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By Jimmy Breslin
March 10, 2004
For days now, the job at Eisenhower Park in Nassau County has been to follow the order from the White House through the Secret Service and down to the park workers:
"The president's feet are not to touch the dirt."
So all yesterday, large crews drawn from all county parks worked to ensure that, as always in his life, George Bush's feet do not touch the ground when he appears in the big park today.
Bush arrives for a fund-raiser at a restaurant in the park. That is indoors and he doesn't have to worry about his feet there. But he has to go over ground to an administration building where he is to meet with families of 9/11 victims. After that, he has to go over more ground to get to the site of a memorial to the victims.
He doesn't want his feet on the ground and he will be at a groundbreaking ceremony.
The 9/11 memorial is not up. Someday it will be a site by a pond. What happened was that Bush was coming in for this big fund-raiser. The county executive, Suozzi, a Democrat, heard about it and rushed an invitation to Bush to be at the dedication to the memorial and also to meet the 9/11 families.
There was no way for Bush to turn this down. So he appears today for a local Democrat. The county Democrats fell all over themselves to have a memorial site and the paths around it following the Secret Service regulations.
Yesterday, a big guy, who had been fixing serious pipe leaks in the county executive's building, was on the walkway unrolling wooden storm fencing that would create an alley for Bush to walk down.
"When you get the fence up, what do you do?" he was asked.
"Cover the ground so his feet don't touch it."
"Is that true?"
"My boss told me that. If he says so, it's true."
"That sounds crazy."
"It sounds like I get paid every week," he said.
Bush's day was to start with him landing in his big plane at Republic Airport. He could either drive or go by helicopter to the park. There is room to land on one of Eisenhower Park's golf fairways. But the job of building whole concrete streets from the plane to the memorial site would be extraordinarily hard, as they would have to remove the streets immediately after today in order to have the place ready for golfers in this Republican county.
Bush was to move to a couple of locations on dirty parkland. Last Thursday, the bureaucrats in charge of the park heard from the Secret Service. The word immediately ran through the halls of local government.
Not a foot touches the earth.
And the workers went to work. First, there was the ground from a parking lot to a wood building used for special activities. This probably will be where Bush meets with the families.
"We're not even sure he will use this," a foreman said. "They just tell us he is going to meet with families. We ask, 'Where?' They won't tell us. So we went ahead, anyway."
They put up a concrete sidewalk from the parking lot to a ramp leading into a side entrance to the building.
The rain and sleet made it impossible for the concrete to dry. So they changed from concrete to the asphalt used on streets. They hoped the president wouldn't mind this. After all, it would protect his feet
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