Part 20 (1/2)

The Mae Tao Clinic is the place Dr. Cynthia Maung calls home. She is a Burmese doctor who fled into Thailand in 1988, when she was twenty-nine years old. She was running from chaos; in the cities, Burmese troops knelt and fired repeatedly on unarmed demonstrators protesting the repressive junta. To silence some of the protesters, the regime's forces rounded them up and drowned them. Dr. Cynthia escaped by walking through the jungles at night. When the sun rose, she slept in fields. She crossed the border at Mae Sot and began life in a refugee camp. Soon she was setting up a primitive medical clinic to treat refugees who arrived with war wounds or who had contracted malaria. She sterilized her instruments by boiling them in an aluminum rice cooker and thought she would return home in two, possibly three months. Twenty years later, she has made only brief forays across the jungle-laced border to care for the sick in Burma. She remains in Thailand, at her clinic, where she is known as the Mother Teresa of the Burmese.

I had already ”met” Dr. Cynthia via a White House teleconference on Burma, but now I had the chance to talk to her face-to-face and to shake her hand. I walked into her open-air clinic, and the first thing I saw was a volunteer American doctor performing cataract surgery in a building with open windows. Outside the rains of a tropical thunderstorm poured down, turning the paths to mud. In another section was a row of picnic tables covered with plastic s.h.i.+elds. That was where they placed the newborns.

They weighed the babies on a vegetable scale, laying each on a paper napkin. The clinic also fits prosthetics--legs, arms, feet--for all the people who lost limbs to the many land mines planted by the military junta. Refugees are being trained to make the prosthetic molds and casts, for which there is near-constant demand. Fifty thousand Burmese also cross the border each year to visit Mae Tao to seek medical care. Many walk hundreds of miles from deep inside Burma to the clinic. I left behind crates of donated supplies, including thousands of bed nets to help prevent malaria, which is rampant in the region.

Thirty miles away, pushed up against the sides of steep, forested mountains, their tops obscured by drifting clouds and rain, is the Mae La Refugee Camp. The sprawling camp winds its way around six hills at the Thai-Burma border. Today children who were born in Mae La two decades ago are having children of their own. None of them has ever set foot outside Mae La's compound of muddy paths and hutlike homes. Thai law requires them to remain confined to their camps in a stateless limbo. More than 140,000 Burmese refugees live in camps like this strung along the Thai-Burma border, nearly 40,000 in Mae La alone, at least according to official estimates. The actual totals may be much higher. Beyond the camps, as many as 1.5 million other Burmese live inside Thailand.

At Mae La there are now twenty-six schools, built from weathered bamboo, with open sides and topped by thatched roofs. What few desks and chairs they had rested on damp, earthen floors. At the school I visited, two young American women were helping to teach English. One of the boys stood and wrote a slightly halting message to me on the blackboard, ”My life in refugee is better than Burma, but I don't have opportunity to out outside the camp. I would like to speak English, so I am now trying hard.” They lived in a camp without jobs, where there is no electricity and no running water, yet they came to learn and dreamed of a better life. A few would get that chance.

In 2005 the U.S. Congress changed the immigration requirements for Burmese refugees. By the time of my visit, over twenty thousand Burmese had been cleared to resettle in the United States. Three families were preparing to board a bus for the first stage of their trip when I arrived at Mae La. One family was going to Florida; another was headed to South Carolina; and a third was leaving for Texas. Their belongings were packed into brightly colored rice sacks.

At Mae La, I was greeted by teenagers performing a traditional Burmese dance. It was a dance from a land over the mountains, a land they had never seen from outside their bamboo walls. The next day, August 8, 2008, would mark twenty years since the brutal government crackdown that drove so many Burmese to run for their lives into Thailand.

That is part of what is ultimately so tragic about these repressive regimes, in Burma, in Afghanistan, in Liberia. They go on for years, in some cases, like Burma, for generations. Whole generations pa.s.s, and the culture erodes. Under the junta, half the people in Burma suffer from malnutrition and hunger. And when these regimes finally do collapse, everything has to be rebuilt. There is no infrastructure for people to even begin to start over, no economic infrastructure, no civil infrastructure, no physical infrastructure, no power lines or good roads. It takes years to rebuild.

It was almost surreal to leave the refugee camp and arrive that night in Beijing, China, which had spent years preparing for a grand Summer Olympics. In a speech in Bangkok, George had called on the Chinese to cease detaining political dissidents, human rights activists, and religious activists. He spoke out in support of a free press, freedom of a.s.sembly, and labor rights, saying, ”The United States believes the people of China deserve the fundamental liberty that is the natural right of all human beings. . . . Trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential.”

