Where She’s From 
George W. Bush Interview With Mark K. Updegrove (Audio) 
Reading Laura Bush
She has spent the past two years keeping herself out of the spotlight. But now that she’s stepping up her fight against illiteracy, the very private first lady of Texas is being thrust into the public eye.
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But not for long. Three months after that dinner, George and Laura stunned many of their friends by getting married. “I think it was a whirlwind romance because we were in our early thirties,” Laura admits. “I’m sure both of us thought, ‘Gosh, we may never get married.’ And we both really wanted children. Plus, I lived in Austin and he lived in Midland; so if we were going to see each other all the time, we needed to marry.” Regan Gammon thinks there was less of a practical motive at work: “We quickly realized that they were perfect complements to one another. Laura loved George’s energy, and George loved the way she was so calm.”
For the first fifteen or so years of their marriage, Laura continued to live a quiet life as Bush built his oil business in Midland, moved his family to Washington to work on his father’s presidential campaign in 1987, then to Dallas, where he became the managing general partner of the Texas Rangers. Except for a stint on the boards of several charity groups, she was little known in Dallas. George recalls that when he first brought up the idea of running for governor, she was “the very last one willing to get on that train.” She didn’t want politics disrupting the lives of their daughters, Barbara and Jenna, who were reaching their teenage years, and she wondered if her husband was only running to fulfill his family legacy. When George finally convinced Laura that he truly wanted to lead the state, she agreed to do some limited campaigning, which consisted of giving speeches to GOP women’s groups. Reading carefully from a prepared text—“The idea of ad-libbing scared me to death,” she says—she’d begin with that same old line about her husband promising that she would not have to give speeches. She always spoke briefly and not particularly demonstratively.
Even after George won, many of Laura’s friends expected her to maintain a low profile as first lady. “I knew she was uncertain about moving to Austin,” George says. “She was a little fearful, maybe, about whether any of this life would be to her liking. So my attitude was, ‘Laura, if you want to sit in the Governor’s Mansion during my term in office, that’s fine with me. You and the girls didn’t ask to be put in this position, and I promise I’m not going to make any of you do anything.’” Indeed, Laura has been committed to protecting the privacy of the twins (who turn fifteen this month). To this day, she refuses to allow reporters to interview them, and photographers are asked not to take their pictures. “The girls would be totally humiliated having to do a photo,” Laura says. “And I know this sounds strange, but I’m just not ready to have everyone know what they look like.”
Although it was one thing to maintain the privacy of her daughters, it was quite another for Laura to keep herself out of the spotlight. “I finally said, ‘Well, if I’m going to be a public figure, I might as well do what I’ve always liked doing,” she recalls, “which meant acting like a librarian and getting people interested in reading.” So in her first act as first lady, she invited a group of Texas authors—among them, self-described “flaming liberals”—to read at an inaugural week event. Then she began traveling the state to focus attention on literacy and encourage better reading programs for children. Of course, much was made of the fact that Laura was following in the footsteps of Barbara Bush, who had made literacy her cause when she was first lady of the United States. “I didn’t want to step on Bar’s issue,” she says, “but it had also been my issue long before I became a Bush. And I think Bar loved what I was doing.” In fact, the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy has donated $150,000 to her literacy program, the First Lady’s Family Literacy Initiative for Texas, which awards grants to deserving nonprofit groups.
Laura says Barbara gave her only one piece of advice about being a politician’s wife: never criticize your husband’s speeches. “She said it would prevent a lot of marital fights,” Laura notes, “and she was right.” Even though she continued to use her George-promised-me-I’d-never-have-to-give-a-speech line, Laura’s own speeches got noticeably better, and she began to learn about the power of her last name. Whenever she showed up in cities or towns, it was front-page news. After meeting the first lady, a wealthy El Paso man named his racehorse Sweet Laura Bush. A businessman emblazoned her name on the gas tank of his Harley-Davidson. And when Laura asked Jan Bullock and Nelda Laney to join her in her project to acquire art for the Capitol, they readily agreed, creating a kind of bipartisan political wives’ club. One morning this summer, I watched them and a few other women visit the home of Dallas collector Claude Albritton, who owns several nineteenth-century bluebonnet paintings by Texan Julian Onderdonk. It was hard to miss Bullock, a striking, outgoing blonde, or Laney, who is charming in a flirtatious small-town way. But where was Laura? She had drifted to the back of the group, letting others take charge. “I think what people see in her is her ability to be just incredibly pleasant,” says Bullock. “In her nice, soft way, she says a few words, and people realize there is nothing phony about her.”
She doesn’t seem overly ambitious either. Laura has no political advisers; her entire staff at the first lady’s office consists of one person, Andi Ball, who does everything from answer the phone to travel with her around the state. Laura insists that unlike, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton, she has no interest in making policy decisions. When I asked her if she would ever lobby legislators to vote for a certain bill, she appeared startled. “Well, no,” she said, “the idea hasn’t occurred to me.” Although she believes teachers should be paid more and that more money should be spent on reading programs, she does not try to persuade her husband to increase state education aid. “She knows that the literacy problem is not so much about spending more money as it is focusing on how the money that we have is being spent,” George says. “Look, Laura and I read the paper together every morning, and we discuss different issues. She’s always asking what I’m going to be doing about this or that. But I think she trusts me to make the right decisions.”
SMART, GENUINE, INDEPENDENT WITHOUT being inflammatory, a loving mother and supportive wife: Not surprisingly, Republican leaders see Laura Bush as precisely the kind of political spouse who can appeal to middle-of-the-road voters. And considering that George is already on several short lists as a Republican nominee for president or vice president four or eight years from now, it doesn’t hurt that she’s starting to get good ink. These days a potential first lady of the United States is often scrutinized as closely as her husband. In fact, all the press talked about during the month of August, it seemed, was Elizabeth Dole’s Oprah-style walk-and-talk in San Diego and Hillary Clinton’s defense of her it-takes-a-village message in Chicago.
George maintains that he had nothing to do with Laura’s speaking at the GOP convention—that it was party chairman Haley Barbour who made the decision after he heard her talk about literacy earlier in the year. But the afternoon before Laura gave her San Diego speech, George noticed a gaggle of reporters, cameras, and boom microphones enveloping her on the convention floor. The reporters were asking about her husband’s presidential prospects. She replied that all the attention was flattering, but if a decision were to be made about a White House run, it would not happen for a long time. She smiled sincerely, and the reporters smiled back.
“Right then I realized that the same thing was happening to me that had happened to my old man,” George later said. “I was already becoming less popular than my own wife.”
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