Spoken from the Heart

by Laura Bush

  I had already invited the foundation's fund-raisers for breakfast at the White House on September 24, 2005, the day of the National Book Festival, to thank them. That morning I asked them to continue to raise money, to be given only to schools along the Gulf Coast; a basic elementary school library book collection costs $50,000, a high school collection at least $100,000. My friends Bill Marriott, Marshall Payne, Ruth Altshuler, and Pam Willeford agreed. They raised and we have given nearly $6 million to rebuild the library collections of these devastated schools.

  And the schools were devastated. In January of 2006, I visited Chalmette High in St. Bernard Parish, which had been used as an evacuation center because it was two stories tall. When the levees broke, it took less than ten minutes for rushing waters to reach the ceilings of local homes. Terrified residents climbed onto rooftops or went up to their attics as the waters kept rising. Some drowned. Those who could took to boats. One seventh grader at Chalmette, Erika Guidroz, told of being knocked out of her family's boat and into the rancid floodwaters. She also watched her father and another man peel back the metal roof on a home to save a woman and her grandson. The woman's husband and her own son, the boy's father, had already drowned. Some twelve hundred residents in St. Bernard had sought refuge in Chalmette High School. The school's entire first floor had flooded. Stranded residents and families had gathered on the second floor, eating boxes of Froot Loops cereal from the cafeteria and rationing small sips of water. There were disabled teenagers with ventilators. One elderly man died; a blanket was placed over his body.

  As the waters rose, evacuees began arriving by boat. The school's principal, Wayne Warner, and the school superintendent, Doris Voitier, lifted scores of refugees into the building by hoisting them through a second-story window using a yellow plastic chair. For three days the storm refugees huddled in the school, without working toilets or a sewer system, until rescue boats reached them. Some first responders were Canadian police officers, who had sailed down the length of the Mississippi River. In parts of St. Bernard Parish, other residents waited six days for rescue. They walked through waist-high floodwaters and were forced to break into local stores to find food. Ironically, in 1927, during the Great Mississippi Flood, St. Bernard and its neighboring parish of Plaquemines had been decimated by floodwaters on purpose. To save the city of New Orleans from the raging river, engineers stacked thirty tons of dynamite and blew a hole in the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana, to divert the water. In 1927 St. Bernard and Plaquemines were submerged while the city was saved. This time, none had been spared.

  When the waters receded, Doris Voitier and Wayne Warner began cleaning up Chalmette High School's second floor first. Even with families living in tents and out of the backs of trucks, they were determined to reopen their school. By the time I visited, they were still working to remove the mud on the first floor. Lost in the flooding were all 29,000 books in the school's library as well as a complete set of original Life magazines. This little high school had saved every issue since 1936, and they used them as primary sources to study history. I contacted Ann Moore, the chairman and CEO of Time Inc., and in May of 2006 she came with me when I returned to Chalmette. She brought an entire replacement set of original Life magazines, as well as a hundred large, framed classic Life photographs, including twenty-five from New Orleans, such as the iconic portrait of the jazz great Louis Armstrong. The Laura Bush Foundation also gave the school two grants to replace its collection of books and materials.

  Getting kids back to school, even if it was just a temporary school, was one of the most important things that could be done to return some normalcy to their lives. I met so many children who had lost everything but held on to a library book and, weeks or months later, brought the book back to their school librarian and nervously asked, What is the late fine? Books matter. Schools matter. And at times like this, I am again struck by how strong teachers, principals, and superintendents are. They matter in ways we often take for granted.