China was consumed with its global spectacle. And we relished every minute of watching our amazing athletes compete on the world stage. We waved flags and cheered, moving from the Olympic swimming pool to the basketball stadium to the imported sand court for beach volleyball. It was a stunning sight to see the Chinese cheering for the American basketball players, chanting ”Kobe, Kobe” for Kobe Bryant. And we were equally proud when our basketball team lined the seats of the Olympic pool to shout as

Michael Phelps won his string of gold medals. The men's team came and cheered at the women's games. It was a genuine display of camaraderie and sportsmans.h.i.+p.

I was particularly touched by one event, the men's 400-meter freestyle in the Olympic pool. Michael Phelps won the gold, while fellow American swimmer La.r.s.en Jensen won the bronze. After the ceremony, all three medalists made a celebratory walk around the pool, and George and I waited at the rail to greet them. As he took his first steps, Michael Phelps tossed his bouquet of red roses into the crowd, and the silver medalist soon did the same. But La.r.s.en Jensen held on to his. When he reached me, he lifted his arm to hand me his flowers, saying, ”I want you to have these.”

Gampy joined us, remembering the days thirty years before when he had been the United States' official diplomat to China after President Nixon reestablished relations.

President Hu Jintao had us to lunch in the Forbidden City, the centuries-old compound of the emperors, tucked behind ma.s.sive red walls. There were small meandering streams and gardens, but the ancient rooms are now largely bare, leaving their past to our imaginations.

As September opened, we expected a harsh presidential campaign but an otherwise calm fall. Within two weeks our a.s.sumptions had been thoroughly dashed.

George's presidency would be bookended by two Septembers, the September of 9-11, when the nation was devastated by forces without, and the September of 2008, when it was threatened with collapse from within.

My own experience with economic collapse came from the fierce boom and bust oil cycles in Midland. Each time, people were lulled into believing that the boom would last, and each time, the oil markets collapsed with the slimmest of warnings. Economics was not part of my portfolio in the White House, but along the dusty streets of Midland I had known highly educated geologists who lost their jobs and families who left town because when the well drilling ceased and the derricks were shut down, there was nothing left for them. But the crisis we now faced was engulfing not one Texas town but vast swaths of the nation. Week after week the White House was working around the clock to manage the financial crisis. Some staffers barely left their desks. George's term began just after the dot-com bubble had burst, plunging the nation into recession. In his final months, he was working to contain another bursting bubble as it direly threatened the entire U.S. economy.

In the news and on the presidential campaign trail, George was attacked ruthlessly. We had both long ago given up stewing over the things said about either one of us. When you are president, there simply isn't time. George did not have time to be mad at a press person who wrote or said something nasty about him. He did not have time to be upset at a candidate who lashed out at him in an effort to secure higher office. Then too, as we had long ago learned, there is a certain luxury that comes from being a candidate. It is easy to criticize a sitting president when you are not the one in the Oval Office, when you are not responsible for the decisions that must be made and for the whole of the nation. I thought of that when I heard the daily rants from the campaign trail. It got so that even the weather seemed to be George's fault. And I wondered if Barack Obama, who spent far more time attacking George than he did his opponent, John McCain, would want to amend his words once he discovered the reality of the White House and was himself confronted by the challenges and crises that hit a president every day, all day.

There is also a larger picture to consider. No one, not even a president, is going to make the right decision every time. Presidents may have more information on which to base their decisions, but they do not have the benefit of hindsight. They must be prepared to take risks for what they believe is right. And they must try to antic.i.p.ate the future, not just two years or four years out but what the consequences will be decades ahead.

George believes, and I believe as well, that the presidency is larger than the men who are in it. The Founding Fathers, who in the spring of 1787 wrestled with this issue, designed it that way. Each president's responsibility is to the office, the sole national inst.i.tution that speaks for all Americans, regardless of their party or cla.s.s or home or age.

George always believed that it was his responsibility to treat the office with great care.

Presidents are not always right, but history tells us that our core values are right and that our country is good. Those are the values that guided George, the touchstone by which he measured what he did. George knew that in the heat of the moment, presidents tend to get much of the blame and little of the credit. Not all of his decisions would be popular, but as a nation, we would not want our presidents to make decisions solely on the basis of their personal popularity, or poll numbers, or daily headlines. The challenges we face are too great for that.

I am proud that, as president, George acted on principle, that he put our country first and himself last.

Just as the financial crisis was roiling America, the surge in Iraq was cementing some of its largest gains. Iraq, which had once been cited as a failure, was becoming a far less violent, far more peaceful and stable place. It was not perfect, but it had an opportunity to build a better, healthier society, and perhaps in time, ten or twenty-five years from now, it would help transform the Middle East into a more peaceful region.

The loneliest of George's decisions, the surge had been the right choice. But ironically, drowned out by the din of a political campaign, Iraq's success was pushed out of the headlines, if it was mentioned at all.

