Part 9 (1/2)

Quickly, I exchanged tops with my press secretary, so that it would seem as if I had a bit more wardrobe variety. To look my best abroad, I employed a hairdresser to accompany

me on overseas trips, and if I needed professional makeup for a state event or a television interview, I paid for that as well. Today, I like to flip through home decorating magazines while I dry my own hair.

On Friday, April 27, George and I were at our ranch after having spent most of the day in Austin for the dedication of the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. The next day, we would return to Was.h.i.+ngton for the White House Correspondents'

a.s.sociation dinner. It was early on Sat.u.r.day morning when the phone rang. Jenna was on the line, in tears. She had been cited the night before for ordering drinks in a bar in Austin and being underage with a fake ID. By the time Jenna called us, nothing we could have said would have made her feel any worse, but we still gave her a stern talk. Her picture was splashed across the television and newspapers; she would be part of local news film footage and the slightly blurry image at the end of a photographer's long-range telephoto lens. When George had been sworn in, I had asked the press to keep the girls out of the public eye, much as they had done with Chelsea Clinton. But Jenna had put herself in the news. We told her that this would be a lesson, and one that she had learned the hard way.

Her friends might do something wrong and not make headlines, but she did not have that luxury.

Almost immediately a warm note of encouragement arrived for Jenna and Barbara from Luci Johnson, who shared with them the advice that her own mother, Lady Bird, gave to her and Lynda: ”Don't do anything that you wouldn't want to read about on the front page of The New York Times, The New York Times, because if you do, it will be.” Cherie Blair also sent because if you do, it will be.” Cherie Blair also sent me a sympathetic note. The year before, her sixteen-year-old son, Euan, had had his own embarra.s.sing run-in with the law, although enduring the British tabloids had proven to be a far worse punishment than a formal police caution.

That night in Austin was just dumb, in the way that so many nineteen-year-olds are dumb. I remember a line from The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, a series of novels a series of novels by Alexander McCall Smith, in which his main character, Precious Ramotswe, says, ”Twenty-one-year-olds are so stupid. And there are so many of them.”

To her credit, Jenna rose to the occasion. She quit going to clubs and other places in downtown Austin. And for years, I've talked to both Barbara and Jenna about the risks of alcohol. Their father quit drinking; my father overdrank; and I've warned both of them about the perils of alcohol, saying, ”Nothing good ever happens when you are drunk.”

But what bothered me long after the incident was over was the image left behind in the public mind, that Barbara and Jenna were party girls. We never considered using publicists to shape their image, as some prominent figures and celebrities do. We wanted them to live their lives as privately and as normally as possible. I tried to slip away to Austin to see Jenna's sorority show skits, which were put on by the girls for their moms.

And I went to visit both girls at school during the year, coming in to do what all college moms do, help them clean their dorm rooms, make a quick run to Bed Bath & Beyond for a lamp or towels or a laundry bag. Most of the snippets that ended up on the news were nothing like our daughters. Many were just plain wrong. Otherwise, Jenna would not have chosen to work with AIDS sufferers in Central America or to teach, and Barbara would not be devoting herself to public health in Africa. But that is the baggage that comes with public life; there are no ”private” mistakes. I accepted it and moved on, and they did the same.

In the way that ancient astronomical calendars measured time by the pa.s.sage of the seasons, the movement of the moon, the seeding of the soil, the culling of the harvest, the presidential calendar is governed by summitry. There are the NATO summits, the Summits of the Americas; the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summits; the G8 meetings; and the United States-European Union summits, all of which rotate locations, usually abroad. Then there are the visits to call on allies, to build relations.h.i.+ps with other leaders, to engage other corners of the world. We would pa.s.s in and out of a country in a day or even a single afternoon. The flights were invariably overnight, and the expectation was that we would arrive looking perfectly rested and impeccably groomed. Our luggage and the bags of our aides made their own convoy; our vehicles traveled with us in the bellies of cargo planes.

