What the D-Day Veteran Told Obama at the 70th Anniversary Commemoration

Christopher Dickey

After the president delivered his long speech and before he finally talked to Putin in Normandy, he was stopped on live television by a bent old soldier who gave Obama a piece of his mind.

COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France — After the speeches were over at the American cemetery above the Normandy beaches on Friday morning, U.S. President Barack Obama and French President François Hollande walked in front of the scores of surviving American D-Day veterans to lay a wreath. But one of them—pale and bent beneath his baseball cap as if it weighed him down—stepped forward and took Obama’s hand, and would not let him go until he had said his piece.

Was the infirm old soldier, perhaps, taking Obama to task for the scandals in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs? Was he telling the president that American policy needed more spine? An old survivor has a kind of license to say whatever he wants, even to the president of the United States. Obama smiled warmly. But then, in front of the crowd and the world’s television cameras, he would. None of us in the crowd could hear.

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When the ceremony was over, I made my way through the arrays of marble crosses to the stage and to the man in the blue hat who had taken Obama’s hand. His name, it turns out, is Irving Smolens, and he was only 19 when he took part in the Normandy landing. Afterward he spent much of his life as a buyer of women’s and children’s clothing in Massachusetts, leading a quiet, peaceful life with his family.

“What did you say to Obama?” I asked him.

“I thanked him for keeping us out of war,” said Smolens.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/06/what-the-d-day-veteran-told-obama-at-the-70th-anniversary-commemoration.html