Spoken from the Heart

by Laura Bush

  When the Taliban seized Kabul, they closed the university. Ten thousand students, including four thousand women, could no longer study. Schools for boys suffered too, because the majority of teachers were women. By December of 1998, UNICEF reported that in Afghanistan nine out of every ten girls and two out of every three boys could no longer attend school. Then the religious police began to patrol the streets, beating women who might venture out alone, beating women who were not dressed properly, beating women who so much as laughed out loud. Women were ordered not to wear shoes that made noise. The Taliban closed female bathhouses and hair salons.

  The repercussions for an already impoverished country were staggering. After half a decade of Taliban rule, 70 percent of the Afghan people were malnourished, one in four children would not live past the age of five, and mothers routinely died in childbirth. Old was age forty-five.

  The more I read, in books and briefing papers, and the more I listened to Condi Rice, to George, and to others, the more heartbroken I became. It was late, very late, but after years of repression, the United States needed to speak out on behalf of these women. And we needed to do more than talk; we needed to reach out and help them.

  I became passionate about the women of Afghanistan and their children, children who had been scarred not just by sharia law but by the near constant violence of Taliban attacks and civil war. According to reports from UNICEF, almost three-quarters of the children in Kabul had lost a family member during the years of conflict. Half of the children in the capital had watched someone be killed by a rocket or artillery, and many more had witnessed corpses and dismembered body parts scattered along city streets. Most no longer trusted adults, and most did not expect to survive themselves. On November 17, George was slated to give his weekly presidential radio address on conditions in Afghanistan, and his longtime advisor and now Counselor to the President Karen Hughes raised the idea that I speak for part of it. Karen had been with us since George's early days as governor. We valued her counsel, her creative thought, and her years of unselfish service. Her bright spirits made her a dear friend as well.

  George responded, "Why not have Laura give all of it?" And so I was slated to be the first first lady to give a full presidential radio address, and I was to tape it on November 15, the same day that Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putina would be leaving our Crawford ranch after their upcoming visit.

  The Putins were arriving in Washington, D.C., on the morning of November 13, the day that the U.S. ally, the Afghan Northern Alliance, captured Kabul as Taliban fighters fled in pickup trucks. George and President Putin were scheduled to have a working lunch in the White House's old Family Dining Room, on the first floor. I was hosting Lyudmila for a smaller lunch in the second-floor dining room. After lunch, we left for Andrews Air Force Base and Texas. The Putins would join us at the ranch the following afternoon after a stop in Houston.

  My staff, Cathy Fenton, our social secretary, and I had arranged the decorations. Outside, we had strung lights through the branches of the old live oaks, and in the dogtrot, we'd arranged round tables with orange cloths and pumpkin and hydrangea centerpieces. Tom Perini and his team would be barbecuing out of the backs of old-time covered chuckwagons. Everything was ready by noon. The Putins were scheduled to land at the ranch at 3:05 p.m. By one o'clock, it was raining; two hours later, the Putins got off Marine One in the middle of a thunderstorm. Our ranch is in one of the most arid parts of the country, and it rained almost the entire visit. George spent forty-five minutes driving President Putin around the ranch in our pickup truck, and fortunately they never got stuck in the mud. Rain blew through the screens to our porch, where we were to have cocktails before dinner. The staff was frantically moving tables and hunting for umbrellas minutes before we had to start greeting the guests. The cowboys cooked in the rain, and the cowboy band the Ranchhands played on the covered porch. The Putins walked from the guesthouse in the downpour.

  We started the meal with fried catfish and corn bread and then mesquite-grilled beef tenderloin, plus a birthday cake for Condi Rice. I had invited twenty people, all of whom we thought a Russian head of state might be interested in meeting, including ranch owners, athletes, and our friend the pianist Van Cliburn, who was the first person to win the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, at the height of the Cold War. He gave a toast to Putin in Russian. I seated the Russian president next to Alice Carrington, one of the heirs to the famous King Ranch in Texas. The Putins thought we had a large ranch at 1,600 acres. Then President Putin asked Alice how big the King Ranch is, and she told him 825,000 acres. The funniest part for me, after all my protocol briefings and binders, was that in Texas it's considered a real faux pas to ask someone how big their ranch is. But it was a perfectly natural question for the head of state of the largest nation in the world.

  Jenna came up from Austin. She speaks Spanish, and I sat her next to Lyudmila Putina, who does not speak English but does speak Spanish.

  The rain finally abated during dinner, and afterward, we walked outside to have coffee around a crackling bonfire. Vladimir Putin struck up a conversation with Don Evans, the commerce secretary, over the fire pit. Putin said, "You have such a short history. You only have two hundred years of history and look how far you have come. How have you done it?" We forget that Russian history dates back well over a thousand years, with centuries of czars and dynasties. Donnie looked at him and said the answer is simple, freedom, democracy. "Here in the U.S.," he added, "people are free to run their own lives."