Summer 2001 began with what would become the familiar whirlwind of travel, five countries in five days in June, first to Spain, where we called on the king and queen, and where I visited the Prado Museum with Ana Botella de Aznar, the wife of Spain's prime minister. Afterward, we went to the National Library, where the curators displayed drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, original editions of the cla.s.sic novel Don Quixote, Don Quixote, and and early Spanish maps of Texas. From there, it was a stop in Belgium for the NATO Summit, and a tour of a market, a church, and a university library, then a NATO spouses'

lunch, an interview for the CBS Early Show, Early Show, then on to a meeting at the Brussels then on to a meeting at the Brussels American School, as well as a visit with Belgium's King Albert II and Queen Paola at the Laeken Palace. The following morning, we were on our way to Sweden, where George joined the US-EU Summit while I toured a children's center and then a botanical garden.

Late in the afternoon, we met with His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf and Her Majesty Queen Silvia, as well as Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Victoria. The Swedish monarchy is one of the oldest in the world; Sweden has crowned kings for over one thousand years. We were introduced surrounded by the tapestry-covered walls of the sixhundred-room Royal Palace; I learned that the king and queen had nine other royal residences scattered around Stockholm. Meanwhile, on the streets, poster-wielding and face-painted anti-globalization protesters were out in force, condemning international corporations and international financial inst.i.tutions, and a few protesting George. The protests did not die down after we left. Three demonstrators throwing cobblestones and other objects were shot by Swedish riot police, but the protesters never got close to any of the continent's leaders, and by the time they had turned violent, we were long gone.

From the gilded chairs and high-ceilinged palaces of European royalty, I flew to Warsaw, Poland. I met First Lady Jolanta Kwasniewska, and together we toured a children's hospital. Then, after lunch, I went to the Lauder Kindergarten, opened by the American cosmetics magnate and philanthropist Ronald Lauder to educate children of the few Jewish families who had survived the Holocaust and had returned to or somehow remained in Warsaw. All the children were blond, and Ron Lauder quietly said to me, ”This is why their families escaped. They were the ones who were able to blend in.” As I left, the children gathered and sang ”Deep in the Heart of Texas,” with a sweet overlay of Polish accents. My next stop was the Noz.yk Synagogue. The only one in Warsaw to survive World War II, it stood within the walls of another property, almost hidden.

Unlike the four hundred other synagogues in the city, Noz.yk was left because the n.a.z.is stabled their horses inside it and piled its floors and corners with feed. After the synagogue came an orphanage. I met with a group of eighteen-to twenty-year-olds who were about to leave their dormitory-style rooms and begin life on their own, with no family to call or come home to. The children were thin and sad, and they barely spoke as we sat inside the old building and its spartan rooms. I told them about how nervous I had been when I started my first teaching job, in the hope that they might find some small comfort in that.

As the afternoon drew to a close, I joined George at a ceremony for the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, where some 400,000 Jews were fenced in like cattle behind barbed wire and then were deported to death camps or finally slaughtered by n.a.z.i guns and flamethrowers that were shot into bas.e.m.e.nts and sewers until entire blocks became infernos. At day's end, George delivered an address with the president; then it was a quick change into black-tie evening clothes for c.o.c.ktails, a receiving line, and a formal state dinner.

After those few days, the crush of images was almost too much to absorb, from glittering fairy-tale palaces to the depths of human despair.

And we still had a meeting with U.S. Emba.s.sy staff the next morning, as well as a wreath-laying ceremony to commemorate the Warsaw Uprising before flying on to Slovenia. While George had his first face-to-face meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin and invited him to our ranch, I was whisked off for lunch at the Grand Hotel Toplice, a favorite of the staff of Yugoslavia's old dictator, Marshal t.i.to, and then a boat ride over to a small island that houses the a.s.sumption of Mary Pilgrimage Church, overlooking Bled's deep, blue lake, which had been carved out by the last of the thick Ice Age glaciers as they retreated from the lower reaches of Europe. I walked up the famous ninety-nine steps rising from the base of the island. Tradition is that, on their wedding day, grooms carry their brides up the steps to the church for the ceremony. When I arrived, there was a wedding in progress, and the bride rushed forward to embrace me, saying this was the best day of her life. I watched costumed folk-life dancers and rang the bell of wishes. Three more brides and grooms were waiting for us as we entered the church. As we left, people lined the sides of the road to wave. In central Europe, where the nations lived under decades of harsh Soviet domination during the Cold War, many of the citizens are deeply pro-American. Like that bride, they always welcomed me with open arms.

Those five days in Europe captured the routine of nearly all our travels, packed days with nations anxious to display their particular beauties and treasures, while others shared their struggles to face the dark episodes of their past.

Back at the White House, by late June, the Rose Garden was in full bloom.

Designed like an eighteenth-century garden, it has neatly arrayed beds and borders.

Tulips, daffodils, and flowering trees bloom in the spring, and by summer, the fragrance of roses fills the air. I watched the lines of tourists gather outside in the mornings in the rising heat to be led on tours of the public rooms, and I began to look for ways to showcase distinctive American arts inside the White House. On June 29, George and I hosted a White House celebration for Black Music Month, featuring Debbie Allen as the master of ceremonies and performances by the Four Tops and James Brown. Lionel Hampton, who had sent those beautiful rose bouquets to celebrate Barbara's and Jenna's births, bravely came, even though strokes and illness had shrunk him down to little more than skin.

For July 4, I at last successfully surprised George for his birthday. We had spent the day in Pennsylvania with Governor Tom and Michele Ridge. When the four of us returned to the White House, Gary Walters, the head usher, told George there was a sample of his new rug for the Oval Office in the State Dining Room and asked would he like to see it? George said yes, and as we stepped in, the word ”Surprise” was being shouted by many of our closest friends. I did the same party every year after that, always on July 4, with fried chicken, deviled eggs, corn bread, all cla.s.sic picnic and barbecue staples.

The White House pastry chef, Roland Mesnier, made George a cake in the shape of a baseball. It poured rain during dinner but cleared just in time for us to watch the Independence Day fireworks light up the Mall.

In mid-July, we were in Air Force One, high aloft the Atlantic, headed for our first visit to England. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip had invited us for a luncheon at Buckingham Palace, on perfectly pressed linens and china emblazoned with the royal coat of arms. Then we helicoptered over to meet Tony and Cherie Blair at Chequers, the sixteenth-century summer home of England's prime ministers.

We had hosted the Blairs at Camp David; now they wanted to show us the same comfort in return. Chequers sits on grounds that have been recorded in history since Roman times; the name of the original estate was inscribed in the Domesday Book of 1086. Its name likely comes from a twelfth-century British landholder who was an official of the King's Exchequer. Its house is a medium-size redbrick Tudor mansion completed in 1565, fifty-five years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Inside, Cherie showed me a ring that belonged to the first Queen Elizabeth and a table used by the French emperor Napoleon during his exile.

Despite its formal pedigree, our evening at Chequers was very casual. The Blairs'

children were there, along with one of their school friends, and Barbara had joined us with one of her school friends. The kids peppered everyone with questions, and it was a fast-moving conversation, covering everything from the merits of missile defense-George being the primary defender and Cherie the skeptic--to capital punishment. On that issue, the American president and the British prime minister's wife, a human rights lawyer, were on vastly different planes. But the debate was cordial. Cherie says no one, left or right, can claim that George doesn't have a very good sense of humor.

When it was over and we all began making our way upstairs, I overheard the Blairs' oldest son, Euan, saying to Cherie, ”Give the man a break, Mother.”

From England, our next stop was Italy, for George to attend the G8 Summit, a meeting of the eight leading industrialized countries, where we also had an audience with the Pope in his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, and then on to Pristina, Kosovo, where Italian peacekeepers advised our staff not to walk on the gra.s.s adjacent to the airport runway because not all the land mines had been removed. Kosovo was, at that moment in July, the global hot spot where some seven thousand U.S. troops had been deployed two years before as part of a NATO force that had arrived after prolonged and b.l.o.o.d.y fighting between the Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbia. It was the last of the Balkan crises. Because we were entering what was considered a combat zone, the Secret Service insisted that we wear flak jackets for the ride on Marine One to the U.S. base named Camp Bondsteel. I dedicated an education center that was being named for me and toured the base before George addressed the troops, and we had lunch in the base's mess. In Kosovo, half the population being guarded by our soldiers was under the age of twenty-five. At that moment, aside from an incident in the spring when China had detained and interrogated the twenty-four-person crew from a Navy surveillance plane, the Balkans claimed the lion's share of international attention. So on that bright summer day, we had helicoptered into what everyone a.s.sumed were the front lines of the world's most prominent war.

By the end of the summer, I was finally hitting my stride in the White House. I had hosted my long-planned conference at Georgetown University on early childhood cognitive development; my pet project, the National Book Festival, was scheduled to debut on Sat.u.r.day, September 8; and we had gotten away to our ranch in August, with George bringing his senior staff and all the White House work along. Whenever George traveled, even to Camp David, the chief of staff or the chief's deputy almost always came.

Now, in addition to the barn and the tractor shed and the green clapboard house, the U.S.

government had put a prefab house on our ranchlands for the military aides, the White House doctor, and other members of the staff who accompany the president. National Security Advisor Condi Rice frequently joined us; she had been coming to the ranch since before the election, and we had even named one of our hills Balkan Hill in her honor. On a hike, she was discussing the finer points of Balkan policy with George, never getting winded while she climbed the steep rise. Now her preferred place to stay was the green clapboard house.

At the ranch, there were briefings each morning, teleconferences, and piles of papers. Being President of the United States does not include an allowance for vacation days. George never took a full day off. There was little difference between being in Was.h.i.+ngton and being in Crawford, except that I could hike the trails we were building and could step out the door into the fresh air without trailing down hallways and having a phalanx of Secret Service agents filing behind. In the White House, I could walk each morning along the corridors from the residence to my offices in the East Wing. Most of the events we hosted and the entertaining we did, even simple coffees, were inside the White House itself, and unless I took Barney and Spot for a walk, it was possible to spend several days without ever venturing outside. At our ranch, from first light, the outside found us.

As September 2001 opened, I was reviewing my upcoming briefing before the Senate Education Committee on the findings of the early childhood cognitive development conference, readying events for the book festival, preparing for the official inaugural gown presentation at the Smithsonian, and overseeing plans for our first state dinner, in honor of Mexico's president, Vicente Fox. State dinner guests are selected by the president, the State Department, and the National Security Council. We had a particular interest in inviting Mexico because of trade and border issues. George wanted to establish a strong working relations.h.i.+p with our closest neighbor to the south.

I was not nervous before my own wedding--there were no jitters or cold palms then--but I was anxious now. A state dinner is far more intricate, an elaborate display of hundreds of moving parts, from guest lists to menus, which require an advance tasting, to table seatings, arrival protocols, and choices of linens, flowers, china, and silver, even the champagnes and wines. And traditionally all of this falls under the purview of the White House Social Office, working with the Office of the First Lady. If the four-hour evening is flawless, it is only because of the hundreds of hours that have been invested beforehand. No detail is too small. My dress of red lace over hot pink silk had been

custom-made by Arnold Scaasi, bright colors in honor of the bright tones of Mexico.

Cathy Fenton, the social secretary, who had worked for both Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, and Nancy Clarke, the longtime White House florist, created tablescapes of white hydrangeas, lilies, and roses interspersed with limes as another nod to Mexico. The arrival ceremony in the morning included a full twenty-one-gun salute and a review of the troops. Afterward, we escorted the Foxes to the balcony off the Blue Room, and surrounded by overflowing pots of red geraniums, we watched a fireworks display light up the sky above the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument.

The next day, Marta Fox and I flew to Chicago to tour an exhibition surveying two hundred years of Latino art in the United States at the city's Terra Museum of American Art. Many of the contemporary Latin American artists whose work was featured joined us, and it was a wonderful day of art and culture and beauty. The Foxes departed the next morning, as I began final preparations for the National Book Festival, which was set to open that weekend.

