Spoken From The Heart Part 19

His goal was to explain what he would do if he were elected and how his plans differed from those of his opponent. In May of 2009, sixteen women ran for public office in Kuwait, and this time four of them were elected to the country's a.s.sembly.

After meeting with the Kuwaiti women, I had a chance to meet and thank some of our troops who were stationed in Kuwait, helping to support U.S. forces in Iraq.

I paid a call as well on the emir of Kuwait, and we sat in two very fancy chairs surrounded by members of his government and my staff, attempting to make small talk.

When our supply of topics dwindled, I began to look for a way to gracefully excuse myself. Just then he stood up, and a door opened onto a beautiful and elegant tea party.

Drinking from a dainty china cup and nibbling on delicacies, I walked about and spoke with the Kuwaitis in one of the most gracious parties I ever attended.

On this trip I returned to Amman, Jordan, where I announced a U.S.-Jordanian partners.h.i.+p at the King Hussein Cancer Center, named for King Abdullah's father, the late King Hussein, who had battled cancer for years. Indeed, with cancer, we do not know from where a breakthrough treatment will come or when. Perhaps it will be a doctor in Amman, or a study of Bedouin women in Abu Dhabi that helps us unlock some of the mystery of this disease.

On my previous visit, everyone in Jordan had told me to go to the ancient city of Petra. Before my plane took off for home, this time I did, walking through its intricate buildings carved deep in the sandstone, rather like the ancient Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Along one street I spotted a group of camels and their handlers, and I turned to our amba.s.sador, David Hale; my chief of staff, Anita McBride; and my press secretary, Sally McDonough, and said, "Let's ride." On our camels, we meandered through the twisting, narrow gorge that surrounds the ancient city and its rose-colored walls. Much of the city has lain largely silent since the 300s, when an earthquake struck, but it is still possible to imagine the people who once made their homes amid this cavernous stone. As we rounded one final bend, almost like a hallway cut through the earth, we came upon a group of Americans. When they caught sight of me, they spontaneously raised their fingers to make the sign of "hook 'em horns" and began singing "The Eyes of Texas." It was a tour group from home.

The November 6 visit of Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president of France, to Was.h.i.+ngton was surrounded by high-level intrigue: would he or would he not be bringing his wife? In August the Sarkozy family had chosen to vacation on a New Hamps.h.i.+re lake.

Cecilia Sarkozy, France's first lady, had mentioned this to me during the G8 Summit. I knew George and I would be in Maine visiting his parents, and I suggested that the Sarkozys and their son come to Kennebunkport. We planned a kid-friendly meal of hamburgers, hot dogs, and blueberry pie, but Cecilia stayed behind and Sarkozy came alone. Now, before we printed the invitations for the state dinner, the National Security Council was working with the French government to determine whether this visit would also be a solo one.

George and I like Nicolas Sarkozy very much. He is young and dynamic and blunt, and he has a great sense of humor and understanding of the frequent absurdity of political life. Sarkozy's father was a Hungarian immigrant, a refugee from World War II and the Communists. Over lunch Sarkozy told us that when he was young, his father said to him, "You must move to the United States." When Nicolas looked at him quizzically, his father had added, "I know that you want to be president, but a man named Sarkozy will never be president of France."

Sarkozy did come by himself. Shortly afterward, he and Cecilia divorced, and a few months later, he married the model and singer Carla Bruni. Single or married, the French president arrived in Was.h.i.+ngton with a very interesting entourage. Rather than the typical group of political people, his delegation included a chef, Guy Savoy, from one of Paris's top restaurants and the director of the Louvre Museum, Henri Loyrette, as well as a retinue of cabinet ministers.

In contrast to the sometimes testy relations.h.i.+p that George had with Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy was pro-American and interested in building a strong partners.h.i.+p with the United States. It was no accident that he timed his visit to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the birth of the Marquis de Lafayette, the young Frenchman who had become one of George Was.h.i.+ngton's closest aides during the Revolutionary War and who is buried in France beneath soil that he himself carried home from the ground around Bunker Hill. In January, at the request of Jim Billington, the Librarian of Congress, I had paid a visit to the Marquis de Lafayette's La Grange, a fifteenth-century chateau outside of Paris, where he lived after his brutal imprisonment during the French Revolution. The chateau's attic contained a treasure trove of artifacts and personal Lafayette papers, and the Library of Congress had overseen a special effort to digitize the collection. So entwined was Lafayette's life with the young United States that on the grounds of La Grange are trees from every U.S. state he visited; he brought their saplings home and planted them. He kept a rare letter written by Martha Was.h.i.+ngton, American newspapers from 1776, a signed copy of the Declaration of Independence, and an American flag that he took with him to prison. Across the ocean President George Was.h.i.+ngton labored for Lafayette's release, sent his dear friend books, and gave Lafayette's son refuge in the young America.