  It takes years, even decades, to recover from a disaster like Katrina, and the destruction spared no one in its path. In Mississippi, Democratic congressman Gene Taylor, who represents Gulfport and Biloxi, lost almost everything he owned. Republican senator Trent Lott and his wife Tricia's family home was destroyed. At the Congressional Ball that December, a few in attendance complained to the White House social staff that we were not serving shrimp--the gulf shrimp industry had been decimated by the hurricane and there were few shrimp to be had that year. But Congressman Taylor was reluctant to come with his wife because the ball is black tie, and most of their clothes, including their dress clothes, had been ruined along with their home. The Taylors arrived late and stayed off to one side, hesitating to go through the receiving line. My chief of staff, Anita McBride, spotted them and urged them to walk through, saying, "President and Mrs. Bush will want to see you." And we very much did.

  For eight years, every day that I was in the White House, I walked past the black lacquer screen that Nancy Reagan had added to the cavernous, yellow upstairs hallway to make it appear a bit smaller and more intimate in scale. Day after day Bar Bush and Hillary Clinton had passed it too, and there was great comfort in that continuity. To live in the White House is to live with your predecessors, with their decorating, their renovations, their furniture; Bill Clinton's Oval Office couches, re-covered, were now in our residence upstairs. George and I both pored over biographies and histories of the men and women who had inhabited these walls; our bedside tables were crowded with books about their lives. And there was a real solace to these constant reminders of what had gone before, to know that from within these walls Franklin Roosevelt had faced the Pearl Harbor attack, Abraham Lincoln had agonized over the Civil War, and tens of other presidents had struggled with their Congresses and their consciences as well. Our presidents have overwhelmingly been good and decent men, men who did the best they could under the circumstances they faced, with the knowledge they had. They loved their country and wanted the best for it and for the office they held.

  I loved the White House. I took great pleasure in the chance to keep and to conserve it, restoring the elegant silk wall covering in the Green Room that Jackie Kennedy had selected more than four decades before, or embarking on a project to renew the library and many of the ground-floor rooms, as well as to restore the Lincoln Bedroom, working on each space with White House curators and preservationists. I was delighted too whenever former presidents and their families returned. We had Nancy Reagan to the White House on several occasions, sometimes to stay overnight in the Queens' Bedroom. We hosted a ninetieth birthday party for Gerald Ford. And in the fall of 2005, Lynda Johnson Robb called to tell me that her mother, Lady Bird Johnson, would be making what was probably her last trip to Washington, D.C. I gladly invited her to the White House. I had always admired Lady Bird, the first Texas first lady, and had been so proud that she had recognized the great natural beauty of our home state and nation. When we drive our vast highways, past waving grasses and blooming flowers, acres of bluebonnets or black-eyed Susans or Queen Anne's lace, that is the legacy of her touch, of how she worked to beautify America with native plants and wildflowers.

  A series of strokes had left Lady Bird unable to speak or walk. I met her in her wheelchair with Lynda at the South Portico. Joining me was the retired White House maitre d', Wilson Jerman, who had worked under President Johnson, and when the two of them saw each other, they fell into each other's arms. We wheeled Lady Bird inside to the Vermeil Room, so she could see her portrait hanging above the carved mantel. Her face broke into the most beautiful smile. When I began redoing the Vermeil Room on the ground floor, I had asked the painters to adjust the color of the walls to more closely match the pale gold-yellow of the dress Lady Bird is wearing in her portrait, which also blends with Jackie Kennedy's pale and elegant column dress in her portrait on the adjoining wall, so the room is all of a piece.

  When we took Lady Bird up to the State Floor to see the portrait of her hu
sband, she reached her arms out as if to touch him. And as we passed through the rooms, she would put her hands together and clap lightly or utter a bit of gasp when she saw a piece of furniture or a painting that she remembered.

  By 2007, when the U.S. Department of Education building was renamed in honor of Lyndon Johnson, who had signed some sixty education acts as president, Lady Bird was too frail to travel to Washington. George invited her daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren to the bill signing. Inside the Oval Office, he placed a call to Texas so Lady Bird could listen to the ceremony. George said, "I'm signing this bill right now, Lady Bird." Then we had the whole Johnson family up to the residence so that Lynda and Luci, now long grown, could see their old rooms and show their children and grandchildren the home where they had once lived.

