Where She’s From 
The Good Wife
Don’t misunderestimate Laura Bush. The least political of first ladies turns out to be a pretty good politician after all. But, asks Mimi Swartz, is she really happy in her new role? Or is she just biding her time until the partisan wars are over, playing . . . the Good Wife.
Lillene Ebanks says: First Lady Laura Bush is the best advocate for education in the history of the United States! (July 5th, 2010 at 2:04am)
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If she was ambivalent about becoming a public figure following her husband’s 1994 gubernatorial victory against Ann Richards—maybe, like a lot of people, Laura didn’t believe it would happen—she adapted, in her own way, to life in the capital. The cadre of studiously underdressed Austin Democratic women who worried that she would impose Escada suits and flashy Dallas jewelry on the populace was immensely relieved when she showed a preference for slacks, rubber-soled shoes, and liberals. (Many of Laura’s oldest friends were progressive Austin Dems; wealthy progressives, but progressives nevertheless. “If you were to characterize them,” clarified one Austin social observer, “you’d think ‘Not Republican.’”) She haunted local antiques shops, tweaked the Governor’s Mansion, put the girls in public school, stayed late at parties long after her teetotaling husband left for bed—and started a statewide book festival with her (seriously Democratic) friend Mary Margaret Farabee. “Well, if I’m going to be a public figure, I might as well do what I’ve always liked doing,” Laura told a reporter at the time. “Which means acting like a librarian and getting people interested in reading.” In this way the first lady of Texas became an enormous asset to the image of intellectual sophistication Texas was trying to present to the world and the era of good feeling that prevailed in the Capitol. (Bob Bullock was George W. Bush’s mentor then, and Karl Rove was just a political consultant.) While the Republican governor was stressing bipartisanship, it didn’t hurt that his wife seemed to be a closet lefty. Laura rarely said what she believed in public, but her comfortable, contained silence left people with the impression that she agreed with . . . just about everyone. He couldn’t be all bad if she married him went the thinking among those who’d sworn they’d never forgive George for defeating their beloved Ann.
Some things changed for Laura when her husband went public with his presidential ambitions. Again, she was a reluctant campaigner, and again, we have to assume that some version of the Treaty of North Dallas remained in place, but not everything could stay the same. I interviewed Laura in 1998 for a national magazine, hoping she might help me explain Bush to the rest of the country, who thought of him only as George Junior. There was construction around the front of the Governor’s Mansion that sunny winter morning, so Laura greeted me warmly at a back door, as if I were a new neighbor she’d heard nice things about. But the slacks and rubber-soled shoes had already been replaced by sensible pumps and a nice Republican suit, the jewel tone of choice being purple, I recall. Her gaze, from those preternaturally turquoise eyes, was friendly but assessing. We warmed up with small talk about the mansion’s fabrics and furniture. Her voice remained soft and animated when she complimented me on a story I’d written, notable then and in retrospect because it was about a gay marriage. (“Good politics!” I thought at the time.)
But when we settled in for the interview, Laura sat ramrod straight, sometimes folding her hands neatly in her lap, sometimes folding her arms across her chest in classic you-are-the-enemy-now posture. (She reminded me a little of Ann Richards then, never a fan of the press.) The casual woman who liked to steal out of the mansion for long walks and cheer her daughters’ friends at high school baseball games had already been packed up for storage. On the topic of George W. Bush—her involvement with his retreat from alcohol in 1986, her desire to help him be “a uniter, not a divider”—she was careful and controlled, her efficient smile slipping every once in a while into a small grimace. That was all I was going to get: a few well-chosen, non-revealing statements. The Buddhists warn that unhappiness can come from attachments, and Laura Bush wasn’t holding fast to her happy life as the governor’s wife; she was moving on. I was the one stuck in the past, expecting the person she’d been.
