Spoken from the Heart (33 page)

That night in Austin was just dumb, in the way that so many nineteen-year-olds are dumb. I remember a line from
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency,
a series of novels by Alexander McCall Smith, in which his main character, Precious Ramotswe, says, "Twenty-one-year-olds are so stupid. And there are so many of them."

To her credit, Jenna rose to the occasion. She quit going to clubs and other places in downtown Austin. And for years, I've talked to both Barbara and Jenna about the risks of alcohol. Their father quit drinking; my father overdrank; and I've warned both of them about the perils of alcohol, saying, "Nothing good ever happens when you are drunk."

But what bothered me long after the incident was over was the image left behind in the public mind, that Barbara and Jenna were party girls. We never considered using publicists to shape their image, as some prominent figures and celebrities do. We wanted them to live their lives as privately and as normally as possible. I tried to slip away to Austin to see Jenna's sorority show skits, which were put on by the girls for their moms. And I went to visit both girls at school during the year, coming in to do what all college moms do, help them clean their dorm rooms, make a quick run to Bed Bath & Beyond for a lamp or towels or a laundry bag. Most of the snippets that ended up on the news were nothing like our daughters. Many were just plain wrong. Otherwise, Jenna would not have chosen to work with AIDS sufferers in Central America or to teach, and Barbara would not be devoting herself to public health in Africa. But that is the baggage that comes with public life; there are no "private" mistakes. I accepted it and moved on, and they did the same.

In the way that ancient astronomical calendars measured time by the passage of the seasons, the movement of the moon, the seeding of the soil, the culling of the harvest, the presidential calendar is governed by summitry. There are the NATO summits, the Summits of the Americas; the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summits; the G8 meetings; and the United States-European Union summits, all of which rotate locations, usually abroad. Then there are the visits to call on allies, to build relationships with other leaders, to engage other corners of the world. We would pass in and out of a country in a day or even a single afternoon. The flights were invariably overnight, and the expectation was that we would arrive looking perfectly rested and impeccably groomed. Our luggage and the bags of our aides made their own convoy; our vehicles traveled with us in the bellies of cargo planes.

Summer 2001 began with what would become the familiar whirlwind of travel, five countries in five days in June, first to Spain, where we called on the king and queen, and where I visited the Prado Museum with Ana Botella de Aznar, the wife of Spain's prime minister. Afterward, we went to the National Library, where the curators displayed drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, original editions of the classic novel
Don Quixote,
and early Spanish maps of Texas. From there, it was a stop in Belgium for the NATO Summit, and a tour of a market, a church, and a university library, then a NATO spouses' lunch, an interview for the CBS
Early Show,
then on to a meeting at the Brussels American School, as well as a visit with Belgium's King Albert II and Queen Paola at the Laeken Palace. The following morning, we were on our way to Sweden, where George joined the US-EU Summit while I toured a children's center and then a botanical garden. Late in the afternoon, we met with His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf and Her Majesty Queen Silvia, as well as Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Victoria. The Swedish monarchy is one of the oldest in the world; Sweden has crowned kings for over one thousand years. We were introduced surrounded by the tapestry-covered walls of the six-hundred-room Royal Palace; I learned that the king and queen had nine other royal residences scattered around Stockholm. Meanwhile, on the streets, poster-wielding and face-painted anti-globalization protesters were out in force, condemning international corporations and international financial institutions, and a few protesting George. The protests did not die down after we left. Three demonstrators throwing cobblestones and other objects were shot by Swedish riot police, but the protesters never got close to any of the continent's leaders, and by the time they had turned violent, we were long gone.

From the gilded chairs and high-ceilinged palaces of European royalty, I flew to Warsaw, Poland. I met First Lady Jolanta Kwasniewska, and together we toured a children's hospital. Then, after lunch, I went to the Lauder Kindergarten, opened by the American cosmetics magnate and philanthropist Ronald Lauder to educate children of the few Jewish families who had survived the Holocaust and had returned to or somehow remained in Warsaw. All the children were blond, and Ron Lauder quietly said to me, "This is why their families escaped. They were the ones who were able to blend in." As I left, the children gathered and sang "Deep in the Heart of Texas," with a sweet overlay of Polish accents. My next stop was the Noz.yk Synagogue. The only one in Warsaw to survive World War II, it stood within the walls of another property, almost hidden. Unlike the four hundred other synagogues in the city, Noz.yk was left because the Nazis stabled their horses inside it and piled its floors and corners with feed. After the synagogue came an orphanage. I met with a group of eighteen- to twenty-year-olds who were about to leave their dormitory-style rooms and begin life on their own, with no family to call or come home to. The children were thin and sad, and they barely spoke as we sat inside the old building and its spartan rooms. I told them about how nervous I had been when I started my first teaching job, in the hope that they might find some small comfort in that.

As the afternoon drew to a close, I joined George at a ceremony for the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, where some 400,000 Jews were fenced in like cattle behind barbed wire and then were deported to death camps or finally slaughtered by Nazi guns and flamethrowers that were shot into basements and sewers until entire blocks became infernos. At day's end, George delivered an address with the president; then it was a quick change into black-tie evening clothes for cocktails, a receiving line, and a formal state dinner.

After those few days, the crush of images was almost too much to absorb, from glittering fairy-tale palaces to the depths of human despair.

