Part 12 (1/2)

Everyone knew it would take years to undo the damage wrought by the vicious gender apartheid of the Taliban.

The morning began with a simple coffee in one of the building's reception rooms, with stunning views of New York's East River. Nane Annan, wife of UN SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan, orchestrated an impromptu receiving line; I stood and smiled alongside international luminaries, including Jordan's Queen Noor. Then it was on to the conference, with six hundred attendees. My chair was marked as the lead seat of the U.S.

delegation. Not until that moment did I realize that I was, on that morning, representing my country at the United Nations.

I spoke of the U.S. government's commitment to aiding the people of Afghanistan and the more than $4 million donated so far by American children to help the children of Afghanistan. American aid workers were doggedly helping Afghan refugees return home and helping the country's widows, devastated after twenty-three years of fighting, support their families. Some of our contributions were bags of wheat for the twenty-one womenowned bakeries in Kabul. Those bakeries fed over one-quarter of the city's population. I spoke too of helping to educate the children of Afghanistan. ”When you give children books and an education, you give them the ability to imagine a future of opportunity, equality, and justice,” I said. My favorite line in the speech was a quotation from Farahnaz n.a.z.ir, the founder of the Afghanistan Women's a.s.sociation, who said, ”Society is like a bird. It has two wings. And a bird cannot fly if one wing is broken.”

We would help bind that broken wing.

My next stop was P.S. 234, the school in lower Manhattan where children had witnessed the horror of the attacks on the Twin Towers from just four blocks away. I had first met many of the students and teachers at the end of September, when they were crowded inside another school, P.S. 41. The students had returned to their original building in early February, once the smoldering fires had finally been extinguished and the worst of the air pollution had cleared. School officials conservatively estimated that at least 5 percent of the students were still suffering from severe emotional trauma. The number was probably far higher. Many children were terrified of getting on an airplane or riding the subway. Low-flying helicopters and planes or sudden loud noises would leave them shaken and in tears. I listened to these ten-and eleven-year-olds and thought of them, like me, still anxiously scanning the skies.

On March 23, school was set to resume in Afghanistan. For most girls, after nearly eight years of Taliban rule, it would be their first time in a cla.s.sroom. The Red Cross had already s.h.i.+pped more than one thousand school kits, with supplies for forty thousand children, to Kabul to be distributed on opening day. George and I helped a.s.semble more kits alongside students at Samuel W. Tucker Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia. But that was only the beginning of the needs. Children, especially girls, were in dire need of school uniforms; those who attended school in ordinary street or house clothes often felt shame. Most Afghans, though, had little more than a needle or thread to sew. Working with Vital Voices, we s.h.i.+pped several thousand manual sewing machines across the Pakistani border--the old foot-pedal style that my grandmother had used, since much of the country lacked any form of electricity. And we sent fabric, yards

and yards, enough to outfit 3 million children. The Liz Claiborne company alone donated a half million yards of material. For the barefoot, we received shoes from Ba.s.s, New Balance, Sebago, and Timberland. The Sara Lee Corporation paid for socks. L.L.Bean donated shoes, jackets, and blankets. Walmart and General Motors gave money to help offset costs. It was, for me, a moment of real pride to see the generosity of these companies and their employees to people in a place half a world away, a place that had given refuge to the plotters of the worst civilian attack in our history.

And other companies came forward to meet other needs. When I met with Afghan judges who told me that they could not even type court records, that every court doc.u.ment had to be laboriously copied by hand, I asked my office to approach the Dell Computer Corporation and Microsoft. The two companies donated computers, software, and printers to bring a bit of modernity to Afghanistan's judicial system. Time and again, Americans from all walks of life gave, and they did so with open hearts.

