by Laura Bush
Pelosi and Reid and others got to say whatever they wanted, and George and I were still polite. We still shook their hands in receiving lines and posed for photographs, and George did not exclude them from important meetings or White House events. He respected the offices that they held. Indeed, past congressional leaders, including Senator Lyndon Johnson and then Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who was a vocal critic of Johnson's during Vietnam, took great care not to utter uncivil words about their presidents in public.
In the Texas statehouse, the governor's office sits in the middle. George could walk down the hall to speak to legislators all the time, and he did. He worked in a thoroughly bipartisan manner. As president, George had great appreciation for the separation of powers, which lies at the heart of how our government works. But in Washington, Capitol Hill was like its own fiefdom, a cacophonous place where no one House member or U.S. senator has the ultimate responsibility for anything. No one has ultimate responsibility for our national security or for our economic security. It is easy to throw mud and pass the buck when there are 534 other people to hide behind. George didn't have that luxury. Every problem in the world comes to the desk of the President of the United States.
On the night of February 11, 2007, as Washington lay huddled under a deep chill, we lit the lights on the East Entrance and welcomed guests to celebrate Abraham Lincoln, on behalf of Ford's Theatre and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial celebration. Senator and Mrs. Harry Reid were two of our guests.
The White House in winter looks like something out of Abraham Lincoln's time, with the soft glow of light bathing it in creamy whites. Marine guards moved with precision as each vehicle approached. In long dresses and tuxedos, the guests walked across the shiny tiled floors of what is called the booksellers' corridor on the ground floor. They then climbed the marble stairs up to the formal State Floor. Time and again, at this event and at many others, people's eyes would overflow as they reached the State Floor. To walk through the corridors, to enter the Green, Red, and Blue rooms, to stand where our own leaders have stood for generations is a deeply patriotic and moving experience. But tonight we had also invited them upstairs to see the Lincoln Bedroom and Sitting Room, whose renovations were now complete. In Lincoln's day, the room had not been a bedroom but the president's official office.
Working with the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, I had re-created the rug based on photographs of an 1861 English carpet that was in Lincoln's office. We commissioned it from the same company that had woven his original rug. Hand-blocked wallpaper that approximated Lincoln's office design was used for the walls, and we reproduced the room's period marble fireplace mantel, which had been discarded in 1902. The bedroom furniture suite that we used had been purchased by Mary Todd Lincoln, and every other piece in the two rooms had been part of the White House collection when the Lincolns resided here. In the sitting room, I installed the only marble Victorian-era fireplace mantel that had survived the numerous White House expansions and renovations. On a simple Victorian desk in a corner of the bedroom, we displayed the fifth and last known copy of the Gettysburg Address written in Lincoln's hand. He had made this copy so that his words might be sold at auction to raise money to buy bandages for wounded Union troops.
In this room, on January 1, 1863, Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and night after night he had waited for word on his war. For this night, I had asked the Marine Strings to play a selection of Lincoln's favorite songs, including "Dixie." As the melodies drifted upstairs, echoing about these pieces of our history, some of the guests wiped tears from their eyes.
Three weeks later, on March 1, 2007, I was landing in the pitch darkness in a small Air Force plane on Midway Island, scene of one of the most bloody and decisive naval battles of World War II in the Pacific. Today the guns are silent and the island is the centerpiece of one of the largest environmental conservation efforts on earth. Midway is home to eighty people and about 400,000 pairs of Laysan albatross, as well as tropic birds, black noddies, white terns, and other nesting and migratory birds. In Hawaiian, the island has long been called Pihemanu, or "the loud din of birds." From November through July, planes are not allowed to land or depart during daylight because of fears that birds in flight will be sucked into the engines.
