President George Bush with U.S. troops, Saudi Arabia, Thanksgiving 1990

"I had a pretty good idea on Thanksgiving of 1990 that we were going to have to fight. We were still trying diplomacy and using the United Nations and all that, but I had my mind set that we were going to have to go to war, and the irony is that troops we talked to were saying, 'We're ready. We want to get it over and go home.' And nobody in the United States believed they could get it over with such speed and such efficiency and with so little loss of innocent life. But when I looked out at these faces, at this point I know I was thinking, 'How many of these kids are going to die for their country?'" - George Bush

Photograph by Diana Walker From Public & Private: Twenty Years Photographing the Presidency (National Geographic Books, October 2002). Used with permission. Copyright Diana Walker. The downloading of photographs for personal or commercial use with express written permission of Ms. Walker is prohibited.