Spoken From The Heart Part 10

We spent that Friday night and Sat.u.r.day cloistered away at Camp David with key cabinet members and the national security team. George was convening a council of war.

On Sat.u.r.day evening, after a day of intense meetings, Condi Rice, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, took a seat at the Camp David piano and began to play hymns. As she played, Attorney General John Ashcroft encouraged us all to join him and sing. With intelligence being a.n.a.lyzed and plans under way, on Sunday, we returned somberly to Was.h.i.+ngton.

For over a month, I had planned a small dinner at the White House that Sunday to celebrate the wedding anniversary of Debra and Alan Dunn, friends of ours from Gampy's 1988 presidential run. George had read at their wedding ten years before. I decided to keep the evening. I knew that George was consumed, almost every waking hour, with responding to the attacks, and for an hour or two, I wanted to change the subject, to give him a chance to briefly refocus and be surrounded by friends. There were seven couples, and we all chatted, but our guests had driven through largely deserted streets to a White House that was heavily secured and fortified. It was even slightly disconcerting for some of them to be within our walls. The threat was too new and too raw. But we lived with that low-level anxiety all the time, and would do so for years to come. It was almost 9:00 p.m. when George walked onto the South Lawn with the last of our guests to take Spot out. Above, a plane roared. George and everyone else looked up, and George asked, "Is that supposed to be there?" That is the question we asked about every plane, every noise. As the engine rush grew fainter, George lowered his gaze and said quietly, "I'm fighting an enemy that I can't see."

At noontime the next day, Monday, I flew to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, for a memorial for the victims of Flight 93, which had been bravely forced down by some of its pa.s.sengers before it reached Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. Whenever I visited Shanksville or later Manhattan, or almost anywhere in the Northeast, people would hand me prayer or memorial cards that they had made for their loved ones. Some families held out bracelets that they had engraved with the names of those they had lost. These items were given with such reverence to me and also to George, and we were careful to collect each one. I kept one card with the photo of a twenty-five-year-old, raven-haired girl, on my mirror.

Suzanne was her name; her mother had handed it to me along a rope line, where people gathered so that we might shake their hands or say a quick word. I never knew Suzanne's last name; I only knew that she had died in one of the towers. I kept her photo tucked in my mirror frame at the White House until January 20, 2009. Every day I looked at her beautiful, young face. And in the mornings after 9-11, I longed to hold my own daughters in my arms.

The leaves were already turning in the rural Pennsylvania southwest when Governor Tom Ridge and I drove to the memorial service at the crash site. We stood alongside the field where the plane had plummeted to the ground; the trees at the edge of the woods were blackened from the fireball that had enveloped this small spot of earth. It was windy, and we stood under a tent while the families lit candles in honor of their loved ones. The flames flickered as the air swirled by. It was not a place of orderly white crosses and Stars of David, like the green fields above the beaches of Normandy in France. It was a crater in the ground, a mark that time and weather would erode until perhaps the land would lie almost flat again. This would always be the last resting spot for their loved ones.

When it was my turn to speak, I said, "America is learning the names, but you know the people. And you are the ones they thought of in the last moments of life. You are the ones they called, and prayed to see again. You are the ones they loved. A poet wrote, 'Love knows not its own depths until the hour of parting.' The loved ones we remember today knew--even in those horrible moments--that they were not truly alone, because your love was with them."

As we left Shanksville, my staff and I had our arms filled with pages of notes and reflections from children whose school building had been within earshot of the crash site, who had felt the earth shudder and who had heard the ground and woods convulse in flames.

For the one-week anniversary of 9-11, I flew to Chicago to tape Oprah Winfrey's talk show. Then, on September 20, as the initial estimates of the dead at the World Trade Center pa.s.sed six thousand, George prepared to address a joint session of Congress, the nation, and the world. British prime minister Tony Blair flew in from London to visit the World Trade Center site and then came to Was.h.i.+ngton to stand alongside us. We had a private dinner at the White House and drove over to the Capitol. The sergeants at arms for the House and the Senate met us at the door, and I was escorted to a small waiting room off the gallery. But unlike at the State of the Union, now I was not alone; Tony Blair was waiting with me. Inside the gallery, we were joined by Tom Ridge, as well as New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor George Pataki. We had invited a group of hero guests, representatives of the New York fire and police departments and the Port Authority, as well as the U.S. Army and Navy, and Lisa Beamer, the pregnant widow of Todd Beamer, one of the pa.s.sengers on board Flight 93. Vice President Cheney was absent from his customary spot behind the podium and was spending the night in a secure location because of fears of a ma.s.s attack on the Capitol. I listened as my husband gave the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan the first of a series of ultimatums, including surrender Osama bin Laden or face military retribution, and as he recalled how Republicans and Democrats, senators and representatives, had come together on the steps of the Capitol to sing "G.o.d Bless America."

I was always nervous when George spoke before Congress, but on this night, with all that was at stake, having Tony Blair, Tom Ridge, Rudy Giuliani, and George Pataki surrounding me was a great comfort.