In the blackness, my staff and I rode on golf carts to aging military barracks; I spent the night in a tiny house belonging to Barry Christenson, the manager of Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, and his wife, Elise. When I awoke, it was to a deserted island paradise of gleaming sands and rustling palms, with waters so clear that it was possible to see the fish beneath. We had to watch each step we took, for fear of stepping on an albatross nest or a young chick. On Midway Island the albatross have no natural predators; the danger to them comes instead from the seas. Parents fly low over the water, skimming the ocean top for fish and squid. They eat what they catch, then regurgitate the half-digested food to feed their babies. The tragedy is that an albatross cannot distinguish between a squid and a piece of floating plastic. Scattered across the sands and grasses were abandoned albatross nests and chick carcasses, the remains of bird babies who had died after being fed. John Klavitter, a wildlife biologist, opened the partially decomposed bodies. Inside were plastic bottle caps and other refuse, including toothbrushes, cigarette lighters, and plastic tires from a child's toy.
Ocean currents in the Pacific have created a plastic garbage dump estimated to be twice the size of Texas. Most of its contents float just under the swells of the waves, where bits and pieces are ingested by bird and marine life. The Department of the Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as other U.S. agencies, are working to mitigate this plastic debris and prevent new trash from accumulating. Twenty-one tons of debris had been collected around the Hawaiian Islands in 2006. But so much more needs to be done; there are 6.4 million tons of trash polluting and destroying our global marine habitats.
In 2006 George had designated nearly 140,000 square miles of these vulnerable Pacific waters as a marine national monument. It is the single largest U.S. conservation area, bigger than all our national parklands combined. Among the string of tiny islands and atolls in these waters, Midway Island is the only spot inhabited by humans. But the entire region is home to some 14 million seabirds and seven thousand marine mammals, nearly two thousand of which cannot be found anywhere else on earth. The next morning, in Honolulu, I would christen the monument with its Hawaiian name, Papaha-naumokua-kea.
On the Midway atoll, after stepping carefully around the albatross nests, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and I knelt in the dirt to replant native plants that were being crowded out by invasive species attacking the shores, another environmental danger. I stood in the water in my bare feet and fed endangered Hawaiian monk seals, of which only about thirteen hundred remain. And I saw the rusting antiaircraft guns and shell craters, the pitted runways and weapons depots where American soldiers and sailors had won their first major victory against the Japanese. We paused in silence to remember as the wind and birdcalls reverberated in our ears.
At the start of 2007, we received word that Queen Elizabeth of England wanted to make another visit to the United States, and the White House immediately sprang into action to host a state dinner in her honor. The preparations involved two social secretaries, Lea Berman, who was departing after over two years of service, and Amy Zantzinger, who would be with us through the remainder of George's term. We invited the violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman to play for the queen. We decorated the State Dining Room with white roses in vermeil vases and used the gold-edged Clinton china. Our menu tastings, with our talented White House chef Cris Comerford, were done weeks in advance, and everything was designed to showcase the best of America with a nod to British favorites, from spring pea soup with caviar to a first course of Dover sole, followed by lamb with seasonal, local vegetables and salad. And the dinner was to be white tie. George of course didn't want to wear w
hite tie, but at Buckingham Palace, Prince Philip and the queen's guests had donned them for us. So Condi Rice and I made an executive decision that this evening would be white tie as well, much to George's chagrin.
The arrival ceremony was perfect, under blue skies, with a twenty-one-gun salute and a parade by the Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps. That afternoon, Queen Elizabeth, followed by George, greeted dozens of British expatriate and American schoolchildren, who came bearing flowers and shyly asking for autographs. We had invited Bar and Gampy to join us, and when the queen asked to visit the newly opened World War II Memorial, we suggested Gampy as her escort. The eighty-two-year-old World War II fighter pilot lent his arm to the woman who had been a beautiful teenage princess when the war raged. Then Princess Elizabeth had volunteered to drive and repair heavy transport vehicles only after her father, King George VI, refused her request to become a nurse. Now Gampy and the queen walked slowly through this monument to their shared past.
