Spoken from the Heart

by Laura Bush

  Judy and I were waiting to get in one of the ambulances, and Judy kept saying to me, "I think that's the father of the person who was in the other car." And I said, "No, that couldn't be the father. That's Mr. Douglas."

  I was still pleading with God as I lay in the emergency room, waiting for the doctors to stitch my knee. The lights were bright, and I could hear the scurrying of the nurses' flat-soled shoes on the floor, but no one was paying attention to Judy or to me because our injuries were cuts and bruises, scrapes and strains. I was still thinking, lying there, that Mike could not have been in that other car. And then, on the other side of the hospital curtain, I heard a woman start to cry, and I knew that it was Mrs. Douglas. But I couldn't stop asking God, over and over in my head, to please keep this other person alive.

  It was Mother and Daddy who told me that Mike had been driving the other car, after I was home, in my own bed. But by then, I already heard the sounds of his parents' choked sobs ricocheting in the far recesses of my mind.

  November 6 was a Wednesday, but we were out that night because Thursday was a school holiday. Mike was on his way into town for a date with Peggy, whose house backed up to Cowden Park, where the old buffalo wallow was, and where we would climb out the window and sneak around in our pajamas. He had dated Regan for a long time before that. He was a handsome boy with a beautiful smile, and he was a top athlete at Lee. He was not my boyfriend, although for a decade some in the press have claimed that he was. But for years, he was my very close friend. I have images of Mike in my home movies, the movies that Charlie White, who lived behind us on Estes Avenue, took every Christmas because the Whites owned a little movie camera. The Whites were good friends of Mike's parents, and that's how Mother and Daddy knew them, long before we were in high school. I can still see a gap-toothed Mike in at least one of those old Christmas movie reels, where years later, everything looks slightly tinged with blue or brown.

  All through high school, Mike and I were good friends; we talked on the phone for hours, and Mike's circle of close friends included nearly all of my own. And so it was unbelievable to me that it was his car in that almost always empty intersection. It was a small car, a Corvair Monza, Detroit's version of a compact, economy car designed to compete with the Volkswagen Beetle. It was sporty and sleek, and it was also the car that Ralph Nader made famous in his book Unsafe at Any Speed. He claimed the car was unstable and prone to rollover accidents. A few years later, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration went so far as to investigate the Corvair's handling, but it didn't reach the same grim conclusions. I was driving my dad's much larger and heavier Chevy Impala. But none of that would ever ease the night of November 6. Not for me, and never for the Douglases.

  So many lives were wrecked that night at that corner, which was known as a particularly dangerous place. Already that year, two other people had lost their lives in crashes where the loop met Big Spring Street. After Mike's death, the city did install a much bigger stop sign and posted warnings. But it was too late for us.

  A dangerous intersection, a less than safe car, and me. I don't see well, I didn't ever see well, and maybe that played a part. Or perhaps it was simply dark, Judy and I were talking, and I was an inexperienced driver who got to a corner before I expected it.

  I didn't have to tell anyone what happened. Every single person in Midland knew. Regan had been with Peggy at a school dance performance rehearsal, and then both had gone home to wait for their boyfriends. Regan was waiting for her boyfriend, John. Peggy was waiting for Mike. Regan's dad called her to say that I'd been in an accident, and Regan and John rushed to the hospital. By the time they arrived, I had already been sent home, so they drove to my house. They knew that Mike had died when they pulled up to our curb. My mother met them outside and told Regan that I didn't know Mike had been in the other car, so Regan and John sat with me as I lay in bed, with this horrible, unspoken truth hovering in the air. After they left, Mother and Daddy told me.

  Immediately afterward, Mother and Daddy's friends showed up, and I'm sure it was the same at the Douglases'. Betty Hackney, Johnny's wife, came over and stood at the sink and washed dishes because so many people came and everyone brought something to eat or stopped to eat something. People from our church came. Mary White was at our house almost every day. All of Mother and Daddy's best friends came. The next morning Mother and Daddy and Mary and Charlie drove over to see the Douglases. I never knew what they said, and they never told me. I only knew that they had gone.