In New York and Was.h.i.+ngton, the scars from the previous fall were slower to heal. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his wife, Joyce, spent many hours helping the families of those killed and wounded in the attacks of 9-11. They followed the progress of the burn victims, helped when other concerns arose, and did not forget to be encouraging. When plans began for a memorial on the Pentagon grounds to honor those who had perished that September morning, Don and Joyce quietly became one of the memorial's largest donors. Another couple who generously gave were Sharon and Kenneth Ambrose, whose son, Paul, the public health doctor, had been on board the hijacked plane. In the months that followed, I wrote to them several times and told them that they remained in my prayers.

That spring, Cherie Blair got her wish, a visit to our ranch in Crawford. She and Tony came in early April with her mother and their two youngest children, as the final stop on a holiday for her family in the United States. That was one of the remarkable things to me about other national leaders and their spouses, the freedom they have to go on holidays, often abroad. Presidents of the United States must get away inside one compound or another, whether it is a rented retreat on Martha's Vineyard, as the Clintons had chosen, or the privacy of their own homes, Crawford for me and George, Kennebunkport for Gampy and Bar, or their California ranch for Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

At our ranch, after dinner, Tony Blair borrowed a guitar and strummed and sang along with the San Antonio band Daddy Rabbit. During the day, we braved a pouring rain to drive across the rugged grounds in George's pickup. Most of all, we enjoyed each other's company. During our final lunch, George and Cherie managed to have another of their good-natured back-and-forths. This time, she was urging him to agree to make the United States a partic.i.p.ant in the newly created International Criminal Court, designed to prosecute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. (The United States, India, China, and Indonesia are among the nations that have not ratified it, citing concerns about sovereignty.) George ran down the driveway as Tony and Cherie were driving off to get in the last word. He joked that Cherie's persistence must have been the reason Bill Clinton had considered signing the doc.u.ment in the first place. But for George and Tony, these couple of days at Crawford had been deeply serious. With the Taliban for now beaten back in Afghanistan, they were looking toward the threat from another country, Iraq, where American and British intelligence, and indeed nearly every intelligence agency in Europe, told them that Saddam Hussein was sitting on a ma.s.sive stockpile of weapons of ma.s.s destruction.

The Blairs departed for London, and so did I, for the funeral of the Queen Mother, who had died just before their visit. I was designated to lead the U.S. delegation, which included the prominent Texas ranch owners Anne and Tobin Armstrong. Anne had been amba.s.sador to the British Court of St. James's under Gerald Ford. The world bade the Queen Mother farewell beneath the glorious Gothic arches and stained gla.s.s of Westminster Abbey. Cars had been banned from the nearby streets; there was only the clop of horses' hooves, pipers playing haunting notes, and the thump of the funeral drum.

It was a scene from another time and place, from a century so very far from our own.

When I returned to Was.h.i.+ngton, my first meeting was about the Christmas holidays. At the White House, Christmas preparations begin in April, from choosing an artist for the card to planning the themes and events. It takes over half a year to organize the three weeks in December during which George and I would often host two events in a single evening and shake well over nine thousand hands.

But even as we planned, we did not know what the future would hold. On April 25, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia came to Crawford to meet with George. I had overseen plans for the lunch. ”No pork products, no flesh of scavenger animals, birds, or fish, including sh.e.l.lfish,” advised Don Ensenat, Chief of Protocol. ”All meat should be cooked until well-done.” So we served barbecued beef ribs, and I made myself scarce on other parts of the ranch after the arrival ceremony. Women did not travel with the crown prince. Condi Rice, our national security advisor, would be the sole woman in attendance. Those were the customs in the prince's part of the world.

I was also preparing for my own trip, fifteen days through Europe, starting in Paris with a speech to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's 2002 Global Forum on Education. Jenna was coming with me. Four days before we left, in Kaspiysk, part of Russia's Dagestan republic, land mines placed by the side of the road had exploded, killing forty-three civilians, seventeen of them children who had gathered to watch a parade in remembrance of World War II. The bombers were Chechen terrorists. I tore up much of my prepared speech as we flew over the Atlantic. Instead of the expected lines about the importance of education, I called on parents and teachers to teach their children to respect all human life, and I told the world that it needed to condemn bombings like that in Dagestan, and other recent ones in Pakistan and Israel.

