Spoken From The Heart Part 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have often wondered if Jacques Chirac or Gerhard Schroeder could have done more, if one of them could have persuaded Saddam to go into exile, if they could have conveyed that the United States was not bluffing. After Saddam was finally pulled from his spider hole, looking like a madman, he said that he had not believed the United States would invade; he had not believed we were serious.

By June of 2003, American and British forces had located eighty of the countless ma.s.s graves in Iraq. Buried within were the remains of thousands of people whom Saddam Hussein had ordered to be killed. Long hair still hung from some of the skulls; they belonged to the women. United States forces found a police station with torture hooks hanging from the ceiling and a special "electrocution room," bare except for two

tires and an electric cable. Saddam Hussein's regime was a regime of terror, in large ways and small ones. Uday Hussein, Saddam's son, who headed Iraq's Olympic committee, would torture athletes who failed to win, beating the soles of their feet until they could no longer walk. He raped women with impunity. In fits of rage, he would hit his victims with a metal bar or a cane.

When U.S. troops captured the Baghdad mansion of Uday and his brother, Qusay, I was in Austin, visiting Jenna. I was just walking into Regan's house when the head of my Secret Service detail, Wayne Williams, took me aside. He told me that pictures of Barbara and Jenna were found plastered on the walls of Uday's palace. American troops had torn them down, he said. He was stone-faced, but inside I felt as though we were both shaking. I spoke with George, and for months afterward, I was sick with worry. But we did not say a word to the girls.

George and I worried for our troops every day. I thought of them in the harshest conditions, sleeping, when they could, with the sand and the wind. I had told a group of soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, about how guilty I felt with my comforts while they went off to fight and had none. And each one immediately said, "Mrs. Bush, that's where we want to be." They loved their country, and they would do anything to protect it and to protect the men and women who served with them. But night after night I would picture our troops, I would worry, and I would pray.

Once, during an interview, Barbara Walters asked me if I could empathize with a mother who sent her child to be a suicide bomber. I said no, I could not imagine a mother who would want her child to blow himself up and kill other people at the same time.

Mothers in our country have watched and prayed as their children left our sh.o.r.es to defend our freedom, and the freedom of people we will never meet in places we will likely never visit. Not only can't I empathize with the mother of a suicide bomber, I can't even imagine her.

On April 3, U.S. forces were racing toward Baghdad. Early that morning George and I flew to North Carolina, to the Marine training ground and base at Camp Lejeune.

Already seventeen Marines from Lejeune's overseas division had been wounded and fourteen killed. Two were missing. They had lost the most of any base so far. George spoke to the troops still there and their families, as well as the loved ones of those who had been deployed. After lunch in the mess hall, we met with the families of the fallen Marines. One sergeant had left behind a six-year-old, a two-year-old, and two-month-old twins. We cried with their wives, parents, and children. The following week I joined George as he awarded Purple Hearts to wounded soldiers in the intensive care unit at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and to wounded Marines in the ICU at Bethesda Naval Hospital. We visited some seventy wounded troops and many of their families, and together we watched as two wounded Marines were sworn in as U.S. citizens. Twentyyear-old Lance Corporal O. J. Santamaria, from the Philippines, broke down as he took his oath. George walked over to hug him. Master Gunnery Sergeant Guadalupe Denogean from Mexico, the son of migrant farm workers, had spent twenty-five years in the Marine Corps and had fought in two wars before taking his citizens.h.i.+p oath. George told both men he was proud to call them "fellow Americans." We have, he said, an amazing country, where people are willing to risk their lives without even being full citizens.

On a trip to Arizona, I stopped to see the family of Army Private First Cla.s.s Lori Piestewa, a twenty-three-year-old Hopi mother who had been killed during the first week of the war after an ambush by Iraqi forces near Nasiriyah. She had fought back bravely and had paid with her life. Lori was the first Native American woman to die in combat while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. For two weeks she was listed as missing in action, until her body was found in a shallow grave. Her roommate and friend, Jessica Lynch, who was riding in the truck that Lori drove, had survived.

