Part 13 (1/2)

We began our second holiday season, this time celebrating ”All Creatures Great and Small,” with animals incorporated into nearly every decoration, even cookies in the

shape of Barney. We hosted night after night of events, including the annual Congressional Ball for nearly one thousand guests, all the members and their invitees. I had selected the image for our holiday card months before, a painting by Zheng-Huan Lu of the State Floor's beautiful piano, with its proud gold eagles, designed by Steinway for Franklin Roosevelt.

Christmas cards are a relatively new tradition at the White House. During the first half of the twentieth century, presidents primarily sent cards to family and close friends.

But thousands of Americans mailed their own cards to the White House. Calvin Coolidge, who held the first National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony, received twelve thousand cards from the public in 1924, the same year that his beloved son died. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt received forty thousand cards, so many that he needed to hire extra staff to open the mail. Christmas cards were rare during the time of Abraham Lincoln, but cartoonist Thomas Nast, the man credited with popularizing Santa Claus, had designed campaign posters for Lincoln's 1860 election. In 1863, at the height of the Civil War, Lincoln commissioned Nast to create a cover image for Harper's Weekly Harper's Weekly depicting Father depicting Father Christmas welcoming Union troops. Among recent presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first to send out large numbers of White House Christmas cards. Six Eisenhowerera cards featured his own paintings, including portraits he did of Lincoln and Was.h.i.+ngton and several of his favorite landscapes. This December I inscribed our card with the words ”May love and peace fill your heart and home during this holiday season and throughout the New Year.”

On December 18, ABC broadcast Barbara Walters's annual special on the Ten Most Fascinating People of the year. Barbara had selected me as 2002's most fascinating person, calling me a ”beacon of calm in the center of the storm.” It was flattering, but even as it aired, I said to George with a smile, ”Bus.h.i.+e, what goes up must come down.”

On Christmas Eve at Camp David, George continued his annual ritual of placing calls to our troops. That day he was reaching out to men and women in the dusty, frigid landscape of Afghanistan and on other bases and s.h.i.+ps around the world. At night we watched the Christmas pageant and Nativity play, retelling the centuries-old story of Christ's birth, performed by the children of the sailors and Marines stationed at Camp David. We smiled as a few pint-size angels, shepherds, and sheep scrunched up their faces in tears, overcome by sheer excitement and exhaustion. All of our family--George's parents, his brothers and sister and their children, Barbara and Jenna, and my mother--had gathered with us. On Christmas Day, George prayed that next holiday season he would not be calling men and women in yet another war zone.

On November 25, Barbara and Jenna had turned twenty-one. We celebrated just after Thanksgiving with a big party and a campout at the ranch with food from Tom Perini's Buffalo Gap chuckwagon. Our girls were now technically adults, looking out on a new world of their own. I treasured the few days and weeks that we had together through the year before they returned to their own lives. They were with us for that Christmas in the woods at Camp David, and a few days after they left, George sat down and typed out a thank-you note to them for his gifts. The note was full of fatherly love, but one line in particular has always stayed with me. He told Jenna and Barbara that he prayed that Saddam Hussein would disarm, that he would give up his weapons of death and destruction, and that there would be peace. He ended that paragraph with his usual

effort to turn something so achingly serious into a lighter moment, a.s.suring the girls that they need not worry that their dad somehow lacked for things to do.

George did not want war. No president ever does. He knew how precious any child is, and every person sent into war is someone's child, and often someone's mother or father too.

He turned to prayer in these times not with some newfound religion but because he had always turned to prayer. He found the first stirrings of his own faith after his sister Robin died. At age seven, at a Midland football game, he said to his dad that Robin, looking down from the stars in Heaven, had the better view. As a young Air National Guard pilot, when George came home, his mother would find an open Bible wherever he had been around the house. He was reading every word, as he would do, again and again, for years. His belief was always in something far larger than himself. He believed in the power of faith for compa.s.sion and comfort, as he must have felt it all those years ago, as a young boy watching his parents grieve the loss of their beloved daughter and who had grieved himself, as a small child would, with an ache beyond words.

