In the Roosevelt Room, the first lady wore black. The president, a blue suit with a white pocket square and blue tie, the same clothes he wore when he boarded Air Force One in Tokyo for the 17-hour flight back to America. He didn’t have time to change before a speech he didn’t want to make.
“I had hoped,” Biden intoned, “when I became president, I would not have to do this again.”
Biden learned of the attack at 30,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. A gunman in Texas had murdered 19 children and two adults at an elementary school on Tuesday before authorities shot him dead. It was the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook Elementary a decade earlier. The children in Uvalde, Texas were two days from the start of their summer break.
The president spoke first of the victims, the “beautiful, innocent second, third, fourth graders.” He shuddered at the horror that little survivors would always remember “as if they are on a battlefield.” He remembered the parents “who will never see their child, never have them jump in bed and cuddle with them; parents who will never be the same.”
