Spoken from the Heart

by Laura Bush

  There are hardworking, stellar members of the press who cover the White House. They are highly dedicated to their work under demanding and difficult conditions. Two journalists, NBC News' David Bloom and The Atlantic magazine's Michael Kelly, had died covering the early days of the Iraq War, David of a blood clot, and Michael in a vehicle accident.

  Many regional reporters from outside Washington also did their homework and were quite fair. On the national stage, I was always happy to do interviews with the highly professional Jonathan Karl, Robin Roberts, and Diane Sawyer of ABC News; as well as Deb Riechmann of the Associated Press; Ann Curry, Matt Lauer, and David Gregory of NBC News; and Greta Van Susteren and Chris Wallace of Fox News. And in the early months and years after 9-11, the snide remarks about my looks largely evaporated. There were far bigger things to discuss. It was the press who had graciously called me the "comforter in chief."

  But as in every White House, from the beginning some in the media came with preconceived notions and an adversarial point of view. Some of it was sloppiness, reporters who didn't know an issue and got basic facts wrong. But some of it was bias, where journalists, rather than being objective, could not put their own emotions and assumptions aside. Jason DeParle was a classic example of a reporter coming with his story already written.

  And how some journalists saw me often had very little to do with me and very much to do with how they perceived George. What was written and said about him was far worse.

  The misperceptions about George were manifested in many ways, large and small. I remember interviewing in February of 2004 with Elisabeth Bumiller, then the New York Times' White House correspondent. She had just written a piece about George and John Kerry both being members of the same secret society at Yale. At the end of the article, Elisabeth repeated a previously circulated story about George's dad appearing at his son's dorm room door and telling George to join his old society and "become a good man." But the story wasn't true. Gampy was a congressman at the time. He wasn't concerned about whether George joined a Yale secret society or not; he certainly didn't make a special trip to New Haven to speak to George. At the end of our interview, I asked Elisabeth about the article, and it was clear from her reply that she had never checked the story herself. But apparently the anecdote was just too good not to use. That was the problem. While the truth may not be as interesting, it is the truth.

  For me, the greatest casualty of this media cynicism was what the press frequently would not cover: stories of amazing people doing extraordinary things across America. The people I met and places I visited as part of my Helping America's Youth initiative inspired me as first lady.

  In April of 2005, I traveled to Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles. Founded in 1988 by Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest, Homeboy is the largest gang intervention program in the nation. Los Angeles County is home to eleven hundred gangs, with an estimated eighty-six thousand gang members. Each year Homeboy opens its doors to twelve thousand gang members from eight hundred separate gangs. If a gang intervention program has a 30 percent success rate, it is considered effective. The University of California-Los Angeles puts Homeboy's success rate at 80 percent. The program has given tens of thousands of gang members new lives.

  "Father Boyle would ride his bicycle into the middle of our gang fights," one of the young women working at Homeboy told me in 2005, shaking her head in disbelief. But Father Boyle couldn't ride into the middle of every gang fight. He designed Homeboy to give ex-gang members, many of whom have criminal records and very little formal education, a fresh start. His motto, he told me, is "Jobs, jobs, jobs," and his belief is that if gang members could be taught work skills and could get good jobs, they would choose a different path. Although drug dealing may look lucrative, Father Boyle contends that many of the young men and women standing on street corners or working out of neglected buildings live with enormous anxiety. They fear being shot, being arrested, being robbed. They fear the people they buy from and the people they sell to. But they don't know anything else. Getting out is, in fact, a relief.

  Homeboy Industries operates five businesses and a solar-panel installation training program, all staffed with ex-gang members. Homeboy also helps to provide job training and placement, even things as basic as how to behave on the job and how to dress. Young people in the program who are not ready for the private work world are given jobs in the Homeboy businesses, where they can learn everything from landscaping and T-shirt silk screening to baking and working in restaurants and food service. They learn how to take direction from a supervisor, how to get along with co-workers, and how to develop a work ethic. Father Boyle's program provides mental health counseling, alcohol and drug abuse treatment, anger management programs and domestic violence classes, ways to get a GED high school degree, and help for people who have recently been released from jail and need to make the transition from detention to a free life. One other major component of Homeboy is gang-tattoo removal. Sitting in his spare office with a simple desk, Father Boyle told me of one young man who came to him when Homeboy was relatively new and said, "I've got a huge tattoo on my chest that I want removed." Father Boyle thought for a moment and then replied, "Don't worry. You can wear a shirt. Tattoo removal hurts. No one will see it." The young man answered, "My son will."

  Thousands of the young men in the program are covered in gang tattoos. Father Boyle has convinced twelve Los Angeles doctors to remove those tattoos for free; these twelve doctors conduct four thousand tattoo removal treatments each year.

  Father Boyle was one of the people I invited to the conference at Howard University. He came and brought some of his ex-gang members. It was their first plane trip and the first time they had ever worn suits. After the conference I invited them to a reception at the White House. Over the years Father Boyle would travel to Washington with other ex-gang members, and we always made sure that they could get a White House tour. Young men who had been in gang fights and had even spent time in jail could learn that, having started down the path to change their lives, they were welcome in the most prominent home in the nation.