I remember one late afternoon in the White House when Barbara was wrestling with a particularly difficult problem. George went to her room and sat down on her bed to console her as she told him what was wrong. He would not leave until he had begun to make it better. Afterward, I walked into my small upstairs office next to Barbara's room and found one of my young staff members in tears. She had heard bits and pieces of the conversation through the thin connecting door. She was sobbing, telling me how desperately she wished that she had had a father like George.

There would be no war for oil or for some kind of U.S. presence in the Middle East. There was war because only one man would not choose peace. That man was Saddam Hussein.

Before we would make any foreign visits, George and I would be briefed on the leaders and the conditions inside of the country. Often I was given printed biographies of national leaders. Occasionally, much to my surprise, those briefings would be wrong. It was usually just small details, such as what the first lady did--I remember once saying, ”So, you are a teacher, like I was?” only to get a stare of disbelief after the translator had finished and the reply, ”No, I am an engineer.” Once we were told that the president of South Korea adored bowling. As a gift, because all leaders bring gifts for official visits, we had a beautiful custom-made bowling ball inscribed with the U.S. and South Korean flags. The South Korean president opened the gift and had no idea what it was; he had probably never been bowling in his life. The ball must have looked to him like some kind of lethal paperweight. More often than not, these embarra.s.sing errors were based on gossip, on conversations overheard at c.o.c.ktail parties or picked up by U.S. Emba.s.sy staff. Some mistakes were the results of simple language barriers or bad translation. But no one ever believed that our intelligence would make a mistake about whether or not Saddam Hussein had military weapons of ma.s.s destruction.

For that matter, our intelligence was confirmed by the Germans, the French, the Russians, the Israelis, the Jordanians, and the Egyptians. The major intelligence services in Europe and the Middle East, indeed in the rest of the world, stated that Saddam Hussein had weapons of ma.s.s destruction. In January of 2003, a key Middle Eastern leader warned U.S. general Tommy Franks that Saddam ”will use WMD--biologicals, actually--on your troops.” Here at home, Bill Clinton and Al Gore believed Saddam had weapons of ma.s.s destruction. So did leading members of Congress, including John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Jay Rockefeller, Joe Biden, and John Edwards. The big open question was how close Saddam's scientists were to creating a nuclear bomb. The unfolding debate was over whether the United States and its allies should go to war to prevent Saddam from having the chance to use those weapons himself or to divert them to terrorists, or whether we should continue more years of sanctions, which had been in place since 1990.

After 9-11, George did not feel that he could subject the safety of other American cities or American civilians to the whims of one man. For George, the potential dangers we faced were numerous. What if he gambled on containing Saddam and was wrong?

What if his gamble cost tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives in a terror attack on U.S. soil?

Beyond the deep worry over weapons of ma.s.s destruction, in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, U.S. national security and common humanity intersected. Few tyrants on the world stage abused human rights like Saddam. The images were haunting and pervasive.

Saddam had repeatedly ordered ma.s.s killings of Iraq's Kurdish minority. Best estimates are that tens of thousands of men, women, and children were ga.s.sed with chemical weapons or rounded up and executed in deserts far from their mountainous, northern homes. After the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam executed hundreds of his Kuwaiti captives and launched strikes on s.h.i.+'ites, Kurds, and other ethnic groups that he thought might be a threat to his regime. George and I heard stories of little children forced to witness their parents being gunned down with bullets to the back of the head. We heard of Saddam's opponents who were tossed from the open doors of flying planes, plunging to a grisly death; we heard about torture chambers where electrical wires were wrapped around young men's t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es and prisoners hung from molten hooks. Saddam read the works of Adolf Hitler and required his top Ba'ath Party officials to read Mein Kampf Mein Kampf. He patterned much of his regime after that of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who had ruthlessly repressed his nation; as did the n.a.z.is and the Soviets, Saddam and his Ba'ath Party elites recruited children to spy on parents and neighbors. No one can say for sure how many Iraqis were killed under Saddam's orders--the number is too high--but the estimates range from many hundreds of thousands to 1 million. Human Rights Watch has said that 290,000 Iraqis alone were ”disappeared” by the Iraqi government over two decades.

