Kati Marton (60 page)

Bush, in his first State of the Union address, was right to recognize that his unassuming wife had changed her image since becoming first lady. Indeed, after the terrorist attacks five months earlier, Laura had become Comforter-in-Chief of the nation. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, had transformed Laura’s role as dramatically as it had her husband’s.

It was not the presidency either of them had prepared for or expected.

AS GEORGE AND LAURA BUSH
moved into the White House in January 2001, one thing seemed certain. The days of endless speculation about the state of the presidential marriage and precedent-shattering and controversial activities by the first lady were over. From what the nation knew of them, George and Laura appeared to be the most “ordinary” couple to inhabit the White House in decades. She would be a more traditional first lady than any of her recent predecessors, including her formidable mother-in-law.

The White House is not a glittering palace of culture or style under the Bushes. It is not an exciting place intellectually or socially. The Bushes prefer their own and their extended family’s company and like to go to bed early. Washington’s social life holds little appeal for President Bush. “He didn’t like it when he was here,” White House aide Mary Matalin noted. “[To Bush] this is a very insular, phony place.” Nor is life
in the White House an overpowering experience for this couple. They know the place.

The presidency is something else again. George W. Bush, like Ronald Reagan, delegates many responsibilities of the office. But Reagan’s performance skills were breathtaking. In the campaign and during the transition, Bush conveyed acute discomfort in public. Ill at ease before cameras, he kept his remarks as short and scripted as possible, reaching for his smiling wife’s hand whenever he could. Even some of his oldest friends wondered, “How did this happen?” But, as events would soon prove, one should not underestimate this man, or the shy Texan he married twenty-three years before.

LAURA BUSH WAS BORN
in Midland, Texas, on November 4, 1946. The mid-sized town, built by oil money in the middle of the west Texas emptiness, is a gleaming corporate city “whose eye-popping wealth … retained the quaint virtues of a small town.” Later, Laura Bush and her husband would describe Midland in only the most glowing terms—and particularly portrayed it in opposition to the Gomorrah of “Washington Deecee.” It was “a place where neighbors had to help each other because any other help was too far away,” Laura would say during the 2000 GOP Convention, “a place of family and community, and it had a sense of possibility as big as the West Texas sky.”

Laura’s sense of duty came early. Before Laura was born, her bookkeeper mother, Jenna Welch, had lost several babies, a fact that weighed heavily on young Laura: “I felt very obligated to my parents,” she once said. “I didn’t want to upset them in any way.” Laura Welch was by all accounts a serious, self-contained child, who had inherited her mother’s love of books and aspired to be a teacher. Years later, millions would hear her recount how she honed her teaching skills in her bedroom, with her dolls as her well-behaved pupils.

Unlike many men and women of her generation, Laura never questioned the values that shaped American society. “She would never have done any protesting,” said her longtime friend Jan O’Neill, “or all that other ’70s stuff.” While her contemporaries became civil rights activists,
she became a debutante; while others shouted protests against the Vietnam War, she sang in church.

At age seventeen, Laura’s placid existence was shattered when, on November 6, 1963, she drove her Chevrolet sedan through a stop sign and hit another car, killing its occupant, who happened to be a close friend of hers. “It was a terrible, terrible thing,” Laura has said. The early trauma no doubt reinforced her innate caution.

ALTHOUGH GEORGE
w.
BUSH
spent just twelve years of his youth in Midland, his official White House biography says only that he “grew up in Midland and Houston, Texas,” making no mention of the fact that he was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1946. Once his political career started, he did his best to play up his—and co-opt Laura’s—“Midlandness” and downplay his East Coast pedigree. “This place,” he has said, “has shaped the values that will shape my service to our nation.” Indeed, Bush has said he wants to be buried in Midland.

