Part 17 (1/2)

Afterward, I gave Charles and Camilla signed books from all the authors who had attended. For our official gift, George gave them each a handcrafted Texas saddle because of their love of horses. They acted thrilled, but I imagine they must have entire tack rooms in their stables devoted to the saddles that have been given to them on various world tours, not to mention the fact that ours were designed for Western-style riding, not English.

On November 9, the Dalai Lama visited George and me for the second time at the White House. The Dalai Lama is a dear and gentle man whose example is an inspiration; he eloquently embodies the hopes for freedom in Tibet. Once, at the White House, he tickled a ramrod-straight, stoic Marine guard under his chin, saying, ”Smile.” The Marine did. But underneath his soft nature is a man who has been denied his rights and his homeland since he was a boy. He told us that he genuinely feared for Tibet, feared that its culture would be erased from memory as China resettled vast numbers of its citizens inside Tibet's mountainous, landlocked region. George believes that acknowledging the Dalai Lama is a special American responsibility. The world looks to the United States for leaders.h.i.+p, and if we do not stand up for freedom, who will? During his eight years in the White House, George met with dozens of dissidents from Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia, North Korea, Burma, Belarus, and other countries.

For the holiday season, I had chosen the theme ”All Things Bright and Beautiful,”

and we decorated the White House with flowers and fruit, plants, and things that people can find in their yards and gardens. We put pears in our evergreen garlands and on our centerpieces. After a year of so much natural devastation--a tsunami, Katrina--it was a way of remembering the special beauty of nature. The White House was filled with retired staff who came back to work at the Christmas parties, when the sheer number of guests and events made everything hectic. They had been through so many holiday seasons that they knew the rhythms, knew when the food tables were running low or how to ladle punch without dripping. They knew just what needed to be done, and they would introduce themselves saying, ”Mrs. Bush, I am Alfredo. I was here in the Kennedy administration.” That is the type of love and devotion the White House inspires.

At the parties, some guests produced unexpected moments of levity. One woman, waiting to be screened by the magnetometers as she arrived for a White House function, asked the Social Office aides if the machine could see that she wasn't wearing any underwear. Another asked if the machine could tell that she was wearing two pairs of Spanx, modern-day girdles. And at the Congressional Ball, one of the members coming through the receiving line told me, ”My wife and her friends think you wear a wig.” I looked at him dumbfounded, then smiled and said, ”No, it's my own hair,” and pulled on it, just so that he would know for sure.

I had asked the third-generation artist Jamie Wyeth to paint a scene for the official White House holiday card, and he featured the Andrew Jackson magnolia covered in snow, with Barney, Miss Beazley, and India the cat in front. When we sent out our holiday greetings we wished everyone ”hope and happiness” for the season and the year to come.

In any given year, it is possible to count the nationally elected female leaders around the world using little more than the fingers of two hands. Some of the most famous female leaders are women who served decades ago, such as Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher. In January of 2006, on Martin Luther King Day, I represented the United States at the swearing in of Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman ever elected to lead an African nation. Liberia was founded by former American slaves, who colonized the west coast of Africa as early as 1820.

President James Monroe asked for U.S. government funds to purchase the original tracts of land. The Liberian settlements became a haven for slaves freed by the U.S. Navy from the last of the transatlantic slave s.h.i.+ps, and today about 5 percent of all Liberians are descended from these early settlers, who escaped slavery for freedom and who, in 1847, created their sovereign state.

But the country's recent history has been brutal and tumultuous. In 1980 a military coup ushered in a decade of authoritarian rule, followed by rebellion and b.l.o.o.d.y civil war. Finally, starting in 1997 the country had two years of calm, until war erupted again in 1999. It took over three years to achieve another cease-fire and the beginnings of peace, and the price of conflict has been enormous. Two hundred thousand people died in the violence; about 1.5 million fled as refugees. Many of the nation's children were forced to fight as tiny soldiers and had grown up with guns and ammunition rather than parents.

In 2005, when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected, she was one of only four previous Liberian cabinet members who had escaped execution. That January morning she was taking office in a capital city, Monrovia, which had no electricity or running water, and where it was not safe to stay overnight. Instead, Condi Rice, Barbara, and I stayed in neighboring Ghana. To reach downtown Monrovia we pa.s.sed thatched huts made of woven reeds and roofs that were little more than plastic sheets or corrugated metal strips, held in place from wind and rain by rocks scattered about the edges.

