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:: Thursday, March 18, 2004 ::

A meeting with the president
O'sider stands beside Bush at site of future 9/11 memorial By JOSEPH KELLARD
Although Bill Weitzman, of Oceanside, wanted to say more than he did to President George Bush, ultimately he said he was honored to meet the 43rd president when he broke ground on a memorial in Eisenhower Park for victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Weitzman is president of the Empire State Regional Council of Carpenters Union, Local 7. He was invited to attend the event as the union's representative, and was introduced to the president by Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi as the man whose workers will build the monument.

"I got a chance to shake the president's hand and talk to him for about 15 seconds," Weitzman, a Vietnam War veteran, told the Herald. "I said, 'I saw you in Washington when I was at the convention,' and I said, 'Please finish the job you started.' I was referring to the war in Iraq."

He said that Bush told him not to worry. "'I'm going to finish it, don't worry,' he told me," Weitzman said. "I felt like saying, Don't leave anyone behind like we did in Vietnam, with the MIAs, and don't stop short like your father did. But he told me at least twice, 'I'm going to finish.'"

Weitzman's workers (his union comprises 3,000 carpenters) will build the memorial gratis. It will consist of a wall of bright white cement featuring plaques with the name of the Nassau County residents who were killed at the World Trade Center three Septembers ago.

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