Both George and I find the presence of close friends and the people we love comforting. Our whole married life, though, we have been comforted most by each other.

Being nearby was how in those days, weeks, and months we rea.s.sured each other. We do not have to speak; ours is a language not just of words but of a shared presence. We take comfort simply from knowing that the other one is in the room. We are anch.o.r.ed to each other. And if it is my nature to be calm, it is also George's to steady and buoy me. We are two symbiotic souls.

I was anxious, but I was never fearful. And I received so many forms of unsolicited comfort. My old roommate from Houston, Janet Heyne, told me on the phone that "the whole time you've been in Was.h.i.+ngton, I've been so glad that I wasn't you and that I didn't have to do what you're doing." She went on, "Now I'm jealous for the first time because you can do something after this horrible tragedy." And I could could do things, do things, things that could make a difference. That was my solace, even as the roar of Air Force fighter planes flying cover patrols echoed through the walls and Secret Service details conducted new rounds of evacuations because there were reports of a truck bomb waiting to detonate on a nearby street.

That weekend, September 21, our girls came home. They flew on commercial airplanes that had just begun returning to the skies. We went to Camp David for Sat.u.r.day night and spent Sunday afternoon at the White House, basking in the suns.h.i.+ne. I was so grateful just to hold them in my arms again. Monday brought a meeting at the White House with family members and friends of the victims of Flight 93. I read their stories in the customary White House briefing binders prepared beforehand, but there is almost no way to be "briefed" on such a visit. Pa.s.senger Thomas Burnett had called his wife, Deena, four times from Flight 93. In the fourth call, he said, "I know we're all going to die--there's three of us who are going to do something about it. I love you, honey."

Jeremy Glick also managed to phone his wife, Lyzbeth. After they spoke, she gave the phone to her father, who heard the final screams before the connection went dead. The GTE phone operator Lisa Jefferson heard Todd Beamer's final words, "Are you ready, guys? Let's roll." Flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw had called her husband, Phil, and told him that they were gathering hot water and were going to rush the hijackers. He heard men on the plane nearby whispering the Twenty-third Psalm, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me." Then his wife said, "Everyone's running to first cla.s.s. I've got to go. Bye." In the Blue Room, under the portraits of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe, George and I shook hands and embraced their families, and the families of the other pa.s.sengers and crew members who gave their lives on that bright blue morning.

In the evening, I joined Senator Kennedy on the stage of the Kennedy Center for a concert in remembrance of 9-11. The next morning, I was on a government plane, bound for New York City.

Manhattan from the air looks doll-size, a perfect expanse of individual buildings rising from the island. With no way to build out, the city built up, until the thousands of building tops have meshed together to create a kind of aerial terrain, gleaming mountains of steel and gla.s.s high-rises, shadowy valleys of tenements and brownstones. And now, at the tip, a cataclysm. We circled the still smoldering wreckage where the Twin Towers had been, before landing in Newark, New Jersey, and traveling into the city.

My first stop was Madison Square Garden, where I was scheduled to address three thousand of the city's Learning Leaders, a nearly ten-thousand-strong volunteer school corps--larger than the U.S. Peace Corps--composed of specially trained parents, retirees, college students, businesspeople, and senior citizens who donate their time to New York City students and schools. My role was to help encourage them to return to their schools and cla.s.srooms because the city's children were in desperate need. My friend Andi Bernstein, who had been one of our co-owners of the Texas Rangers and whose husband was the business partner of one of George's oldest friends, had asked me to come. From Madison Square Garden, the motorcade headed south to one of the city's elementary schools, P.S. 41. That day, P.S. 41 was more than a school packed to bursting.

It was a refuge, as it had been for the last fifteen days.

On the morning of 9-11, students at another school, P.S. 234, an elementary school for grades pre-K through fifth, were on their playground four blocks from the Twin Towers. They heard the thunderous crash and saw the first plane hit. Other children, already in their cla.s.srooms, where windows were open to let in the air on that bright, fresh fall morning, caught sight of the North Tower engulfed in flames.

Within minutes of the attack, many parents had rushed to the school to pick up their children, but as the streets clogged with evacuees and emergency vehicles racing south, 150 students remained behind. The school's princ.i.p.al, Anna Switzer, herded them, their teachers, and a few parents inside. Before the South Tower fell, Switzer and her teachers lined up the students, ages five to eleven, in a single file and told them to hold hands. They stepped out of the building into the ash and smoke. Some looked up and watched as men and women flung themselves from the upper floors of the towers, their bodies pa.s.sing through the billowing flames. One child said, "The birds are on fire."

Running, some being carried, others being pulled, they moved north. Moments later, the air rumbled and the South Tower fell. The torrent of dust blotted out all signs of sky and sun. Students and teachers at the front of the line kept going north. Switzer grabbed those at the rear and raced back into the school's bas.e.m.e.nt. "The day turned into night, and we ran for our lives," she later recalled. At first, Switzer did not know if her caravan of students and teachers who had left survived. They did, walking and running about a mile and a half north to the sheltering brick walls of P.S. 41.

Not only were many of the P.S. 234 students forced from their school but their families also had to abandon their homes for weeks or even months. Staff, parents, and children in both schools, P.S. 41 and 234, had friends who had died.

With rescue workers using the school building and the Trade Center site still

aflame, the P.S. 234 children and teachers were sharing the cla.s.srooms at P.S. 41; two sets of students and two teachers were crowded into each room. I was there that morning to try to comfort them. I spoke to the children, and I read the storybook I Love You, Little I Love You, Little One while, in the back of the cla.s.sroom, teachers wept into their hands. while, in the back of the cla.s.sroom, teachers wept into their hands.

Governor George Pataki's wife, Libby, had joined me at the school. Now we were on our way to Engine Company 54 and Ladder Company 4 in lower Manhattan. The fire battalion had lost fifteen firefighters. The sidewalk in front had become a makes.h.i.+ft memorial of candles, notes, and flowers. The flowers were stacked one bouquet on top of another, creating a slowly fading mound. We placed our own fresh bouquets of sunflowers on the sidewalk and went inside to meet the men who remained. They were the ones who hadn't been on duty that day, who had been somewhere else when their friends suited up and raced south, climbing the stairs of the North Tower in full gear, including helmets and oxygen tanks, and wearing the locator devices that are designed to chirp so firefighters who fall in the dark can be found. I think sometimes of all those chirpers that suddenly went silent.

Inside the firehouse, the men were grieving. Unlike the grief of the teachers, which was laced with fear and uncertainty for the future, this was a very different grief-raw, aching, and angry.

The next week, on October 2, George and I went out to dinner in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., with Mayor Anthony Williams and his wife, Diane, at Morton's, a steakhouse.

Across the country, people had stopped going to shopping malls and to restaurants. They had stopped flying on airplanes and staying in hotels. No one could promise them that other strikes would not come. But now, in addition to all the fears of another terror attack, George was concerned that the economy would spiral into a full-blown crisis. We had already been in a recession from the bursting of the dot-com bubble. He did not want the specter of more people losing their jobs, of storefronts being boarded up and businesses going bankrupt. It's not a large gesture for a president to go out to dinner, but we hoped that by doing so we might encourage other Americans. It was why George wanted them to shop, to fly on commercial airlines, and to travel again--those were all ways to bolster business. If the terrorists had succeeded in undermining our economy too, they would have scored a double blow.

The White House was abuzz with foreign leaders arriving for meetings with George. They came for Oval Office sit-downs and for small working lunches and dinners, at times with their spouses. On September 28, I hosted Jordan's Queen Rania for a coffee while her husband, King Abdullah, talked terrorism and security with George. In all, over the next six months, more than twenty-five foreign leaders would fly to Was.h.i.+ngton to meet with George, and he would keep in near constant touch with others by phone. I also wanted to invite friends over. As the blistering intensity of the early days continued unabated, I felt very strongly that every so often George needed an hour or two to clear his mind, or at least to have the distraction and the comfort of longtime friends. From before dawn each morning, he was reading threat a.s.sessments and reviewing retaliation options. I wanted him to have a few brief moments of respite. So our friends came: Penny Slade-Sawyer, who had been one of our good friends when we moved back to Midland and who now lived in Northern Virginia, as well as Joan and Jim Doty, whom we had met in 1988 during Gampy's campaign, and other friends scattered around Was.h.i.+ngton.

At the start of October, our longtime friends from Lubbock, Mike and Nancy Weiss, came for a few days. We took immeasurable comfort in seeing all of them.

On Friday, October 5, we traveled to Camp David with Mike and Nancy. We had known them since George's race for Congress back in 1978. Mike was an accountant who had been George's Lubbock County chairman for the campaign; the two had met in the back of a men's clothing store when George had dropped by to introduce himself and shake hands. Mike had supported George on every run since, even moving to Austin to help George set up the Texas budget office, and Nancy and I had spent countless mornings walking around the city's lake trails. They were with us to lend their companions.h.i.+p and friends.h.i.+p, but as we ate our meals or took brief walks at the edge of the Catoctin Mountains, George knew what was to come. I knew as well. He spent most of the weekend closeted with his staff, and in the evening, when we were alone, he talked about sending our forces into combat. I knew how anxious he was; along with the fears of more terrorism, he now had the added worry of the safety of our own troops. There was no precedent for this type of war and for what would have to be done. But he and I said nothing about it to Mike and Nancy.

On Sunday morning, on our return to Was.h.i.+ngton, we stopped at the National Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Emmitsburg, Maryland, to honor firefighters who had died during the year. Over three hundred firefighters had perished on 9-11. When we landed at the White House, George left to prepare for his remarks to the nation. I took Mike and Nancy upstairs, into our bedroom, and told them: at one o'clock that afternoon, George was going to announce the first round of bomb and missile strikes against the Taliban rulers in Afghanistan. He would speak from the Treaty Room, the place where other presidents had pursued peace, with the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument and Jefferson Memorial rising in the background. A few doors down, technicians were adjusting the lights and checking the audio feed, and George was reading his speech a final time. I turned on the television and got in bed; Nancy and Mike drew up chairs beside me, although Nancy later told me that she felt like getting in bed too.