Lori Piestewa came from Tuba City, Arizona, home also to Moenkopi, a Hopi enclave in the heart of the Navajo Nation reservation. Some homes in the Hopi village still did not have running water; women and men carried buckets to a nearby river. For heat they burned tree branches, and the air hung with the scent of char and smoke, even in the spring. Most of the houses were the same adobe style that had been built for centuries in these dry desert lands. Lori, whose parents had both worked for the Tuba City schools, had grown up on the Navajo side of the reservation. Her father had fought in Vietnam; her grandfather had served in World War II. Lori had been the commanding officer of her high school Junior ROTC program. Her parents buried her on Hopi land. I met them, along with her three-year-old daughter and four-year-old son, one of her sisters, a brother, a sister-in-law, and her four nieces and nephews in a room at Page Munic.i.p.al Airport, a tiny airstrip overlooking the Colorado River and Lake Powell. We had decided on this location so they would feel no obligation, on top of their grief, to host a first lady in their home. I invited them to come to the White House on Memorial Day.

George read the names of every man and woman who died in Iraq and wrote a personal letter to each family. The stories of those who received Medal of Honor citations deeply affected him. There was Sergeant First Cla.s.s Paul Ray Smith, who after a surprise Iraqi attack leapt aboard a damaged armored vehicle and, completely unprotected, manned a fifty-caliber machine gun alone. He laid down his life for his friends and his men, and his selfless bravery saved the lives of more than one hundred American soldiers. There was Marine Corporal Jason Dunham, who played street soccer with Iraqi kids and who, when a grenade was thrown by an Iraqi insurgent, jumped on the explosive to save the lives of two other Americans. On a rooftop in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, Petty Officer Michael Monsoor of the U.S. Navy did the same, flinging himself upon a grenade to save two teammates.

Every day George read the casualty reports. He knew which military service, what city or province, and how. It was heartbreaking. One night at dinner he was particularly silent. Barbara and Jenna were there, teasing him, trying to get him to laugh. Eventually he just got up and excused himself. I told them then that a packed military helicopter had been shot down that morning over a field outside Baghdad.

But as George read the casualty reports, he read the threat reports too.

Just one week after I met with the Piestewa family, I was expected at an annual Was.h.i.+ngton tradition, the Congressional Club First Lady's Luncheon, for the wives, and occasionally the husbands, of senators and representatives. The luncheon is a fund-raiser for the club and is designed to honor the first lady. It is a demanding event for the organizers and the office of the honoree. Early in George's term, Hillary Clinton's former White House chief of staff confided to my chief of staff, Andi Ball, that "each year, the Congressional Club ladies made the Clinton staff cry."

Andi soon came to understand what she meant. In 2001 I had been told to walk on an elevated catwalk, like a fas.h.i.+on runway, so that the nearly two thousand women packed inside a giant hotel ballroom could catch a glimpse of me. As first lady I was accustomed to doing almost anything, but this was a bit too much. In 2002 I politely declined to do the runway. I also left the four-hour event a little early because Barbara had to move out of her dorm that afternoon, and I wanted to rush up to New Haven to help her. Indeed, it is rare for any first lady to stay for a four-hour-long luncheon. This year the organizers had started besieging my staff in February: they had specific requests for my remarks; they insisted that I stay for the entire lunch; and they wanted me to walk the runway again. The constant back-and-forth for these luncheons invariably, as with Hillary Clinton's staff, reduced one of the women in my office to tears.

But we admired and appreciated the enormous complexity of putting on such a large event, and at the lunch itself, the congressional spouses went out of their way to make me feel welcome. They invited singers they thought I would like, including Wynonna Judd. One year they even named a perfume for me and had tiny bottles of the scent waiting at each place setting as luncheon favors. There were other moments of genuine fun with the congressional spouses. I always looked forward to the smaller and more intimate annual Senate Spouses Lunch. Karyn Frist, wife of former Senate majority leader Bill Frist; Kathy Gregg, Senator Judd Gregg's wife; and Tricia Lott, wife of former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, were three of my closest friends in Was.h.i.+ngton. The Senate spouses, Republicans and Democrats, created special events for me each year.

Once they surprised me with a re-creation of my first cla.s.sroom, at Longfellow Elementary. Another year we ate at tables under the gla.s.s ceilings of the U.S. Botanic Garden, surrounded by exotic plants.