  My friends were brokenhearted, but Regan and Jan, Candy, and a bunch of Mike's friends and my high school boyfriend, now a college freshman, came over to our house to sit with me. That is the amazing thing about Midland. So many people could be utterly devastated and could wish that this terrible thing had never happened, and they were and they did, but they still found it in their hearts to be supportive of me.

  I did not go to the funeral. It was held that Saturday, November 9, at St. Mark's Methodist Church. I wanted to go, and I told Mother and Daddy that I wanted to. But they wanted me to stay home. No doubt they were trying to protect me, thinking that it would be too hard on me, and on the Douglases, if I were to attend. Whatever their reasons, I did not have a chance to decide. The next morning, no one rapped on my door to awaken me. When I finally opened my eyes, the service had started, and it was too late. So I didn't go, and I never contacted the Douglases. Like everyone else around me, I thought that they wouldn't want to see me, that there wasn't one thing that I could say to them that they would want to hear.

  Pretty quickly no one mentioned the accident. My parents never brought it up. And neither did my friends, with the exception of Regan. I remember when the story of the crash appeared in the press during the 2000 presidential campaign, two of George's cousins, with whom we're very close, were shocked. I'd never told them. I didn't even get to tell my own daughters. A Texas Department of Public Safety officer on our protection detail did that when George was governor. He assumed they already knew.

  But when one of Barbara's and Jenna's best friends committed suicide during their junior year of high school, I insisted that we go over right away to see his parents. I tried to do for them what I couldn't do for the Douglases.

  Once I became a mother myself, I thought more about the Douglases. I began to understand how devastating their grief must be. On some level, only when I had children could I begin to comprehend the enormity for them of losing Mike. Only then, when I could imagine that it was Barbara or Jenna.

  Looking back now, with the wisdom of another forty-five years, I know that I should have gone to see the Douglases; I should have reached out to them. At seventeen, I assumed that they would prefer I vanish, that I would only remind them of their loss. But in retrospect, I think all of us--not only me but all of Mike's friends--should have been more solicitous of them. We weren't. We were so close to leaving Midland; in a few short months we all went off to college. We did not grasp what a difference a simple visit would make. But having friends now who have lost their own children, as well as knowing the parents of Barbara's and Jenna's friends who have died--the boy who was killed coming home from the Texas-Oklahoma game their freshman year in college, the girl who died with her date when their car skidded off the treacherous, winding roads heading back to Washington and Lee University in Virginia, the same little girl who had shown Barbara and Jenna around school and had become their first friend when we moved to Austin--I know from these parents that they like being with Barbara and Jenna. Having their child's friends remember them, and also remember the child they have lost, gives them another way to remain connected to that adored child who is forever gone.

  To them, those children will always be seventeen or eighteen years old, a little bit older than I was in 1963. Their futures exist only in the ache of imagination. I see that now, but I did not see it then.

  In the aftermath, all I felt was guilty, very guilty. In fact, I still do. It is a guilt I will carry for the rest of my life
, far more visible to me than the scar etched in the bump of my knee. At some point most people in these situations come to make a mental peace with the fact that it was an accident. And that it cannot be changed. There is no great clock to unwind, no choice that can somehow miraculously be made again.

  But I can never absolve myself of the guilt. And the guilt isn't simply from Mike dying. The guilt is from all the implications, from the way those few seconds spun out and enfolded so many other lives. The reverberations seem to go on forever, like the ripples from an unsinkable stone. There are the hard, inner circles wrapping around Mike's parents and Mike's sister, whose lives were changed and ruined. His parents grieved until their deaths. And then there are the more distant ripples, encompassing all of his friends and my friends. It is a grief that they had as well.