  To us, it was a very simple statement of the fundamentals of American life, but George and I and the rest of the administration were never under any illusions about how hard a concept that is for the most powerful in Russia to grasp.

  For the remaining seven years, whenever George was scheduled to meet with Vladimir Putin, leaders from around the world would start calling the White House weeks in advance. First it would be the Baltic countries, then the Balkan ones. Nation after nation wanted George to deliver messages for them. Even Tony Blair would call and say, "You've got to tell this to Vladimir." George would go to the meeting with a string of messages from others. And he would have a few of his own as well.

  Both here and in Russia, he repeatedly chided Putin for cracking down on the press, telling the Russian president that his country had to have a free press, that a free press is essential for a democracy. "You need to have an independent press," George would tell him. And Putin would invariably reply, "Well, you control your press." George would shake his head and say, "No, Vladimir, I don't. I wish sometimes that I could control them, but I can't. They are free to say whatever they want. In our country, the press is free to write terrible things about me, and I can't do anything about it."

  But Russia is a country without those traditions, and with no memory of them, and many in Russia believed that the U.S. government did control our press. In fact, following a summit meeting, one of the first questions George got from a Russian newsman essentially was, How can you complain to President Putin about the Russian press when you fired Dan Rather?

  George worked hard to reach out to Putin in spite of the philosophical divide between them. The next morning at the ranch, the four of us had breakfast and then headed into Crawford, so the two presidents could make remarks to the press at the local high school. First-grade students had hung a banner that read "Howdy, Russian President Putin." Having world leaders visit our private home forged relationships; it helped to make it possible for George to deliver all those messages to Putin for so many years. And we quickly discovered that leaders from all over the world wanted to come to Crawford. When George invited Chinese president Jiang Zemin to "come and visit America," President Jiang indicated that George had invited him to be a guest at our ranch. A few months later, he arrived at our door. We entertained fifteen foreign leaders among the live oaks and wild grasses of Crawford.

  After lunch, the Putins departed, and I walked over to our old green clapboard house
to tape the president's weekly radio address. I had spent hours editing the draft of the address and going over every nuance with Karen Hughes. I was a little bit nervous, but I was also proud to be able to say something on behalf of the women of Afghanistan, who were threatened with having their fingernails pulled out if they wore so much as a coat of nail polish. I spoke of the Taliban's "degradation" of women and children, forcing them to live lives of poverty, poor health, and illiteracy. "The plight of women and children in Afghanistan is a matter of deliberate human cruelty, carried out by those who seek to intimidate and control. Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror--not only because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us." I wanted the address to be strong, because we needed to speak strongly. But I also wondered if anyone would be listening.

  On Sunday, the day after the address aired, I spent the afternoon in Austin with Jenna, doing all those mother-daughter things that I loved doing with my girls as they grew, including shopping. We stopped in the cosmetics section at one of the big department stores, and the women working behind the counter said something I never expected. They all said, "Thank you so much. Thank you so much for speaking for Afghan women." I was stunned. And for the first time, I realized the degree to which I had a unique forum as first lady. People would pay attention to what I said. I had always known that intellectually, but now I realized it emotionally.

  When I had put on the headphones and bent over the microphone to read the address, I had thought of those Afghan women, weighed down under their burkas, with nothing more than tiny mesh slits to uncover their eyes, hidden away from the world and having the world hidden away from them. They were truly powerless. At that moment, it was not that I found my voice. Instead, it was as if my voice had found me.

  "Grand Mama Laura"

  Upstairs in the private White House residence.

  (Tina Hager/White House photo)

  The eighty-one-foot-tall, eight-ton Norway spruce that towered over Rockefeller Center had arrived on November 9, strapped to a specially designed trailer, with a full police escort. The tree, donated by the Tornabene family of Wayne, New Jersey, required a giant crane to hoist it onto a steel platform located just behind the golden statue of Prometheus, overlooking the plaza's famed ice rink. For days the tree was encased in scaffolding as twenty-four electricians draped five miles of colored lights, thirty thousand red, white, and blue bulbs to be wrapped around its limbs and boughs. All that remained was for the giant evergreen to be lit.

  But even Andy Tornabene, who had grown up in Queens and from whose backyard the tree came, at one point had doubted that New York would light any holiday tree this year.

  As I made my way into the city just after dusk on November 28, I could sense the security corridor from blocks away, the sky blue NYPD street barricades, the phalanx of uniformed officers ringing Rockefeller Center, the mass of steel pens to hold back spectators, and the near total absence of traffic, as the usual sea of yellow cabs and shiny cars was shunted to far-off cross streets and distant avenues. New York still lived under an umbrella of fresh alerts; periodically, police and antiterror task forces would surround Grand Central or Penn Station. There were visibly armed National Guard soldiers walking through the airports and along the commuter rail platforms. A mournful silence seemed to reverberate through the city. The people were fewer, the sounds were quieter, the streets less brilliant and more subdued.