  There were so many other remarkable programs across the nation. Dr. Gary Slutkin, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Chicago, had spent most of his career combating tuberculosis in San Francisco, cholera in Somalia, and AIDS in Uganda with the World Health Organization before he returned home to Chicago. He thought he was done with public health crises until he realized that in some Chicago neighborhoods 20 to 30 percent of children have directly witnessed violence. In other areas the numbers are even higher. In the South Side of Chicago during the 1990s, as many as one in four children at three elementary schools had witnessed a shooting; one-third had seen a stabbing. By 2002 Chicago's homicide rate was nearly three times that of New York. Slutkin's model was to treat violence as an epidemic, like AIDS in Africa. His program, CeaseFire, works to reduce violence in communities by treating the entire community.

  Whereas in Uganda he had used former prostitutes to spread the message about AIDS, in Chicago he recruited reformed ex-convicts and ex-gang members. Called "violence interrupters," they return to the same neighborhoods where they once got into trouble. If they see a fight or hear of one brewing, they literally interrupt it and say, "Don't ruin your life over this petty slight," or "Don't shoot someone or pull a knife because he looked at your girlfriend or because he cut in front of you in line." Slutkin matches at-risk kids with older trained mentors in their communities, and he brings together the whole community, law enforcement, clergy, teachers, school administrators, and parents, so each of them can deliver the message that violence is not accepted here. They march in the streets to protest after shootings and put up billboards with the pictures of beautiful young children, saying, "I want to grow up." In its first year, CeaseFire cut shootings in one police beat by 68 percent. In six communities, it reduced shootings by 42 percent. By 2004 CeaseFire had been implemented in fifteen Chicago neighborhoods. Within a few years, it would be used i
n cities throughout Illinois.

  After the Howard University conference, my staff and I held six regional conferences, to highlight more programs and reach more people; in short, to help the helpers. We searched published reports and interviewed hundreds of experts to find organizations that were turning around what might otherwise have been tragedies. Each organization had to have independent statistics measuring its success and a track record to pass our vetting process. What we found amazed us.

  The human needs in parts of our society are so great that fatherhood initiatives must teach young men the most basic lessons of being a dad. One program I visited in Kansas taught fathers and their children how to hug. They started with a thirty-second embrace. For most of these children and their dads, it was the first time they had ever been wrapped in each other's arms.

  I traveled again to Los Angeles to visit Will Power to Youth, a program founded by Ben Donenberg and sponsored in part by Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, which uses Shakespeare to reach at-risk kids. Instead of hanging out with gangs, teens in L.A. are paid to spend a summer producing a Shakespeare play, building scenery, acting, and learning Shakespeare. One of the young men I met was hired by Home Depot for its kitchen design department because of what he had learned designing sets for Shakespeare plays. I saw a program in Atlanta where Emory University students coach debate teams in housing projects, to teach kids to use their minds and their words to settle disputes. In upstate New York, I watched as teenagers were taken through a mock arrest and jury trial to see how evidence is presented and what their sentences would be for a potential crime. I played the Good Behavior Game with kids in Baltimore. Dr. Sheppard Kellam helped pioneer the game; his idea was that many children do not know how to be students; they have never seen a parent read, have never sat still in a chair to listen. The Good Behavior Game teaches them how to behave in school.

  I also told these success stories to other audiences, speaking to the National League of Cities, the Big Brothers Big Sisters conference, and other organizations around the nation. After three years my office had helped to develop a more organized way for these innovators and pioneers to share their findings and their wisdom. We created a special website to help new organizations get started and existing ones to expand. And George signed an executive order to make the special interagency working group permanent.

  There are still gangs, still teenagers going to jail, still children without fathers, but there are also more people giving their time and their lives to offer kids another path. In December of 2008, Gary Slutkin of CeaseFire wrote to me, "I believe that someday we may be able to contain violence, as we have so many other epidemic problems of history." However difficult that may be, there is no reason not to try.

  On November 2, 2005, Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, came for an official visit. For their arrival lunch, we served ginger biscuits from Charles's Duchy Originals food products, which the prince founded to raise money for his personal charities. During their stay, Charles, Camilla, and I visited the SEED School, a charter boarding school in Washington, because the prince has a particular interest in education.

  In the evening we hosted an official black-tie dinner. State dinners can be held only for heads of state, thus the only state dinner that can be held for the United Kingdom is a dinner for the queen, not for the prince or the prime minister. Japanese prime ministers can have only official dinners; according to protocol, the emperor remains Japan's head of state. The same is true for many other nations, including those with prime ministers and presidents. Israel and India, for example, can have official dinners only for their prime ministers because the presidents outrank them. At our official dinner, the Marine Band played themes from famous British shows, such as Reilly: Ace of Spies, and Nancy Clarke, the White House florist, and I chose white orchids for the tables because Charles and Camilla were newlyweds.

