I will never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don't care what the facts are.

Bush Ethnic Coalition Speech (at 41:16)|publisher=C-SPAN.org|date=August 2, 1988 |access-date=April 23, 2025|url=c-span.org |at=41:16. Some commenters at the time saw this as a reference to the Navy warship USS Vincennes having shot down Iran Air Flight 655 on July 3, although Bush did not explicitly mention the shoot-down in the speech. The quote of the week section of Newsweek (15 August 1988, p.15) described the quote as "George Bush, speaking to a group of Republican leaders about the accidental downing of an Iranian airliner", and in "Rally Round the Flag, Boys" by Michael Kingsley in TIME magazine (12 September 1988), the quote was described as "the Vice President's reaction to the shooting down of the Iranian civilian airliner". <!-- | Someone has removed this quote more than once or denied that it was cited in Newsweek (15 August 1988) saying they "removed false quote which cites NewsWeek, but search via NexisLexis on that phrase has no matches" but Newsweek's online archives only go back to 1993; it was also misquoted by CNN correspondent Bruce Morton at transcripts.cnn.com and a 2004 article on Iranian history here : iranchamber.com - it has sometimes been quoted as having been "I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what it has done. I don't care what the facts are." (at en.allexperts.com ). Quotations are widely varied because the statement was made frequently during the campaign, prior to the shootdown and not just in reference to it. | --><!--Omitted this variant, since it refers to the same occasion as the quote above | "I'll never apologize for the United States. Ever. I don't care what the facts are," Bush told about 200 members of his newly formed Coalition of American Nationalities, a group with representatives of ethnic bac

, as quoted in Campaign '88/ "I'll never apologize for the United States" by Judy Wiessler in Houston Chronicle (3 August 1988) p. 6. The Houston Chronicle did not indicate that the quote referred to the Iran Air 655 shootdown.