George's voice was steady as he spoke, but I knew the consequences. Twenty-six days after 9-11, my husband was formally announcing military action. The Taliban had ignored every ultimatum. "The battle is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail," he said. Less than two hours before, American and British forces had launched the first strikes on the cities of Kabul and Kandahar. Missiles and bombs would be followed by drops of food, medicine, and transistor radios that were tuned to a message broadcast for the people of Afghanistan.

George had been given update reports on the military plans since before we boarded Marine One that morning. "Peace and freedom will prevail," he said as we watched him on the television screen.

In our system of government, while Congress is the body that can officially declare war, presidents are the ones who make the ultimate call to send our troops into battle. My father-in-law had done it at the start of 1991; four presidents--John F.

Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford--had presided over a single war: Vietnam. After two years of n.a.z.i aggression in Europe, Franklin Roosevelt took the country to war against j.a.pan and then Germany in 1941. Harry Truman had the Korean War, although it was undeclared, and every post-World War II president through George H. W. Bush had faced the nuclear specter of the Cold War. The history lessons are easy;

what is hard to find are the words to convey my emotions when my husband had to commit precious American lives to combat. In his speech, George spoke of a letter he had received from a fourth-grade girl whose father was in the military. "As much as I don't want my dad to fight," she wrote, "I'm willing to give him to you." I pictured the faces of the sailors and Marines on the cruisers in San Diego, where I had gone for my first Troops to Teachers event, six months ago; I thought of the Navy personnel who sat alongside us in the chapel at Camp David; I thought of the faces of the men and women in uniform who had met us at the Pentagon, of the injured at Walter Reed. They were people with names, with hometowns, with parents, spouses, and families, and they were willing to give themselves and their lives so that other dads and moms going to work on a quiet, late-summer morning might never know terror again.

For months, I would lie in bed at night or wake in the darkness and think of our troops, think of them sleeping on cold, hard ground beneath the unforgiving Afghan winds, and feel guilty that I had a warm room and a warm bed while they risked everything. At Camp David, on that first Sunday morning after 9-11, our chaplain, Navy Lieutenant Bob Williams, had selected as the scripture reading Psalm 27, "I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." I knew that goodness wore camouflage and khaki; it wore Army green, Navy white, Marine tan, and Air Force blue.

The first anthrax-laced letters were mailed from Princeton, New Jersey, on September 18, 2001. Four were addressed to major New York City media companies, including to the NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw; a fifth letter arrived at the offices of American Media, a tabloid newspaper and magazine company in Florida. The Florida letter killed a photo editor and nearly killed a mail room employee. Robert Stevens died on October 5, two days before George gave the final order for attacks to begin on the Taliban. Then, on October 12, five days after our air strikes began, an a.s.sistant to Tom Brokaw tested positive for skin anthrax, an infection marked by sores or boils that can spread to the bloodstream if left untreated. Anthrax was found at ABC and CBS news, as well as the New York Post, New York Post, and each news organization had at least one employee with a and each news organization had at least one employee with a confirmed case of skin anthrax. On October 15, the anthrax reached Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

Contaminated letters had been sent to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. The Hart Senate Office Building was evacuated and shut down, and all mail, including all mail to the White House, was quarantined. But no one thought to close the post office that had processed the mail. Two employees at the Brentwood postal facility, Thomas Morris Jr.

and Joseph Curseen Jr., would die from inhaled anthrax; two others would fall ill but, after prolonged treatment with antibiotics, would recover. The entire mail facility, along with the Hart Building, would be sealed shut while chlorine gas was pumped in to kill any remaining bacteria. October was the month of anthrax. Suddenly, threats seemed no longer confined to the sky; they were coming from all directions.

The White House was now literally cut off. Any letter or package being sent was entombed in an off-site facility. Letters could not reach us, not even ones from fourthgrade girls. It was impossible to send any kind of envelope to the White House grounds.

For years, the mail sat in sacks, unopened and waiting to be irradiated. Even the finished art by Adrian Martinez that we had chosen back in the hot months of summer to adorn our holiday card vanished for three years inside those mail sacks. Hallmark had mailed it back, along with the final proof for the card. They had to rush to create another proof, and

the president of Hallmark met me on the tarmac of the airport in Waco, Texas, during a stopover so I could approve the proof before the final printing began.

The mail was the last severed link to much of the outside world. During the spring and summer, after we had moved in, I would occasionally sit in my small, private upstairs office and gaze out at the lines of tourists streaming through the White House doors, people who had waited in line for hours to see the East Room, the State Dining Room, the Blue, Red, and Green rooms. But since September 12, the doors had been closed.

