FLASHBACK--George W. Bush Gives Up Golf: ‘Playing Golf During a War Sends Wrong Message’

(CNSNews.com) – The White House has released some information about President Barack Obama’s vacation on Massachusetts’ upscale Martha’s Vineyard including his golf games, but no open press coverage of his time on the links has been allowed.

President George W. Bush, who routinely allowed journalists to accompany him on golf outings early in his presidency, told Politico in May 2008 that he decided to give up the game in August 2003 after a bomb attack on the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad that killed a top U.N. official.

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf,” Bush said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them.”

“And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong message,” Bush said.

On Monday, Obama spoke about the recent developments in Libya from Martha’s Vineyard.

Bush said in the Politico interview that he had been golfing when he was informed about the deadly attack on the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.

“I remember (Sergio Vieira) de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life,” Bush said in the interview. “I was paying golf--I think I was in central Texas--and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It’s just not worth doing this anymore.’”

Following that interview, Bush was harshly criticized by members of the media, including Don Froomkin in the Washington Post, who entitled his commentary “Bush’s Idea of Sacrifice.”

Froomkin called Bush’s decision to stop playing golf “a hollow, trivial sacrifice at best” and tried to present evidence that Bush had golfed after the date he said he’d given up the game. Froomkin also called the Politico story a “moronic interview.”

According to a June 2011 article in Golf Digest, Obama played 60 rounds of golf over his first two years as president.

From Obama's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009 through July 31, 2011, at least 1,019 U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan, according to a CNSNews.com database of casualties in that war. Those 1,019 deaths equal 64 percent of the total 1,588 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan since the war started there in October 2001.