  Since I became a public person, I've gotten many letters--letters from strangers, from mothers, aunts, cousins, teachers, and friends--asking if I could write a note of encouragement to a young driver who had been in a terrible accident. Each time, I've answered. I've told them that, although you will never get over what happened, there will come a time in your life when you can move on. And I've always suggested that they talk to the people whom they love. Or that they speak to a counselor or a spiritual or pastoral adviser. Sometimes the letters are to kids in situations where someone was drinking, but a lot of them are just like I was, an inexperienced, seventeen-year-old driver who didn't have a good concept of where I was in town, who didn't know how far I'd gone in the dark or how close I was to the intersection.

  But while I give this advice in my letters, I didn't do any of that. West Texas in 1963 was a time and a place where no one would have gotten a counselor. People in Midland did not think of psychologists or psychiatrists. I don't remember if our pastor, Dr. Guthrie, stopped by. He must have come to talk with Mother and Daddy. But I have no memory of it, no memory of anything but my own thoughts about that dark November evening.

  Most of how I ultimately coped with the crash was by trying not to talk about it, not to think about it, to put it aside. Because there wasn't anything I could do. Even if I tried.

  I lost my faith that November, lost it for many, many years. It was the first time that I had prayed to God for something, begged him for something, not the simple childhood wishing on a star but humbly begging for another human life. And it was as if no one heard. My begging, to my seventeen-year-old mind, had made no difference. The only answer was the sound of Mrs. Douglas's sobs on the other side of that thin emergency room curtain.

  Over dinner one night my dear friend Jim Francis shared a story of a mutual friend. This man had lost his son to suicide. One day in the summer of 2009, he was sitting in a men's shop in Dallas trying on a pair of shoes when a small boy, a special needs boy, came racing up to him and nearly knocked him off the bench with a hug. The boy's mother hurried up, apologizing profusely, and pulled her son away, only to have the boy launch at the man again. As she started to apologize a second time, the father looked up at her and said, "Please don't apologize. It's been a long time since I've had a hug from a boy."

  Jim cried as he told it. So did his wife, Debbie, and so did George and I. George, who lost his little sister Robin to the ravages of leukemia, and I, who will forever carry with me those four or five seconds on that blackened Midland road, and lovely Debbie and Jim, whose youngest son nearly drowned when he was two but who didn't die. He's in his thirties now, but mentally he is like a newborn baby. They have lived for thirty-four years with the grace of accepting, of not asking "why me?" of not seeking to blame, or becoming cynical, or being lulled into bitterness. Life's largest truth may be that everyone faces tragedy. Learning to accept those tragedies, learning to accept that life is riddled with events large and small, events that you may cause or that may happen to you, events that you can never control, is perhaps the hardest lesson of all. In that wrenching fact, I have faith that no one is ever alone.

  In the months ahead, Lee was full of memorials for Mike. He was remembered in the school annual. His teammates picked out a little metal cannon to salute him in the school courtyard. At the end of the school year, Regan and a couple of Mike's friends went to visit his parents. Mike's mother asked them all to sign her copy of his annual, as they would have done had he been alive.

  I stayed home from school for a week with my broken ankle and blackened eyes, but by mid-November, I was back at class. I walked the hallways with stiff tape wrapped around my ankle. Almost as soon as I returned, Kim Hammond, one of Mike's best friends, a boy who had been a pallbearer at his funeral, called and asked if he could nominate me for the Rebelee Court, which crowned the princesses and queens for Lee's senior program. (Midland High's homecoming court was called Catoico, for cattle, oil, and cotton, the three industries of Midland.) I said thank you and yes, although I felt about the farthest possible thing from a princess or a queen. It was a sweet gesture of unspoken forgiveness, and I have never forgotten. Quietly, I went back to my books. My mother started thinking about what might have happened if my father had never sold the Big House. My father worried about whether there had been anything unsafe about his Chevy Impala.

