Spoken from the Heart

by Laura Bush

  By late May, St. Petersburg is light late into the night. Sundown is just before 11:00 p.m. At 9:15, the sky was still ablaze as we boarded a boat to cruise with the Putins along the Neva River. We dined on caviar as the sun slipped toward the western horizon on one side and the moon rose in the east. George looked at me and said, "Bushie, you are in Heaven." The translator immediately repeated it to the Putins, who gasped with pleasure.

  We said good night after a barrage of fireworks.

  The next morning, we toured the Kazan Cathedral, Russia's adaptation of the Basilica of St. Peter's in Rome and a monument to the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812, when captured French banners were placed in the cathedral. Inside the main basilica, there were no chairs. Worshipers stand as priests in long, flowing robes chant the liturgy. Under the Communists, the Kazan Cathedral had housed a museum of "History of Religion and Atheism." The museum remains, but the word "atheism" has been scrubbed away. From there, we made our way to the Grand Choral Synagogue, the second largest synagogue in all of Europe. It was built in the 1880s, with a special permit from the czar. Only select Jews, those with specific trades or advanced degrees, or those who had served in the military, were allowed to reside in St. Petersburg, and the synagogue's builders were told that they could not construct their place of worship near any churches or within view of any roads ever traveled by the czars.

  The Putins hosted a farewell tea for us at the Russian Museum. George walked into the room where elegant tables were laden with trays of pastries and coffee samovars had been meticulously arranged. He turned to Vladimir and asked, "Are we going to eat this food or just look at it?" The Russian leader answered, with a twinkle in his eye, "This is a museum." Everyone in the room burst out laughing.

  I did not go with George to the G8 Summit in June. It was held atop a mountain outside of Calgary, Canada, enveloped in a security bubble so tight that spouses were not invited. In Washington, my Secret Service detail would no longer allow me to go for a walk outside the White House grounds, which I had done early on some mornings. Camouflaged in a baseball cap and sunglasses, I would traverse the gravel paths crossing the National Mall or the canal in Georgetown. But now I was to walk on White House grounds. It was ironic that as we hosted an official event in honor of the two hundredth anniversary of the great western explorers Lewis and Clark, my own physical space was shrinking.

  Amid the uncertainty, we treasured the simplicity of our family life. For the girls' twentieth birthday the previous November, we had suggested that they invite twenty friends to Camp David for the weekend. George devised contests for the guests, including tennis, basketball, and bowling for the boys, and we put a karaoke machine in the main lodge so the kids would have fun activities all weekend. The girls stayed with us for holidays, breaks, and even some weekends, and I talked to my daughters on the phone almost every other day when I was home. On foreign trips, when they could accompany me, I found them to be wonderful companions. I looked forward to long flights and the hours of transatlantic mother-daughter time, chatting about friends and boyfriends, and whatever they found interesting. Echoing my path, Jenna was studying English and writing at Texas, while Barbara had chosen humanities at Yale.

  In our own lives, George remained the biggest homebody known to man. When either one of us traveled around the country, we always tried to make it a day trip, flying out at the crack of dawn and returning home in time to eat dinner side by side. Except for solo visits overseas, we seldom spent a night apart. Many evenings we had quiet dinners, just the two of us, in the residence. We spoke about our daughters, about baseball in the summer, about family, and about friends.

  But these respites could be measured in minutes; they never lasted long. There was, I realize now, a constant low-level anxiety that enveloped us each day in the White House after 9-11. We were always on watch for the next thing that might be coming. It was far more than simply scanning the skies; it was the threat reports, not merely from countries like Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran but from Yemen or North Korea or Somalia. It was earthquakes, tornadoes, or hurricanes. It was the constant knowledge that, in the span of thirty minutes or an hour, the world could change.

  The pace inside the White House was brutal, not simply that year but for the entirety of George's two terms. George would arrive in the Oval Office by 6:30 or 7:00 every morning; his immediate staff came in by 6:00 a.m.; his chief of staff, Andy Card, was often in by 5:00 a.m., and everyone worked deep into the evening.

  I remember vividly during 2002, when we would go to Camp David on the weekends, Condi Rice and Andy Card and his wife, Kathleene, would come along. Cabinet members frequently joined us as well. Condi and Andy would work the entire time, taking phone calls, reading papers, briefing George. Condi and I used to joke about her "inadvertent nap," the one she took when she was sitting on the couch to work and, from sheer exhaustion, fell asleep. Since the late 1990s, Condi had become like family. She traveled with us, joined us for dinner, and whenever she was in the room, her lively mind and sparkle were on full display. We are fortunate to have had not only her advice but her friendship.

  At Camp, our Navy mess chefs became experts at comfort food, like fried chicken and chicken-fried steak, which we seldom had at the White House. Sometimes, early in the morning, Condi, Kathleene, and I would walk the two-mile perimeter trail with the steep hill at the end that we nicknamed Big Bertha. But even when we talked, in some corner, all of our minds were still working. There was no letting go.

