Bush Portrait Prompts Historical Revision

Published December 24, 2015

President Bush's legacy, which he has forcefully defended in his final days in the White House, has already received its first rewrite -- and at the unlikeliest of places: the National Portrait Gallery.

A newly acquired official portrait of Bush at the gallery, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution, prompted Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to demand a correction to the wall text accompanying the picture.

The text said the 43rd president's administration was marked by "the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

In a letter to the director of the gallery, Sanders explained his objection to the text.

"When President Bush and Vice President Cheney misled our country into the war in Iraq, they certainly cited the attacks on September 11, along with the equally specious claim that Iraq possessed vast arsenals of weapons of mass destruction.

"The notion, however, that 9/11 and Iraq were linked, or that one "led to" the other, has been widely and authoritatively debunked," wrote Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.

The gallery issued a mea culpa and agreed to delete the words "led to" from the label.

"Our label was not intended to imply that there was a casual connection between the attacks that occurred on 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq," the gallery's director, Martin Sullivan, wrote in a letter to Sanders.

"Our intention was to remind viewers of the portrait that the listed events were defining episodes in the Bush presidency, within the limited space of an object label."

Now it reads: "Expecting that the success of his presidency would hinge, as it had when he was governor, on his negotiating skills and ability to solve problems, Bush found his two terms in office instead marked by a series of cataclysmic events: the attacks on September 11, 2001; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina; and a financial crisis during his last month in office."

Sanders thanked the gallery for making the change.

"I very much appreciate the prompt response from the director and appreciate his willingness to make the change," he said in a statement.

Sullivan could not be reached for comment Tuesday because he is out of town, the gallery said. Sanders did not respond to an interview request.

URL

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bush-portrait-prompts-historical-revision