Spoken from the Heart

by Laura Bush

  The week before the malaria summit, I was reminded of the less than life-or-death issues that dominate the news from the White House. My ultimate in clothing faux pas received about as much attention as the summit. The dress debacle occurred on December 3, 2006, at a White House reception before the Kennedy Center Honors, and the guilty party was a red Oscar de la Renta gown. George and I were standing for the long receiving line greeting guests when I saw a good friend of mine from Houston. She was wearing the identical red lace dress. We posed for the camera with slightly awkward smiles. A few minutes later a friend from Washington walked through in the exact same gown. Then came a good friend of mine from California. Now there were four of us in the identical dress. We tried to turn it into a lighthearted moment, and the four of us gathered for a group photo, but I could tell that no one was amused. I had chosen the de la Renta gown because it blended so nicely with the brilliant red of the Kennedy Center's interior. But after the last camera click, I raced upstairs to change into a navy blue dress from the back of my closet to wear to the awards ceremony.

  Thus continued my fashion education. It had started when the press made fun of the purple suit I wore to that first White House visit with Hillary Clinton. After that I had begun visiting New York fashion houses; my favorites were Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera. I paid for all my own clothes and took to attaching an index card to each outfit, writing down what event it had been worn to, so that I could avoid duplications. Each season my assistant would remind me of the different occasions for which I would need a new dress or outfit: state dinners, annual galas, and the like. I would glance through the designers' "look books" and make selections, usually asking that the color or style be slightly altered. But in the book, that red dress had looked perfect. It had vaguely crossed my mind that someone else might see the dress and think exactly the same thing, but what were the odds of that woman wearing it to a White House party? I let the thought pass from my mind until December 3. Unfortunately, no one else had thought to check on how many of the red lace dresses had been sold around the country, and one of the women who wore hers to the White House that night was so infuriated that she returned it to the store and demanded they give her a refund.

  My dress, however, had a long life. Not only did I wear it for the official White House holiday photo but I sent it to travel the country as part of the Heart Truth Red Dress campaign to raise awareness about heart disease.

  When I arrived in the White House, if I had been asked what was the leading cause of death among American women, I would have replied cancer. But the correct answer is heart disease. In 2003 heart attacks and related diseases were responsible for one out of every three female deaths in the United States. Very few American women knew this devastating statistic, and thousands of doctors were insufficiently aware of the risk for women's heart health. Most modern heart procedures, like stents and angioplasty, had been developed for men. Even the instruments used by heart surgeons were designed to fit men's far larger arteries and veins. At the start of 2003, Dr. Elizabeth Nabel of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute asked me to be the ambassador for Heart Truth, a campaign to educate women about the risk of heart disease, and what they could do to prevent it. The keys to prevention are exercising, maintaining a healthy weight, quitting smoking, and monitoring blood pressure and cholesterol. I immediately said yes.

  My first message was that women's heart attack symptoms may be different from men's. For women, common symptoms are often extreme fatigue and pain in the neck or the jaw, not just pain in the arm or the chest, the most frequent symptoms for men. In September 2003, I visited St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, where I discussed the warning signs of a heart attack. A local woman named Joyce Cullen watched me on television. That night, as she was getting into bed, Joyce began to feel ill. She remembered what I had said and told her husband to pray and rush her to the hospital. Doctors performed heart surgery and saved her life. Joyce joined the Heart Truth campaign and began speaking to local churches and women's groups to try to save other lives. In February 2004, I invited her to the White House to help me launch American Heart Month. I heard from other women as well. A daughter told me how her mother's life was saved after they watched me discuss heart attack warning signs on the Rachael Ray show. Another woman dialed 9-1-1 because of an article I wrote in the AARP Bulletin. This is the remarkable platform that a first lady has. By 2005 women's deaths from heart disease had fallen to one in four. The heightened attention in the media, especially in women's magazines, to heart health and the national effort to educate women and their doctors saved countless lives.

  The Heart Truth campaign put me on the cutting edge of fashion when I unveiled its Red Dress Project during New York City's famed Fashion Week. More than one hundred top models and celebrities have walked the runway in red dresses to highlight the importance of heart health. Today the red dress emphasizing heart health has become almost as iconic as the pink ribbon for breast cancer. And my now famous 2006 Kennedy Center red dress has traveled the country to remind women to care for their hearts.

  That December, George and I hosted a retirement dinner at the White House for Kofi Annan, the outgoing secretary-general of the United Nations. America has a long history with the UN; during the darkest days of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt was the one to coin the name United Nations, and the organization's charter was signed in San Francisco in 1945. Kofi Annan had been a fierce opponent of the Iraq War but a good ally in working to combat violence, disease, and illiteracy around the globe.

