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)
Related Multimedia
(Page 3 of 3)
Then came September 11. Just as the events following that awful day proved to be her husband’s finest hours, they were Laura’s too, providing the perfect intersection of her personality and the nation’s needs. As biographer Gerhart put it, “The woman who had the capacity to lie for hours on a sofa, reading, was suddenly logging sixteen-hour days, and in full public view, perfectly groomed, suit pressed, hair in place, and always, waterproof mascara. . . . The same emotional clarity that had guided her in composing her life now informed a new mission.” She calmed, she comforted, she selected just the right hymns for the National Cathedral service, and she visited the site of the crash of Flight 93 in a lonely, muddy field in Pennsylvania. Just before George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll reported that Laura was the most admired woman in America. “I actually think that the American people think that the first lady ought to do whatever she wants to do,” she said.
It seems to have worked for her.
MANY CRITICS OF THE BUSH family want to believe that the current, more partisan incarnation of the first lady displays her obeisance to the family machine. (“She might as well be wrapped in veils,” one Democratic friend groused to me.) She took up for the entire clan when she bashed (in a nice way, of course) the Bush-snubbing Nancy Reagan over stem cell research. But Laura possessed many Bush-like tendencies before she ever became one; she blended so effortlessly into the family that her more progressive friends just failed to notice. She’s always been better at being a Bush—the idealized, admirable, loving family George H. W. and his wife, Barbara, concocted—than the Bushes themselves. Before she married, Laura devoted a decade or so to helping the kind of people her husband never showed much interest in until he decided to run for office. She taught school in poor communities, and though her husband performed brief volunteer work with underprivileged kids for a Houston organization called PULL in the early seventies, reporters have long wondered whether this was some form of mandated community service for goodness knows what. Laura’s reticence might be attributed to the fabled silences of West Texans, but it could easily pass for that of a musty but well-bred East Coast aristocrat, like the Connecticut Bushes. The pull of the past must have felt like an undertow to George when he met Laura; it’s no wonder the two married expeditiously, after a three-month courtship. Barbara Bush early on singled Laura out from among her daughters-in-law as the only one who was first-lady material. She was, by nature and preference, intent on staying out of the way: “I have the best wife for the line of work that I’m in,” the president once told a reporter. “She doesn’t try to steal the limelight.” (Or, as a mutual friend put it, “Bush didn’t have to marry his mother because he is his mother.”)
Laura didn’t crave attention like her ambitious in-laws, but that doesn’t mean she was a pushover. It was inconceivable that she would ever embarrass the family, as Jeb’s wife, Columba, did when she was fined for failing to declare jewelry and clothes she brought back into the U.S. several years ago, or try to outshine Barbara, as Neil’s wife, Sharon, did in the pre–Silverado scandal days in Denver and in her pre-divorce Houston society era. Still, Laura neatly deflected comparisons between herself and her mother-in-law (Lady Bird is my role model) just by being . . . herself. She was this way from the beginning: At the family compound in Maine, she avoided the Olympic trials that passed for family sporting events, staking out instead a spot on the front porch with her books and cigarettes. “What do you do?” George H. W. Bush’s famously competitive mother, Dorothy, asked Laura, when she was newly wed in 1977. “I read and I smoke,” Laura replied—Midlandese for “shove it.” The ever-watchful Barbara would later tidy up her daughter-in-law’s line in her 1994 memoir, claiming that Laura had actually said, “I read, I smoke, and I admire,” possibly grafting a few words from her own note to a Smith College alumni magazine. (“I play tennis, do volunteer work, and admire George Bush!”)
