What do you mean 'we'? 9/11 families for Bush.(Campaign 2004 II)

IN mid March, George W. Bush traveled to Long Island to help dedicate a new memorial to the 281 people from Nassau County who died in the September 11 terrorist attacks. The president took part in a ground-breaking ceremony, and while he didn't address the crowd, he did speak privately with each of the victims' family members who came to the event. But first, he had to direct a little traffic.

A man named Jimmy Boyle, a retired New York firefighter whose 37-year-old son Michael, also a firefighter, died in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, was trying to get to the event but found himself stuck in traffic and the web of security that surrounds presidential appearances. Boyle was with his wife, one of his sons, and a staffer for his friend and congressman, Peter King (R., N.Y.). He drove up to one checkpoint and was told by a guard to go to another point nearby. He tried that, and was sent to another checkpoint, and then to another. The runaround continued until King's aide called his boss, who had flown to New York with Bush on Air Force One.

A few minutes later, with frustration in the car rising, Boyle's cellphone rang. His son answered it and said to Boyle, "It's George Bush." And indeed it was. A thoroughly surprised Boyle told the president he couldn't get past the checkpoints. "I've got some power around here," said Bush, with a bit of presidential understatement. "I think I can get you in."

Just then, another policeman guarding yet another entrance confronted Boyle and his group. "The cop said, 'You can't go there,'" recalls Boyle, "and I said, 'I'm on the phone with the president of the United States.'" Of course, the policeman didn't believe it. As the two argued, a golf cart drove up with two members of the president's staff, and bingo, Boyle was in. When the president arrived, he approached Boyle with a smile. "I told you I could get you in," he said.

Bush had reason to pay attention to Jimmy Boyle. Boyle is a past president of New York's Uniformed Firefighters Association, Local 94, the largest local firefighters' union in the country. He's also a lifetime Democrat who has never voted for a Republican for president (he was, in fact, head of Firefighters for McGovern back in 1972). But this year, Boyle plans to vote for George W. Bush, because Boyle wants the president to keep up the war on terrorism.

All that would be enough to make Bush grateful, but on that day in Long Island the president owed Boyle for another reason. In the week before the memorial ceremony, Boyle, acting not as a retired union chief but as a man who lost his son on September 11, took it upon himself to defend the president against charges that his campaign exploited memories of 9/11 in its first set of advertisements.

One of the commercials had shown a brief shot--just a second or two--of a firefighter on a lift with a flag-draped coffin at Ground Zero. Members of an antiwar group called September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, working with left-wing foundations and public-relations experts, protested loudly. They were joined by Boyle's old friend Harold Schaitberger, head of the International Association of Fire Fighters, a leading supporter of the Kerry campaign.