  During dinner in the upstairs Yellow Oval Room, Kofi Annan asked me about the protesters who gather in Lafayette Park, across from the White House. He was most likely thinking of antiwar protesters, but in fact, many of the people who come in sun, rain, sleet, and snow are not protesting against something but are imploring the American president to do something. Many are pro-democracy protesters, demonstrating on behalf of freedom. We heard the chants of protesters asking George to do more to support human rights in Vietnam. "Mr. President," they called, "please say, 'Vietnam must be free.'" We heard voices calling for an end to political imprisonment in China or freedom for Tibet. Ethiopians came to hold candlelight vigils to call for greater freedoms and an end to civil war. We would look out and see hundreds of their flames waving in the darkness. Week after week people came asking for the United States to use its power and influence to make lives better in other corners of the world. They did not come out of anger or hate, I explained, but out of hope. Kofi Annan looked vaguely surprised, then nodded his head.

  The theme of Christmas 2006 at the White House was "Deck the Halls and Welcome All," and the decor was primarily red. The tree in the visitors' reception room and another outside the Oval Office were decorated with ornaments made by artisans in the North Carolina community of Spruce Pine, which had been hard hit by the loss of manufacturing jobs when local textile factories shut their doors. Helped by a generous donation in 2003 from Gloria Houston, who wrote The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree, Spruce Pine had established nearly one hundred small businesses dedicated to producing handmade Christmas decorations. They called their economic development program the Home of the Perfect Christmas Trees. I chose their hand-blown red glass balls and Carolina snowflakes, woven from colored reeds. Roland Mesnier returned from retirement to make the gingerbread White House, using over three hundred pounds of dark chocolate and gingerbread and adding eight hundred hand-piped snowflakes. At the Hanukkah party, the Marine Band played the traditional Jewish tune "Hava Nagila," and guests began dancing the hora in a large circle around the central hall. To inscribe our holiday card, a scene of a glowing Oval Office exterior bathed in a fresh coating of snow, painted by the landscape artist James Blake, I chose Psalm 119, "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path."

  For George and me, the holidays were once again the season of receiving lines, where we spent long hours shaking hands. To manage the receptions, sometimes two in
a single night, Blake Gottesman, George's personal aide, started the practice of counting how many photos were taken in an hour. During the early parties of the season, we averaged about fifteen seconds per photo, but as the weeks progressed, we, and the ever-longer lines, would whittle that down to about seven seconds. Each morning our staff would e-mail around the numbers from the previous night, but even at seven seconds, we could be standing, shaking hands, and smiling for hours in a single evening, so that every guest had a chance to be greeted by the president and the first lady.

  For several years during the month of December, I had noticed pain in my left forearm. I brushed it off as coming from too many hours spent standing and holding my arm at my side. But this year, the pain continued into the spring, and it escalated after my hiking trip in Zion National Park. I scheduled an MRI, and the White House doctor, Richard Tubb, told me that I had a pinched nerve in a cervical vertebra. In August of 2007 the chief of neurosurgery at the George Washington University Hospital scraped away bone spurs and calcification that were pressing on the nerve in my neck. For the first time in months, I woke without any pain. Pinched nerves are harbingers of creeping age, and even though this required surgery, the press interest was not nearly as intense as when I had a small squamous cell skin cancer lesion, likely the result of too many hours spent around the Ranchland Hills Country Club pool in Midland, removed from my shin. One of the White House correspondents caught sight of my postsurgical Band-Aid and asked me if I had been bitten by Barney.

  In 2006, as always, we spent Christmas at Camp David with the girls and much of our extended family, and George made phone calls to our troops overseas. In November, following the midterm elections, George had replaced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with former CIA chief Robert Gates. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein's yearlong trials had concluded; he was scheduled to be hanged on December 30. But that was not enough to turn the tide of bombings and violence; three thousand American troops had died since the war began. At this stage, George was convinced that the United States needed a new strategy. Many Americans now blamed him for the war; the attacks were shrill and personal. For popularity's sake, it might have been easier to withdraw U.S. forces, but the easy course is not always the right one. Instead, George chose to implement a policy known as "the surge."

  On January 10, 2007, he announced to the American people that he had decided to commit some twenty thousand more U.S. troops to Iraq, to protect the Iraqi population, to isolate the extremists, to push the Iraqis to lead, and to create space for political progress. More than 70 percent of eligible Iraqi citizens had voted in the last election, but the nation still had a long road ahead.

  Many in and out of government, including prominent Republicans and nearly every Democrat, opposed the surge. Many inside George's administration also disagreed with the plan. It was a hard and lonely decision, and it was one of his bravest moments in office.