  Mayor Giuliani was waiting for me in the holding area, and there we stayed until given the signal to make our way outside. As I stood alongside New York's fire and police commissioners, and the performers, all of us cast brief wary glances up at the night sky. The tree-lighting ceremony was designed to honor the rescue workers and the victims of the 9-11 attacks, and some of their relatives and friends were there. One hundred thousand people filled the streets between Fifth and Sixth avenues. They came for hope; many had tears in their eyes. "America loves New York," I said, adding, "President Bush and I wish for all Americans a happy holiday season and a New Year filled with peace." Then, together, at 8:56 p.m., while television cameras beamed the signal live across the country, Rudy Giuliani and I held our breath ever so slightly and flipped on the lights. That night, the only sounds we heard in return were the cheers and applause from the crowd.

  Three days before, the United States had suffered its first casualty in Afghanistan. Johnny Michael Spann was killed during a riot by Taliban prisoners who launched an attack in the courtyard of a medieval fortress that had been commandeered to serve as a twenty-first-century jail. On that same day, more than seven hundred Marines set up camp in the desert south of the remaining Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. The Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was calling on his forces to "fight to the death."

  I had slowly started watching television again. In the first weeks after 9-11, the television had been a constant drone at night as I waited in the residence for George. For the most part, the news was a repetition of that initial horror. And we lived with threat assessments more disturbing than any ever spoken on the air. By October, to try to sleep at night, I kept the sets turned off. Finally, on November 12, I turned the TV on to catch up on the news before the Putins arrived. The first images I saw were of a horrible plane crash in Queens, an Airbus that had accidentally gone down just after takeoff. Two hundred and sixty passengers died, along with five people on the ground. I stared at the screen, numb, tears welling in my eyes. It was as if I were being transported back to September all over again. And I knew that for the families of these dead and the dead from 9-11, the ache would be harder, the missing greater as the holiday season began.

  I had chosen the theme for the White House's Christmas, "Home for the Holidays," back in the humid heat of summer, when everything was lush and green. Now that theme had a far greater meaning, for those who had lost loved ones, for those whose loved ones would be fighting overseas, and for the nation as a whole. One of the White House trees was decorated with snowflakes from third graders who attended school at the various military bases scattered around Washington, D.C. Carpenters, plumbers, and electricians who worked in the White House had built eighteen miniature replicas of former presidents' homes. Using original floor plans, they re-created John and John Quincy Adams's Peacefield, Lyndon Johnson's ranch, James Madison's Montpelier, George Washington's Mount Vernon, Ulysses S. Grant's and Abraham Lincoln's Illinois homes, and Woodrow Wilson's birthplace in Staunton, Virginia. Our pastry chef, Roland Mesnier, made a gingerbread house based on the original White House of 1800, before British troops attacked the city and the house burned practically to the ground. We also asked the nation's governors to select local artisans to create handmade ornaments representing a special historic home or structure in each state, using shades of white. We received cut-paper sculptures, fabric, and leather to adorn the Blue Room tree. One ornament was a little cotton cloud from which the Twin Towers rose, as if they had been transported whole to Heaven.

  The other trees scattered through the rooms and halls were draped in lights and frosted with shimmering snow. That season, the White House had the quality of stillness after a snow. Almost no one was allowed inside to see the decorations. On Monday, December 3, the threat assessments arriving in the West Wing were so great that George placed the entire nation on high alert for possible terrorist strikes. The Secret Service insisted that all public tours be canceled. Some of the guests we invited to White House Christmas parties turned us down; many were still too afraid to fly or to visit a city where terrorists had struck. I wore a red dress and walked cameras through the rooms for a video of the decor.

  With the absence of visitors, we worked on expanding the virtual White House, and in addition to the television special, the White House communications office created the "Barney Cam," a specially mounted camera that followed Barney and Spot through the decorated rooms and the grounds. Each year at Ch
ristmastime we debuted the footage for the young patients at Washington's Children's National Medical Center. One of our press aides, Jeanie Mamo, became an expert at launching bright plastic Christmas balls around the East Room, which Barney chased, slipping and sliding across the glossy waxed floors. In subsequent seasons, we developed more elaborate story lines and included celebrity guests. One Barney Cam video ended with Kitty serenely sitting on my lap. Unlike our canines, she steadfastly refused to mug for the camera.

  On December 10, we hosted the White House's first-ever Hanukkah party, which I had begun to plan in August. The Jewish Museum in New York lent us a century-old menorah for the candle lighting, and we had a catered kosher buffet. That holiday season and all others to come, we took special pride in two sets of parties, one for the Secret Service and their families--I loved watching year after year as new babies appeared and children grew older--and our final party of the season, for the residence staff. They were the ones who showed us every small kindness, who cared for us, who came to serve under every condition, and we are grateful for their generosity and constant, unflagging goodwill.