Saddam had already been to war with Iran and had invaded Kuwait. Inside the national security community, in the age of al Qaeda and the post-9-11 world, there were fresh worries that he was a ticking time bomb.

Throughout the fall and winter, George attempted to persuade Saddam to disarm.

He did not act alone. In October he sought a congressional resolution to authorize ”the use of military force against Iraq.” It pa.s.sed the Senate 77-23, with Senators Kerry, Clinton, Biden, Edwards, and Reid all voting in favor. In November he sought and received a unanimous UN Security Council resolution calling on Saddam to disarm or disclose his weapons. He also sent private messages to Saddam through the French and the Russians. A few nations indicated that they could be persuaded to offer Saddam refuge if he chose exile. But when the offers were raised, Saddam refused to go. We waited, hoping for a last-minute breakthrough, for some kind of reprieve.

On February 1, 2003, the s.p.a.ce shuttle Columbia Columbia exploded as it began its reentry exploded as it began its reentry

toward the earth, streaking like an enormous comet across the atmosphere. From thirtynine miles above, debris and remains dropped from the skies over Texas. On board were seven astronauts, including two women and the first Israeli ever to fly in s.p.a.ce. Ilan Ramon, the Israeli mission specialist, had said on January 29 that viewing the earth from the reaches of s.p.a.ce made him realize how fragile the planet is, and also how important it is to strive for peace in the Middle East. Three days after that, I was hugging his wife at a memorial service in Houston.

Just as we returned to Was.h.i.+ngton, the FBI and other federal agencies raised the threat level for the District of Columbia. While residents continued to drive along the Beltway or hop the Metro, high-tech weaponry was quietly moved around the perimeter of the city. The military was placed on high alert. Unbeknownst to most people living in and around the capital, handheld missile launchers, capable of shooting down rogue airplanes or helicopters, were arrayed on mobile vehicles around Was.h.i.+ngton. The Pentagon also deployed other wide-ranging air defense and ground-to-air missile systems. Antiaircraft defense units were placed on alert in the vicinity of the capital, and heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles were visibly stationed on at least one Was.h.i.+ngton bridge. Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 fighter jets patrolled the skies. U.S. Capitol Police were issued submachine guns. Was.h.i.+ngton was the number one target for terrorists, and the White House was designated as the top terrorist target in D.C.

In the weeks that followed, residents were advised to buy supplies, like plastic sheeting and duct tape, to create windowless safe rooms that could withstand a chemical attack, and to lay in stockpiles of canned food. The anxiety was so great and the intelligence chatter so disturbing that some civilian a.s.sistant secretaries and others who worked at the Pentagon would, on some days, call their wives and children at 7:00 a.m.

and tell them to stay out of the city for the next twenty-four hours. For those of us who lived in Was.h.i.+ngton, there was nothing to do but get up each morning and face the day.

In late February of 2003, I met with governors' wives and the Military Child Education Coalition to explore ways to make moves across state lines easier on military families. Many school districts wouldn't allow students to transfer their GPAs, so a straight A student and potential valedictorian's existing academic record vanished once he or she moved to a new school district. Together we worked to streamline the process.

Commonsense initiatives like this aren't glamorous or headline-grabbing, but they solve problems. Many state first ladies helped to change rules and regulations to make transfers easier on the spouses and children of our armed forces. As March began, I called the mother of a ten-month-old girl who had received a heart transplant while her father was stationed with the Army in Kuwait. I could only imagine how hard it would be for a mother and father to face such a serious medical crisis under any condition, let alone when the dad was deployed half a world away.

In the winter of 2003, politics had begun to intrude more fully into the East Wing.

From the beginning of George's term, I had worked to showcase American literature and the arts in the White House, first with music and then with writers. In late November of 2001, I hosted a symposium on Mark Twain, including Twain scholars and the filmmaker Ken Burns, who was preparing to unveil his doc.u.mentary on the writer. Mark Twain is considered America's first real novelist, writing in the style and the vernacular of the young nation. George and I had always loved Twain's frankness and his razor-sharp mockery and wit. George's favorite Twain quotation is ”Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” After the symposium, we had the additional pleasure of going to Ford's Theatre to see the legendary Hal Holbrook's one-man show on Twain.