And we still had a meeting with U.S. Embassy staff the next morning, as well as a wreath-laying ceremony to commemorate the Warsaw Uprising before flying on to Slovenia. While George had his first face-to-face meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin and invited him to our ranch, I was whisked off for lunch at the Grand Hotel Toplice, a favorite of the staff of Yugoslavia's old dictator, Marshal Tito, and then a boat ride over to a small island that houses the Assumption of Mary Pilgrimage Church, overlooking Bled's deep, blue lake, which had been carved out by the last of the thick Ice Age glaciers as they retreated from the lower reaches of Europe. I walked up the famous ninety-nine steps rising from the base of the island. Tradition is that, on their wedding day, grooms carry their brides up the steps to the church for the ceremony. When I arrived, there was a wedding in progress, and the bride rushed forward to embrace me, saying this was the best day of her life. I watched costumed folk-life dancers and rang the bell of wishes. Three more brides and grooms were waiting for us as we entered the church. As we left, people lined the sides of the road to wave. In central Europe, where the nations lived under decades of harsh Soviet domination during the Cold War, many of the citizens are deeply pro-American. Like that bride, they always welcomed me with open arms.

Those five days in Europe captured the routine of nearly all our travels, packed days with nations anxious to display their particular beauties and treasures, while others shared their struggles to face the dark episodes of their past.

Back at the White House, by late June, the Rose Garden was in full bloom. Designed like an eighteenth-century garden, it has neatly arrayed beds and borders. Tulips, daffodils, and flowering trees bloom in the spring, and by summer, the fragrance of roses fills the air. I watched the lines of tourists gather outside in the mornings in the rising heat to be led on tours of the public rooms, and I began to look for ways to showcase distinctive American arts inside the White House. On June 29, George and I hosted a White House celebration for Black Music Month, featuring Debbie Allen as the master of ceremonies and performances by the Four Tops and James Brown. Lionel Hampton, who had sent those beautiful rose bouquets to celebrate Barbara's and Jenna's births, bravely came, even though strokes and illness had shrunk him down to little more than skin.

For July 4, I at last successfully surprised George for his birthday. We had spent the day in Pennsylvania with Governor Tom and Michele Ridge. When the four of us returned to the White House, Gary Walters, the head usher, told George there was a sample of his new rug for the Oval Office in the State Dining Room and asked would he like to see it? George said yes, and as we stepped in, the word "Surprise" was being shouted by many of our closest friends. I did the same party every year after that, always on July 4, with fried chicken, deviled eggs, corn bread, all classic picnic and barbecue staples.

The White House pastry chef, Roland Mesnier, made George a cake in the shape of a baseball. It poured rain during dinner but cleared just in time for us to watch the Independence Day fireworks light up the Mall.

In mid-July, we were in Air Force One, high aloft the Atlantic, headed for our first visit to England. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip had invited us for a luncheon at Buckingham Palace, on perfectly pressed linens and china emblazoned with the royal coat of arms. Then we helicoptered over to meet Tony and Cherie Blair at Chequers, the sixteenth-century summer home of England's prime ministers.

We had hosted the Blairs at Camp David; now they wanted to show us the same comfort in return. Chequers sits on grounds that have been recorded in history since Roman times; the name of the original estate was inscribed in the Domesday Book of 1086. Its name likely comes from a twelfth-century British landholder who was an official of the King's Exchequer. Its house is a medium-size redbrick Tudor mansion completed in 1565, fifty-five years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Inside, Cherie showed me a ring that belonged to the first Queen Elizabeth and a table used by the French emperor Napoleon during his exile.

Despite its formal pedigree, our evening at Chequers was very casual. The Blairs' children were there, along with one of their school friends, and Barbara had joined us with one of her school friends. The kids peppered everyone with questions, and it was a fast-moving conversation, covering everything from the merits of missile defense--George being the primary defender and Cherie the skeptic--to capital punishment. On that issue, the American president and the British prime minister's wife, a human rights lawyer, were on vastly different planes. But the debate was cordial. Cherie says no one, left or right, can claim that George doesn't have a very good sense of humor.

When it was over and we all began making our way upstairs, I overheard the Blairs' oldest son, Euan, saying to Cherie, "Give the man a break, Mother."

From England, our next stop was Italy, for George to attend the G8 Summit, a meeting of the eight leading industrialized countries, where we also had an audience with the Pope in his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, and then on to Pristina, Kosovo, where Italian peacekeepers advised our staff not to walk on the grass adjacent to the airport runway because not all the land mines had been removed. Kosovo was, at that moment in July, the global hot spot where some seven thousand U.S. troops had been deployed two years before as part of a NATO force that had arrived after prolonged and bloody fighting between the Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbia. It was the last of the Balkan crises. Because we were entering what was considered a combat zone, the Secret Service insisted that we wear flak jackets for the ride on Marine One to the U.S. base named Camp Bondsteel. I dedicated an education center that was being named for me and toured the base before George addressed the troops, and we had lunch in the base's mess. In Kosovo, half the population being guarded by our soldiers was under the age of twenty-five. At that moment, aside from an incident in the spring when China had detained and interrogated the twenty-four-person crew from a Navy surveillance plane, the Balkans claimed the lion's share of international attention. So on that bright summer day, we had helicoptered into what everyone assumed were the front lines of the world's most prominent war.

By the end of the summer, I was finally hitting my stride in the White House. I had hosted my long-planned conference at Georgetown University on early childhood cognitive development; my pet project, the National Book Festival, was scheduled to debut on Saturday, September 8; and we had gotten away to our ranch in August, with George bringing his senior staff and all the White House work along. Whenever George traveled, even to Camp David, the chief of staff or the chief's deputy almost always came. Now, in addition to the barn and the tractor shed and the green clapboard house, the U.S. government had put a prefab house on our ranchlands for the military aides, the White House doctor, and other members of the staff who accompany the president. National Security Advisor Condi Rice frequently joined us; she had been coming to the ranch since before the election, and we had even named one of our hills Balkan Hill in her honor. On a hike, she was discussing the finer points of Balkan policy with George, never getting winded while she climbed the steep rise. Now her preferred place to stay was the green clapboard house.