It was this ability to move forward with the steady, steely assurance of a Coast Guard cutter that seems to have confounded the national press when she arrived in Washington. They wanted to know her; she didn’t want them to. She was perfectly happy to let them think she was bland or dull; she wasn’t going to expend her energy changing their minds. (At one point, slightly annoyed by her press, she told a reporter that she wasn’t shy; she was introverted, a sorority girl’s delicate way of saying she’d rather be alone than with members of the media.) The press tried to retaliate. Laura’s varied life as an academic (the master’s in library science), a teacher of poor kids for nearly a decade, a stay-at-home mom, and a devoted wife was portrayed not as a paradigm of feminist flexibility but as an example of a woman whose myriad choices ultimately meant nothing, except that every choice she had made could be used to advance her husband’s career. “She is the Play-Doh first lady,” wrote The New Republic in August 2001. “Mold her into whatever shape you want, then stamp her back down into a pile of putty for her next audience.” The author added that when Laura lunched with Hillary Clinton as the latter was leaving the White House, the new first lady wore “a terrible purple plaid number, looking like nothing so much as a country mouse.” She could not possibly be smart: That she was an insatiable reader was met with incredulity, particularly when she cited an imposing chapter in The Brothers Karamazov as her favorite part of her favorite novel. Wrote the author: “Asked about this ambiguous and unsettling passage—in which Christ returns to earth only to be arrested as a heretic and threatened with burning at the stake—Laura replied bafflingly, ‘It’s about life, and it’s about death, and it’s about Christ. I find it really reassuring.’” It’s only baffling, of course, if you refuse to take Laura at her word, but the first lady plainly didn’t care what the journalist thought. She later joked about donating her plaid suit to a historical clothing collection and to this day keeps The Brothers Karamazov on her White House Web site reading list.
“If I differ with my husband, I’m not going to tell you about it,” Laura told a reporter in 2000, which, as it turns out, was the last word on her intention to maintain a zone of privacy around her feelings and opinions. It was the Austin technique writ large: The less she said, the more the public seemed to project its own feelings onto her, and most of those feelings were helped along by the kind of harmless and heartwarming appearances no one could carp about. Laura was in favor of reading (good!), she was against heart disease in women (great!), she never changed her hairstyle (a relief), and she had absolutely no intention of participating in a co-presidency (ditto). The idea of using the first lady’s job as a bully pulpit didn’t suit her solitary, self-effacing temperament, and it didn’t suit the times, which even before September 11 were rancorous enough without throwing a Hillary-type into the mix.
Instead, Laura told reporters that Lady Bird Johnson was her White House model, which satisfied just about everyone. Both women were gracious; both women showed a knack for handling cantankerous men; both women knew how to keep out of trouble. But Laura also had a pinch of Jackie in her sly wit and passion for the arts—soon enough, no one could mistake her for a cowgirl. She also had more than a little in common with Bess Truman, who retreated to Independence, Missouri, for months at a time because she hated “the rigmarole” of Washington. Austinites got used to seeing the first lady sipping margaritas with friends at Manuel’s while her husband flew solo in Washington; people in Midland got a charge out of seeing an official government plane on the airport tarmac when Laura got a hankering to visit her mom. George opted for the White House; Laura opted to redo the house in Crawford.
Her biographers struggled mightily to add drama and pathos to a life that was, with a few exceptions, supremely happy and serenely uneventful. (Reading these accounts, you cannot help longing for a chronicler like Virginia Woolf, who knew how to endow seemingly ordinary people with rich internal lives, or Larry McMurtry, who understands the unshakable reserve of West Texas women.) At least three biographies have been written about Laura—three and a half, if you count her share of George and Laura, by Christopher Andersen—and in all, the reader comes out knowing almost less about her at the end than at the beginning. The same stories are recycled endlessly, with little to no elaboration from her. Hence, the repercussions of a horrible automobile accident in which she ran a stop sign and killed a close high school friend are used to explain variously her passion for order, the arranging of her bookcases according to the Dewey decimal system, and the sponging down of homes with Clorox; the climactic moment in which she persuaded her husband to stop drinking is used to show her inner fortitude and profound influence (even though she’s denied that she ever spoke up in such a manner). Laura went from being the cowed librarian to her hot-tempered husband’s personal Prozac; she alone could control him with words like “Rein it in, Bubba,” according to the New York Times.
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