By keeping the family at some distance—and childhood friends close—Laura probably saved herself from the depressions suffered by political wives in general and Bush women in particular. Life in China was tough on Barbara Bush, by her own admission, as were the many times her husband left her, alone, to raise their ever-expanding brood. Laura, faced with a husband who wouldn’t own up to his drinking problem, threatened to walk when the situation became intolerable. (It isn’t just Kitty Kelley who suggested that Bush treated his wife like a doormat or worse when he was in his cups; people in Midland and in Washington, where George went to help his father on his 1988 campaign, saw the same short-tempered, dismissive oaf at social events.) Whether Laura was the person who directly intervened to get her husband to stop drinking or simply one of many who attempted to get Bush sober, she was soon characterized (by Bush himself) as the person who had “saved” him. She demurely denied doing any such thing, but the mythology grew when George faltered on the campaign trail during the 2000 race and Laura was supposedly the only person who could quiet him down. “She brought calm and serenity to his bearing,” spinmeister Mark McKinnon told this magazine in April 2001. “He was happier, more at ease, less distracted. Even on the airplane, he was more likely to relax. If she wasn’t there, he’d bounce around the plane.” Laura looked like a cavalry of one each time she made those sojourns to the front, and it never really occurred to anyone to ask why she hadn’t been there all along. Riding to the rescue boosted Laura’s popularity while it humanized her husband, a neat trick originally perfected by Lady Bird Johnson. In the passive-aggressive playbook, less is always more: The twins act out in public, and Laura explains that she never wanted them to feel oppressed by family pressures; meanwhile, she lets them get back at their dad for his absences in much the same way he exacted revenge on his own father.
Laura’s distaste for public life jibes perfectly with her husband’s propensity for privacy, though she wants to be alone because she likes being alone, and he likes being alone because he doesn’t like pesky, prying reporters. Either way, the result is the same: Laura has learned how to use the Bush machine to get what she needs. When Gerhart, who covered the first lady for the Washington Post, sent her a letter asking for her cooperation with a biography, Laura never responded. Word came from Karen Hughes, then a special adviser to George Bush, that it was “too soon” for such a book. Was it the cautious White House or the cautious first lady, or both, who had turned her down? Gerhart never knew. Since publication of that book, the vow of silence has extended even further from Laura’s center of gravity. After Gerhart criticized the behavior of the twins in The Perfect Wife, members of Laura’s Austin book club, who had been content to recycle the same pabulum on her behalf for years, decided to stay mum about their most famous participant.
Occasionally these loyalists can go too far in their self-imposed protectiveness, as when a group of Laura’s friends took over the Texas Book Festival (of which this magazine is a sponsor) this year and tried to institute a plan to ban political books, this being an election year and many of the books being less than complimentary about her husband. Thankfully, they reconsidered. But almost simultaneously, a rumor swept through Austin that Texas writers and artists who had signed a petition against the war—a petition that was to run as an ad in the New York Times if enough money was raised—would be banned from the book festival. This report also turned out to be false, but Laura’s friends weren’t shy about leaning on book festival participants who made their anti-war opinions public. “If I’d known my chicken dinner came with an oath of loyalty, I wouldn’t have eaten it,” said one of the petition signers.
But of course, it did. From her earliest days as a political wife, Laura has said that her first loyalty is to her husband, and nothing in her character has ever suggested that she would stray from that promise, despite separate vacations in Crawford. The pillow talk wished for by her Austin friends is a thing of the past, if it ever existed: When the first lady’s celebration of poetry threatened to collapse in a firestorm of rancor over the 2003 invasion of Iraq, she chose to have the event postponed indefinitely rather than embarrass the president. It’s a shame Laura didn’t believe, or wasn’t allowed to show, that she possessed the fortitude of Lady Bird, who famously—and politely—stood her ground when Eartha Kitt blamed her for her husband’s war at a White House women’s luncheon in 1967. Lady Bird listened while the singer harangued her—“I know the feeling of having a baby come out of my guts! I have a baby and then you send him off to war!”—then gathered herself and replied, “Because there is a war on, that doesn’t give us a free ticket not to try to work for better things—against crime in the streets and for better education and better health for our people.” Today, protesters are shouted down during the first lady’s speeches or, in the case of a New Jersey woman whose son was killed in Iraq, handcuffed and charged with trespassing.
Because of her reticence, Laura will probably never enjoy the same legacy as her mother-in-law or Lady Bird, both of whom found causes and pushed them with a passion that assured some sort of historical niche for themselves. But it’s likely that Laura Bush, who never aspired to the job in the first place, isn’t interested in any return other than a return to normalcy. The country is crazy and she’s standing still, waiting for the days when her life will again be occupied solely with friends and family. Maybe in these times, that’s just what the country needs.
My Library
