Kati Marton (61 page)

The marriage had a rough start. Their honeymoon was spent on the campaign trail, as an attractive congressional seat had opened up. Kent Hance, a native Texan—who had stayed in Texas—was Bush’s opponent. It didn’t take long for the carpetbagger accusations to fly. “My daddy and granddad were farmers,” Hance twanged in a debate shortly before the election. “They didn’t have anything do with the mess we’re in right now, and Bush’s father has been in politics his whole life.” George was stunned. For her part, Laura had made George promise not to ask her to give any speeches, but he soon broke that promise and made her stand in for him at a speech in Muleshoe, Texas. Petrified, she spoke too softly and ran out of words.

Laura was learning how to handle her husband as well as politics. One evening, the newlyweds were pulling into the driveway after a full
day of campaigning. “How was my speech?” George asked Laura. “It wasn’t that good,” Laura replied. George slammed their Pontiac Bonneville into the garage wall, and Laura learned to tread lightly when criticizing her husband’s political performances. She would soon find that a lilting “Bushieee,” and a knowing glance would suffice to calm him.

Bush lost his 1978 congressional bid. Laura was quietly relieved. It meant no more speeches—at least for a while. He returned to the oil business, while she hoped to start a family. But Laura had such difficulty conceiving that the couple finally began the process to adopt children. When she finally became pregnant, they soon discovered that she would have twins.

Five weeks before her due date, Laura’s and the twins’ lives were threatened when she developed toxemia. George could not conceal his alarm; Laura remained, as ever, a rock. “These babies will be fine,” she told him. “They will stay with me until they’re big enough to emerge.” “There was a determination and a grit,” George recalled, “an unbelievable will to protect the children. I remember to this day how confident I became because of her.”

George burst into tears in the operating room when Jenna and Barbara—named after their grandmothers—were born by cesarean section, premature but healthy. “I realized our life had changed forever,” George said, “in a positive way.”

AT AGE FORTY
, George was “on the road to nowhere,” according to his first cousin John Ellis. The story of how George quit drinking—and began going to Bible study—following a hard night’s carousing in celebration of his fortieth birthday in 1986 is well known. This was no overnight conversion to sobriety, however, but the result of Laura’s many pleas, “after nights that weren’t particularly great.” But many of his friends think even this was really about his father. “He looked in the mirror and said, ‘Someday I might embarrass my father,’” said Joe O’Neill, who was with him when he swore off drinking. “‘It might get my dad in trouble.’ … And boy that was it. That’s how high a priority it was. And he never took another drink.”

It was as if everything had been cued up for the moment. His name, his parents’ vast network and his winning personality opened doors to the moneymen who invested in his oil business, the purchase of the Texas Rangers baseball team and in his political campaigns. Bush may not have been a serious student of much else, but he soon demonstrated that he was an avid student of people. Still smarting after the first campaign, he sought training by Lee Atwater, the “prince of wicked political spin” (in the words of Texas author Bill Minutaglio) of the Republican Party. He would not again fall into the trap of seeming too remote, too elitist, too Yale, too Kennebunkport. When asked how he differed from his dad, George W. answered, “He attended Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto High School in Midland.” Few seemed bothered that the Connecticut-born politician actually attended San Jacinto Junior High for one year before transferring to private schools in Houston and Massachusetts.

When he defeated Texas’s popular governor Ann Richards in 1994, Bush first demonstrated what the nation would learn only six years later: that stylistically he was not his father’s son. His father’s humiliating loss to Bill Clinton and the questions raised about the elder’s authenticity opened up wounds inflicted by Hance fourteen years earlier, and accelerated the process by which George W. adopted an assertively different style. Louder, earthier and looser, his affect was closer to Lyndon Johnson than to his father. Culturally a Texan, he is almost as physical—touching, slapping, punching, whispering—as LBJ. In place of the “Johnson lean,” George cultivated the “Dubya slouch,” in meetings or conferences.

While George polished his populist political style, Laura, seemingly nonpartisan and somewhat detached, became an indispensable political asset. She also provided order in his life, a peaceful space away from the combat zone of politics and a check on his often unwieldy ego. “She’s pretty good at keeping me centered,” George has said, “and reminding me that I’m not ‘it.’” His father agrees: “Golly, she sure can calm him down.”

Ann Richards has a single word to describe the wife of the man who ended her political career: “Nurturing.” Though Texans expressed a wide spectrum of opinions regarding her husband, Laura received virtually universal praise. In this, as in many other things, the younger Bush seemed to be repeating his father’s pattern.