  Day in and day out, the criticism of George from all sides was withering. He was denounced and caricatured in ways far worse than his father had been. I survived it because George did. He is not a self-pitying man. He is not a man of outsize ego or arrogance, despite what his critics said. He simply did what he believed to be right and expected to be judged based on outcomes and history, not by daily headlines or pundits on talk shows. But it was still painful to see the man I loved, the man I knew, so misrepresented by his opponents to the American people. And the hardest part was knowing that our daughters saw it too. The dad who had held them as babies, who had loved them unconditionally, was now the target of mocking late-night comics and near hysterical cable television hosts. It hurt me to think of our daughters picking up the newspaper or reading the Internet or walking into a room where the television was on. Their resilience in the face of this onslaught was remarkable. As a family we have listened to some of the worst things that can be said about us or someone we love, and never has our own love dimmed. But what we endured is a meanness of spirit, a viciousness, and a cruelty that I hope no political family will ever be subjected to again.

  We could do nothing but wait and hope for the tide to turn. Our friends and our family waited with us. George had the unwavering love and support of his parents. He also had the special companionship of his youngest brother, Marvin, who lived in nearby northern Virginia. On the weekends, Marvin would call and say, "There's a great game on, why don't we watch it together?" The two of them could lose themselves in sports for an hour or two, and in that easy way that brothers have, the unspoken language of friendship would pass between them. I had my sisters-in-law. Margaret Bush, Marvin's wife, came several times during the week when I was in Washington to exercise with me in the White House gym. George's sister, Doro Bush Koch, and her husband, Bobby, and their children frequently came for dinner and joined us at Camp David. The richness of their friendship and their love for me and for George was of great solace as we waited for improvement in Iraq. The Bush children had seen their father lead the nation during the Gulf War; now it was their brother, in a longer, more difficult fight. They understood, as few people could, the burdens of leading a nation in wartime. And this was a war unlike any our country had ever faced.

  In World War II, we knew that if we crippled the enemy in one place, other fronts would weaken and eventually collapse. During the Cold War, the United States could cede some countries, such as Cuba or Eastern Europe or Vietnam, or even Afghanistan up until 1979, to the Soviets' sphere, and still the fundamental balance of power would remain unchanged. Yet in this new type of war, against not an army in uniform but a radical ideology bent on destroying the very framework of our shared civilization, we could not write off one country to the enemy. Never before in history had such small numbers possessed the potential to inflict such horrific damage. So wherever the terrorists were plotting destruction, we had to engage them. And wherever terrorist cells might be trying to gain a foothold, we had to turn them back. It was a war of terrorist acts and a contest of ideology, and we could not win unless we met them firmly on every front. We could not let Iraq fail, or let the United States fail in Iraq. We could never again allow a full-fledged haven for terror to flourish if we wanted to protect Americans inside the borders of our own nation. Nor could we give up on the millions of Iraqis who were hoping that the extremists would be turned back and a free society would have a chance to take hold. George chose the best way he thought to win, and we waited. And we prayed for the men and women who had pledged to fight for our country and for our freedoms.

  The nasty personal criticisms of George had begun in earnest in 2004. In a May 2004 interview with her hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives, said, "Bush is an incompetent leader. In fact, he's not a leader. He's a person who has no judgment, no experience and no knowledge of the subjects that he has decided upon." She went on, "Not to get personal about it, but the president's capacity to lead has never been there. In order to lead, you have to have judgment. In order to have judgment, you have to have knowledge and experience. He has none." In 2005, after being invited to a meeting at the White House, she called George "dangerous." Meanwhile, the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada, called George a "loser" and a "liar." Subsequently, in a private, one-on-one meeting in the White House Cabinet Room, Reid said to George that he would stop calling him names. But he didn't stop. And he later told both Rolling Stone and then The New York Times Magazine, with apparent pride, that he had "never" apologized for the liar comment.

  These two congressional leaders also made those statements about the sitting United States president when the country was at war, though as George and I knew, similar invectives had been hurled at presidents during wartime from the earliest days of our republic. Franklin Roosevelt had complained that "every senator is a law unto himself and everyone seeks the spotlight." Interestingly enough, when Pelosi and Reid were asked to suggest their own policy proposals, their answer invariably was withdraw fro
m Iraq immediately, whatever the consequences.

  Nevertheless, George and I repeatedly invited Harry and Landra Reid and Nancy and Paul Pelosi to the White House. They came for small gatherings and for black-tie dinners, and received invitations to major state events. When the Queen of England visited in the spring of 2007, Nancy Pelosi danced in the White House in her long ball gown.

  Of course, I hated hearing all those terrible things said about my husband. The comments were uncalled for and graceless. While a president's political opponents, as well as his supporters, are entitled to make what they see as legitimate criticisms, and while our national debates should be spirited, these particular words revealed the very petty and parochial nature of some who serve in Congress. George, as president, would never have used such language about them. It demeans honest debate; it debases the office of the presidency; and just as importantly, it does little to produce good decisions or good policy. George did not use interviews to call political opponents "losers" or "liars," and if he had, the outcry would have been enormous. The president doesn't have the luxury of behaving like a smart-aleck kid on a school playground; he has to work not just with Congress but with leaders around the world. The cockiest thing George did was say that he wanted to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive."