Where She’s From 
The Education of Laura Bush
She has learned what is expected of her, and she'll do what she has to do: An exclusive interview with the first lady.
On the ranch at Crawford, looking over new construction.
Photograph by Charles Ommanney
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I met Laura Bush for the first time in early May 1995. An interview I had scheduled with the governor had to be changed from afternoon to evening and from the Capitol to the Governor's Mansion. I was invited to a casual dinner, along with my wife. Mrs. Bush would be there. The interview was a lost cause, but the evening wasn't. Most of the conversation is lost to memory, other than that it consisted mainly of nonpolitical small talk and the governor's reports of phone calls from aides updating him on the progress of House floor action on his education bill, but at one point the antics of a prominent Texan popped up in the discussion—sorry, no names. I observed that he had once accused the Republicans of a nefarious plot to embarrass his family.
Suddenly Mrs. Bush leaned forward in her chair. "Not the Republicans," she said. "Us! The Bushes!" It wasn't just her words that made the moment embed itself in my memory, but the force with which she delivered them and her body language, which conveyed solidarity with her husband across the room. That brief exchange provided a rare glimpse into the private world of the Bush clan; its power and intensity, its unity and sense of loyalty, flashed before our eyes.
Soon afterward, she excused herself to put her twin daughters to bed. She returned later to say good-night, having changed into pants, and she was barefoot. You may not find this reportorial detail particularly newsworthy, but in the home in which I grew up, to come downstairs with feet unclad was an action that would draw my mother's worst epithet: Tobacco Road, the title of a thirties novel about the unimaginably low-class life of sharecroppers in the Deep South. My wife and I exchanged approving glances: The first lady of Texas was a woman who, literally and figuratively, was comfortable in her own skin.
Now, six years later, Laura Bush is the first lady of the United States, one of the most visible and important women in the world. Yet the two sides of her that I first saw in 1995 still define the person she is today. You could call one side Laura and the other side Bush. Laura remains a woman who is down to earth, without affectation or pretension—someone who, as she once said, would be just as happy puttering around in her garden as being first lady. Her reluctant attitude toward public appearances hasn't changed much since the time, early in their marriage, when he was running what would be an unsuccessful race for Congress in West Texas, and he asked Laura to make an appearance for him. "My husband told me I'd never have to make a political speech," she told a group of supporters in Levelland. "So much for political promises." But the other side of her is that she is totally a Bush. Not all of her education has come from reading the succession of books that the former teacher and librarian keeps stacked on her bedside table and on the floor beneath it. Being a member of the clan has also been a central part of the education of Laura Bush: She has learned what is expected of her, and she will do what she has to do.
The job of first lady has not always been what it is today. Indeed, before the Civil War, when presidential spouses served mainly as hostesses, the title did not exist; a British correspondent, ever mindful of royalty, was the first to apply it, in reference to Mary Todd Lincoln. (This distinction has not saved Mrs. Lincoln from historical opprobrium. Her eccentricity, her free spending on the White House in a time of war, and her family's divided loyalty—several of her brothers fought for the Confederacy, leading to baseless rumors that she was a traitor—relegated her to the bottom spot in the Siena Research Institute's 1982 and 1993 rankings of first ladies, based on a survey of historians at 102 universities.) With the rise of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, the first lady became a public figure. Some were fashion trendsetters; others took political stands, most notably Eleanor (Mrs. Franklin) Roosevelt, the nation's foremost civil rights activist and the leader in the Siena Institute surveys. In recent administrations, it has become customary for first ladies to promote a worthy cause, from beautification (Lady Bird Johnson) to literacy (Barbara Bush).
Laura Bush's cause is reading, particularly early childhood reading. It brought her to Cesar Chavez Elementary School in Hyattsville, Maryland, on a mild morning in late February. Motivational signs occupied the cream-colored cinder-block walls of the small auditorium where she was to speak: "Today is a great day to LEARN something new"; "Turn the pages of your imagination—READ"; and on the podium, the name of the program Mrs. Bush would unveil that day, "Ready to Read. Ready to Learn." Her appearance was scheduled for ten-thirty in the morning, but the room was filled to capacity more than an hour earlier. Despite the new Hispanic name of the fifties-era school, which reflected an ongoing demographic change in the surrounding neighborhood, the audience included a large number of African Americans— educators and dignitaries, along with some parents, from Prince George's County, the largest and most affluent African American suburban community in the country. The women sported business suits and stylishly coiffed hair. Prince George's is overwhelmingly Democratic country, but this event was, for this audience, more social than political.