  In the late spring and early summer I attended the groundbreaking for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a preservation event for Louisa May Alcott's home in Concord, Massachusetts. I addressed an Early Learning Summit in Boise, Idaho, the third regional conference my office had helped to initiate after last summer's Early Childhood Summit, and I discussed the need to educate parents on creative ways for them to be their children's first teachers. I dedicated the Katherine Anne Porter home in Kyle, Texas, as a National Literary Landmark. At the White House, I had already hosted a conference on school libraries; now we were addressing character and community, gathering major leaders from character education programs across the nation to discuss what was working and what wasn't. Part of the conference focused on the increasing prevalence of service learning programs, in which students perform outside community service, often as a graduation requirement. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave the keynote address. But that entire summer it felt as if we were waiting, wondering where the next danger might lie, and whether the international community could persuade Saddam Hussein to disarm.

  On July 17, Poland's president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, and his wife, Jolanta, came to Washington for an official state visit. George and I had visited Poland the previous summer, and in one of my albums, I had a collection of photographs from the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw taken several days after 9-11. The entrance overflowed with flowers and notes that read, "We are with you." "We are all American."

  In the wake of 9-11, President Kwasniewski had helped mobilize central, eastern, and southeastern Europe to respond more aggressively to international terrorism and pursue terrorists. Although George had held more than fifty meetings with heads of state from around the world in the last eighteen months, this was just our second state dinner, and our first since September 11. State visits are precision displays, with everything organized down to the minute, and the protocol is almost as tradition-bound as the ceremonial opening of Parliament by the British monarch. That morning we hosted a formal arrival ceremony for the Kwasniewskis with four thousand guests on the South Lawn.

  As the final bars of the fanfare music, "Ruffles and Flourishes," sounded from trumpets on the Truman Balcony, George and I stepped into a small alcove outside the Diplomatic Reception Room. We stood there, completely still, barricaded behind two very tall, fully dressed Marine Guards until "Hail to the Chief" commenced. Then the guards parted and we began the walk down the red carpet to await our guests, who at th
at same moment were motoring up in their limousine. Military bands played the two national anthems; there was a twenty-one-gun salute, and the Revolutionary War-era Fife and Drum Corps marched past, playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Together George and Aleksander walked forward to review the U.S. troops representing all the military services, standing at attention in perfect formation. Afterward, both presidents spoke. At the conclusion we walked up the South Portico steps to the balcony and turned for a final wave before entering the Blue Room for an official receiving line. The two presidents departed to confer in the Oval Office; Jolanta and I retired to the Green Room for coffee. Between the arrival ceremony and the dinner preview for the press, and before the dinner itself, I slipped off to the National Cathedral for the memorial service for J. Carter Brown, the longtime director of the National Gallery of Art.

  The evening was every bit as ceremonial as the arrival; there was another official greeting, and full-dress members of the Joint Service Color Guard, representing the military services, the Army, Navy, and the Marines--a fourth member is from either the Air Force or the Coast Guard, which alternate events--led us in a formal procession down the grand staircase and to the East Room to greet our guests. After the receiving line, we proceeded to the State Dining Room for the official toasts and dinner. The largest change in state dinner protocol in recent decades had come forty years before, when Jackie Kennedy traded in the traditional long, horseshoe-shaped table for round ones. For the Kwasniewskis, the tables were decorated with red and white roses and daisies, in honor of the Polish flag. I had once heard the horrible tale of an official dinner where the flower arrangements had been in the colors of the guest nation's mortal enemy, and I was always deeply conscious of the flowers we chose. For the place settings, I had selected Nancy Reagan's red china and reproductions of Jackie Kennedy's West Virginia crystal; no one is able to use Jackie's original pieces, because too few remain. The glasses have been broken and chipped over the years; multiple glasses are lost at every party held, and the West Virginia glass blowers that once made them have long since shuttered their doors. Most crystal is now manufactured overseas. Fortunately, Lenox copied the Kennedy pattern, and it has continued to provide the White House with reproductions of Jackie Kennedy's glassware.

  China dinner services are almost as much of a challenge. The earliest presidents brought their own porcelain sets, usually made in France or England, and dutifully crated up the pieces and carried them back home when they left office. There are a few scattered plates and teacups remaining in the White House collection, and we did host small dinners in the upstairs residence with plates from the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and Lady Bird Johnson's lovely wildflower pieces. But only the most recent china services, Nancy Reagan's famous red and Hillary Clinton's pale yellow, have enough pieces to be used for a state dinner. Every dinner takes a small toll on the china collections. Before Hillary Clinton ordered her pale yellow pattern, she asked Lenox to rerun pieces from some older china services to fill in the gaps from near constant breakage and chipping. Using privately raised funds from the nonprofit White House Historical Association, I added another china service near the end of George's second term. Manufactured by Lenox, its green lattice design is based on the few pieces of James and Dolley Madison's china in the White House collection. I ordered 320 place settings, but the pieces arrived in small batches, and we never had the chance to host a full dinner with them.