”Every parent, every teacher, every leader has a responsibility to condemn the terrible tragedy of children blowing themselves up to kill others.” I added that ”prosperity cannot follow peace without educated women and children.” It is a simple idea, but it lies at the heart of so much suffering in the world. And I was reminded of exactly what ignorance breeds during the balance of my days in Paris.

The following morning I toured the Guimet Museum's exhibition ”One Thousand Years of Afghan Art.” The museum's curators had begun the exhibition months before 911, when the Taliban leader Mullah Omar ordered the destruction of the two giant Bamiyan Buddhas that had been carved into majestic sandstone cliffs less than 150 miles northwest of Kabul, in a valley region of central Afghanistan that lay at a crossroads of east-west trade routes along the once-fabled Silk Road. The Bamiyan Buddhas were shockingly dynamited in February of 2001, after inhabiting their niches for almost fifteen hundred years. They had been the largest examples of standing Buddha carvings in the world and had been designated by UNESCO, the United Nation's Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, as a World Heritage site. Now they lay in a pile of rubble.

At the Paris museum, curators had meticulously created replicas of these ancient statues. Displayed alongside were other priceless artifacts from Afghan history, which had been lent from museums and private holdings across Europe. I gazed upon intricate bronze buckets from the year 700, the dawn of the nation's Muslim era, as well as delicate ivory figures and a carved foot of Zeus, all that remained of a statue painstakingly sculpted in the third century b.c. Daring Afghan curators had rescued some of the rarest objects, smuggling them out of the country in the backs of trucks or on horseback after the Taliban looted Kabul's art museum in the mid-1990s. Gazing around the rooms, I wondered about a regime so determined to destroy everything of beauty from its nation's past and about the Taliban's deep hatred of any culture outside its own.

I made another stop in Paris, one so private that it was not listed on my official schedule. Without the press or most of the staff, Jenna and I made our way to the small flat where Mariane Pearl, Danny Pearl's widow, was staying. It was a modest place, with a bit of a student feel, reminding me for a minute of my little walk-up all those years ago in Austin.

Mariane was less than two weeks away from giving birth to their son, and what should have been a buoyant, slightly anxious time was instead framed with sadness.

There would be no father for Adam, no husband beside Mariane. I thought of the pregnant wives of the firemen and other victims on 9-11, how some had asked their lost husbands' brothers or friends to be with them at their baby's birth. But Mariane was alone.

We talked. I asked her about her experiences and what we might learn, and I told her that she would be welcome in the United States if she chose to come. I thought that in a city like New York there would be others who might comprehend her unique pain.

On May 16, as I left Paris, Danny's body was found on the outskirts of Karachi. A week later, the day before her son was born, Mariane received an e-mail that had been intended for another recipient. In its mechanically s.p.a.ced electronic letters, the terse dispatch described how, after his throat had been slit and he had been beheaded, Danny's body was cut into ten parts, then dumped in a shallow grave.

When Adam Pearl was born, both George and Jacques Chirac called Mariane with good wishes. Her heart, she later said, was so heavy that she could barely speak.

From Paris I flew to Budapest, where the focus of my stop was women and disease. In my first few hours on the ground, I met with Hungary's president and first lady, Ferenc and Dalma M'dl, and Prime Minister Viktor Orb'n, lunched with women leaders, many of whom were struggling to establish themselves in their nation's traditionally patriarchical society, and at night attended the opera Madame b.u.t.terfly, Madame b.u.t.terfly, sitting in the gold-trimmed president's box. The opera was in Italian, the subt.i.tles were in Hungarian, and my exhausted staff fell asleep.

The American amba.s.sador to Hungary was my good friend from Dallas, Nancy Brinker, who had become a breast cancer activist after her sister, Susan Komen, died at age thirty-six from the disease. Hungary has the fourth highest death rate from breast cancer in Eastern Europe, and Nancy made it her personal mission to improve cancer screening rates and care for women. Together we visited an oncology clinic where the nurses in their starched white caps reminded me of my childhood Cherry Ames books. I spoke with and tried to comfort women who were days away from major cancer surgery and who were terrified. By October of 2002, Nancy had convinced the reluctant Hungarian government to put aside its fear that pink was the color of h.o.m.os.e.xuality.

Pink ribbons for breast cancer awareness began to appear, and the Hungarians lit bridges linking the city halves of Buda and Pest a bright, rich pink.

My next stop was Prague, where I met V'clav Havel and his wife, Dagmar Havlov'. I had long admired Havel, a gifted intellectual and playwright who had spent years as a political prisoner under the Communists. Both V'clav and Dagmar are funny and charming and wise. They showed me around the famous Prague Castle, the official presidential home, and later hosted me in their modest residence; they had no desire to live in the splendor of a castle. Being elected to the presidency of a nation that in a previous era had jailed him was, V'clav said quite simply, ”a gift of fate.”

I joined Craig Stapleton, our amba.s.sador to the Czech Republic--Debbie, his wife, is George's cousin and one of my close friends--for the ceremony marking the fiftyseventh anniversary of the liberation of the Terezin (or Theresienstadt) concentration camp. Just a year before, I had gazed upon the drawings made by children at the camp, images of flowers and of loaves of bread carried on hea.r.s.es, displayed in simple frames on a wall of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Nearly every child at Terezin died; only these pictures, hidden away, had survived.

As I laid flowers on the ma.s.s grave of ten thousand victims, I thought of my father and his fellow soldiers who had overseen the burial of some five thousand dead at Nordhausen in April of 1945. All those souls, now resting beneath gra.s.s and stones.

On Tuesday, May 21, I was slated to give a radio address directly to the people of Afghanistan from the studios of the U.S. government's Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which now broadcast into Afghanistan, Iran, and many of the former Soviet republics from the old Czech parliament building. The name was a bit of a misnomer; there was nothing parliamentary about it. Instead, it was the place where Czechoslovakia's former Communist leaders.h.i.+p had met. Sandwiched amid Prague's bright Rococo architecture, the old parliament building is gray, angular, and unadorned, a perfect example of Stalinist construction. Now, in a touch of irony, it housed America's primary means of speaking to the people of Afghanistan. At Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's headquarters, my morning's events also included a media roundtable for the press.

But when my staff and I awoke, the Secret Service told us to cancel the address and the roundtable. They had received a specific threat.

The Secret Service is a remarkable inst.i.tution. Its men and women are willing to risk their lives to guard the president's. They wait in broiling sun and subzero cold; their mission is to protect the first family from harm. My closest agents--Ron Sprinkle, Wayne Williams, Leon Newsome, Ignacio Zamora, and Karen Shugart, all of whom headed my detail--became like family. From the start, George and I made it a policy never to travel on Christmas, so that as many agents as possible could spend the holidays with their families. We knew they gave so very much.

We did not dismiss the risk, but I very much wanted to give the address. Finally, we arrived at a compromise. The agents sent out a dummy motorcade from my hotel. I departed later and was hustled into the parliament building via a rear loading dock, and from there, straight to the sound booth. My words were translated into the Afghan languages of Pashto and Dari. I spoke about the school kits being created, about the

American children who had enthusiastically donated money to the children of Afghanistan, and about the educational, medical, food, and other humanitarian aid the United States was sending. The entire time, a helicopter hovered overhead.

I gave the address, and the threat never materialized.

But there was a constant stream of threats, and they seemed to increase in the following months.

After an overnight in Berlin, I met George and we traveled to Russia, first to Moscow, the sprawling city on the plain with the fortified Kremlin sitting high above, and then to St. Petersburg, with its western ca.n.a.ls, ornate palaces, and czarist heritage.

