Spoken from the Heart (46 page)

What he did not say, but what everyone surmised, was that there were two paths now before us: peace or war. And what we would choose depended in large measure on whether, in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein was listening and would heed these words.

Days later, we had the chance to return V'clav and Dagmar Havel's hospitality with a visit to Washington. Both Dagmar and I were wearing navy blue dresses for the black-tie dinner, and when we paused for White House photos on the red carpet, she was overcome with a fit of giggles; neither of us had thought to coordinate what we were wearing. It was a lighthearted evening, especially for the Havels. The previous August enormous floods along the Moldau River had engulfed the city of Prague. Marine guards and other U.S. Embassy employees, including our ambassador, Craig Stapleton, had gone to work cleaning out the knee-high mud and debris from flooded historic buildings throughout the city, saving priceless artifacts. The Havels wanted to express the deep gratitude of the Czech people. Ours, they told us, had been the only embassy and the only ambassador to help. It is easy to be proud of our country, because when there is a need, Americans' first instinct is to respond.

On the late afternoon of October 2, a single shot rang out across the D.C. city line in Montgomery County, Maryland. More than twenty-four hours later, after multiple sniper-style shootings in suburban Maryland and Northwest Washington, six people lay dead, among them a seventy-two-year-old retired carpenter, a thirty-nine-year-old landscaper who had been mowing a lawn, a fifty-four-year-old man who had been pumping gas, and a twenty-five-year-old mom who had been vacuuming her minivan. Each had been killed by a long-range rifle shot. Within a day the sniper had extended his deadly attacks into Virginia, shooting a forty-three-year-old woman as she loaded packages from a craft store, and then a few days later killing a forty-seven-year-old woman in the parking lot of a Home Depot. There were no suspects, no witnesses; the only clue was a tarot card left behind at one scene. Washington and the surrounding suburbs as far away as Richmond, Virginia, went into panic. Parks and playgrounds were suddenly deserted; parents were afraid to let their children wait at a bus stop or ride the bus to school. Parking lots sat empty. People crouched on their knees to fill their gas tanks, hoping to avoid giving the anonymous sniper a clear target.

After each new shooting, police set up roadblocks on major arteries and searched cars, vans, and trucks. Large black federal response vehicles idled along main roads, waiting to spring into action at the first report of another sniper attack. In the midst of these shootings, on October 6, we were invited to dinner at the Chevy Chase home of the columnist George Will and his wife, Mari, along with David McCullough and his wife, Rosalee, and the Civil War historian James McPherson and his wife, Patricia. It was less than a week after the first sniper attack, and there were still no leads. Hours in advance the local streets were blocked off, and when we arrived, with the usual police escort, a dark helicopter circled overhead, its rotors thumping against the evening sky. On the surrounding streets, neighbors bolted their doors and cringed in fear. They thought all the security gathered on the street meant that the sniper had struck again.

As the sniper's rampage continued, we were preparing for the second National Book Festival, to be held outside, underneath tents on the National Mall. Forty-five thousand people came to hear over seventy authors, and I brought a special guest, Lyudmila Putina. I had invited her during our spring visit. I liked Lyudmila, even though our conversations always had a slightly stilted quality because they were conducted via an interpreter. Lyudmila was engaging, and we both loved reading and books. I found myself thinking back to that long-ago Houston summer when I sat in the sweltering heat and read the classics of Russian literature, never knowing that my journey would lead me here.

Lyudmila accompanied me to the opening ceremonies for the festival in the East Room and then to the festival itself, where we walked through the tents and listened to authors. This was her first trip to the United States without her husband. She told me that she wanted to host her own book festival in Moscow, a remarkable step in a country where little more than a decade ago the bookstores were government-controlled. Many moments from that day stayed with me, but of particular note were the closing remarks by the historian David McCullough, in which he described John Adams's quest for knowledge: "The greatest gift of all, he was certain, was the gift of an inquiring mind." McCullough quoted Adams, saying, "I shall have the liberty to think for myself," and he added, "We face a foe today who believes in enforced ignorance. We don't." That plainspoken statement says so much about America, then and now.

On October 24, the Beltway sniper, John Allen Muhammad, and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, were finally captured, sleeping in their car at a rest stop off a Maryland highway. Malvo later testified that one of the aims of the killings had been eventually to extort money from the government so that they could "set up a camp to train children how to terrorize cities." On December 12, I made the annual Christmas visit to the Children's National Medical Center, a tradition among first ladies dating back to Bess Truman and Jackie Kennedy. One of my escorts was Iran Brown, a thirteen-year-old boy who had miraculously survived being shot by the sniper in the chest outside his middle school in Bowie, Maryland, just after eight o'clock in the morning on October 7. He was one of only three victims who survived. Ten others died.