Unlike his wife, George had much to prove, both to himself and to his parents. “Young George,” his cousin Elsie Walker commented, “sometimes was sort of sensitive to the fact that he was too coarse, or, you know, rough-edged for his father.” Life, in the words of the elder President Bush, is about “passing on legacy, passing on tradition.” The unspoken burden weighed heaviest on the eldest son. “A lot of people who have fathers like this,” George’s younger brother Jeb noted, “or moms who have lived such extraordinary lives, feel a sense that they have failed because they haven’t reached the same level … and it creates all sorts of pathologies.” Barbara Bush—”a very ferocious mother,” in Laura’s words—described her eldest’s desire to live up to the standard set by his father in simpler terms: “nuts.” For the boisterous son of a patrician overachiever, competition was bred in his bones. The trouble was, young George had no real idea what to compete
for,
other than his father’s affection and attention. George, in his own words, did not have “normal access” to his busy father. “My father doesn’t have a normal life,” he told friends at Yale. “I don’t have a normal father.”

At first, George didn’t show much interest in the family business. As
a Yale undergraduate during the sixties, one of the most politically charged periods of the last century, “George was never involved in any of that … [he] expressed no interest [in politics] and had no involvement in it,” his college roommate Clay Johnson recalled. “I don’t remember him saying anything profound,” his old friend Bill Semple said. “I never knew what his passion was, I never thought of him as a passionate person. And yet he got there.”

It did not happen right away. Though George consciously retraced his father’s footsteps, he did not match the elder man’s distinguished record at either Andover or Yale, or in the military or the oil business. Mostly he stood out for being fun-loving and unambitious. But he struggled to emulate his father. He even got engaged at the end of his junior year at Yale, just as his father had, though in his case the engagement (to Cathryn Wolfman, a Rice University student) did not last. Until midlife nothing really
took.
Bush calls those his “nomadic years.” For a long time—virtually until George W. was elected president—his elders deemed his younger brother Jeb the more serious, the smarter and the more electable. When, early in the 2000 campaign, I asked the elder President Bush what if things did not work out for George W., without skipping a beat, he answered, “Jeb would make a very fine candidate.”

AFTER TWO YEARS OF TRYING
in vain, Jan and Joe O’Neill finally convinced their friend Laura—a thirty-year-old librarian who was contentedly single—to return to Midland from her new home of Austin and meet George in late July 1977. She had put off the O’Neills’ prior efforts to introduce her to the wisecracking, hyperkinetic young man with the famous name. “I was so uninterested in politics,” she later explained. “I thought he was someone real political, and I wasn’t interested.”

When she showed up at the O’Neills’ backyard barbecue wearing a blue sundress, George was definitely interested. “Smitten, I must confess,” he later admitted. Though for a while they had attended the same junior high in Midland together, and lived in the same apartment complex in Houston in the 1970s, George and Laura had never met. Now he found her to be “one of the great listeners. And since I am one of the big
talkers, it was a great fit.” He later said getting married was one of his toughest decisions prior to the presidency—as well as one of the best.

George’s big dreams and high ambitions did not impress Laura. “The thing that I liked about him was that he made me laugh,” she later said. He was avid to reach some as yet unspecified goal; she was content with her life. Young George surely perceived what a solid counterweight Laura would be to his still hazy ambitions. She would help him mature. All Laura ever wanted to do was teach: “I’ve always done what really traditional women do, and I’ve been very, very satisfied,”

Laura was still unconvinced and, days later, when George left for the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, he had trouble getting her on the phone. To prove he was serious, he interrupted the Bushes’ annual rite of summer water sports to return to Texas. In three whirlwind months, she became Laura Bush.

“
AND WHAT DO YOU DO
?” Dorothy Walker Bush, the starchy matriarch of the Bush family, asked her grandson’s new bride during her first visit to Kennebunkport in 1977. “I read, I smoke and I admire,” Laura replied. Barbara Bush later recalled that the elder Mrs. Bush “darn near collapsed.” But Laura’s answer revealed remarkable comfort about herself, even in the alien world of the Yankee establishment.