I never visited Iraq, one of my genuine regrets from my time in the White House.

I did spend several years working on a project to open a children's hospital in Basra; Iraqi children have one of the highest incidences of pediatric leukemia in the world, likely caused in part by Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons, and their need for care was great. But the location chosen for the hospital was for years a high security risk. There were lengthy delays, and when I left the White House, the state-of-the-art facility had still not opened. There are, however, many moments at which I could look back with pleasure and a bit of pride. I had worked to support better education and women's rights and human rights around the globe, and I had worked to better people's lives here at home. I had reached out to victims of oppression in Burma and to tattooed American teens struggling to break free from the cycle of gang violence. I had sat on mud floors in African health clinics and inside Bedouin-style tents for breast cancer survivors. I had visited seventy-five countries, including five trips across Africa and three to Afghanistan.

I had been to many of the countries hardest hit by AIDS and malaria. I had held the hands of the dying and looked into the eyes of children who had been orphaned in the most hideous ways, as well as children who were raising other children younger than themselves. Yet amid heartbreak and horror, I had seen individual miracles. I saw how medicines or simple bed nets were giving millions of people a new lease on life. I had met Burmese who were still able to dream of freedom, and Afghan women who were proud to earn an education. I had seen the worst of man in the 9-11 attacks and the worst of nature in Katrina. But I had also seen the very best of America in the hundreds of thousands of people who had put their lives on hold to help the victims and to help our country rebuild. I witnessed the compa.s.sion of strangers comforting, clothing, and feeding those in need. I had seen young men and women abandoned by their parents choose to raise their own children in love. I had been blessed to meet and to know many of the bravest men and women the world has ever seen, our soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors, and Coast Guard men and women.

At home and abroad, I was inspired by stories of resilience. I could think of Doris Voitier in St. Bernard Parish, who was determined to keep her promise of an open school for her students after the ravishes of Katrina, or of Habiba Sarabi in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. I could think of military families whose grandfathers, fathers, and now daughters and sons wore our nation's uniform. My greatest keepsakes and treasures from the White House are the people, the ordinary yet so very extraordinary people I met, day after day, week after week.

Inside the White House, I had helped restore five historic rooms and refurbish over twenty-five rooms in the residence for future families. At Camp David I had worked on redecorating the cabins with privately raised funds; many of the buildings were now more than half a century old. Foreign leaders had been staying in a cabin where the front hall looked directly into the bathroom. It was a pleasure to make them comfortable. We gathered a historical archive of photos capturing famous visits to Camp David so that every president from FDR forward and numerous foreign leaders are remembered and recognized. I helped to renovate the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, which had last been modernized in 1981. Every seat now has Internet access and energy-efficient lighting. I worked on updating the Cabinet and Roosevelt rooms in the West Wing. In the White House, George and I had hosted over fifteen hundred social events; many were to award medals or honor accomplishments or great moments in American arts and literature. With Jim Billington I had started the National Book Festival, which now draws some 120,000 visitors each fall, and I had worked to combat illiteracy worldwide. I had done what I had hoped to do: I had worked to be a good steward of the White House for our nation. Every day, even the difficult ones, had been a privilege.

In October of 2008, I was finally able to travel to the Laura Ingalls Wilder house in Mansfield, Missouri, where she and her husband had settled on Rocky Ridge Farm.

I had long wanted to visit the last home of the woman whose Little House on the Prairie stories I had grown up with and had spent hours reading to my own daughters.

From the Laura of those books and her family, I relearned the lessons that no matter how impoverished the lives of those on our frontiers, they were rich in character and strength and love. I proudly presented the home and museum with a certificate from the National Trust for Historic Preservation designating it an official project of Save America's Treasures. One of the great treats I had as first lady was the chance to visit the homes of some of my favorite authors--Mark Twain's residence in Hartford, Connecticut; Carl Sandburg's home, Connemara, in Flat Rock, North Carolina; and Edith Wharton's Lenox, Ma.s.sachusetts, home, the Mount. In the case of the Mount, preservation work has been vital to save it from closure and decay. Today it is a thriving place, honoring one of America's best female writers.

In November, as the banking system began to stabilize after its near collapse, George hosted a world economic summit, where there were so many foreign leaders that the White House had to place the translators in a tent on the roof of the East Wing, with wires running through the bottom of the residence and up into the State Dining Room, so everyone could hear what was being said simultaneously. Thirteen languages were spoken at the dinner, and the arrivals alone took close to an hour, because each head of state had to arrive and receive the same recognition of protocol.

December brought the renewed joys of Christmas. I chose a red, white, and blue theme to honor our country during this election year. We recycled many of the decorations from previous seasons, turning old towering Nutcracker statues into flagwaving Uncle Sams; even Santa wore red, white, and blue. We sent ornaments to every member of Congress and asked each representative to select a local artist to decorate them. Three hundred and sixty-nine returned, decorated with paint, fabric, beading, and images of our varied regions.