I thought that to commemorate this extraordinary French aristocrat who had such love for the United States, we should host Nicolas Sarkozy at Was.h.i.+ngton's Mount Vernon home. My initial hope was to do a formal state dinner on the grounds, but the visit could not be scheduled until November, and by then the weather was likely to be changeable and cold. Instead, on Sarkozy's second day in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., the two heads of state traveled to Mount Vernon and sat at the table where Lafayette and Was.h.i.+ngton had once dined to discuss the security of the globe. But unlike that George and the marquis, George and Nicolas were banished to Mount Vernon's greenhouse for lunch. The Mount Vernon Ladies' a.s.sociation, which oversees the historic treasure, does not permit food or drink of any kind inside Was.h.i.+ngton's home, not even for two presidents.

Before he left, Sarkozy also addressed a joint session of Congress--the Marquis de Lafayette had been the first foreign dignitary to do that, in 1824--and told the House and Senate that he was committed to sending more French forces to help secure Afghanistan.

By late fall the Iraq surge had reached its maximum point, with 170,000 U.S.

troops on the ground, and there were positive signs of change. In the summer Iraq had met eight of eighteen political and security benchmarks, but on another eight, its progress was still, according to a White House review, "unsatisfactory." There had, however, been

no catastrophic bomb attacks. Violence was markedly declining, as were attacks on U.S.

troops and U.S. combat deaths. In mid-December, British troops would return control of the once violent port city of Basra to the Iraqis and the Iraqi army. It appeared that the surge, which earlier that year had been so derided by its critics, was beginning to bear fruit.

December brought another round of Christmas parties. Our pastry team commandeered the ground-floor China and Vermeil rooms to frost the thousands of Barney and Miss Beazley cookies they baked each season. The theme I had chosen was "Holiday in the National Parks." I had come to love the national parks from all my summer hiking trips. With my childhood friends, I had hiked not just in Yosemite and Yellowstone but also in Olympic, Glacier, Denali, Mesa Verde, Acadia, the Everglades, Zion, and Death Valley, all truly some of the most beautiful and striking spots on earth.

In 2005 my hiking group and I had returned to the Grand Canyon, where we began our hiking ritual in 1986, the year we turned forty. This time we took our daughters on the route that started with a river trip through the canyon and then a ten-mile hike out along the South Rim. There were five women in their late fifties and six in their twenties.

The twenty-somethings walked out in about four hours; their mothers finally made it in seven. The dry heat and the hike had so exhausted me that at one point I thought about lying down to rest alongside the trail. Then I imagined the headlines: "First Lady Carried from Canyon on a Gurney," and I doggedly kept going. When the girls asked us if they could come again next year, we looked at each other for an instant, sweat beading on our faces, and answered with a resounding "No."

During our summer hikes, we always invited the park superintendent and rangers to join us, usually on our last night. After our 2002 visit to Yellowstone, Suzanne Lewis, the superintendent, surprised us by nominating my childhood friend Regan Gammon to the National Park Foundation board. Started in 1967 with support from Lady Bird Johnson and funds from Laurance Rockefeller, the foundation serves as a charitable partner for the park system, helping to increase parkland, protect fragile ecosystems and species, conduct school outreach, and protect park history. Although we had hiked in the parks for years, none of us had been aware of the foundation and its work. After Regan, I joined as well, as the foundation's honorary chair.

To decorate the White House for "Holiday in the National Parks," the official t.i.tle of the holiday celebration, we sent a plain gold ball to each of the 391 parks and historic sites and asked park service officials to select a local artisan to create an ornament that would represent the site. When we think of national parks, we tend to think of the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite, but the list is long and includes the White House grounds, Independence Hall, the Statue of Liberty, Gettysburg, and Valley Forge. Every state in the nation has a national park or monument except Delaware, which is creating a national historic trail.

For the fir tree in the Blue Room, we received ornaments painted or etched with scenes from the s.h.i.+loh battlefield and from the Pennsylvania site where Flight 93 had crashed, which was now our newest national monument. In the niches at the entry to the State Floor, we hung oil paintings by Adrian Martinez of Hopi Point at the Grand Canyon and a waterfall in Zion National Park to bring scenes of the parklands into the White House. He created the paintings especially for the curved s.p.a.ces, working on scaffolds as

well as down on his knees. White House carpenters built replicas of the missions in San Antonio, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, and the Statue of Liberty to decorate the rooms and halls. The chefs reproduced Mount Rushmore in chocolate. In the Palm Room, the decorative tree was made entirely from seash.e.l.ls to represent our national seash.o.r.es. It was a wonderful chance to showcase our diverse parklands, and our holiday card depicted a scene from the first lady's garden--itself national parkland--painted by David Drummond. We added our wishes that "the joy of all creation fill your heart this blessed season."