Her apolitical affect was perhaps her strongest political asset. During her tenure as first lady of Texas, she gave very few speeches, sought no public involvement in policy and held few social events. In stark contrast to her counterpart in the White House at the time, she had no qualms about quietly and unobtrusively “standing by her man.” “I don’t give him a lot of advice,” she told Barbara Walters. “I really don’t think George wants a lot of advice from me.”

George, elected governor at the height of the Whitewater scandal, understood that his wife’s traditional approach would win him support from a public weary of the Clintons’ personal psychodrama. Laura, he said, was “the perfect wife for a governor,” as she kept from “tryin’ to butt in and always, you know, compete.” His comment spurred a backlash, however, and forced him to acknowledge that he does rely on Laura for advice. In addition to being “a great wife and a good mother,” he later said in an interview with
Ladies’ Home Journal,
“she’s a good adviser, and she’s also got very good judgment.”

Laura proved adroit at sidestepping press attempts to probe differences between husband and wife. It was widely rumored that she did not share George’s enthusiasm for the death penalty, and at a press conference in Houston in the last year of her husband’s governorship, a reporter asked her point-blank about whether or not she supported his position on capital punishment. “If I differ with my husband I’m not going to tell
you
about it,” she snapped. “Sorry,” she added, with a forced smile.

In his quest for the White House, her husband made much of the contrast between Hillary and Laura. She would make a “fabulous first lady,” Bush proclaimed. “She cuts right through, through the posturing and positioning,” George explained. “America’s starved for something. I’m telling you: they’re starved for something real. And that’s what she brings. She’s a real person.” The message was clear: Laura would be the un-Hillary in the White House.

ON JULY 31, 2000
, Laura Bush went prime-time. With her trademark composure, she stood before the assembled delegates that packed Philadelphia’s First Union Center and millions more who watched on television
as she opened the convention that would nominate her husband for President.

Her carefully scripted speech demonstrated to the world just how far she had come since her trembling performance on the courthouse steps of Muleshoe. “Okay, that’s enough,” she began, in a futile attempt to quiet the overzealous reception. “I am honored and I have to say I’m just a little bit overwhelmed ….” Never straying from the secure zones of education and family, like all her other speeches, this was more about the melody than the lyrics.

Near the end of her speech, however, Laura inserted a jab worthy of her mother-in-law. She described traveling with her husband and meeting parents and grandparents who would “hold out pictures of their children and then say to George … ‘I’m counting on you … I want my son or daughter to respect the President of the United States of America!’” The delegates loved the not-so-subtle put-down and erupted in whoops and sustained cheers.

She never actually pronounced the names Clinton, Lewinsky or Whitewater. She had learned very well that what she did not say was often more significant than what she did say.

George and Laura fought hard for the presidency, but they did not seem as emotionally invested in the election’s outcome as some of their supporters, or, for that matter, Al Gore. “People may not believe that,” Laura said of the five weeks it took to determine who won the presidency. “But I knew George and I would be all right either way.”

IN JANUARY OF
2001, it seemed likely that George W. and Laura Bush’s leadership style and home life would be transferred intact from Austin to Washington. In the first nine months, Laura spent enough time away from the White House to rival Bess Truman’s record. Asked about the best advice she had given her husband since he became the leader of the free world, she glibly answered, “Let’s see, I don’t know. Cut his hair or something. I don’t give him a lot of advice.”

She seemed even more traditional and less assertive than the tart-tongued Barbara Bush. “[My mother-in-law] is very funny,” Laura has
said, “very acerbic, very entertaining to listen to. I’m, well, none of those things … [Barbara and George W.] both love to needle and they both love to talk.” While Barbara Bush communicated her political views with winks and nods, Laura’s unthreatening style enables her to be more straightforward. Unlike Barbara, Laura is not feared by White House staffers. From the beginning, she was liked for being just what she claims to be: a traditional wife and mother, a White House anomaly in this or any other time.

Because of her low-key style, few eyebrows were raised when, on January 18, 2001, Laura asserted that she did not think that the 1973 Supreme Court decision declaring a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion should be overturned. Her husband supports a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion, except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the life of the woman.

For the most part, however, Laura stuck to her issues—reading and education—and demurred when pressed to take a policy stand. When a group of women CEOs visited the East Room, she nervously began her remarks by speaking about how Abigail Adams got her laundry done.

Perhaps the most bookish first lady since Abigail Fillmore, to her closest friends she made no bones about where she’d rather be: curled up reading in Crawford, Texas.

For a couple that ran on a platform of restoring dignity to the White House, however, events in the summer of 2001 proved somewhat troubling. Around the same time that Chelsea Clinton was pictured registering for graduate classes in Oxford, the media reported that the first daughters, Jenna and Barbara, faced an Austin magistrate for underage drinking.