In March of 2002, I hosted an event to highlight the Harlem Renaissance, where we discussed the syncopated, jazzy rhythm of Langston Hughes's poetry and the beautifully rendered novels of Zora Neale Hurston and other great writers of the age. The symposiums included scholarly addresses and lively panels debating the meaning behind the words. We talked about how these African-American writers began to create a twentieth-century and distinctly Black American ident.i.ty with a rich culture of its own.

The following September my topic was women writers of the American West. We explored the lives and works of Willa Cather and Edna Ferber, author of the novel Giant, Giant, who wrote, ”The sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped settle this glorious land of ours.” The final author I selected for the event was Laura Ingalls Wilder, the writer I had loved since I was a little girl. Some of her descendants attended. Each of these writers had her own complex love affair with the wild, untamed land of the West that she called home and that I so loved.

But many of the scholars we invited did not, at first, want to come. David Levering Lewis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W. E. B. DuBois, told The New The New York Times that he was shocked when my office invited him. A leading Twain scholar that he was shocked when my office invited him. A leading Twain scholar was so surprised he told my staff he'd have to call them back, and Ursula Smith, a scholar of the American frontier, also didn't initially want to come. I found that sad. Everyone can appreciate and enjoy literature; books do not come with a ”do not read” sign for Democrats, independents, or Republicans. Some of the partic.i.p.ants believed that I did not read widely. But they came away with their minds changed. The western scholar Patricia Limerick later said, ”I did Mrs. Bush a terrible disservice thinking that maybe she didn't know, that she thought these [works] were all little houses on the prairie.”

We ultimately had rich discussions, and all our literary events included Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., high school students. But that was the end result. The first impulse, too often, was prejudice. Most of us over the course of our lives are guilty of some kind of stereotyping, but I have always found it a uniquely distressing attribute in people who study and teach. For these are the people who have chosen as their profession the life of the mind, and they are the ones whom we trust to teach our children. They, who have had every educational benefit, should welcome different thoughts and viewpoints. But so many responded to a White House invitation with their minds closed. And that was particularly true of a significant group of poets.

I have long been a reader of poetry, and I very much wanted to host a symposium featuring the works of Emily d.i.c.kinson, Langston Hughes, and Walt Whitman. I planned the gathering for February 12, 2003. But one of the invited poets sent a blast e-mail to fifty friends asking for antiwar poems and statements. He refused to attend but wanted another guest to present me with an antiwar anthology and have the event become an antiwar protest. What would have brought the works of three great American writers into American homes via C-SPAN was now set to become a forum for a purely political agenda. With real regret I postponed the event. It was never rescheduled. I had not selected the poets on the basis of politics, nor had the guest list been political. I wondered what victory the invitees thought they had won by keeping the East Room dark and silencing some of the nation's most eloquent writers.

In March of 2004 I held a symposium on Southern writers featuring Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor. It was to be my last literary symposium in the White House. Each of these writers was in his or her own way familiar with prejudice, which comes in many forms. I find particular beauty in the words of Eudora Welty, who over the years grew hunchbacked and misshapen but who created some of the most complex characters ever to appear on the printed page. She was a reader as well as a writer and once penned, ”I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that storybooks had been written by people, people, that books that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like gra.s.s.”

The girls came home often that spring. Jenna flew up to spend a weekend with us at Camp David; Barbara spent her spring break at the White House. They wanted to be with us as the nation edged toward war. I tried to keep things as normal as possible inside the White House. Old friends, including Roland Betts, one of George's best friends from Yale, and his wife, Lois, and Mike and Barbara Proctor, came. Mike was George's childhood best friend, who had lived across the street and was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Mike and Nancy Weiss, our friends from Lubbock, also came. They all wanted to be there for George because they knew how their friend was agonizing.