  The months of travel during the 2004 reelection campaign had given me time to reflect, and as I moved about the country, I began to consider what I would like to work on if George won a second term.

  For years I had known that, as a nation, we are not focusing on boys the way we should. The statistics tell a particularly bleak story: Boys are more likely to drop out of high school than girls; boys are more likely to have a learning disability; fewer boys than girls attend college--girls are soon expected to make up 60 percent of all college undergraduates; fewer young men than young women attend graduate school. Boys are much more likely to be incarcerated and to get into trouble for drug and alcohol use. In the last forty years, the nation has entirely rethought how we raise girls, fostering their belief that they have every opportunity. But we have not given that same thought to boys; they are still locked in traditions as much as our daughters were two generations ago. And as they grow into men, the importance of their role as fathers is often demeaned. We expect men to provide financial support, but many of their other skills have been marginalized. They are too often viewed as the television caricatures of bumbling, hapless people, not as vital nurturers.

  Yet that is very far from the truth. Since I was a young child, I had seen the difference that fathers made, in my life and others. I remember my second-grade friend Georgia, whose own father had died, and how my father would take her and me to the father-daughter events at school or with the Girl Scouts. And I remembered the many boys I met on school visits or during other events, such as the twelve-year-old in Austin who talked to me about not having a dad to play catch with and do the things that dads do. As he spoke, he struggled with the words; he felt the loss of a father so deeply. And of course, I had seen the consequences of absent fathers when I taught and worked in Dallas, Houston, and Austin. When you are missing a parent, you live with a special sadness for your entire life.

  I knew the statistics, I knew the stories, and in August of 2004, I decided that if George won, I would start a special White House initiative to focus on boys. By January of 2005, I had expanded that idea to include troubled and at-risk girls as well, but the major focus remained on boys. George announced the Helping America's Youth initiative in his 2005 State of the Union speech. The initiative was my responsibility to lead. My goals were several: to raise awareness about the problems young people face and to motivate caring adults to connect with our nation's young people in their families, schools, and communities. I also wanted to examine the myriad of federal programs for at-risk youth, scattered across twelve departments as diverse as defense, justice, education, and health and human services. Each agency gives millions of dollars in grants every year to programs that serve youth. But sometimes programs duplicated each other, or the effect was unfocused or uncoordinated, and the different agencies did not always communicate with one another. As part of Helping America's Youth, my staff and I created one interagency working group, bringing together all these agencies and government entities so this disconnect would change.

  Almost immediately that winter, I began traveling the country to visit some of the most innovative and daring private programs focused on at-risk youth, such as a Chicago program that cut shootings by 68 percent in one police district and the largest gang intervention program in the nation, in Los Angeles. Over the next four years, I would do fifty separate events around the nation, focused solely on Helping America's Youth.

  Starting in the winter of 2005, my staff and I also began planning a major conference, to be held in October at Howard University, a historically African-American university chartered in 1867 and located in Washington, D.C. We gathered over five hundred civic leaders, educators, faith-based and community service providers, teen experts, and parents to highlight the most serious problems facing American boys and youth--and to showcase successful solutions. In this way, individual communities would not have to keep reinventing the wheel. The thought was, where success stories exist, let's find them and share them, so that more children and teens have a chance. We invited people from all political persuasions; this is an issue beyond politics.

  On the day before the Howard University conference, I sat for an interview with the New York Times reporter Jason DeParle. Jason's beat was poverty and welfare, and on the campaign trail the previous year, I had read an article he had written for The New York Times Magazine about a young man named Kenyatta Thigpen, who was trying to turn his life around. Ken had been a drug dealer and pimp who had done time in jail, but now he had a three-year-old son, and he was determined to be a good parent. He was trying to become the father that he had never had, even driving a pizza delivery car at night so that he could be with his boy during the day. I had met Ken, his girlfriend, and his son in March during a visit to the Rosalie Manor Community and Family Services Center in Milwaukee. When we met, I told him that this article about his life and struggles had helped crystallize my thinking about ways to reach out to the young people who are most in need. Now, as we prepared to open the Howard University conference, where I had invited Ken to speak, I was also eager to meet the reporter who had first written about him.