Liberians lined the road to watch our convoy pa.s.s, transistor radios pressed to their ears for a bit of news. I smiled and waved, and they shyly did so in return.

It was a remarkable moment of promise to see a strong woman inaugurated as the president of an African nation, a woman so determined to lead her country out of the ruin of decades of war and conflict. As I read the program for the inauguration, I saw the irony that Liberia's early leaders, like ours, were born in Virginia or Kentucky or other Southern states. But while our presidents and statesmen had often been born as sons on landed estates, Liberia's leaders had been born as slaves. When they came to Africa to found a new nation, they created its name as well. The word ”Liberia” is meant to denote liberty.

In her inaugural address, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf spoke of how women in Liberia had long been ”second-cla.s.s citizens,” forced to endure rape during the civil wars, forced to endure the loss of their families and their dignity. She said that she prays for the reconciliation of the country.

Liberia's last leader, Charles Taylor, had allegedly flown arms traded for diamonds into the airport while his own citizens fought and killed each other. In July of 2003, George had repeatedly called for Taylor to resign and leave the country. He then dispatched three American wars.h.i.+ps with two thousand Marines to Liberia's coast. After weeks of back-channel diplomacy between the United States and Liberia's neighbor Nigeria, Taylor was persuaded to leave, and departed Monrovia on August 11. That summer Charles Taylor did what Saddam Hussein would not the previous spring.

A small group of Marines went ash.o.r.e to a.s.sist West African peacekeepers and to clear the way for humanitarian aid. The United States was the only Western nation to provide such direct political and humanitarian help, and many Liberians were grateful to George; the vice president's wife later told me: ”President Bush said 'leave,' and Charles Taylor did.”

In Ghana, I launched the Africa Education Initiative, which linked U.S.

universities with African nations including Ghana, Senegal, Zambia, Tanzania, South Africa, and Ethiopia. The first partners.h.i.+p was with six minority-serving universities, most African-American, plus the University of Texas at San Antonio, which is predominantly Hispanic. Each university shares its expertise and its education department to develop kindergarten through eighth-grade textbooks written in native African languages, ill.u.s.trated by African ill.u.s.trators, and if possible, printed in each African country. The presidents and representatives of the American universities--Chicago State, Elizabeth City State, Tougaloo College, South Carolina State, University of Texas at San Antonio, and Alabama A & M--joined me at the launch.

As part of the United States' work in international development, we had made a special commitment to improving education in Africa, where a staggering one-third of young children do not attend school. American resources help provide textbooks and teacher training and scholars.h.i.+ps so that orphans and other vulnerable children, especially girls, have a chance at an education. With education we can reduce disease, poverty, suffering, and violence, and with better education, we can work to stop future genocides.

In sub-Saharan Africa, girls especially are denied the opportunity to learn. In 2005, of the 42 million African children who had never set foot inside a cla.s.sroom, who did not know how to read or to do simple math, 60 percent were girls. In fact, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has made it a priority to teach the sidewalk market women in Liberia the basics of addition and subtraction so they might earn a better living.

By 2006, the United States had helped provide more than 2.1 million books to schools and libraries and had implemented programs to train 300,000 teachers. I met with some of those teachers that January morning in Ghana. Then I visited, as I did in every African nation, an HIV/AIDS treatment center. Between 3 and 4 percent of all Ghanians have HIV or AIDS, and as in other African nations, the stigma is particularly great for women.

It is tragic that while the United States and Western nations have made tremendous strides on behalf of women and women's rights, many other parts of the world lag far behind. During a South American summit meeting, when I was attending a lunch with the first lady of Brazil, she told me that she wanted to work on ”birth records.”

The translation was spotty, and I thought she said ”bird records.” I immediately started thinking of the Amazon, ecotourism, and the fabulous ways that they could protect their bird species, because I am an avid bird-watcher. And I replied, ”Oh, that's great.” She never realized that I thought she was talking about birds when she started. But what she was discussing was so much more basic yet vitally important. In Brazil and many other parts of the world, countries do not have adequate data on their populations because they do not record births or produce birth certificates. Tens of thousands of children, especially girls, are never counted. Boys may make it into the system eventually because they join the military, but girls remain invisible. They literally do not count, in nation after nation around the globe.

Before I left Ghana, I had lunch with President John Kufuor at what was then the official presidential palace, inside the Osu Castle, or Slave Castle. It was the place where slaves were s.h.i.+pped to Europe and the Americas, and for years it was where Ghana's president made his official home. Underground, I saw the small ”storerooms” where Africans were kept chained in the dark, waiting for months for s.h.i.+ps to arrive. Many went blind because, after so much time in the darkness, their eyes were irreparably damaged when at last they stepped into the brilliant tropical light.