At the end of October, I was in the air again with George, off to Mexico for the APEC Leaders' Meeting. In November it was back to Europe with George for a NATO meeting and stops in Lithuania and St. Petersburg, where I saw Lyudmila. Our friendship was built not simply out of frequent meetings but the common threads of our lives. Like me, Lyudmila had two daughters, Maria and Yekaterina, both close in age to Barbara and Jenna. The Putins were proud that their daughters were fluent in English and several other languages. During a visit that previous summer to the Putins' dacha--a sprawling, steep-roofed house in the middle of a birch forest just west of Moscow--the girls played violin and piano for us. Another time, Vladimir proudly showed George the chapel he had built inside the compound and his stables, where a troop of Russian riders treated us to a command acrobatic performance. And as I walked through the dacha's brightly painted rooms with their massive fireplaces, I thought back to Lyudmila's surprise at seeing all the windows and open doors at our Texas ranch. Frigid Moscow winters and nights do not lend themselves to vast expanses of clear glass.

On this November visit to St. Petersburg, Lyudmila and I toured the beautifully restored Catherine Palace, and we were both drawn to Catherine's large, even indulgent, windows. Outside, the ground was covered with snow, and the lights from the palace reflected off the snow and then back off the windows until they resembled a kind of infinite light. I stood gazing out, imagining myself in some past century racing in a horse-drawn troika across the white, frozen ground. Off in other rooms, George and Vladimir discussed the complex issues of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Republicans had won an unprecedented victory in the 2002 midterm congressional elections, the first time the party of a newly elected president had won seats in both houses of Congress since Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. According to a Gallup poll, George's approval rating stood at 68 percent. He was, the pollsters declared, "wildly popular." But we did not spend our days thinking about those numbers. Poll numbers are ephemeral; we did not live our lives by them. With the election now in the past, what stretched before us was the future, and every contour of it was unknown.

On December 4, I hosted thirteen women teachers from Afghanistan at the White House. Selected from across the country's provinces, they had already spent five weeks in a special professional training program run by the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where they lived with local families. I thought of them being welcomed into those solid, loving midwestern homes, eating Thanksgiving dinner, with heaping plates of turkey and dressing, biscuits and pie, and getting to know their American hosts. Each teacher who came had pledged to teach ten new teachers once she returned home. I hoped they would teach them everything they had learned, in the classroom and beyond. We had coffee, and as I walked them through the White House, I started to dream of making my own visit to Afghanistan.

We began our second holiday season, this time celebrating "All Creatures Great and Small," with animals incorporated into nearly every decoration, even cookies in the shape of Barney. We hosted night after night of events, including the annual Congressional Ball for nearly one thousand guests, all the members and their invitees. I had selected the image for our holiday card months before, a painting by Zheng-Huan Lu of the State Floor's beautiful piano, with its proud gold eagles, designed by Steinway for Franklin Roosevelt.

Christmas cards are a relatively new tradition at the White House. During the first half of the twentieth century, presidents primarily sent cards to family and close friends. But thousands of Americans mailed their own cards to the White House. Calvin Coolidge, who held the first National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony, received twelve thousand cards from the public in 1924, the same year that his beloved son died. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt received forty thousand cards, so many that he needed to hire extra staff to open the mail. Christmas cards were rare during the time of Abraham Lincoln, but cartoonist Thomas Nast, the man credited with popularizing Santa Claus, had designed campaign posters for Lincoln's 1860 election. In 1863, at the height of the Civil War, Lincoln commissioned Nast to create a cover image for
Harper's Weekly
depicting Father Christmas welcoming Union troops. Among recent presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first to send out large numbers of White House Christmas cards. Six Eisenhower-era cards featured his own paintings, including portraits he did of Lincoln and Washington and several of his favorite landscapes. This December I inscribed our card with the words "May love and peace fill your heart and home during this holiday season and throughout the New Year."

On December 18, ABC broadcast Barbara Walters's annual special on the Ten Most Fascinating People of the year. Barbara had selected me as 2002's most fascinating person, calling me a "beacon of calm in the center of the storm." It was flattering, but even as it aired, I said to George with a smile, "Bushie, what goes up must come down."

On Christmas Eve at Camp David, George continued his annual ritual of placing calls to our troops. That day he was reaching out to men and women in the dusty, frigid landscape of Afghanistan and on other bases and ships around the world. At night we watched the Christmas pageant and Nativity play, retelling the centuries-old story of Christ's birth, performed by the children of the sailors and Marines stationed at Camp David. We smiled as a few pint-size angels, shepherds, and sheep scrunched up their faces in tears, overcome by sheer excitement and exhaustion. All of our family--George's parents, his brothers and sister and their children, Barbara and Jenna, and my mother--had gathered with us. On Christmas Day, George prayed that next holiday season he would not be calling men and women in yet another war zone.

On November 25, Barbara and Jenna had turned twenty-one. We celebrated just after Thanksgiving with a big party and a campout at the ranch with food from Tom Perini's Buffalo Gap chuckwagon. Our girls were now technically adults, looking out on a new world of their own. I treasured the few days and weeks that we had together through the year before they returned to their own lives. They were with us for that Christmas in the woods at Camp David, and a few days after they left, George sat down and typed out a thank-you note to them for his gifts. The note was full of fatherly love, but one line in particular has always stayed with me. He told Jenna and Barbara that he prayed that Saddam Hussein would disarm, that he would give up his weapons of death and destruction, and that there would be peace. He ended that paragraph with his usual effort to turn something so achingly serious into a lighter moment, assuring the girls that they need not worry that their dad somehow lacked for things to do.