  From Washington the royal couple was going on to New Orleans, so I invited Joe Canizaro, a friend of ours from there, who shares the prince's interest in architecture and planned communities. Also on our guest list was Lieutenant General Russel Honore, the commander of the Joint Task Force Katrina, who led the Department of Defense's response to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, which followed. The prince, who has frequently been in the crosshairs of the British tabloids, was particularly amused by General Honore's story of admonishing the American press, "Don't get stuck on stupid" during a news conference three days before Rita struck.

  Charles's eclectic interests made for a fun guest list; I invited architects, including Robert Stern, the dean of Yale's architecture school, and writers Red Steagall, the cowboy poet from Fort Worth, and Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Afterward, I gave Charles and Camilla signed books from all the authors who had attended. For our official gift, George gave them each a handcrafted Texas saddle because of their love of horses. They acted thrilled, but I imagine they must have entire tack rooms in their stables devoted to the saddles that have been given to them on various world tours, not to mention the fact that ours were designed for Western-style riding, not English.

  On November 9, the Dalai Lama visited George and me for the second time at the White House. The Dalai Lama is a dear and gentle man whose example is an inspiration; he eloquently embodies the hopes for freedom in Tibet. Once, at the White House, he tickled a ramrod-straight, stoic Marine guard under his chin, saying, "Smile." The Marine did. But underneath his soft nature is a man who has been denied his rights and his homeland since he was a boy. He told us that he genuinely feared for Tibet, feared that its culture would be erased from memory as China resettled vast numbers of its citizens inside Tibet's mountainous, landlocked region. George believes that acknowledging the Dalai Lama is a special American responsibility. The world looks to the United States for leadership, and if we do not stand up for freedom, who will? During his eight years in the White House, George met with dozens of dissidents from Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia, North Korea, Burma, Belarus, and other countries.

  For the holiday season, I had chosen the theme "All Things Bright and Beautiful," and we decorated the White House with flowers and fruit, plants, and things that people can find in their yards and gardens. We put pears in our evergreen garlands and on our centerpieces. After a year of so much natural devastation--a tsunami, Katrina--it was a way of remembering the special beauty of nature. The White House was filled with retired staff who came back to work at the Christmas parties, when the sheer number of guests and events made everything hectic. They had been through so many holiday seasons that they knew the rhythms, knew when the food tables were running low or how to ladle punch without dripping. They knew just what needed to be done, and they would introduce themselves saying, "Mrs. Bush, I am Alfredo. I was here in the Kennedy administration." That is the type of love and devotion the White House inspires.

  At the parties, some guests produced unexpected moments of levity. One woman, waiting to be screened by the magnetometers as she arrived for a White House function, asked the Social Office aides if the machine could see that she wasn't wearing any underwear. Another asked if the machine could tell that she was wearing two pairs of Spanx, modern-day girdles. And at the Congressional Ball, one of the members coming through the receiving line told me, "My wife and her friends think you wear a wig." I looked at him dumbfounded, then smiled and said, "No, it's my own hair," and pulled on it, just so that he would know for sure.

  I had asked the third-generation artist Jamie Wyeth to paint a scene for the official White House holiday card, and he featured the Andrew Jackson magnolia covered in snow, with Barney, Miss Beazley, and India the cat in front. When we sent out our holiday greetings we wished everyone "hope and happiness" for the season and the year to come.

  In any given year, it is possible to count the nationally elected female leaders around the world using little more than the fingers of two hands. Some of the most famous female leaders are women who served decades ago, such as Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Ma
rgaret Thatcher. In January of 2006, on Martin Luther King Day, I represented the United States at the swearing in of Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman ever elected to lead an African nation. Liberia was founded by former American slaves, who colonized the west coast of Africa as early as 1820. President James Monroe asked for U.S. government funds to purchase the original tracts of land. The Liberian settlements became a haven for slaves freed by the U.S. Navy from the last of the transatlantic slave ships, and today about 5 percent of all Liberians are descended from these early settlers, who escaped slavery for freedom and who, in 1847, created their sovereign state.

  But the country's recent history has been brutal and tumultuous. In 1980 a military coup ushered in a decade of authoritarian rule, followed by rebellion and bloody civil war. Finally, starting in 1997 the country had two years of calm, until war erupted again in 1999. It took over three years to achieve another cease-fire and the beginnings of peace, and the price of conflict has been enormous. Two hundred thousand people died in the violence; about 1.5 million fled as refugees. Many of the nation's children were forced to fight as tiny soldiers and had grown up with guns and ammunition rather than parents.

  In 2005, when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected, she was one of only four previous Liberian cabinet members who had escaped execution. That January morning she was taking office in a capital city, Monrovia, which had no electricity or running water, and where it was not safe to stay overnight. Instead, Condi Rice, Barbara, and I stayed in neighboring Ghana. To reach downtown Monrovia we passed thatched huts made of woven reeds and roofs that were little more than plastic sheets or corrugated metal strips, held in place from wind and rain by rocks scattered about the edges. Liberians lined the road to watch our convoy pass, transistor radios pressed to their ears for a bit of news. I smiled and waved, and they shyly did so in return.