There were no tours; the grounds were deserted except for the cl.u.s.ters of sharpshooters who paced the roof and patrolled among the trees. I grew accustomed to heavily armed men in black combat gear walking in through the doors from the Rose Garden and bombsniffing dogs making their rounds in the previously placid corridors of the East Wing.

Sharpshooters hung out the windows of our convoys, and helicopters hovered above our destinations. The flak jackets that we had worn for the trip into Kosovo seemed like a quaint memory; we were now living with danger all around us, so that every errant sound, every fast-moving plane made me lift my eyes to scan the sky.

Inside the White House, the stillness was almost deafening. Gone now was the tan and brown folding screen that had been routinely spread across the ground-floor Cross Hall, allowing the president or me, or anyone else coming from the upstairs residence, to pa.s.s through the corridor unseen by tour groups or other visitors. In this emptiness, there was no longer any need for a protective screen.

When George and I were visiting the Blairs at Chequers the previous summer, Gary Walters, the head White House usher, had called to tell me that painters and plasterers had found a false wall in the large upstairs Cross Hall in the residence. The Cross Hall had not had a new coat of paint since the Reagan administration. The White House walls are plaster with canvas stretched on top, so this time when they repainted they removed the canvas to repair the plaster, and at the entry to the Yellow Oval Room found bookshelves dating from Truman's term that had been covered, probably by Jackie Kennedy. The shelves emerged, looking freshly painted and perfectly preserved, although no one on the staff had known that they were there. They also discovered delicately carved sh.e.l.ls in niches above two doors along the hallway. The White House is a home that gives up its secrets one by one.

Although it was George Was.h.i.+ngton who chose the site for the White House, the first president to live inside its walls was John Adams. But little of the Adams era survives; the house was torched by the British in 1814, during the War of 1812, and had to be rebuilt. Its first major renovation was by Theodore Roosevelt, who tore down great gla.s.s conservatories erected to grow fruits and flowers for the first family and built the West Wing offices in 1902. He also transformed the ground floor from a cooking and laundry area with bedrooms for White House servants and staff, including a separate room for the fireman who manned the house's enormous furnace, into receiving and reception rooms for the president and his guests. By 1948, the house's interior was so fragile it was in danger of collapsing. Harry and Bess Truman moved across the street to Blair House, and the building was gutted down to its original brick walls and completely rebuilt. Jackie Kennedy updated many of the interior decorations and made changes to the family living quarters, and subsequent first ladies have added their own personal touches, transforming carpeting and wall and window coverings, moving furniture, and adding art.

But above all, the White House is a living, breathing place; even in the public rooms, there is always some flux. The Green Room, now a formal sitting room on the State Floor, began as a bedchamber and then a breakfast room for Thomas Jefferson; James Monroe made it into a card parlor. Many commentators hated its various iterations of green color, particularly Andrew Jackson's. Only in 1962 did Jackie Kennedy select its well-known waterfall green silk wall coverings. The State Dining Room was originally Thomas Jefferson's office, and even after it became a dining room, Theodore Roosevelt hung large mounted moose heads on its walls. The Map Room, which we frequently used as a waiting place for formal receiving lines, was the room where FDR monitored the progress of U.S. forces during World War II. Before that, it had housed Woodrow Wilson's billiard table. I knew whatever I did was temporary; it was merely to keep and care for the house. Other administrations would make changes of their own.

When we first arrived, I had set about redoing the girls' rooms and the Treaty Room (in the residence). But that was only the start. The White House is a home, but a home that accommodates more than 100,000 people a year. Hundreds alone came for small events upstairs in our residence quarters. Butlers, maintenance staff, and White House staff and employees also walk across the carpets and hallways, because it is a place of business as well as a residence. And it is an old, historic home, making the need to refurbish almost constant. Painters literally walk around with cans and brushes, constantly touching up scuff marks, streaks, and nicks on the walls.

So it was a strange incongruity that, as the White House was being emptied of all but essential personnel, I was going room by room to see what was in need of repair.

When my father-in-law was president, Bar and I would walk the house some nights, in the quiet dark, switching on lights, exploring the Red, Green, and Blue rooms in a kind of perfect stillness, wondering who else had, on other nights, also walked there.

For days after we moved in, I found that each room in the residence reminded me of Bar and Gampy, of some moment or memory that we had made during their four years.

Indeed, despite its museumlike atmosphere, the White House remains a home.

Until the Kennedys arrived, many presidential families did most of their living downstairs, amid the vintage furnis.h.i.+ngs. They ate their meals in the old Family Dining Room, a small, square s.p.a.ce that abuts the large State Dining Room. George would sometimes host working lunches and dinners for foreign leaders there; otherwise, it is a quasi-storage room used to plate the food for official dinners and other functions.

The upstairs, until the time of Theodore Roosevelt, had housed the president's office s.p.a.ce--the famous Lincoln Bedroom actually served as Lincoln's office; his aides occupied a room across the hall, and visitors congregated in a small sitting area in between. Just a doorway away from the offices was the corridor for the family bedrooms.