  I had long ago resigned myself to what was written about me in the press. First ladies generally have an easier time than presidents, but that doesn't exempt them from criticism. In the beginning, much of the commentary focused on how I looked. Whereas Hillary Clinton was mocked for her hairstyles and headbands, I was told, "Laura Bush is begging for a makeover" and "She's no Jackie O." On January 15, 2001, before George had even taken office, The New York Times wrote, "Some historians predict that the first lady she may come to resemble most is Mamie Eisenhower . . . whose division of labor was simple: 'Ike runs the country and I turn the lamb chops.' And," the Times continued, "Mamie wasn't such a great cook either, but understood the symbolic need to look as if she were a great cook," thus managing to zing me and Mamie Eisenhower in the same line.

  In March of 2001, The Washington Post asked: "Everybody wants to know: Is she publicly genteel and privately tart? Is she smarter than he is? Does she work to make herself somehow smaller next to him?" By George's second term, it was lines like The Boston Globe's "Maybe Laura Bush will finally break out of the plastic." I was used to all of this. It comes with the job.

  I was also used to questions that began with negative poll numbers about George, and then went on to ask "How does that make you feel?" such as when Ed Henry of CNN said, "But you know what people are saying, which is that your favorability rating in the latest CNN poll is 68 percent, about twenty-two points higher than your husband. . . . Does that annoy you?" Or the reporter who began our interview by asking me if I had ever Googled myself, then proceeded to discuss nasty entries about me that popped up on a Google search. I was used to having my words reinterpreted, as when, on my July 2005 Africa trip, I was asked if I wanted George to name a woman to Sandra Day O'Connor's soon-to-be-vacant spot on the Supreme Court. "Sure," I said, "I would really like for him to name another woman. I know that my husband will pick somebody who has a lot of integrity and strength. And whether it's a man or a woman, of course, I have no idea." But the headline was "First Lady Wants New Female Justice," as if I were pointedly instructing George and dra
wing a line in the sand.

  But I never expected what would happen on the afternoon of October 26, when I sat down with Jason DeParle in my office in the East Wing. In a tone that was adversarial and more than a touch offensive, he began by asking, "So what's a nice woman like you doing with a guy like him?" Meaning Ken Thigpen. It was demeaning to me, and it even seemed demeaning to Ken. I thought it radiated cynicism, as if Jason did not believe in the sincerity of Ken's efforts to choose a different path for himself and his son.

  In these exact words, Jason later said, "One of the people wrote, this is a Saturday Night Live skit, that people--you're vulnerable to people--being a wealthy woman in the White House, vulnerable to people rolling their eyes and making fun of your ability to talk to gang members. What do you think about that? Did that--does that go through your mind?" And then I recounted yet again that I began my adult career as a twenty-one-year-old teacher working with predominantly African-American kids in inner-city schools. It was not a new interest. It had been my interest for nearly forty years, while I taught and while George was governor. But Jason kept on trying to bait me, saying, "Well, that's what so interesting about your association with Ken. You're not put off that he was a drug dealer or a pimp in his earlier life?" At that point I was incredulous. The assumption by this reporter was that he knew all there was to know about me, and that of course, I couldn't be, wouldn't be, interested in anyone who was different from me. I had already spent hours talking with ex-gang members. I was happy to meet Ken.

  Jason DeParle's tenor suggested that he saw my efforts as some kind of a joke. His article after the conference was no better. It opened by smugly saying that I was "wealthy and white," while Ken was "poor and black." As it happens, Jason DeParle himself is wealthy and white, but does that disqualify him from writing about poverty and African-American welfare mothers?