But while the Senate Spouses Lunch, at roughly one hundred, is a friendly, personal gathering, events held for the entire Congress instantly pa.s.sed the one thousand mark: 535 elected officials, each with one invited guest. In sheer numbers, entertaining the Congress was one of the biggest challenges the White House Social Office faced, and we always looked for engaging ways to entertain the congressional mult.i.tudes. There are two events designed for the full Congress each year. The first is the Congressional Picnic, for all the members and their families, and the second is the Congressional Ball, held in December, for the members and their spouses. Every year the Social Office began working months in advance to develop a suitably exciting picnic theme that would honor different parts of the United States. One year it was cowboys, with pony rides for the small children. Another year, it was Mardi Gras, with a horse-drawn carriage on the White House drive and Paul Prudhomme as our celebrity chef, cooking up New Orleans fare. In 2006 the social secretary, Lea Berman, organized mini-Broadway musical numbers inside a large tent on the South Lawn, televised by PBS. In 2008 we borrowed a miniature train for the kids to ride. Beyond the numbers, though, there were other challenges that tested the patience of every social secretary and her staff.

Each year the social secretary's office would report that there were members who would not RSVP to the picnic, no matter how often White House staff called their offices to see if they were coming. Other members would call the Social Office and insist upon bringing more people, or they would arrive at the gate with eight interns in tow and expect to be cleared immediately, producing an outcry from the Secret Service, which required everyone's Social Security number days in advance in order to be admitted inside the White House grounds.

Occasionally the White House Social Office would find itself attempting to save members from themselves. At one picnic a member of the House leaders.h.i.+p got drunk and threw up in the bushes. The social staff tried to maneuver him away from the nearby press pool. Alcohol is no stranger to some members of Congress. Social Office staffers were waiting to greet another member when he arrived at the White House. When his driver pulled to a stop, the man, who was already tipsy, took a swig of something and then proceeded to hop out of his car and teeter over to spit it into the bushes. It was mouthwash, presumably to mask whatever he had imbibed before.

The Congressional Ball, the largest event of the holiday season, was a substantial undertaking and often an adventure. It was held on a Monday night, always the night after the Kennedy Center Honors. The receiving line for photos lasted for three solid hours. Some senators and representatives wanted to bring additional guests, even their entire families, although the ball numbers already topped one thousand guests and the event was spread over every inch of two full floors of the White House.

Rather than just an outsize buffet, we worked to make the ball a real party.

Downstairs was quieter and more reserved, but on the State Floor we had music and dancing. We searched the country for great, unusual bands, beginning with Rotel and the Hot Tomatoes in 2001. At every ball, by midnight, there would be sixty or more hardened partygoers still dancing, and more than once the staff had to intervene to prevent a conga line of senators and representatives from parading up the marble stairs to the private residence, where George and I were already in bed.

We invited members of Congress to the White House residence all the time, and these smaller events produced many memorable, laughter-filled evenings. We hosted c.o.c.ktail parties for Republicans and Democrats in our private living room. When Nancy Pelosi became the House Speaker, George and I invited her and her husband, Paul, to dinner, just the four of us, in the residence dining room. Numerous times, when representatives or senators and their spouses arrived, my staff would hear them say as they rode the elevator, "I can't believe I'm going up here." One senator's wife wanted to take pictures of everything in the White House, even the bas.e.m.e.nt kitchen, with racks of raw chicken waiting to be roasted in the oven.

On May 22, the j.a.panese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, came to visit us at the ranch. Koizumi had been one of the first world leaders to offer aid and a.s.sistance to the United States after 9-11, and he and George developed a close friends.h.i.+p. It was all the more remarkable because their two fathers had fought against each other in World War II. Indeed, in 1946, the year George and I were born, no one could have imagined that j.a.pan would become one of our most steadfast international allies. During the war George's dad had been a naval aviator. In 1944 his plane had been forced down by enemy fire in a bombing raid on j.a.panese military installations; Gampy had survived by ejecting and parachuting into the Pacific. That same year Koizumi's father had worked to build an airfield for kamikaze pilots taking off to crash into American s.h.i.+ps and carriers. Koizumi himself had been born in 1942, at the height of the war, when American forces were in retreat across Asia. And now, in a true historical irony, the sons of former enemies had become close friends. There is a comforting aspect to seeing history unfold in that manner and to knowing that the world can, in fact, change. After American and coalition forces entered Iraq, Koizumi later volunteered to deploy j.a.pan's Self-Defense Forces in

support of the mission, the first overseas deployment of j.a.panese troops since World War II.