Our room was the traditional first lady's bedroom, while the president's bedroom was our sitting room. Not until Gerald and Betty Ford took up residence at the White House did the custom of a separate presidential bedroom officially end. Before that, a host of American presidents--from Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon--chose separate but usually adjoining rooms for themselves and their wives.

I decorated our room in a soothing blend of pale celadon green and cream, covering the walls, headboard, and curtains in a fabric designed by Peter Fasano, with wide, round tables by the bedside to hold books for reading. George's table was stacked with history books. We were at home in the past almost everywhere we turned.

Jenna's room had also been the bedroom for Caroline Kennedy, who liked to creep down the ma.s.sive marble staircase nearby and peek at her parents' guests through the bal.u.s.ters, as well as for Lynda Bird Johnson, and Chelsea Clinton, and President Taft's sons, Robert and Charles, while Barbara's room next door had rested the sleepy heads of John F. Kennedy Jr., Luci Johnson, Tricia Nixon, and Amy Carter. The room that Jackie Kennedy had designated as the upstairs presidential dining room was once the bedroom where Alice Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt's daughter, remembered having her appendix removed. By the late 1940s, the room's floor was so unsound that a leg of Margaret Truman's piano broke through the boards.

Over time, the upstairs residence became a collection of sitting and guest rooms.

In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt's large family necessitated going up into the attic, which had its dusty s.p.a.ces part.i.tioned to create a few new, small bedrooms. Calvin and Grace Coolidge oversaw the replacement of the White House roof in 1927, building in the process an entire finished third floor, which was enlarged and redone by Harry and Bess Truman. Married presidential children, including the Fords' and the Carters', made their Was.h.i.+ngton homes in suites of rooms up there, and Hillary Clinton's mother and my mother were most at home in a third-floor room tucked under the eaves.

Under doctor's orders to get out of the Oval Office during the middle of the day as World War II raged, FDR would eat lunch in the third-floor "sky parlor" added by Grace Coolidge. The Trumans transformed it into a rectangular solarium. President Eisenhower liked to barbecue on the parapet outside when he and Mamie weren't eating their dinner on TV trays downstairs in the West Sitting Hall, sitting side by side, each watching his or her own television. Mamie preferred I Love Lucy, I Love Lucy, while Ike chose westerns. Both did while Ike chose westerns. Both did sometimes watch the news. The solarium was also the room where Lynda and Luci Johnson entertained their teenage friends and where Caroline Kennedy for a while had a tiny, private preschool and an at times solitary playroom. And over the years, it became a favorite place for male guests and sometimes presidents to smoke cigars.

Each room that I entered had a history, each piece of furniture a past, whether it was the antique English canopy bed that had been finished in 1775, a year before American independence, or the table and bookcase made from the original 1817 wood used to finish the White House roof after British troops had set it aflame, or the collection of framed silhouettes, including one of President John Tyler that had survived a s.h.i.+pwreck in the English Channel. And it was not just the intimacies of the daily lives of other first families that we felt as the years pa.s.sed, but their private sufferings that were also contained within these walls.

Every day I walked by the room where Willie Lincoln had died in February of 1862 after a two-week battle with a typhoidlike illness, probably contracted from contaminated water in a nearby ca.n.a.l, water that was drunk at the White House and a ca.n.a.l where children played. Mary Todd Lincoln spent hours at his bedside as he was plied with everything from Peruvian bark to beef tea. The night that he took sick, the Lincolns were hosting a party in the East Room. The orchestra strains rose up to the room as Willie's parents scurried back and forth between his bedside and their guests. The last ones departed late into the night, and as their coaches clattered off, Willie's fever was rising. After his death, Mary Todd Lincoln refused ever again to enter that room, or the

Green Room, where his body had been embalmed. The Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg would write that there were thirty-one rooms in the White House, but Lincoln was not at home in any of them. And Willie Lincoln was not the only child to die while residing in the White House.

The Coolidges lost their sixteen-year-old son, Calvin Jr., to blood poisoning, or septicemia, in July of 1924. He had developed an infected blister after playing one of his favorite sports, tennis, on the rear grounds of the White House. The Coolidges stayed at their son's bedside, but doctors could offer them nothing. "When he was suffering, he begged me to help him, but I could not," Coolidge later wrote. On July 4, as workers were readying the White House grounds for celebrations and fireworks, Calvin Jr. was rushed to Walter Reed. He died three days later. Coolidge openly wept in the Oval Office and later said that if he had not been president, his son would not have suffered a raised blister playing lawn tennis on the South Grounds. Jackie Kennedy had lost an infant son just three and a half months before her husband was a.s.sa.s.sinated. And three first ladies-Let.i.tia Tyler, Caroline Harrison, and Ellen Wilson--died while they lived in the White House. Presidents suffered too. After his own stroke, Woodrow Wilson, his left side paralyzed and barely able to write his name, retreated to the East Room, where with curtains drawn, he spent hours watching the flickering reels of silent films lent by a local theater. He was just sixty-three years old.