  But I already knew that the "what ifs" are fruitless. It's a futile exercise to go through the "Oh, if I only hadn't done that, then that wouldn't have happened."

  Two weeks and two days later, on November 22, President John F. Kennedy was riding in a preelection motorcade through Dallas when he raised his hand to wave to the crowd and a perfectly aimed bullet whistled through the air under that all-enveloping Texas sky.

  Traveling Light

  As a fourth-grade teacher at John F. Kennedy Elementary School, Houston, Texas, 1970.

  We knew something was wrong the moment the wooden door with the glassed-in window closed and our teacher, Mr. Carter, walked to the front of the room. Standing there, slump-shouldered, with a catch in his voice, he uttered the unimaginable words, the President of the United States had been shot dead in Dallas. Most people can remember whatever quiet, mundane task they were doing on that day when they heard the news that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. I was seventeen years old, sitting in my senior year History of Western Thought class at the precise moment when our own history shuddered and changed. I sat at my desk surrounded by the writings of some of the greatest minds that humanity has ever produced, and all I could feel was mute shock, utter horror, and a numbing disbelief. It was a Friday afternoon.

  That Sunday, with the TV droning in the background, Daddy came rushing in the side door from the carport while Mother was fixing lunch to tell us that someone had shot Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin. The report had just come over the car radio. He stood there in the kitchen shaking his head and saying how tragic it was, because now no one would ever really know what had happened. There would always be speculation. We would never be certain of the truth.

  For the rest of that day and the Monday following, I lay on the couch in our den and watched the entire presidential funeral ceremony, the inky mourning crepe looking somehow even blacker on the grain of the black-and-white TV. I was aching from Mike Douglas's death. Kennedy's assassination entwined itself with my own sense of tragedy until all I felt was a smothering sadness. I could never imagine meeting a president, but I had given Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage, to my high school boyfriend for Christmas the previous year. Now I was watching President Kennedy's flag-draped coffin roll by.

  My mother sat glued to the ceremonies as well. She would have seen Jackie Kennedy, her face obscured behind a voluminous black veil, and known that the first lady had already buried two babies, a stillborn girl and a premature boy, Patrick. That day, along with the country, she was burying her husband.

  There is a story, told forty years later by one reporter, that at a single Midland restaurant, Luigi's, an Italian pizza and pasta place where the tables were covered in red and white checked cloths, lunchtime diners applauded when they heard the news of Kennedy's murder. I never heard that.
Not at the time, not in the years afterward. Neither did any of my friends. The not so subtle implication behind the story was that Midland was fiercely conservative and more than a little racist, although many of the United States' greatest civil rights gains would come under a Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

  Certainly Midland in the early 1960s wasn't a racially integrated town. As in most of Texas, much of the South, and indeed the rest of the country, the schools were segregated, and there was an undercurrent of racism. The Midland of my early childhood had a few separate water fountains, each porcelain basin clearly marked "white" or "colored." But they were soon taken down. The prejudice that remained was subtler, a back-room or bridge-club type of prejudice, inflicted behind closed doors. No one burned crosses or scribbled epithets or deployed water cannons. And if some people spoke badly, most assuredly not everybody did. I never heard my parents talk in a racist way. When George once used a derogatory word that he had overheard, his mother smacked him for speaking "filth." In the early 1960s, there was a small African-American section in Midland but not yet a sizable Hispanic one. I didn't have any black friends, but I didn't have any way to make black friends, and they had no way to make friends with me.

  And I always knew that on the horrible night of November 6, the first car that had stopped to help and the family that had come running up to wrap me in the protective cover of their arms was African-American.

  Ultimately, it took federal intervention--starting with the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and continuing through years of school closings, National Guard encounters, and federal marshals dispatched to open barred doors--to change the schools. Attitudes changed even more slowly, because this wasn't just how Midland was, it was how much of the United States was, even places that had once been bastions of abolition, like Boston. Change had to come from the top, not the bottom.