On January 26, 2006, I returned to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, along with Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, to visit local schools and a playground. I began at the Alice M. Harte Elementary School in Orleans Parish. It had been one of the lucky schools, suffering only minimal damage. But it had also experienced ”the Katrina effect” in education. Before the storm, the state of Louisiana had launched a state takeover of some of New Orleans's most troubled schools. When tens of thousands of families evacuated the city and temporarily enrolled their children in other school systems, many parents realized how substandard the city's schools were. Parents and teachers began to demand better for New Orleans. By November 2005, the Louisiana legislature gave the state full control of 107 of the city's 128 schools. Within eighteen months, half of New Orleans's schools would reopen as charter schools, available to all students but independently operated, with more comprehensive curriculums, and required to meet strict performance standards. One of the first of these public schools to become a charter school was Alice M. Harte, where I helped celebrate the return of its students.

My second stop was the St. Bernard Unified School, which had opened its doors on November 14, 2005, to serve 354 students. That number had risen to 1,500 students, from kindergarten through high school. This was now the only school in the entire parish.

Some students were traveling from Baton Rouge, ninety miles away, where they had been evacuated, so they could attend cla.s.ses in what had been their home. With portions of the school still being cleaned out from the flooding, teachers and administrators were using trailers and tents as cla.s.srooms. Doris Voitier, the determined school superintendent, had been unable to get temporary buildings or emergency funds from either FEMA or the Army Corps of Engineers. But instead of waiting, she took action so her students could resume their education. In St. Bernard Parish, nearly every school, home, church, and business had been destroyed by the flooding in Katrina's wake.

In Mississippi, even before the floodwaters had receded, Governor Haley Barbour had begun putting together a rebuilding commission. Despite the immense devastation, every Mississippi school had reopened by November of 2005. This January afternoon in the tiny town of Kiln, the pro football quarterback Brett Favre and his wife, Deanna, were waiting for me. Favre had grown up in Kiln and had played his first ”big-time” football in its modest high school stadium. Together we dedicated a new KaBOOM! playground, built by local volunteers that very same day. Through its Operation Playground, KaBOOM!, a nonprofit that builds play s.p.a.ces for children in low-income areas, had pledged to build or restore one hundred playgrounds across the Gulf Coast over two years. Each project was completed by volunteers. People from around the country came to the Gulf Coast to help with all aspects of the rebuilding. Jenna and Barbara did as well.

They spent a New Year's in Louisiana, constructing a house with Habitat for Humanity.

On nights and weekends, I had a second career inside the White House: movie critic. After years of barely being able to squeeze in time for a movie or waiting until it came to the video rental stores, George and I were now the happy beneficiaries of the White House movie theater and a supply of feature films from the Motion Picture a.s.sociation (movies have been shown in the White House since Woodrow Wilson was in office). We showed movies to heads of state visiting at Camp David, and Jenna, Barbara, George, and I entertained the girls' friends with new releases and hot popcorn. We loved to have the children of the White House staff in to see the latest Disney offering or movies about Nancy Drew and Kit Kittredge. Each fall, after the National Book Festival, I would spend Sunday afternoon watching a chick flick or a foreign film with my friends.

My inner movie critic decided that many films were too long and could stand a good bit more editing; for his part, George did not like films that depended on the F-word for much of their dialogue.

The White House theater is on the ground floor. For state occasions it doubles as a coat check, but the rest of the time, it looks like an old-time movie theater, with oversize red plush seats and a big screen. Our first showing in 2001 was Thirteen Days, Thirteen Days, the story the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy presidency. We invited Senator Ted Kennedy and many members of his family to attend.

In February of 2006, we debuted Glory Road, Glory Road, the story of the Texas Western the story of the Texas Western Miners, one of the first integrated basketball teams and the first to be desegregated in the South. To win the NCAA champions.h.i.+p in 1966, Coach Don Haskins started his five best players, all African-American, making sports history. We invited the producer and the central star, but most of our spots were reserved for the former team players and the family of Coach Haskins. I remembered well the story of El Paso's Texas Western Miners. For two years my mother had gone to Texas Western, when it was called the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy, and I had attended summer school there in 1965.

Afterward, we had the entire team, most of whom were our age, nearly sixty, to dinner in the State Dining Room, where players reminisced and swapped stories.