I was always aware of the brave faces that other families had placed on their personal tragedies and on the way that the demands of the White House gave no time for grief, even less for reflection. "The funeral is a very solemn affair," wrote William Stoddard, an aide to President Lincoln about Willie's funeral in the East Room, where cabinet secretaries, senators, amba.s.sadors, and soldiers choked back tears. "But it cannot be permitted to interfere overmuch with work. The burden is increased rather than laid aside."

Five days after American and British fighters began strikes on the Taliban's strongholds, as additional U.S. Special Forces readied themselves to enter the bleak, mountainous Afghanistan terrain on the backs of horses, weapons slung over their sides, I accompanied George to the Pentagon for a service to mark the one-month anniversary of 9-11. We traveled across the Potomac over streets that had been cleared and sealed off to form an almost perfect security bubble. There could be no more casual breaches of the perimeter. We were in a constant state of vigilance, always saving some awareness for wherever we were standing. This morning was no different, except for the addition of an F-16 fighter cover, flying low and close above the Pentagon.

The hijacked plane had penetrated the entire outer ring, and a good portion of the river side of the building was charred with layers of thick, black soot. But what lingered for weeks, even after the cranes had arrived and the debris began to be collected, was a fierce smell, the noxious, deep scent of burning jet fuel, building materials, and human remains. It was a smell that burned the throat and stung the nostrils, a smell so strong that even commuters in closed subway cars racing underneath the World Trade Center site inhaled it for months after 9-11. And it remained at the Pentagon. We looked at the gouge in the building, and I looked into the somber faces of the men and women who were embarking upon a war.

Before fifteen thousand people, George spoke of a wound to the building that would not be forgotten but that would be repaired. In an overwhelming bit of irony, it was on September 11, 1941, that construction on the Pentagon had first begun. As the cameras clicked, both of us had tears in our eyes.

I felt the grief again at a memorial service sponsored by Elayne Bennett's Best Friends organization for three exceptional eleven-year-old Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., students who were on Flight 77 with their teacher, bound for a special National Geographic program on California's Channel Islands. So many lives lost, each one exceptional to someone.

On October 16, five weeks after the attacks, I was attempting to return my official life to a regular routine. I had committed months before to teach in different schools across the country for Teach for America Week, highlighting the program and its efforts to get bright and eager college graduates into some of the nation's toughest cla.s.srooms.

Teach for America recruits commit to spending two years teaching in public schools in low-income communities. During Teach for America Week, professionals from all across the country spend an hour teaching children in public school cla.s.srooms.

There are those who dismiss school visits as photo ops, but there is so much more to them than that. There is a chance to connect with the students and the teachers, to convey how much they are valued. And every school that I visited was thoroughly vetted, so being selected was a significant badge of honor. Many of the schools I saw were in rough areas; they were not wealthy schools, even though the districts had rushed to spruce them up. George and I always noted that we could smell the coats of new paint before we even stepped through the doorways. But paint couldn't camouflage rusty pipes, ancient bathrooms, and dilapidated desks. Or the neighborhoods that I saw on the drives in--graffiti-covered walls, stray bullet holes, abandoned buildings, and makes.h.i.+ft cardboard where gla.s.s windows should have been. There were piles of trash, chain-link fences around asphalt blacktops, and hardly anything green, such as a patch of gra.s.s to play on.

That week, I was scheduled to teach in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.; Baltimore, Maryland; Atlanta, Georgia; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My second stop was the South Seventeenth Street Elementary School in Newark, New Jersey, where I was to teach a kindergarten cla.s.s. South Seventeenth Street Elementary was similar to the John F.

Kennedy Elementary School in Houston; 453 of its 537 students were eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, and the majority of them were African-American. Mark Williams, the kindergarten teacher, had graduated from college just over a year before.

He had painted a bright mural on his cla.s.sroom walls.

I spoke to the students and read a story. At one point, a little girl snuggled up next to me and tugged on my arm to whisper in my ear. I bent my head and listened to her hushed, solemn voice. "Did you hear," she asked, "about the buildings?" I very slowly nodded my head. "The bad men knocked them down and all the people died," she said, and then asked, "What do you think about what happened?" I wrapped my arms around her and said, "I'm sad." And she nodded and said, "I'm sad too."

In Baton Rouge, on the morning of October 19, I taught at the Eden Park Elementary School, and then, instead of flying directly back to D.C., I made a stop at the ranch. George had left for China for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit. He had wanted to decline, but the Chinese were determined that the event go forward and had made elaborate plans to host the Pacific Rim nations, so he made the trip. When he arrived, he called me to say that all of Shanghai was a ghost town. The Chinese had cleared it out for the conference; almost 16 million people had been moved. With George away, I did not want to spend the weekend in the White House alone. I invited my good friend Debbie Francis to spend Sat.u.r.day night at the ranch with me. We were sitting in the living room after dinner, having a gla.s.s of wine and talking, when my Secret Service agents burst in. They had received warning of an impending attack on our ranch. I was shocked. When I didn't immediately leave the house, the agents told us to turn off all the lights, and they moved the convoy of blast-proof vehicles into the driveway so we could run to the road if necessary. Debbie and I sat in the pitch black and kept talking, although I'm sure for her it must have seemed unnerving to sit in total darkness before we made our way to bed, where we would try to sleep, waiting for an attack that never came.