The first lady arrived precisely on time, as is the Bushes' way. ("Mr. and Mrs. Prompt" was her description to me in our 1999 interview.) She wore a light blue suit, shaded a bit toward lilac, and minimal jewelry: a wedding ring and earrings that were all but hidden by her hair, which had hints of red under the bright lights set up for the television cameras. Her speech was serious and self-effacing; the text was laced with references like "President Bush and I support . . .," "President Bush has a plan . . .," "I am proud to be a part of President Bush's effort . . .," all designed to underscore that the reading initiative was not hers alone but also her husband's. Otherwise the speech was nonpolitical: no jokes, no made-for-TV soundbites, no rhetorical flourishes, no applause lines (although the audience did clap once, when she said, "Television is no substitute for a parent"). This was a speech for educators; she spoke of recruiting more teachers, of spotlighting early childhood programs, and of encouraging parents to read to their children. Her demeanor was earnest, but her emotions—and her motions—were reserved, which is how she always is in public. As she read the speech, she clenched the sides of the lectern with her hands, letting go only twice to make a slight gesture of turning her left palm upward. She could have been at a lyceum, presenting her annual research paper to her fellow members.
After the speech, the first lady went off to read to a group of kindergarten students while I waited in a hallway to talk to the principal. Among the many posters on the wall was one titled "If We Met President George Bush," and underneath were three questions that students wanted to ask. "Do you work on projects?" "Do yo help peple?" "Do you fly airplanes?" Later I would ask the principal how the reading went. "Oh, she connected with those kids right away" came the answer. "I could tell she had been a teacher, because she had them sit around her, and she read upside down." I didn't get it. The principal explained, "So they could see the pictures." Then she picked up a Styrofoam coffee cup from the table beside her and held it aloft, like a trophy. "Look!" she squealed with excitement. "Mrs. Bush drank from this cup!"
The position that Laura Bush occupies is at once great and small, a truth recognized by a 1989 cartoon in The New Yorker labeled "Ms. Rushmore." The faces of Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson, Edith (Mrs. Theodore) Roosevelt, and Mary Lincoln appeared in place of their presidential husbands. The genius of the cartoon is its ambiguity: Is it making the straightforward point that first ladies are just as deserving of a memorial as their husbands or the ironic point that they are not? The ultimate arbiter, history, has not been kind to first ladies. Presidents are remembered; their wives are not. Who recalls today that Dolley Madison was the first American woman to influence fashion and manners? Who knows that Edith Roosevelt oversaw the construction of the West Wing, providing the title for a popular television show? Who reflects upon whether the Civil War might have been avoided if that most obscure of presidents, Millard Fillmore, had heeded wife Abigail's advice not to sign the Fugitive Slave Bill into law? Few first ladies have continued to generate public fascination beyond their tenures in the White House. Before Hillary Clinton, Jacqueline Kennedy was the most obvious exception, though the obsession was largely with her celebrity status, first as the widow of an assassinated president, then as the wife of one of the world's richest men. Her substantial achievements in historical preservation and the advancement of the arts have receded in public memory, leaving only her restoration of the White House, which is usually misdescribed today as "redecorating."
If the fame and achievements of first ladies are fleeting, their role in their husband's lives before reaching the White House tends to be relegated to history's dustbin. In the case of Laura and George W. Bush, that will be a big omission. For no matter what she accomplishes as first lady, she will be hard-pressed to have as much influence over his life and career as she has already had. Without her, he would not be where he is.
The beginning of the story is well known. They grew up in Midland, he the son of an oilman, she the daughter of a developer; they were the same age and went to the same school but did not know each other. Their paths diverged in junior high, when the Bushes moved to Houston. She went to Southern Methodist University; he went to Yale. Their paths converged but did not cross when they lived in the same apartment complex in Houston. He moved to Midland to try his hand at the oil business. She moved to Austin to get a master's degree in library science and stayed on to teach, but she went home frequently to Midland. They were both in their early thirties and single, and their mutual friends Jan and Joe O'Neill wanted her to meet him. In an interview in 1999, portions of which were used in a Time magazine article, Laura Bush recalled her initial reaction: "Oh, gosh, somebody who is probably political, and I wouldn't be interested." Finally, in 1977, she agreed to dinner at the O'Neill's. What happened next must have resembled the romance of Professor Harold Hill and Marian, the Librarian, in The Music Man: fast-talking, wisecracking, lovable scamp meets unassuming, firmly grounded woman who values the life of the mind. They were married in three months.
My Library