Mother came for that last Christmas, and as she had done in previous years, she pulled a chair to the very top of the residence stairs and listened to the beautiful sounds of the carolers and bell ringers as their voices and music rose and echoed off the marble below. Each year, aside from the formal parties, we opened the White House on December afternoons and weekends to members of Congress and their guests and every person on the White House staff; we did the same for hundreds more across the government. They were invited to tour the house with family and friends, and we asked choirs and orchestras and carolers from around the nation to perform as the guests walked among the decorations, the garlands, and the trees. Those were the sounds that Mother so loved.

But it was too much for her to spend Christmas Day with us at Camp David. The prospect of getting her from the cabin to the lodge in the cold and ice was too daunting.

With a knot of regret, I let her return home to Midland. But we did have our girls and the entire Bush family--George's parents, his siblings, their spouses and children. It would be our last gathering at Camp David, ”Camp” as we called it, the place where George's sister, Doro, had married Bobby Koch at the end of Gampy's term. When he left office, she had a.s.sumed she would never see Camp again. Instead, when George was inaugurated, Doro was issued a standing invitation to come with us, not just for the holidays but for any weekend.

It was the season for good-byes. George was busy with departure photos for the staff. But he insisted upon adding something else. He invited everyone who worked at the White House--the butlers, the painters, the ushers, the telephone operators, the secretaries, every White House employee--to come to the Oval Office for a photo. And they came, these wonderful people who had been such an important part of our lives for the past eight years. Some had worked at the White House for four decades but had never before been invited into the Oval Office. They entered with tears in their eyes.

We would also be leaving not just close staff but true friends. George's second chief of staff, Josh Bolten, had been a steadfast guiding presence during the difficult months of the Iraq surge and through the economic crisis. He had been with George since 1999, the earliest days of his presidential run. Josh is a fine person, with a wonderful sense of humor and a great and versatile mind. We had treasured his company, and that of his longtime girlfriend, Dede McClure, on our Camp David weekends.

My own staff had a special place in my heart. I remained very close with Andi Ball, my first chief of staff. My second, Anita McBride, had become a confidante and a cherished friend. She and my other staff members had been instrumental in so many accomplishments. Our lives were interwoven far beyond the walls of the office, and it was with real sadness that we watched as this period of shared days came to an end.

Long before the November election, George was determined to make the transition to the new president the most seamless in history. He created a Transition Coordinating Council, to ensure that ”each office was left in better shape than when our administration had arrived.” It was part of George's interest in the continuity of government, and it was also because we knew how vital a smooth transition is, particularly given the ever-present threat of terrorism and the challenges to the economy.

He believed that one of the paramount responsibilities of the president is to do all that he or she can for the next occupant of the Oval Office. Every White House department was instructed to prepare detailed briefing binders for its successors. In my office, the projects team left behind detailed lists of all their contacts at federal agencies, as well as timelines for events and even for producing the White House Christmas card. The correspondence shop left binders filled with sample letters, and we left scheduling information as well.

And that practice was repeated across all parts of the administration. The Social Office gathered hundreds of pages of instructions, timelines, and sample invitations to leave behind detailed information for their successors. The same was done for Homeland Security, national security, economic policy, commerce and trade, everywhere that there would be a new team. Because this was also the first presidential transition during a period when the nation was under terrorist threat, the White House held a full Homeland Security exercise, a mock attack on major city subways, bringing together the outgoing and incoming administrations, including National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and his successor, General James Jones, and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and his successor, Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, as well as Fran Townsend, the longserving a.s.sistant to the president for Homeland Security and counterterrorism, so that there would be full continuity for the government and for the American people.

Barack and Mich.e.l.le Obama came to visit the White House, and while George and the president-elect met in the Oval Office, I gave the next first lady a tour. Upstairs I showed her the dressing room window, with its view across the Rose Garden and into the West Wing, and told her the story of my mother-in-law first pointing it out to Hillary Clinton sixteen years before. I also invited her to come back with her daughters and her mother. She did, in December, and Jenna and Barbara came to show the girls the parts of the house that they had always found the most fun.

As in so many years past, Inauguration Day 2009 was cold. It was also historic, as the nation swore in its first African-American president.

After the inaugural ceremony, we made our last walk down the steps of the Capitol with the Obamas; inside Marine One, Bar and Gampy were waiting, so that they could join us for the final helicopter ride to Andrews Air Force Base, where nearly one thousand of our staff and friends were waiting to bid us a fond farewell.

The love of the Bush family had come full circle; the pride George had felt for his parents, they felt in return for their son. They too had made this journey we were about to begin and had found unexpected joys in the years beyond.