Spoken from the Heart (51 page)

There would be no other political races after this one. Ten years after George had sought the Texas governorship, he would be running in his last election, this time for a second term as president. Come January of 2005, we would either be leaving or have four final years to serve. Some call serving in the White House a "burden" or a "sacrifice." The presidency can be, at moments, difficult, and in exchange for the enormous privilege of holding the office, you give up your privacy for a lifetime. But I believe it is a deep honor to be given the trust of the American people. For George and for me, it was a constant blessing to have the opportunity to witness, so often, the very best of America. I enjoyed this last campaign, with its enormous rallies and the chance to once again crisscross the country. I am grateful too to the tens of thousands of people who came out and cheered, to those who waited for hours to shake our hands on the rope lines and who said, "We are praying for you." I took strength and solace from their words.

Spot, our beloved springer spaniel, died that winter. I was away when she suffered a stroke. The only humane thing to do was put her to sleep, but George waited for me to return, so that I too would have a chance to say good-bye. The evening before Spot was going to be put down, George lovingly carried her out to the South Lawn, on whose lush grass she had rolled as a puppy and where, even as an old girl, she loved to chase after balls. George laid her down and then got down on the grass himself, encircling her in the chill dusk with the warmth of his body and gently stroking her head for a final farewell. Spot had been born in the White House to Bar's dog, Millie. She was the only dog to live and die in the White House, with two different presidents.

There was more private sadness to come.

On Valentine's Day, I hosted a dinner for some of our old friends from Midland in the Red Room. It was a dinner for Cathie Blackaller, my old next-door neighbor from Hughes Street, who was dying of metastatic breast cancer. On New Year's Day in Austin, Regan Gammon, Peggy and Ronnie Weiss, Cathie, and I had met for brunch. I told them that I wanted to do a mini-Midland reunion at the White House for a few friends, and Cathie, who used to sneak around outside with me in our pajamas on sleepover nights back when we were teenagers, said, "Why don't you do it sooner rather than later?" I heard her words, and I organized it for Valentine's Day. There were fourteen of us, including Mike Proctor, George's childhood friend. Cathie came in a wheelchair, with her scalp wrapped in a scarf, and Ronnie pushed her around. I seated her next to George, who kept her laughing all evening. That weekend we went to art galleries and enjoyed Washington. It was to be our last visit. Cathie died in April, at fifty-eight years old.

On April 28, CBS News'
60 Minutes II
broadcast the first images from a prison named Abu Ghraib outside Baghdad. They showed naked Iraqi prisoners being subjected to disgusting and degrading abuse by the American soldiers assigned to guard them. A
New Yorker
magazine article followed two days later with more gruesome images. I remember sitting with George over dinner as we did many nights upstairs in the White House, just the two of us, talking. George was nearly physically sick to think that any American troops could have behaved in this manner. He was angry too. "Laura," he said, "I have to know how this was ever allowed to happen and to make sure that it never happens again." There are times when the system of command fails, when soldiers fail their junior officers, when junior officers fail their senior officers, and when senior officers and their layers of civilian leadership at the Defense Department fail. Tens if not hundreds of people in authority across the system had not looked hard enough, had not done their duty. Suddenly the sacrifice, character, and hard work of more than 100,000 American troops in Iraq was being jeopardized by a few deranged men and women. It sickened and devastated both of us.

After two years of meeting on mountaintops, in 2004 the G8 came to the United States. George and I chose to host the leaders of the world's largest economies on Sea Island, Georgia. I invited the presidents' and prime ministers' wives--including Cherie Blair, Lyudmila Putina, Bernadette Chirac of France, and Sheila Martin of Canada--and created a special program for them. Later G8 meetings would do the same; in Germany, Angela Merkel's husband, Professor Joachim Sauer, put together a seminar on G8 population demographics for visiting spouses.

I took our group of wives bird-watching along a deserted beach, although they were most interested in seeing an alligator that made its home on the island's golf course. Lyudmila went swimming several times in the Atlantic's churning waves. The spouses' "work session" featured a roundtable and luncheon to which I invited Dr. Habiba Sarabi, the minister of women's affairs in Afghanistan; and two Iraqi women, the minister of displacement and migration and an Iraqi Fulbright scholar; as well as Paula Nirschel, the wife of the president of Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. Paula had become galvanized by the plight of Afghan women, and in January of 2002, she woke in the middle of the night with an idea, to start scholarships for Afghan women at U.S. universities. Within two years, eleven women from Afghanistan were studying in the United States on full scholarships, and Paula had raised the money to cover their incidental expenses. At the summit's conclusion, Bernadette Chirac told us that France would build a maternity hospital for women in Afghanistan.