While George and Vladimir Putin signed a nuclear arms reduction treaty, I read Make Make Way for Ducklings to Russian children at the State Children's Library. They all laughed to Russian children at the State Children's Library. They all laughed when they heard the names ”Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack.” In St. Petersburg, the Putins put grand Russian culture on display. We saw the sprawling Winter Palace, the place where Czarina Catherine had once ordered a soldier to stand guard over the first snowdrop of spring. At the Hermitage, we glimpsed bits of the art that the czars had collected and other pieces later confiscated from the n.o.bility by the revolutionaries. We saw only a small fraction of what is stored within those walls. There are over 3 million objects in the Hermitage Museum and Winter Palace; their corridors alone stretch for nearly fourteen miles. If we spent just one minute looking at each work of art, it would take eleven years.

By late May, St. Petersburg is light late into the night. Sundown is just before 11:00 p.m. At 9:15, the sky was still ablaze as we boarded a boat to cruise with the Putins along the Neva River. We dined on caviar as the sun slipped toward the western horizon on one side and the moon rose in the east. George looked at me and said, ”Bus.h.i.+e, you are in Heaven.” The translator immediately repeated it to the Putins, who gasped with pleasure.

We said good night after a barrage of fireworks.

The next morning, we toured the Kazan Cathedral, Russia's adaptation of the Basilica of St. Peter's in Rome and a monument to the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812, when captured French banners were placed in the cathedral. Inside the main basilica, there were no chairs. Wors.h.i.+pers stand as priests in long, flowing robes chant the liturgy. Under the Communists, the Kazan Cathedral had housed a museum of ”History of Religion and Atheism.” The museum remains, but the word ”atheism” has been scrubbed away. From there, we made our way to the Grand Choral Synagogue, the second largest synagogue in all of Europe. It was built in the 1880s, with a special permit from the czar. Only select Jews, those with specific trades or advanced degrees, or those who had served in the military, were allowed to reside in St. Petersburg, and the synagogue's builders were told that they could not construct their place of wors.h.i.+p near any churches or within view of any roads ever traveled by the czars.

The Putins hosted a farewell tea for us at the Russian Museum. George walked into the room where elegant tables were laden with trays of pastries and coffee samovars had been meticulously arranged. He turned to Vladimir and asked, ”Are we going to eat this food or just look at it?” The Russian leader answered, with a twinkle in his eye, ”This is a museum.” Everyone in the room burst out laughing.

I did not go with George to the G8 Summit in June. It was held atop a mountain outside of Calgary, Canada, enveloped in a security bubble so tight that spouses were not invited. In Was.h.i.+ngton, my Secret Service detail would no longer allow me to go for a walk outside the White House grounds, which I had done early on some mornings.

Camouflaged in a baseball cap and sungla.s.ses, I would traverse the gravel paths crossing the National Mall or the ca.n.a.l in Georgetown. But now I was to walk on White House grounds. It was ironic that as we hosted an official event in honor of the two hundredth anniversary of the great western explorers Lewis and Clark, my own physical s.p.a.ce was shrinking.

Amid the uncertainty, we treasured the simplicity of our family life. For the girls'

twentieth birthday the previous November, we had suggested that they invite twenty friends to Camp David for the weekend. George devised contests for the guests, including tennis, basketball, and bowling for the boys, and we put a karaoke machine in the main lodge so the kids would have fun activities all weekend. The girls stayed with us for holidays, breaks, and even some weekends, and I talked to my daughters on the phone almost every other day when I was home. On foreign trips, when they could accompany me, I found them to be wonderful companions. I looked forward to long flights and the hours of transatlantic mother-daughter time, chatting about friends and boyfriends, and whatever they found interesting. Echoing my path, Jenna was studying English and writing at Texas, while Barbara had chosen humanities at Yale.