At our Hanukkah party, Judea and Ruth Pearl, the parents of Danny Pearl, The The Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan, lit the reporter kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan, lit the menorah. For the six previous years, we had borrowed magnificent menorahs from Jewish museums and synagogues around the nation. Many had been saved from Europe before the Holocaust. But this year the Pearls brought their family menorah.

The Pearl family menorah had belonged to Danny's great-grandfather Chaim, who had carried it with him when he moved from Poland to Israel to help found the town of Bnei-Brak, where today there is a street named in Chaim Pearl's honor. From there the menorah had come to the United States. Year after year it was lovingly lit in the Pearls'

home. Judea, who is also a cantor, movingly sang to us during the ceremony and his melodic voice left many guests wiping their eyes. When George spoke, he said that Daniel Pearl's "only crime was being a Jewish American--something Daniel would never deny. In his final moments, Daniel told his captors about a street in Israel named for his great-grandfather. He looked into their cameras and said, 'My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, and I am Jewish.' These words have become a source of inspiration for Americans of all faiths. They show the courage of a man who refused to bow before terror--and the strength of a spirit that could not be broken."

On December 10, International Human Rights Day, I spoke via teleconference to Burmese refugees living in Thailand and then issued a call for greater international pressure on the junta, which was still persecuting those who had peacefully protested in the late summer. In Iraq the violence was continuing to ebb. The surge was showing further signs of working.

For us, the year 2008 was to be a year of lasts, the last NATO Summit, last Summit of the Americas, last international trips and visits, the last state dinner, the last chance for me to work on the White House initiatives I had begun. The final year in office, especially after seven years, is in many ways its own long good-bye. But there were firsts as well, and though the year was sometimes difficult, it was also remarkable.

I could now walk the halls of the White House and have my own memories come flooding back, such as the 2006 Veterans Day, when we invited all the living members of my father's World War II unit, the Timberwolves. Those who could came to the White House with their wives and children. Some apologized that they didn't have a jacket or a tie to wear, and we said, Come just as you are. One veteran didn't believe that he was actually being invited to the White House--he thought it was a scam and called the Better Business Bureau. After a chain of phone calls up to his congressman, he was a.s.sured that the invitation was in fact real. I watched those men, who had once been so young and brave, come with their canes, walkers, and wheelchairs to the house of presidents and wished my father could have been among them.

In June 2008, we invited the Cla.s.ses of 1964 from all three Midland high schools-Midland, Lee, and George Was.h.i.+ngton Carver--for a reunion at the White House. In the fall we held a dinner for the justices on the Supreme Court and their spouses.

And now, in addition to our American guests, I could recall the many times when I had walked women from Africa and Afghanistan through these famous rooms and halls, so they might glimpse our history as well. In the East Room, George had paid tribute to Medal of Honor recipients, his voice breaking as he recited their acts of heroism until he himself could barely speak. I could pa.s.s each doorway and remember a conversation I had had, a person I had met, a memory that was my own.

We had hosted dinners in the State Dining Room in honor of Benjamin Franklin and William Shakespeare as well as two black-tie dinners to recognize Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Special Olympics, which she helped to found. We had celebrated the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Thelonious Monk Inst.i.tute of Jazz, Thomas Jefferson's 265th birthday, and also baseball. For my entire eight years, I had wonderful partners.h.i.+ps with our leading national cultural arts agencies. The poet Dana Gioia, who headed the National Endowment for the Arts, helped Americans rediscover the pleasure of reading through his Big Read program, highlighting such cla.s.sics as To Kill a Mockingbird, To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, and and The Joy Luck Club. The Joy Luck Club. I was there when Dana and the NEA launched I was there when Dana and the NEA launched the largest tour of Shakespeare in American history, bringing the Bard's words to some 2,300 small and midsize communities in all fifty states, as well as to 3,600 schools and major military bases. Dana pioneered a special NEA effort called Operation Homecoming, which paired returning war veterans with writers to help them tell their stories. A special anthology of soldiers' writings was published in 2006.