That spring Jenna and Barbara graduated from college, one day apart. We headed first to Austin for a celebratory dinner with Mother, Regan and Billy Gammon, and Jenna's friends at a local restaurant. The next night we were in New Haven, celebrating Barbara's graduation with a party at Dean Richard Brodhead's house--he was a friend and former classmate of George's. The only damper on the celebrations was George's nose, which he had scraped when his bike tire hit some loose soil and he toppled over. In all our photos, he is sporting a perfectly placed red mark. By the end of May, for the first time in four years, our girls came home to live.

A couple of months before school ended, Jenna had written a heartfelt letter to her dad, saying that she wanted to work for him in this, his final political race. She told George that she was tired of "hearing lies about you," and she wanted to help others to see "the Dad I love." Both Jenna and Barbara signed on with the Bush-Cheney campaign. It was, they said, their first campaign and also their last chance to volunteer for their dad. They answered phones in the headquarters and flew with us to campaign stops. By the fall the girls were going out and giving speeches on their own. We had the magic of watching the race unfold through their eyes. The constant rush of a full-throttle presidential campaign was new for them. They had been little girls when Gampy ran; they had been college freshmen, adjusting to their new, independent lives during George's first White House race. Now they would tear up when crowds of ten or twenty thousand roared in support of their dad.

Their friends came too. Many from Yale and the University of Texas moved to Washington to help on the campaign. Barbara would get e-mails from college friends with whom she had never discussed politics. They wrote, "I'm in New Hampshire" or "In New Jersey, campaigning for your dad."

I was so proud of the young women Barbara and Jenna had become, and to see how much they wanted to help their father. Both of them knew the world that was visited on presidential children. They had experienced its many privileges, the thrills of foreign travel, the glamour of meeting heads of state. But there are sacrifices as well, starting with the heightened scrutiny of their own lives. A few times they had strangers accost them on the street and scream profanity-laced epithets about their father and their family. They did not tell me about it when it happened, only much later. They knew the strains that George was under; they wanted to protect us. I would not wish what was said to them on any presidential child, or the child of any candidate for public office. But I fear that we have crossed a personal boundary in American political life, a boundary that we may not be able to recross. And the first crossing of that boundary began in the final month of the 2004 campaign.

The 2000 and 2004 national campaigns had a dividing line question. It was invariably a question on a social issue where the press made a concerted effort to find places where my views might diverge from my husband's. During the 2000 race, the media questions usually led, in various guises, back to the issue of abortion. Lisa Myers of NBC was the first to raise it, in the summer of 2000. The day before the 2001 inauguration, Katie Couric went further: Did I want
Roe v. Wade
to be "overturned"?

Hillary Clinton had been outspoken about White House policy and often commented on political decisions and politics. For eight years she had been a highly visible advocate in her husband's administration, so there was a belief on the part of the media that, even though I was not an elected official, they were entitled to ask me about policy, and also a curiosity about whether I would weigh in on policy with George. There was, from the start, a desire by some in the press and many of the pundits to discover any points of disagreement between us. It was an odd sort of Washington parlor game; I should have recognized it when I got the very first abortion query.

I knew the
Roe v. Wade
question was coming; Katie had already asked me two other questions about abortion in the minute before. I thought of Barbara's and Jenna's shock when, as young girls, they first learned what abortion is. They knew how much George and I had longed for children, how much they were wanted. Talking with them around our small kitchen table, I, who had come of age during the bitter fights over
Roe v. Wade,
was also a bit shocked at their surprise and disbelief.

On the issue of abortion, I have always been struck by the deep divide between the sides. And how rarely the alternative of adoption is raised. We have so many friends and family members who found their children through adoption; George and I were fully expecting to be one of those couples as well. Today, for women in their twenties, thirties, and forties, infertility is the issue that is the most personal to them; it is the private struggle that breaks their hearts.