On Friday night, we held a gala for the festival at the Library of Congress, before the official day of author events. Dr. James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, introduced me. As the back of the stage opened, I walked out in a blue Arnold Scaasi dress, with sheer chiffon and a short underskirt. The crowd gasped, and I felt as if this was my official debut as first lady. Not quite nine months after George took office, I was now doing what I loved, finding my place in the world of Was.h.i.+ngton and beyond.

Goodness in the Land of the Living With George at the Pentagon, October 11, 2001.

(White House photo) Tuesday morning, September 11, was sunny and warm, the sky a brilliant cerulean blue. The day before, I had hosted a lunch for Janette Howard, wife of the Australian prime minister, while George met with her husband, John. My friends who had come for the National Book Festival had all flown home, and even George was gone, in Florida for a school visit. George H. W. Bush and Bar had spent the night, but they had already left at 7:00 a.m. to catch an early flight. And I had what I considered a big day planned. I was set to arrive at the Capitol at 9:15 to brief the Senate Education Committee, chaired by Edward M. Kennedy, on the findings of the early childhood development conference that I'd held in July. In the afternoon, we were hosting the entire Congress and their families for the annual Congressional Picnic. The South Lawn of the White House was already covered with picnic tables awaiting their fluttering cloths, and Tom Perini from Buffalo Gap, Texas, was setting up his chuckwagons. Our entertainment would be old-fas.h.i.+oned square dancing and Texas swing music by Ray Benson and his cla.s.sic band, Asleep at the Wheel.

I finished dressing in silence, going over my statement again in my mind. I was very nervous about appearing before a Senate committee and having news cameras trained on me. Had the TV been turned on, I might have heard the first fleeting report of a plane hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center at the tip of Manhattan as I walked out the door to the elevator. Instead, it was the head of my Secret Service detail, Ron Sprinkle, who leaned over and whispered the news in my ear as I entered the car a few minutes after 9:00 a.m. for the ride to the Russell Senate Office Building, adjacent to the Capitol. Andi Ball, now my chief of staff at the White House; Domestic Policy Advisor Margaret Spellings; and I speculated about what could have happened: a small plane, a Cessna perhaps, running into one of those ma.s.sive towers on this perfect September morning. We wondered too if Hillary Clinton might decide not to attend the committee briefing, since the World Trade Center was in New York. We were driving up Pennsylvania Avenue when word came that the South Tower had been hit. The car fell silent; we sat in mute disbelief. One plane might be a strange accident; two planes were clearly an attack. I thought about George and wondered if the Secret Service had already hustled him to the motorcade and begun the race to Air Force One to return home. Two minutes later, at 9:16 a.m., we pulled up at the entrance to the Russell Building. In the time it had taken to drive the less than two miles between the White House and the Capitol, the world as I knew it had irrevocably changed.

Senator Kennedy was waiting to greet me, according to plan. We both knew when we met that the towers had been hit and, without a word being spoken, knew that there would be no briefing that morning. Together, we walked the short distance to his office.

He began by presenting me with a limited-edition print; it was a vase of bright daffodils, a copy of a painting he had created for his wife, Victoria, and given to her on their wedding day. The print was inscribed to me and dated September 11, 2001.

An old television was turned on in a corner of the room, and I glanced over to see the plumes of smoke billowing from the Twin Towers. Senator Kennedy kept his eyes averted from the screen. Instead he led me on a tour of his office, pointing out various pictures, furniture, pieces of memorabilia, even a framed note that his brother Jack had sent to their mother when he was a child, in which he wrote, ”Teddy is getting fat.” The senator, who would outlive all his brothers by more than forty years, laughed at the note as he showed it to me, still finding it amusing.

All the while, I kept glancing over at the glowing television screen. My skin was starting to crawl, I wanted to leave, to find out what was going on, to process what I was seeing, but I felt trapped in an endless cycle of pleasantries. It did not occur to me to say, ”Senator Kennedy, what about the towers?” I simply followed his lead, and he may have feared that if we actually began to contemplate what had happened in New York, I might dissolve into tears.

Senator Judd Gregg of New Hamps.h.i.+re, the ranking Republican on the committee and one of our very good friends in the Senate--Judd had played Al Gore for George