When he arrived in Crawford, Koizumi and George walked out to our pool and sat side by side, talking for two hours. That kind of conversation, the personal give-andtake, was difficult to have inside the White House, with a legion of staff or formal seating arrangements. The following afternoon we had a cookout with hamburgers made from Texas beef. When I next saw the j.a.panese prime minister, he raised his arm and made a muscle, telling me, "That hamburger made me strong. I went home to do political battle, and I was strong because of that hamburger."

The 2003 G8 Summit was again held on a remote mountain. This time, the location was Evian, France. Before the summit opened, George traveled to Poland and then Russia to meet Vladimir Putin; for that leg of the trip, I joined him. In Poland we made a special visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous n.a.z.i death camp. George and I quietly walked along the train tracks that had carried carloads of human beings, piled on top of each other, without light or fresh air. I laid a single red rose at the terminus, where men, women, and children began to be herded left or right, to the gas chambers or to the labor camp, to work first and then die. We pa.s.sed the barracks and the crematoriums, and I tried to imagine a blue sky that had once been covered over, black and gray, with human ash. "The inconvenient smell of smoke" was how one n.a.z.i officer, who had gone free, later described it.

As I walked, I realized there are things that textbooks, photographs, or even graying doc.u.mentary footage cannot teach. They cannot teach you how to feel when you see prayer shawls or baby shoes left by children torn from their mothers, or prison cells with the scratch marks of attempted escape. And I wept when I saw the thousands of eyegla.s.ses, their lenses still smudged with tears and dirt. I, who would be nearly blind without gla.s.ses or contacts, could suddenly imagine people being driven into terror, with no way to see, groping about with their hands. And then there was the larger blindness, of the people who lived around the camps and around the world, of all of those who refused to see what was happening.

I thought too of Saddam Hussein, who had said how much he admired Adolf Hitler.

We waited for news out of Iraq. Some of it was positive and historic; we watched Iraqi citizens pull down statues of Saddam as people in the old Soviet Union and the Baltic nations had done to the images of Lenin and Stalin after the fall of communism.

We heard reports of the Iraqis' joy at being able to speak freely for the first time in decades and to no longer live under the shadow of fear of Saddam and his henchmen. In some neighborhoods, Iraqi children trailed after American soldiers, staring in wonder at gifts of candy and crayons. But there were other disturbing signs. Museums and stores were looted. In sections of major urban areas, there was no rule of law. And there were attacks on our soldiers. At first, they were scattered incidents, a stray bomb or an errant shooter. But over the months the violence escalated. And no one was certain if the people behind it were disgruntled Ba'athists, the closest a.s.sociates of Saddam, who had gone underground, or if they were Iranian-backed terrorists, or al Qaeda recruits. What we knew was American troops were under fire in a new kind of insurgent war.

In late September, after we had marked the second tearful anniversary of 9-11, I traveled to Paris as America's representative to the official ceremonies marking the United States' reentry after a nineteen-year absence into UNESCO, the United Nations'

leading cultural and educational inst.i.tution. The United States had withdrawn from UNESCO in 1984 to protest corruption and bias in the organization, but in the intervening years and with the end of the Cold War, UNESCO had made substantial efforts to reform, particularly under the leaders.h.i.+p of its last director-general, the j.a.panese diplomat Koichiro Matsuura. Among its new missions were global literacy and addressing the serious lack of education in the developing world.

I also made a "social call" to President Jacques Chirac, who had been fiercely opposed to the Iraq War. In full view of the a.s.sembled photographers, he greeted me by bending over to kiss my hand, and the photo was beamed around the world. When he raised his head, he told me, "Let bygones be bygones."

From Paris I jetted to Moscow to attend Lyudmila Putina's first book festival, which was devoted to children's literature. The Russian press called it the "Festival of School Libraries." When Lyudmila invited me, she asked that I bring along several American children's book authors. I selected two writers whose books were among the few American children's books that had been translated into Russian, R. L. Stine of Gooseb.u.mps fame, whose own ancestors had emigrated from Russia looking for freedom in America, and the teen thriller writer Peter Lerangis. Rounding out our delegation was Marc Brown, best known for his chapter books about Arthur the aardvark. At the festival R. L. Stine helped Russian children write a scary story about a boy named Mark and his father's ghostly car. With Marc Brown drawing on a giant paper wall, the Russian children "created" a make-believe creature built from all different parts of the animal kingdom and invented a fairy tale. To the a.s.sembled school librarians and other invitees, I spoke about the need for families to turn off the television and read, and confessed my fondness for scary stories and mysteries and also Harry Potter. I added that to celebrate books is to celebrate freedom as much as it is to have fun.