  Three months of planning and preparation had gone into this dinner, but I had not planned on Jolanta wearing a long dress with a gauzy silk train. When we were walking into the State Dining Room, she stopped short. I stopped behind her, with an entire line of guests awkwardly pausing behind me. In a whisper I urged her forward, but she did not move. I spoke again, and at last she murmured, "I can't. You are standing on my dress."

  After the high precision and gloss of the state dinner, Jolanta and I spent the next day in Philadelphia, where we toured the Thaddeus Kosciuszko house, home to the famous Polish soldier who was instrumental in our own Revolutionary War. Many Polish-Americans still lived in the neighborhood. I hosted a luncheon for Jolanta at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and to commemorate the visit, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts offered to loan us a painting for the White House. I chose a Karl Anderson piece, painted by the brother of the writer Sherwood Anderson, best known for his Winesburg, Ohio. We hung it in our bedroom.

  The following week, I traded in my blush-colored tulle state dinner gown for jeans, a floppy hat, and hiking boots. My destination was Yellowstone National Park. I was meeting four of my childhood friends.

  Our first summer hiking trip had been to the Grand Canyon National Park, the year we turned forty. For three years in the 1990s, we had entered the lottery to stay at the tented campsites inside Yosemite National Park in California. But we were never picked. After George was elected president, I told my friends, "We finally won the lottery." In the summer of 2001, we at last hiked around Yosemite's gorgeous scenery. Then Ron Sprinkle, the head of my Secret Service detail and a former law enforcement ranger in Yellowstone, told me we had to visit his former national park. We stayed in rangers' cabins in the deserted backcountry and rode horses through a massive downpour one afternoon. We camped in a lone cabin on Peak Island, where an enormous old tree blew over and nearly landed on our roof, and in another spot where at dusk an awkward and skinny-legged teenage moose wandered past the five of us. We dipped our feet in hot, rushing creeks and watched as the mighty geyser Old Faithful spewed its water aloft. We hiked past the bubbling mud pots and gazed upon the forests where massive wildfires had blackened and scarred the trees, and where new, green saplings were now pushing their way up from the once-charred ground. With the cool tree canopy gone, the old forest floor was carpeted with wildflowers, blooming in the unexpected sunlight. We talked as we walked the trails and read poetry at night as the stars hung above us in the sky.

  I came to cherish these annual trips, not simply for the uninterrupted pleasure of friendship but for the chance to be out in nature, to be unencumbered by schedules, appointments, and the constant forward rush of time. We could pick up our friendships as if one year had not passed, as if we had all been together the month or week before. It is hard sometimes, for women especially, to steal time for friends. The demands on us from families, from jobs, from every other commitment are so strong and unrelenting. But friendship is what nurtures us. My friends were often my sustenance during the White House years. We could talk, laugh, and simply be. Sharing those trails renewed me, body and soul.

  I returned to Washington, and George and I began to contemplate the first anniversary of 9-11. On September 10, I spoke at the opening of the 9-11 exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. It was in the same building that housed the first ladies' inaugural gowns, including my own. Gathered with me among the invited guests were Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, and Pentagon rescue workers. The exhibition, "September 11: Bearing Witness to History," was a collection of objects and artifacts from 9-11, including the briefcase that belonged to a woman who worked on the 103rd floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She had miraculously escaped. There was a squeegee that had been used by maintenance workers to pry open an elevator in the Trade Center's North Tower and a metal crowbar used by a fireman to break through wallboard.

  Fire Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer, who had helped direct the rescue operations that morning, stood beside the crowbar and spoke of sending another firefighter up into the burning towers. "I told him to go up, go up with his company, but not to go any higher than seventy. . . . After I told him, he stood there, and in the silence we looked at each other, and he turned around and he walked over to his men and took them upstairs. That was the last time I saw that lieutenant. That lieutenant was my brother, Kevin." The crowbar on display was the one that Kevin had been carrying. It was found next to his body in the rubble.

  Near the crowbar, Joseph Pfeifer's helmet, boots, and coat we
re now also preserved. "My definition of a hero," Pfeifer said that morning, "is one of ordinary people doing the ordinary right thing at an extraordinary time." The exhibition also included a twisted piece of steel from the South Tower, a crushed fire truck door, and a partially melted television screen from the Pentagon. In its own glass display was the bullhorn that George had used, standing on the towers' rubble, to tell the rescue workers, "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

  There was also a section from one of the many walls of prayers that had dotted Manhattan, this one by Bellevue Hospital, where people had posted notes and pictures, searching for loved ones. I spoke of the love we will always share with the heroes, "both here and beyond."

  The following day, we began with a service at St. John's Church, across Lafayette Square from the White House. The Reverend Luis Leon, a refugee from Cuba sent to our shores by his parents to start a new life in freedom, delivered the sermon. He had fled on the frantic "Pedro Pan," or Peter Pan airlifts of children as Fidel Castro was seizing power. He would never see his father again. Leon spoke of that terrible morning of September 11. He likened it to a tattoo on our national soul. We who were alive on that morning were marked by it, indelibly and forever. "Mr. President," he said, "you never asked me why the terrorists did it. But I think they did it because this is a country where an immigrant can preach to the president."