by Laura Bush
I was so proud of the young women Barbara and Jenna had become, and to see how much they wanted to help their father. Both of them knew the world that was visited on presidential children. They had experienced its many privileges, the thrills of foreign travel, the glamour of meeting heads of state. But there are sacrifices as well, starting with the heightened scrutiny of their own lives. A few times they had strangers accost them on the street and scream profanity-laced epithets about their father and their family. They did not tell me about it when it happened, only much later. They knew the strains that George was under; they wanted to protect us. I would not wish what was said to them on any presidential child, or the child of any candidate for public office. But I fear that we have crossed a personal boundary in American political life, a boundary that we may not be able to recross. And the first crossing of that boundary began in the final month of the 2004 campaign.
The 2000 and 2004 national campaigns had a dividing line question. It was invariably a question on a social issue where the press made a concerted effort to find places where my views might diverge from my husband's. During the 2000 race, the media questions usually led, in various guises, back to the issue of abortion. Lisa Myers of NBC was the first to raise it, in the summer of 2000. The day before the 2001 inauguration, Katie Couric went further: Did I want Roe v. Wade to be "overturned"?
Hillary Clinton had been outspoken about White House policy and often commented on political decisions and politics. For eight years she had been a highly visible advocate in her husband's administration, so there was a belief on the part of the media that, even though I was not an elected official, they were entitled to ask me about policy, and also a curiosity about whether I would weigh in on policy with George. There was, from the start, a desire by some in the press and many of the pundits to discover any points of disagreement between us. It was an odd sort of Washington parlor game; I should have recognized it when I got the very first abortion query.
I knew the Roe v. Wade question was coming; Katie had already asked me two other questions about abortion in the minute before. I thought of Barbara's and Jenna's shock when, as young girls, they first learned what abortion is. They knew how much George and I had longed for children, how much they were wanted. Talking with them around our small kitchen table, I, who had come of age during the bitter fights over Roe v. Wade, was also a bit shocked at their surprise and disbelief.
On the issue of abortion, I have always been struck by the deep divide between the sides. And how rarely the alternative of adoption is raised. We have so many friends and family members who found their children through adoption; George and I were fully expecting to be one of those couples as well. Today, for women in their twenties, thirties, and forties, infertility is the issue that is the most personal to them; it is the private struggle that breaks their hearts.
We are a nation of different generations and beliefs, seeing issues through different eras and different eyes. While cherishing life, I have always believed that abortion is a private decision, and there, no one can walk in anyone else's shoes.
When Katie Couric raised the issue of Roe v. Wade, I knew George's views, and I knew what the federal law is. I also knew the religious objections and the personal anguish of women on both sides. The simplest interpretation of her question was, Did I, as an incoming first lady, want to start off my husband's term by declaring that an existing Supreme Court ruling should be overturned? But the issue is so much more complex than that. Those were the split-second thoughts that filtered through my mind. Finally, to the question Did I think Roe v. Wade should be overturned? I answered no, and of course, that one word became the lead headline.
In 2004 the social question that animated the campaign was gay marriage. Before the election season had unfolded, I had talked to George about not making gay marriage a significant issue. We have, I reminded him, a number of close friends who are gay or whose children are gay. But at that moment I could never have imagined what path this issue would take and where it would lead.
Over twenty-four years, I had been at every Republican convention: Detroit, Dallas, New Orleans, Houston, San Diego, Philadelphia, and now New York. Once again the entire Bush family joined us, making it in part a mini-reunion of siblings, in-laws, cousins, and children and grandchildren. The Republican National Committee had chosen New York as its site in part to make a defiant stand against the terrorists. They wanted to show the world that the city had rebounded and that political leaders were not afraid to pack the hotels and eat in the restaurants. Being in the city reminded me how completely our country came together after 9-11, when for a time personal passions were put aside and we had a common care and a common purpose. Now I began to feel the country separating along new seams.
The campaign was highly personal for me in other ways too. In addition to my girls, I traveled with some of the families who had lost their loved ones on the morning of 9-11. Cheryl McGuinness, the widow of the copilot Tom McGuinness, whose hijacked plane had been flown into the World Trade Center, campaigned with me, as did David Beamer, father of Todd Beamer, one of the heroes of Flight 93. They did not, in the heat of a campaign, want the threat of terrorism to be forgotten.
Amid the rallies, speeches, and debates, George and I never forgot the sacrifice of our own troops at war. On almost every swing across the United States, George met with families who had lost sons or daughters, husbands or wives, or fathers or mothers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many times I joined him; sometimes I visited with the families on my own. We met in stadium holding rooms and also on nearby military bases, any location that would give us a bit of privacy. We were there to thank and comfort them, to make sure that they were getting everything they needed from the Department of Defense or Veterans Affairs. But mostly we came to listen. Many of the families would show us photos, would tell us stories of the loved ones they had lost. They talked about a son's favorite sports teams, what position a daughter had played in high school. They talked about a brother's hobbies or pets, what a husband had said when he held his newborn son or daughter for the first time. They wanted us to know their loved ones as living people and to know the warmth and value of their lives. And I was struck by how similar their losses were to the losses of the families of 9-11. We came away humbled by these families' courage and sacrifice. There is no compensation for such a loss; we carried their stories in our hearts.