The usual round of Was.h.i.+ngton events continued unabated. We hosted a reception for the annual Ford's Theatre gala to celebrate President Lincoln and dressed in white tie for the dinner hosted by the Gridiron Club, Was.h.i.+ngton's oldest journalistic organization, founded in 1885. Jeannette Kagame, the first lady of Rwanda, visited Was.h.i.+ngton, and I had her to coffee at the White House. But with war increasingly looming, George's every thought was on our troops, Iraq, and Saddam.

For the better part of six months, I had been planning to host a group of my old Midland friends for four days at the White House, to tour Was.h.i.+ngton gardens, including Mount Vernon. I had been looking forward to seeing them, as had Susie Evans, my kindergarten friend and George's second-grade friend, who had moved from Midland to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., when her husband, Don, became the secretary of commerce. But when the days arrived, I regretted the invitation. I could tell that it irritated George to have a group of women sitting around, laughing, talking, opening a bottle of wine as he strode off to the Treaty Room after dinner for one of his frequent nighttime meetings with Condi Rice and her National Security Council deputy, Stephen Hadley. Many evenings, after most of official Was.h.i.+ngton had left its offices and gone home, they met in the residence to review, strategize, and question. The butlers put out chips and drinks, but they remained largely untouched.

Late one afternoon, Barbara called home. The teaching a.s.sistant in one of her cla.s.ses at Yale had starkly told her, ”I will only give you an A in this cla.s.s if you tell your father not to go to war.” Barbara handled the situation herself, making an appointment to speak to the dean of her residential college, who said that she should submit all her coursework directly to her professor.

We knew exactly how deep the pa.s.sions ran before any American soldiers set foot on Iraqi sands.

In early March, antiwar protesters converged on Was.h.i.+ngton, waving signs and shouting epithets while George and Tony Blair worked to get the United Nations to vote on a final resolution taking Saddam to task for violating seventeen previous UN resolutions and authorizing military action if he refused to cooperate. In Was.h.i.+ngton, London, and New York, the days and nights turned into a marathon negotiating session, as our military began the final preparations for war.

On the night before the scheduled UN vote, George, Condi Rice, and I were eating dinner in the residence. All afternoon George had been placing last-minute calls to world leaders, including Vicente Fox of Mexico and Ricardo Lagos of Chile, soliciting their support for the resolution. George and Tony hoped the UN vote would convince Saddam of the international community's resolve and lead to a peaceful outcome, but other leaders were fearful that the two men were asking them to commit to war. The mood was somber as Condi and George reviewed the latest vote count and waited for word.

George never wavered under the pressure. It was the same as that moment after 911 at the height of the anthrax attacks, when he strode out to the mound, alone in the middle of Yankee Stadium, and threw out the first pitch. He has never been afraid to step up to the plate for whatever was required. When he first ran for president, he told his staff that he didn't want to make campaign promises that he could not deliver. He said, ”If I run on something and say I'm going to do this, make sure it's something that really can be done.” He is very disciplined and practical. He did not want to invade Iraq, but most of the global intelligence community was telling him that, the next time, a 9-11 could happen with chemical or biological weapons. We had been brutally attacked once; he would not allow it to happen again.

I remember too how during those weeks I would glance out from my sitting room window and see George walking Spot outside the Oval Office. On the lawn he could be alone with his thoughts. He was sending the best of America to fight and even die in Iraq because he thought it was the safest thing to do for our country. It was a decision that he had always hoped he would not have to make.

The UN resolution to authorize force was withdrawn in mid-March, after France, Russia, and Germany came together to announce their opposition. George and Tony Blair went ahead with their plans to depose Saddam Hussein. Troops from the United States, Great Britain, Poland, and Australia were readied; ultimately, more than forty nations would send troops or military support. On March 17, George gave Saddam and his sons one more chance, a forty-eight-hour deadline to leave the country and avoid war. Saddam and his sons did not leave. On March 19, at just past 9:30 p.m., U.S.-led coalition forces began high-precision bombing strikes on Baghdad. Less than twelve hours later, Americans and Iraqis had their first skirmish on the ground. We were at war.