Kati Marton (62 page)

ON THE MORNING OF
September 11, 2001, Laura was en route to Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Education Committee. At three minutes past nine, United Airlines Flight 175 ripped into Tower Two of the World Trade Center. It was the second Boeing 767 to hit the Twin Towers that morning.

The President, who had assumed that the first crash had been a
tragic accident, sat on a stool and entertained sixteen toddlers at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. His Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card, Jr., leaned down and whispered the news into his ear: “A second plane has hit the World Trade Center: America is under attack.” Thirty minutes later American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon.

By the day’s end, the terrorist attacks claimed the lives of 3,000 people. The world, and the Bush presidency, had changed forever.

“I remember thinking,” Laura recalled, “that nothing would ever be the same.” First she spoke with her husband, who was at the time on his way back to Washington. Then she called her daughters. Finally, she called her mother, “just for the comfort of her voice.” George and Laura spoke twice before noon that day. She calmed the President who seemed ready to tear apart the “tinhorn terrorists” with his bare hands, Texas-style. Once he was back in Washington, George recalled, Laura “never created any sense of alarm in our household, which was great. I mean … she was very comforting. The way you see her in public is the way she is in private. She’s, you know, calm. She’d occasionally admonish me for getting a little too, you know, overboard on, you know, ‘dead or alive.’ … She thought I could have [been] a little more diplomatic or phrased it differently. But … that was just me coming out there.”

In the following days, while her husband often seemed barely able to contain his anger—and occasionally choked back tears in public appearances—Laura remained composed, very much a reassuring public figure. She visited burn victims from the Pentagon attacks, appeared on national television and, in sharing her own anguish with the country, struck a chord with the stunned and grieving nation. The day after the attacks, she addressed an open letter to elementary school students: “When sad or frightening things happen, all of us have an opportunity to become better people by thinking about others …. I want you to know how much I care about all of you. Be kind to each other, take care of each other and show your love for each other.”

She provided a necessary balance to her husband’s righteous fury. The President warned the world that America was “fierce when stirred to anger”; the first lady asserted that “we are a kinder nation today.” While George talked about smoking “the evil-doers” out of their caves,
Laura counseled the nation’s children that, “while there are some bad people in the world, there are many more good people.”

Unlike that of her activist predecessors Eleanor and Hillary, Laura’s service to the nation comes in simple acts. When she visits classrooms, “Children will sidle up to me and whisper, ‘What do you think about what happened?’ I’ll say ‘I’m sad,’ and they’ll nod and say they are sad too.”

She has also served the nation by projecting the strength of her marriage. By reminding Americans of traditional values that seemed suddenly in jeopardy, she steadied and brought comfort. As her husband prosecuted the war on terrorism overseas, Laura soon returned to her normal life. While she frequently mentioned September 11, her public remarks returned to the carefully scripted comments on early childhood and education.

On November 17, 2001, Laura made a little history. In the first Saturday presidential radio address ever delivered in its entirety by a first lady, she fired the first shot in “a worldwide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban.” Her address was short but pulled no punches—describing the “horror” of the Taliban who “pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish.”

On March 8, 2002, Laura followed up her address with a speech to the United Nations (on International Women’s Day) on the status of women in Afghanistan. The quiet small-town Texan who never wanted to be anything but a teacher and housewife ended her speech to the world’s largest governing body by calling for “human dignity, private property, free speech, equal justice, education and health care—these rights must be guaranteed throughout the world. Together, the United States, the United Nations and our allies will prove that the forces of terror can’t stop the momentum of freedom.” The speech might easily have been delivered by her controversial predecessor.

THREE DAYS BEFORE
the State of the Union, a
USA Today/CNN/Gallup
poll chose Laura Bush as the most admired woman in America. (Her husband was admired by more Americans than any man since Gallup
had begun the poll in 1948.) Though their sky-high approval ratings were a function of the national crisis, they marked a stunning transformation of the most contested presidency in history.

Neither Nancy Reagan nor Hillary Rodham Clinton could have given the President’s weekly radio address without political cost to their husbands. Ironically, because Laura does not seem anxious for a public role, she is more easily granted a bully pulpit. Since September 11, 2001, she has emerged as a stabilizing voice in America’s national dialogue—something she probably could not have imagined earlier. But the question remains: will she sustain her new role, extend it still further—or slip back into her comfortable, low-profile pre-September 11 existence? The latter seems unlikely—she has proved too valuable a political asset.

“I never wanted …” John Adams letter to Abigail, March 27, 1797,
Founding Brothers
by Joseph J. Ellis (New York: Knopf, 2000).

“I hope some day …”
The Woman in the White House,
Marianne Means (New York: Signet Press, 1963).

Presidential Studies Quarterly—Modern First Ladies
vol. 20, no. 4 (Fall 1990);
Presidential Studies Quarterly—Reassessments of Presidents and First Ladies
vol. 26, no. 3 (Summer 1996);
First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives and Their Power,
vol. 1 (New York: Morrow, 1990), vol. 2 1961–1990 (New York: Morrow, 1991).

H. W. Brand’s
T.R.—The Last Romantic
(New York: Basic Books, 1997), Judy Crichton’s
America 1900
(New York: Owl Books, 2000), and FranÇoise Thebaud’s
A History of Women in the West: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) were useful in setting the scene for this chapter.

