was beginning to fill up with smoke. So we headed out here and it became apparent to me that the plane was, I thought it was going to explode because I could see fire along where the wings fold in the PBF (ph). And the cockpit had tons of smoke in it and I just figured I can't, we can't stay up here.

ZAHN: But on the Avenger, it was impossible for the pilot to see the crew because an armor plate separated the cockpit from the rest of the plane. So when Bush parachuted into the water, he could only wonder if Ted White and Jack Delaney had done the same. Bush splashed down in enemy waters about a half mile from land and eventually was able to inflate a small raft.

BUSH: I was crying, throwing up and swimming like hell. I could have made the Olympics that day because we had to get out of there. And it was going like this in the life raft and I was scared to death and thinking of my family and, you know, whatever else you do when you're a scared kid. (END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAHN: And this is the first of three pieces we did together with best selling author James Bradley. He wrote "Flags Of Our Fathers," about the Iwo Jima flag raising. And next fall he'll release a book about navy pilots in the Pacific during WWII and eventually, Bill, all of this will be neatly wrapped together in an hour long documentary that will appear on CNN about a year from now.

BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Amazing...

ZAHN: Believe it or not, in spite of what you've seen today and what you're going to see over the next two days, we still have a lot of work to do to completely reprise what happened on that September day.

HEMMER: Yes, it's so interesting how you asked about the relationships of his men that he was with and he said it was too complicated, almost getting choked up and choked back. And he did not want to relive that memory.

ZAHN: And he talks about that sense of responsibility he felt for men and then later on as president almost as a custodianship, and he'll talk about that tomorrow.

HEMMER: Good deal.

Thank you, Paula.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com