The guest list for this dinner was fun to compile, particularly the invitation I was waiting until the very end to extend. The queen is a fan of horse racing, and she had attended the Kentucky Derby the weekend before coming to the White House. I watched the derby on television, and the moment it ended, I called Amy Zantzinger with a request: invite the winning jockey, Calvin Borel. When she finally reached him, he thought it was a joke. Amy convinced him that indeed the White House was calling, and he said yes, he would attend, but he and his fiancee, Lisa Funk, had nothing to wear. After they heard about the invitation, the stores in Louisville, Kentucky, where the derby is run, stayed open on Sunday so that Lisa could find a dress. For Calvin, Amy arranged to rent a set of white tails from the same man who was outfitting George for the evening.
Both Calvin and Lisa were beaming when they walked through the receiving line, and then Calvin did the sweetest thing. It is strict protocol not to touch the queen, not even to shake her hand, until she extends hers to you first. But as Calvin stood between the queen and me, he wrapped his arms around both of us for the official photograph. All during the dinner, I could see Calvin and Lisa at a nearby table, and they looked so happy. He had his arm draped over her and an expression of bliss, winning the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, and on Monday night dining with the Queen of England at the White House.
On the evening of June 5, George and I landed in Heiligendamm, Germany, site of the country's oldest seaside spa, nestled on the coast of the Baltic Sea, for the G8 Summit. I arrived and began my events, but by the afternoon of the seventh, I could barely stand up. My head inexplicably throbbed; I was horribly dizzy and nauseated. I went to bed, pulled up the covers, and for several hours felt so awful that I thought I might die right there in that hotel room.
I was not the only one to fall ill. Over the next day nearly a dozen members of our delegation were stricken, even George, who started to feel sick during an early morning staff briefing. For most of us, the primary symptoms were nausea or dizziness, but one of our military aides had difficulty walking and a White House staffer lost all hearing in one ear. Exceedingly alarmed, the Secret Service went on full alert, combing the resort for potential poisons. In the past year, there had been several high-profile poisonings, including one with suspected nuclear material, in and around Europe. The overriding fear was that terrorists had gotten control of a dangerous substance and planted it at the resort.
After my stay in bed, I managed to get up and return to the summit. George, who almost never gets sick, refused to postpone a meeting with French president Nicolas Sarkozy, but he canceled a press conference and remained in his room to rest during the G8's final morning meeting. Indeed, George felt so ill that he met with Sarkozy in his hotel room and did not even stand up to greet him. Sarkozy walked over to the sofa to shake his hand and then sat nearby. The White House press office announced to the media that the president had contracted some kind of virus or stomach flu. European papers began scrutinizing every meal that George had eaten and even examined the Baltic fish that had been served.
We all recovered, although a few of the staff had lingering aftereffects; our military aide's gait has never returned to normal, nor has our senior staffer regained full hearing in that ear. The most concrete conclusion any doctors could reach was that we contracted a virus that attacks a nerve near the inner ear and is prevalent in Heiligendamm. But we never learned if any other delegations became ill, or if ours, mysteriously, was the only one.
Later in June, I returned to Africa, to follow the progress of the President's Malaria Initiative and our work to combat AIDS through PEPFAR. Jenna came with me. She had just spent the better part of a year working with UNICEF in Central America, where she had met an AIDS orphan who she called Ana, a young woman who had suffered the trauma of contracting HIV/AIDS from her mother at birth and then lost both parents to the disease. As a teenager, Ana was sexually abused in her grandmother's home. Jenna had been so moved by Ana's determination to build a new life for herself that she asked to write a book about her, Ana's Story.