I was happy to support Chairman Bruce Cole's efforts at the National Endowment for the Humanities to reinvigorate the teaching of history through programs such as We the People, which put some of our most important national doc.u.ments within reach of school cla.s.srooms. I helped launch Picturing America, which gave public and private schools, libraries, and communities access to top-quality reproductions of iconic images of America's past, so they might experience our history through art, from Was.h.i.+ngton Was.h.i.+ngton Crossing the Delaware to the works of Winslow Homer, Depression-era photographs by to the works of Winslow Homer, Depression-era photographs by Dorothea Lange, and the scene of Martin Luther King marching from Selma to Montgomery.

At the Inst.i.tute of Museums and Library Services, Dr. Robert Martin, and later Anne-Imelda Radice, worked with the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums to recruit and educate new professionals. I was proud to be part of IMLS's presentations of the annual National Medals for Museum and Library Service. Among its many contributions, IMLS helped to provide opportunities to train Native Americans to preserve their past in Arizona, and support interpreters for African-American history in Brooklyn. It worked with the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo to a.s.sist with the conservation of endangered animals, and also to a.s.sist with the 190 million objects around the nation that are in serious need of conservation.

At the White House we hosted each year's winners of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards, given to the best architects, landscape architects, fas.h.i.+on designers, and others whose design work make our country more beautiful. I enjoyed meeting many of these talented creators, whose work I had admired for years. At the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, my good friend Adair Margo expanded the Coming Up Taller Awards for excellence in children's arts programs to add an international focus, by recognizing programs in Mexico, Egypt, and China. The idea is that when a child takes a bow, afterward he or she comes up taller. I am proud to have helped make the White House a strong partner for the nation's artistic and cultural life.

Many of our happiest moments came from welcoming Americans from across the nation into the home of presidents. We had military families, from Jewish veterans of the Korean War to the cousins and friends of soldiers in Iraq. Fifteen hundred military spouses came for breakfast. We invited people we'd met out along rope lines or who had written us letters. We hosted Girl Scout troops and school groups. I invited high school students from Was.h.i.+ngton's Ballou High, which was grieving several murders, to come to the East Room for a special screening of a doc.u.mentary on their high school band. We invited a dance troupe from Atlanta, comprised of girls from at-risk neighborhoods, to perform for the Coming Up Taller Awards. When travel funds were an issue for this troupe and others, we found the money to pay their way to the White House. We had over a thousand college athletes come for NCAA receptions. Almost every week, Diane Bodman, wife of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, brought through small groups of wounded soldiers, veterans, and their families. I wanted everyone who walked through the doors or onto the grounds to feel comfortable. During the late-spring and summer months, George and I watched children play T-ball, as a thousand visitors strolled around the South Lawn during each game. We were happy that the White House grounds had become a place where families could gather on a Sunday afternoon. Opening this house, opening our days to others, also opened our own hearts.

In February, George and I made our last trip to Africa. We began in the West African nation of Benin and then flew to Tanzania, where at the airport crowds of dancers awaited us dressed in fabric imprinted with George's picture, surrounded by the country's traditional colors of blue, green, black, and yellow. Tanzania's first lady wore a dress made from fabric with George's picture stamped on it and the American and Tanzanian flags intertwined. On one of her scarves was written the words "We cherish democracy."

Everywhere we stopped, in Benin and Tanzania and Rwanda and Ghana and Liberia, thousands of people lined the sides of the roads, waving American flags and the flags of their nations, singing and cheering, to thank George for what he had done for them, for the lives that his efforts had saved. The Ghanaian president, John Kufuor, invited a thousand people to celebrate at a dinner in an overflowing ballroom, where the band played Ghanaian highlife music, a combination of Glenn Miller-style swing and jazz. President Kufuor asked me to dance, and within minutes everyone was on his or her feet, even George, dancing with Theresa Kufuor.

There had been an incredible change from our first trip, in 2003. I remember one mother in Botswana who had heard that the American president was coming to visit a local medical clinic, so she dressed her daughter in a lovely white, fluffy dress with bits of lavender, already looking like an angel. The little girl lay on an examining table, so frail and sick but with her mother's last hopes to make her beautiful. Today, with antiretrovirals, that child would have a chance. Millions do have a chance. Whereas once a visit to Africa was about holding the hands of the sick and dying, now it is about hope.

People who were waiting quietly for death are taking antiretrovirals and, in what they call the "Lazarus effect," are now celebrating a second chance at life.