The same was true of our visits to the wounded at Walter Reed, Bethesda Naval, and Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. We would see soldiers and Marines who had lost limbs and were asking to return to duty. We saw their spouses and small children clustered around their bedsides, and middle-aged mothers who had left their jobs and driven across half the country or flown from home with little more than the clothes on their backs to rush to the hospital and be there for their injured sons or daughters. We saw the hideous burns of IED bombs, and soldiers and Marines whose brains had been damaged beyond full repair. We saw their suffering. And I always knew when George had gone alone to visit the wounded or the families of the fallen. He was quiet, a deafening kind of quiet. And the grief shone in his eyes.
The last presidential debate of the 2004 election was held in Tempe, Arizona, on October 13 and was moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS News. Bob is from Texas and has always been a straight shooter. His brother, Tom, a Democrat, had been one of our partners in the Texas Rangers, and George named him ambassador to Australia and later to Japan.
I was nervous before this debate, just as I was before every debate. Senator John McCain and his wife, Cindy, were with us in the holding area. The night before, for a brief respite, they had taken us to their favorite Mexican restaurant in Phoenix.
When George sat down to collect his thoughts, John, meaning well, went over and said, "Relax. Relax," which of course I knew would most likely distract George and make him anything but relaxed. George walked out onto the stage in a dark suit, white shirt, and red tie. John Kerry was wearing the same thing, exce
pt a slightly darker red tie. It was as if they had read the same handbook, what to wear to a debate. Jenna and Barbara were sitting on either side of me. We all heard Bob say, "Both of you are opposed to gay marriage. But to understand how you have come to that conclusion, I want to ask you a more basic question. Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?" John Kerry began his answer by saying, "I think if you were to ask Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as." Beside me, Jenna and Barbara gasped. They were utterly stunned that a candidate would use an opponent's child in a debate. John Kerry's statement did not seem like some off-the-cuff remark. His running mate, John Edwards, had also mentioned Mary during his vice presidential debate with Dick Cheney, the week before. Lynne Cheney was rightly furious to see her daughter be used by these men in a calculated attempt to score political points. Lynne called it "cheap and tawdry," and it was.
Seven days later I was the one in the campaign spotlight. In a brief interview, Teresa Heinz Kerry was asked by USA Today if she would be different from me as first lady. These are the trick questions of politics. They may seem benign coming off a reporter's lips, but they are minefields for whoever answers. Teresa began by saying, "Well, you know, I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her, which is good." Had she ended at that sentence, there would have been no headline. But instead she continued, "But I don't know that she's ever had a real job--I mean since she's been a grown-up." Of course, Teresa had no idea that I had worked as a teacher and a librarian from 1968 until I married George, in November of 1977. Her husband's campaign issued an apology the same day. I was never offended. But from then on, at political rallies, I would see women holding signs: "I never did anything either, I'm a teacher" or "I don't do anything either, I'm a librarian."
Although the network news exit polls predicted that John Kerry would win, they were wrong once again. George and Dick Cheney won reelection by over 3 million votes.
In those months together out on the trail, we grew even closer as a family. And the 2004 race would ultimately add to our little foursome. During the campaign Jenna met another campaign aide, a young man from Virginia named Henry Hager. In May of 2008, they would marry under a sunset sky by the little lake at our ranch.
When Bill and Hillary Clinton entered the White House, Saturday Night Live debuted a few particularly cruel skits aimed at their then twelve-year-old daughter, Chelsea. The Clintons took a hard line, and the press was shamed into leaving Chelsea alone. The press did largely the same for Barbara and Jenna, although reporters from the tabloids and from more mainstream publications frequently called their friends, trying to entice them to talk about the girls. None ever did. But a postscript to the 2004 campaign was that it changed, perhaps irrevocably, how the families, especially the children, of national candidates are treated. The strategy of making Mary Cheney's private life an issue failed with the voters in November of 2004. But in the years since, it has become acceptable to mock candidates and their families, and other elected officeholders, in highly personal ways; David Letterman feels free to ridicule Sarah Palin's teenage daughters, and the audience laughs. That is the legacy of the 2004 campaign.
For the holidays that year, I chose the theme of seasonal music, and scattered across the White House we had scenes depicting our favorite songs, from "Frosty the Snowman" to "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." In the front hallway, we created our own winter wonderland of snow-flecked trees with glittering icicle lights, a look that Nancy Reagan from sunny California had also loved. The Secret Service allowed us to resume tours, and some 44,000 people were able to come through the house to see the decorations. We hosted another 9,000 guests for the receptions, among them many military children and personnel.
We were at Camp David for Christmas Day when, deep under the Indian Ocean floor, the tectonic plates shuddered and the seabed cracked in the second largest earthquake in recorded history.
The entire planet vibrated from its force. Above, in the seawater, the energy from the quake unleashed a series of waves. The water began rushing toward shore, traveling as fast as an airplane, at speeds of some five hundred miles per hour. Off the coastline the pace of the water gradually slowed. Its power changed from speed to height, until it formed a wall of water that was in some places more than ten stories tall. In Thailand people on the beach saw the ocean race back, sucked into the tidal force of the wave. Then the water rushed forward. When it reached land, it crashed with the force of a small nuclear explosion. The tsunami was as high as one hundred feet, and it devastated not just southern Asia but the East African coast as well. Ultimately, more than 200,000 people in fourteen countries were killed. Thousands were drowned; many were sucked into the giant undertow and washed away. George and I watched the early television footage in horror, and he immediately asked his father and Bill Clinton to spearhead a fund-raising and relief effort in the United States. American citizens contributed more than $1.8 billion, and the U.S. government dispatched a total of $841 million in aid. Day after day we heard the stories of devastation: villages where only a few residents remained alive, survivors who clung to palm trees and waited with broken legs and arms, husbands and wives, parents and children of whom one remained and one was swept away.
There were no early warning systems for tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, just as there are none for earthquakes. But for other natural disasters, we could be confident that warnings could go out hours or even days before they arrived at our shores. In 2004 alone, four hurricanes had hit Florida in a period of six weeks. Two were Category 3 hurricanes, and one was a Category 4, the worst storm to arrive on the U.S. mainland since 1992. Forty-five people in six states died as a direct result of those four storms. Always, though, most of the people in their paths had fled to safety.
On January 6, George and I held a black-tie sixtieth-anniversary dinner for Ganny and Gampy. We had begun preparations for it before the election, not knowing if we would be packing to leave the White House or planning to stay. The singing Army Chorus performed, led by the moving bass singer, Alvy Powell, and we toasted Bar and Gampy's extraordinary marriage. One of their longtime friends, David Rubenstein, raised his glass and noted that Barbara and George Bush were the first presidential couple to reach the milestone of sixty years of shared life.
On her visit Bar also replaced her official White House portrait. She had never liked the image that had been painted of her; she and I both thought that it was flat and dull. When Bar mentioned this to the head White House usher, Gary Walters, he said with characteristic pragmatism, "Why don't you do something about it?" So Bar had a second portrait painted, and this one did capture her sparkle and wit. We proudly watched as her new and improved portrait was hung, proving that even first ladies can have a second act after they have supposedly been "immortalized."
Inauguration Day 2005 dawned cold and snowy. A light dusting fell over the Capitol, coating the dull winter grass in white. By the time George stepped onto the platform, a dazzling sun had broken through, but the air was still cold. Gampy spent the afternoon in a White House tub, trying to warm up. I later heard that the German ambassador, a big fan of Alpine skiing, described that morning, sitting in the shady section for diplomats, as "the coldest I have ever felt." I felt the cold too, but I was focused on George's words. His second inaugural address was a stirring discussion of freedom, not our unique American vision of freedom but the concept of freedom at its most fundamental. "America," he said, "will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies."
He spoke of our own nation: "You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs. Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself--and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character."
George believes in the capacity of human bei
ngs to change their lives and the lives of others for the better. He believes in the generosity of the human spirit. And he believes that everyone, no matter what his or her circumstances, deserves a chance. I believe it as well. His inaugural words and ideals would inspire me in the four years to come.
My mother missed the family inaugural portrait. When I went to her room to get her, she was standing out in the hallway, not fully dressed, with rollers still in her hair. I knew at that moment that I should have had someone with her the whole time; the independent, confident woman who had been at the 2001 inauguration was gone. Travel was hard for her. She could no longer get on or off the plane unassisted. She visited less frequently during our second term, and when she came, my longtime Midland friend Elaine Magruder accompanied her.
In April of 2004, before the campaign had kicked into high gear, I'd cleared my schedule and gone home to Midland to help Mother move out of the last house that Daddy had built for her. Together, Mother and I packed up her belongings. As an only child, had I waited, I would have been doing it alone. We laughed over what we found in boxes or in closets. She moved her best things into her apartment in her new retirement home. The rest we gave away or I sent to Crawford. Mother was still thrifty too, cutting down "perfectly good" draperies to fit in her new, small living room. We hung her pictures on the walls and arranged her dwindling collection of furniture for what I knew would be the last time.
Two months later I was reminded again of the passage of time when President Ronald Reagan died and we sat with Nancy Reagan in her grief. I listened to the words of praise from many who had once mocked President Reagan. In the intervening years, they had reassessed his life and his legacy. Now he was seen as the man who had stood up to the Soviet Union and begun the end of the decades-long nuclear stalemate that was the Cold War. In those June days following his death, Reagan was hailed as a great statesman by many commentators, political opponents, and historians who had derided him during his lifetime.