Vladimir Putin joined us for lunch afterward, and he told me, "I heard your speech, and I saw that you had to mention freedom."

Lyudmila was particularly proud that her first book festival was what she called "legitimate." The attendees, nearly all women, were school librarians who had been selected to come to Moscow through an essay contest. They were not there because of family or party connections; none was, as Lyudmila put it, "a provincial governor's sisterin-law." Both Lyudmila and I very much agreed about the importance of education, and how difficult it is for books to compete with television, computers, and video games. The final night I was there, Lyudmila hosted a beautiful performance of the ballet Don Don Quixote at Moscow's enchanting Bolshoi Theatre. at Moscow's enchanting Bolshoi Theatre.

In Was.h.i.+ngton, on Sat.u.r.day, October 4, I hosted the third National Book Festival and then, two days later, a state dinner for the president and first lady of Kenya, Mwai and Lucy Kibaki. On October 10, at a speech in downtown Was.h.i.+ngton to the National a.s.sociation of Women Judges, I was thrilled to tell them that s.h.i.+rin Ebadi, the first female judge in Iran, had won the n.o.bel Peace Prize. "There can be no justice in the world," I told them, "unless every woman has equal rights." It saddens me that, in the twenty-first century, this point is one that still needs to be made. I think of our own lives and then of the lives of the women in Afghanistan and in Iraq. That day I spoke to the judges about how Iraqi women who came under political suspicion were "tortured, or raped, or beheaded. Some of Saddam's militiamen carried ID cards listing their official a.s.signment as 'violation of women's honor.' Iraqi men were allowed to kill female relatives for supposed slights to the family name." By 2003, three out of four women in Iraq could not read. Over 60 percent of all Iraqi adults were illiterate. For the literate, Saddam had also succeeded in banning many of Iraq's best writers and poets. Free speech was nonexistent; the Iraqi secret police were known to sit in cla.s.srooms to monitor what was studied and what was said. By contrast, American soldiers solicited donations of school supplies from their friends and families for Iraqi children.

We can and should debate all American wars, but can anyone truly say that the world was a better place and Iraq a better nation with Saddam Hussein in power? Or that it would not have become a full-fledged terrorist haven? And then there are the unanswerables. What, for instance, would the world have said if, in 1999, the United States had invaded Afghanistan? But had we done so, might the World Trade Center be standing today, its offices and observation deck crowded? We will never know. The world does not operate according to the principles of "what if?" All leaders make choices, and no one can say for certain what would have happened had a different path been taken. For myself, I prefer to stand against oppression, to stand, with George, for freedom.

In late October I was in Asia with George, stopping in j.a.pan, the Philippines, and then Thailand, where we called on King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Queen Sirikit. During our brief stay, I visited an AIDS treatment clinic and met a young girl, shunned by her family, who came alone for her medicine. In Bali, Indonesia, the scene of a recent terror bombing, the security was so tight that our delegation staff was not allowed to walk in front of the buildings. Every entry, for us and for them, was through a back door. s.h.i.+ps and submarines hovered off the coast.

Meanwhile, Great Britain was reeling from another kind of security breach when we arrived in November for an official state visit. The tabloids went wild with revelations that a reporter for the Daily Mirror Daily Mirror had spent the last two months working as a "phony had spent the last two months working as a "phony footman" inside Buckingham Palace. Among his duties was serving breakfast to the queen and Prince Philip; his last act before he resigned was to arrange fruit and chocolates in the Belgian Suite, the rooms we would occupy on our four-day visit.

George and I were amazed at the idea of a tabloid spy, while my staff members were a bit in awe of the palace, each having been a.s.signed her very own lady-in-waiting.

We had a chance to explore Buckingham Palace, and the queen suggested that I go with my staff to watch the preparations for the white-tie state dinner being given in our honor. It was held in the palace's ballroom, which Queen Victoria unveiled in 1856 to honor the end of the Crimean War. At one end is a ma.s.sive dais with golden columns and two royal thrones. We stood at the room's edge and watched as the royal staff walked on top of the perfectly set tables in their stocking feet, measuring tapes in hand, to check that