For essential background on the Wilsons I relied on interviews with several key scholars. First among them was the late Professor Arthur Stanley Link, who devoted the better part of his scholarly life to the study of Woodrow Wilson and produced the five-volume collection,
Wilson,
all published by Princeton University Press between 1947 and 1965. I owe thanks to Professor Link for pointing me toward essential scholarship and scholars. Link’s Princeton University protégé, Professor Thomas Knock, and Professor John Milton Cooper of the University of Wisconsin were kind and patient in sharing some of their views on both Edith and Woodrow Wilson. Columbia University professors Henry Graff and Alan Brinkley offered historical insights and suggestions on my research and with the manuscript. I am grateful to them all, particularly Professor Brinkley, who was among my first readers and made many helpful suggestions.

Of the many books on the subject, several were invaluable in writing this chapter. August Heckscher’s
Woodrow Wilson
(New York: Scribner’s, 1991) and Edward Weinstein’s
Woodrow Wilson, A Medical and Psychological
Biography
(Princeton University Press, 1981) were the two I relied on most. Many of the key letters of Edith and Woodrow are found in a collection edited by Edwin Tribble,
President in Love—the Courtship Letters of Woodrow Wilson and Edith Bolling Galt
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). Throughout the chapter, I also quoted Irwin “Ike” Hood’s
Forty-two Years in the White House, The Memoir of White House Chief Usher
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934). Hood offered a sharply different perspective of Wilson’s illness than Edith Wilson’s very one-sided account,
My Memoir
(New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1938).

This chapter is also informed by Alden Hatch’s
Edith Bolling Wilson—First Lady Extraordinaire
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1961) and Ishbel Ross’s
Power with Grace,
(New York: Putnam, 1975) which represent two subsequent generation’s views of this complex woman. Rear Admiral Cary T. Grayson, Edith’s co-conspirator in her cover-up, also wrote his own account,
Woodrow Wilson, An Intimate Memoir
(Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 1960), which I relied on for the section on the later stage of Wilson’s illness. Gene Smith’s
When the Cheering Stopped
(New York: Morrow, 1964) is also a valuable account of Wilson’s decline.
Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal
by Thomas Bailey (Chicago: Encounter Paperbacks/Quadrangle Books, 1945) backgrounds the political context of the Wilson’s marriage.

Throughout this chapter I relied on the
New York Times
archives to tell the story of how Edith manipulated the media from September 1919 until late 1921.

I am grateful to Jenny Lyn Bader for sharing her play,
Petticoat Government,
as well as her acute observations on the indomitable Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. Louis Auchincloss’s
Woodrow Wilson
(New York: Penguin Lives, Lipper/Viking Books, 2000), a stylish, astute short biography, confirmed many of my own conclusions about Wilson the man.

The amount of available documentation on the Roosevelts is overwhelming. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s
No Ordinary Time—Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
(New York: Touchstone, 1994) is the groundbreaking account of Eleanor and Franklin as wartime couple in the White House. This would be quite a different chapter without Kearns’s work. I found Blanche Wiesen Cook’s two-volume work entitled
Eleanor Roosevelt
(New York: Viking, 1992, 1999) essential for understanding Mrs. Roosevelt. Joseph Lash’s
Eleanor and Franklin
(New York: Norton, 1971) was my bible and touchstone for this chapter. Lash’s
Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends
(New York: Doubleday, 1982) and
Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend’s Memoir
(New York: Doubleday,
1964) round out and refine the portrait. What Lash and Cook did for Eleanor, Geoffrey C. Ward achieves in his vivid portrayal of Franklin,
A First Class Temperament
(New York: Harper & Row, 1989). Eleanor’s own accounts,
This Is My Story, This I Remember, On My Own
and
My Day
(variously published between 1937 and 1961 by Harper & Brothers, New York) are indispensable in forming any clear picture of her astonishing role in our national narrative. No other presidential spouse has left such a record, because none has led such a life.

Eleanor’s correspondence offers the freshest and most reliable insights. Her relationship to Lorena Hickock is best understood through their correspondence,
Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickock,
edited by Rodger Streitmatter (New York: Free Press, 1998). Eleanor’s letters to her daughter, Anna, are collected in
Mother and Daughter: The Letters of Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt,
edited by Bernard Asbell (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982).

Franklin Roosevelt did not leave much of a personal paper trail. Others have been left to interpret his life. In addition to Lash and Ward, I relied on Robert Ferrell’s
The Dying President: Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1944–1945
(Columbia: University of Missouri, 1998) and
Closest Companion—the Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995) in profiling the final, sad year of the Roosevelt marriage.

I drew on the memories and personal accounts of a number of Roosevelt intimates and associates in writing this chapter. Trude Lash, widow of Joseph Lash and friend of Eleanor, was generous with her time. So were Jane Plakias, William J. Vanden Heuvel, Alan J. Pakula, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Raymond Lamontagne and Professor Alan Brinkley. Eleanor’s granddaughter Kate Roosevelt Whitney shared a few precious memories of her grandmother. Winthrop Rutherfurd III recalled his step-grandmother, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd.

No one can hope to penetrate the complex Roosevelt union without spending time at Hyde Park, where Franklin was raised and where Eleanor—before she built her own house, Val Kill—spent her painful early years as his wife. I am grateful to Verne Newton, the director of the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, for his hospitality and his guidance, as well as his insights. The bulk of the research material found in this chapter—letters, oral histories and memoranda—are housed in the Roosevelt Hyde Park Library.