There were many such warnings, whispered in my ear when I was at an event or even sitting on a sofa in the White House residence, having a quick cup of coffee with a friend. I would be told of a suspicious plane or vehicle or other concern. One time, when Barbara and Jenna were home on a spring break and we were sitting in the living room with some of their friends, we heard the agents' footsteps pounding down the hall. They raced in and told us that we had to go to the bunker. Everyone jumped up and started running down the hallway to the long, slick marble stairs. Panting, we made it the three long flights down. Then word came that it was only a stray plane that had violated the protected airs.p.a.ce.

We had another evacuation incident in the spring of 2005, when Nancy Reagan was staying with us to attend a lunch that I was hosting in her honor. Again, the agents appeared to hustle us down to the bunker, but this time I insisted on taking the elevator. I was not going to make Nancy Reagan walk down three steep flights of marble stairs. So we dropped in our elevator cage to the subterranean bunker. After we arrived, fighter jets intercepted the plane. It was a pilot from Pennsylvania who had mistakenly strayed into the restricted airs.p.a.ce. Months after the incident, he ran into someone I knew and said, "Please tell Mrs. Bush that I am so sorry."

But there was no way of knowing which threats were accidents and which were real. We grew used to das.h.i.+ng down to the bunker, to always being a bit more aware. It came with our new lives.

George read the daily threat a.s.sessments, the pages upon pages of worrisome plots, activities, and chatter. He didn't bring it all home, but he brought enough that I could see the lines cut deeper in his face and could hear him next to me lying awake at night, his mind still working.

But whatever our private anxieties, our public lives required us to go on. Just three days after the ranch scare, I visited the National Gallery to tour its new exhibition of Renaissance art, featuring a portrait by Leonardo da Vinci.

It is hard to recall now just how empty parts of the nation were in the months after 9-11, especially museums, movie theaters, malls, restaurants, and hotels. Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., hotels were all but vacant. There was a collective unease about large public s.p.a.ces, and one of the things that mattered most was interrupting that cycle of fear. I walked through the National Gallery of Art with its charming and smart director, Rusty Powell, and the exhibition's wonderful curator, Russell Sale. Over the years, I would visit many exhibitions in Was.h.i.+ngton, usually quietly, just to take in the beauty and power of the creations. In a time of destruction, art reminds us of the enn.o.bling impulses that exist in human beings, the desire to create, to beautify, to build, to educate, and to make something that will last for generations. Art and artists are among our bulwarks against ruthless terrorists who would fas.h.i.+on bombs or commandeer and crash planes. Art reminds us too that time pa.s.ses and things change; peace may not always be permanent, but neither is war. On that morning, going to this museum, I brought the press with me. If I was unafraid to go, perhaps others would begin to feel the same. And I remember the grat.i.tude of Rusty Powell and Russell Sale, for the simple effort of my coming. "You just can't know," they said, "what it meant for a first lady to come to the museum at all, and then to come so soon after 9-11."

But there were still moments when fear crept in.

On Monday, October 29, a second national terror alert was issued. The FBI announced that it expected terror strikes against the United States, either at home or abroad. Among the most specific warnings, the CIA believed that al Qaeda had plans to attack a nuclear facility with a hijacked aircraft. The next day, we were back in New York City.

George had been asked to throw out the first pitch at the opening New York home game of the World Series, where the Yankees were playing the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Barbara came down from Yale to be with me, and we were perched in the box of George Steinbrenner, the Yankees' owner. George would be walking onto the field alone. He would stride from the dugout to the empty mound and stand with no agents beside him and a packed crowd filling every seat in the stands. George was focused on his pitch.

Under the stadium, as George was warming up, the Yankees star Derek Jeter had already asked him if he was going to throw from the mound. As George worried about throwing a strike, I was worried about far more. Every entry point had metal detectors; bombsniffing dogs roamed the grounds, and sharpshooters took up positions on the roof.

Evacuation information flashed across the scoreboard as both teams began batting practice. The official start to the evening was a phalanx of fighter jets flying overhead, after which we all observed a moment of silence to honor the fallen and our troops. The flag that snapped in the air was one recovered from the wreckage at Ground Zero, where buried fires were still smoking. It was partially torn and missing twelve stars.

I smiled and watched as my husband raised his arm and hurled the ball straight into the grooved leather of the catcher's mitt. I heard the chants of "USA, USA, USA,"

but inside my heart was racing, my hands were cold, and my mind was wondering, What if? It was the same feeling that followed me when I glanced at pro football stadiums packed for weekend games or when we began planning the 2002 National Book Festival.