In Zambia, Jenna and I glimpsed the widespread consequences of AIDS. Together we toured the Mututa Memorial Center, founded by Martha Chilufya, whose husband had died from AIDS. Mututa, whose name means "drumming" in the Bemba language, provides home-based care for some 150 Zambians living with AIDS. We sat in brilliant sunshine on the hot red earth, surrounded by baby dolls and bicycles. World Bicycle Relief had donated 23,000 bicycles to nonprofits in Zambia so that caregivers can ride through villages and out to the countryside to deliver medicines and check on neighbors. Some of these men and women on bicycles had gone to their neighbors' houses and found them in bed, half dead from the ravages of AIDS. They would get them up, get them to a clinic, and get them started on antiretrovirals for another chance at life. As we sat in a circle listening to their stories, two girls told us about how they had each been victims of sexual abuse and were now HIV-positive. Tears streamed down their cheeks as they spoke. Afterward, Jenna went over, took their hands, and said, "You are not alone. This story happens all over the world," and she told them about Ana. I added that Jenna had just written a book about this young woman. They raised their faces to ours and then they said, "I wish you would tell our stories. Write about us."
Since 2002 I had been following the repressive Burmese junta and its harsh treatment of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Elsie Walker, George's cousin and my good friend, who had once worked for the Dalai Lama, was a longtime advocate for Burmese human rights.
The Burmese are a tragic example of a people striving for democracy and being cruelly denied. The brutality of Burma's current military regime is even more ironic because the inhabitants of one of the earliest kingdoms there, the Pyu, eschewed war and jails and even, as legend has it, would not wear silk because they did not want to harm the silkworms. Like the ancient kingdoms of central Asia, Burma was invaded and conquered by the Mongols, and it too felt the reach of imperial Britain. The first Anglo-Burmese War was the longest and most expensive in the history of the British Indian Empire. By 1885 Britain had annexed the entire kingdom and the Burmese king had been forced into exile in India. The Japanese invaded Burma during World War II, and late in the war, the Burmese joined with the British to oust Japan from their soil. Burma gained its official independence in 1948, but it was marked by internal strife. A coup in 1962 placed it under control of the military. The military maintained power, despite repeated protests, until a 1990 election, which Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won in a landslide.
The junta placed her under house arrest, nullified the election, and would not allow the National Assembly to be convened. Although she was eventually allowed to move about Rangoon, Suu Kyi was returned to house arrest in 2000 and again in 2003.
While I was in the White House, some of what I did to aid the Burmese had to be done in secret. But by the fall of 2006, I could no longer remain publicly silent. To coincide with the annual opening of the UN General Assembly in September of 2006, I con
vened a roundtable at the UN to address the deteriorating situation in Burma. While the United Nations uses "Myanmar," the word that the junta has selected to rename the country, for the meeting I sat under a map inscribed with the traditional name, "Burma." As in Iraq and other nations, in Burma rape is routinely used as a weapon of war. The day of the roundtable, we heard stories of the victims. Among the oldest to be raped by government forces was a woman of eighty; the youngest was a girl of eight.
I followed that conference with op-eds in major newspapers and several meetings with the UN's special envoy to Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, and my office participated in the weekly White House meeting on Burma. In May I joined the Senate Women's Caucus, comprising all the female senators, and we publicly appealed for Aung San Suu Kyi's release. In June I met with Burmese exiles and refugees at the White House. By August, Burma was dominating international headlines because of the government's brutal crackdown on Buddhist monks who had peacefully taken to the streets to protest soaring prices for fuel and other basic goods. The government responded with beatings and arrests. Here and abroad, the usual round of diplomatic protests were launched, but it was not enough. I decided to speak out.
I telephoned the new UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, and asked him to denounce the junta's crackdown. I called for a new UN Security Council resolution against the regime, even though China and Russia had vetoed similar U.S. efforts just eight months before. Determined to help mobilize public opinion, I sent testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote another op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, and gave interviews. The U.S. government imposed new sanctions, including sanctions aimed at the junta generals' personal wealth. I wanted the people inside Burma to know that we heard them, and the junta to know it too. Things might not change, but that is no excuse for not speaking out when the need and the opportunity arise.