February was also the month the Winter Olympics opened in Turin, Italy, and I led the American delegation, which included a great group of former Olympians: the skaters Dorothy Hamill and Debi Thomas, the gymnast Kerri Strug, the football star Herschel Walker, who had competed in the bobsled, and the speed skater Eric Heiden, who was now the skating team's orthopedic doctor. In Rome, Barbara and I went to meet the new Pope, Benedict XVI, and all of us visited with our troops stationed at the air base in Aviano. The troops were thrilled to meet the former Olympians.

As with every international event, there were scattered groups of protesters in Turin, arrayed against a variety of causes. Most were antiglobalization; some were protesting Coca-Cola, smog, fast food, and plans for an Italian high-speed train; and some were protesting the Iraq War. Media reports before the Olympics had predicted largescale demonstrations, but they did not materialize. What protest groups did form stayed far away from most Olympic sites. But when Brian Williams interviewed me a few hours before the Opening Ceremony, his second question was: ”How much do the protest signs get to you along the motorcade route?” I told him I had seen only a few protest signs.

And I wondered whether he, tucked away in his broadcast booth, had seen any at all.

Inside, at the ceremony, only the Italian athletes received louder and more

resounding cheers than the American team. Spectators stood and clapped.

I sat with Cherie Blair for the opening, and behind us was the very charming Giorgio Armani. I spoke no Italian, he spoke almost no English, and the noise from the celebration was deafening, but we communicated with hand signals and got along fine.

As we were preparing to fly home from Italy, I received word from my Secret Service detail that there had been an accident on a ranch in Texas; d.i.c.k Cheney had accidentally shot a friend while they were hunting quail. I was sick with worry, for Harry Whittington, who had been hit, for d.i.c.k, and also for George. I asked my chief of staff, Anita McBride, to call Andy Card, George's chief of staff, though it was the middle of the night at home. I wanted to urge the vice president's office to state the facts, to be open, and to answer questions. There was no need to say anything but the truth. Silence, which was all that was coming from the West Wing, was worse. d.i.c.k Cheney did speak to the press, and Harry Whittington recovered. And it gave George a great joke for his next black-tie roast: that the vice president had shot the only trial lawyer who'd supported him.

Back home and around the world, there was mounting dissent over the Iraq War, and George was deeply troubled by how badly the situation inside Iraq had deteriorated.

Iraq had already held two sets of national elections, including one in December of 2005 for a 275-member Council of Representatives. But there were near daily terror attacks and bombings, and in parts of the country neither our troops nor the Iraqis were safe.

Suicide bombers were killing day laborers and market shoppers, police and National Guard recruits, and even religious pilgrims at mosques. As many as one hundred Iraqis would be killed in a single incident. One of the most devastating events occurred in late February, when bombers struck a holy s.h.i.+'ite shrine, the Askariya shrine in Samarra, some sixty-five miles north of Baghdad. In the weeks and months after the bombing, Iraq would be crippled by fresh waves of sectarian violence between s.h.i.+'ite and Sunni Muslims. It seemed that each time Iraq began to stabilize, after it held elections, after it began to form a broad-based government, a new incident or threat would appear and undermine that precarious stability. How to drive the insurgents out was occupying most of George's waking hours. This would be a decisive year.

On March 1, Air Force One, with George and me on board, had just finished refueling in Ireland for a scheduled trip to India and Pakistan. I called my a.s.sistant, Lindsey Lineweaver, into the president's cabin and asked if she could keep a secret. ”We are not going to be landing in New Delhi,” I told her. ”Air Force One is headed for Afghanistan.”

George and I arrived at Bagram Air Base outside of Kabul and then headed to the city on board Marine One. Hamid Karzai was waiting for us at the presidential palace compound. George and President Karzai conferred while I joined his wife, Dr. Zeenat Karzai, for lunch, a traditional meal of chicken, green vegetables, flatbread, and several kinds of rice. Just as on my previous trip, we spoke intently about the needs of women, especially their medical needs. Even something as simple as cooking can be deadly in Afghanistan. Because so many women cook with primitive fires using highly flammable kerosene, they often suffer severe burns. Their children are frequently burned too, by falling into the flames or as a result of kitchen explosions. We discussed mothers' health and infant mortality. There was still no maternity hospital in Kabul, but I had spoken to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld after my last trip, and by late 2005, the U.S.

military had set up a program to train midwives in Afghanistan.

In downtown Kabul, George cut the ribbon on the new U.S. Emba.s.sy building.