Our history has made us a free nation, but history has not been so kind to much of

Africa, where colonialism, the slave trade, poverty, war, and pandemic disease have ravaged nations not just for decades but for centuries. Yet after just three years, nearly 25 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, living in the fifteen countries of the President's Malaria Initiative, were protected by insecticide-treated nets. In 2003, only fifty thousand people in sub-Saharan Africa received antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. By 2008, after George's PEPFAR program, that number had grown to more than 2 million. Another 4 million orphans and vulnerable children had been cared for, and more than 200,000 babies whose mothers had AIDS were born HIV-free. People thanked us with such enthusiasm and warmth that we left each stop with tears in our eyes.

In March I traveled to Haiti, one of the first nations to receive PEPFAR funding.

It is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, with the greatest HIV burden. In the early 1980s, Haiti was the epicenter for HIV. It was the first country on earth to have a clinic devoted solely to HIV/AIDS care, the GHESKIO Center in Port-au-Prince, founded in 1982 by Dr. Jean Pape, a native Haitian who trained as a doctor at New York's Weill Cornell Medical College, one of the center's longest sponsors. Each year the clinic sees over 100,000 people, many of them the poorest of the poor. Even in March, the island heat was stifling, and the brightly colored buildings belied years of suffering. For most of the decade, Haiti's political situation had been so volatile that the Secret Service had refused to allow me to visit earlier in George's term. But in the Haitians I met, I saw a deep warmth, rich spirit, and hope for the future. And there were reasons to hope. By 2008, Haiti's infection rate from HIV had fallen, and PEPFAR programs were helping to provide antiretrovirals to nearly eighteen thousand men, women, and children. We left hoping that more things would change, never imagining the devastating earthquake to come.

In April, Benedict XVI made the first visit by a Pope to the White House in almost thirty years. He came on April 16, his birthday, and more than thirteen thousand guests welcomed him on the South Lawn, spontaneously serenading the Pontiff with "Happy Birthday" during the arrival ceremony. It was the largest gathering on record at the White House.

The papal nuncio told the White House that the Pope had decided to arrive on his birthday because "you spend your birthday with your friends." He wanted the visit to be a reflection of his respect for the United States, for its generosity and charity. We were deeply touched.

We decorated with yellow and white tulips, in honor of the papal colors, and under a sky of brilliant blue, the soloist Kathleen Battle performed "The Lord's Prayer,"

rather than a traditional anthem or marching song. We had asked if there was any song the Pope would like to hear, and the papal nuncio said the song with the words "Glory!

Glory! Hallelujah." So Sergeant Alvy Powell led the Army Chorus in singing the Civil War anthem "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Then George spoke. "Here in America, you'll find a nation of compa.s.sion. . . . Each day citizens across America answer the universal call to feed the hungry and comfort the sick and care for the infirm. Each day across the world the United States is working to eradicate disease, alleviate poverty, promote peace and bring the light of hope to places still mired in the darkness of tyranny and despair. . . . In a world where some invoke the name of G.o.d to justify acts of terror and murder and hate, we need your message that 'G.o.d is love.'"

Pope Benedict talked of America's pluralistic society and how "all believers have found here the freedom to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d in accordance to the dictates of their conscience."

He continued, "Freedom is not only a gift, but also a summons to personal responsibility.

Americans know this from experience--almost every town in this country had its monuments honoring those who sacrificed their lives in defense of freedom, both at home and abroad."

He ended with the words "G.o.d bless America."

When the arrival ceremony was complete, we walked inside the White House and up to the State Floor. I'd asked the pastry chef to prepare a birthday cake for the Pope.

When we wheeled out the four-tier cream and white cake, adorned with white icing ribbons and a single white candle, his eyes lit up with surprise.

The visit was deeply meaningful for George and for me, and also for the many members of our family who are Catholic, including Jeb and his wife, Columba, and Doro's husband, Bobby Koch, and their children.

That night Pope Benedict had a private dinner with his American cardinals while we held a special dinner in honor of his visit, inviting Catholic bishops and other Catholic leaders, especially from charities, who had done so much to help at home and abroad. We had Catholic members of the cabinet and the Congress, including Nancy Pelosi, and Catholic members of the Supreme Court, as well as many of our good friends who shared the Pope's faith, including Joey and Jan O'Neill, who had introduced George and me, now more than thirty years ago. That April 16 was one of the loveliest days we spent at the White House.

Just over two weeks later, on May 2, Cyclone Nargis devastated the Burmese coast, causing the worst natural disaster in Burma's recorded history. More than 100,000 were reported dead, and many, many more were missing. And that was just the official count; unofficial totals suggested that the number of deaths might be far higher, approaching the toll of the deadly 2004 tsunami. To add to the suffering, the Burmese government would not allow outside aid. The United States had naval vessels that could have docked and provided clean water and medical care for those in need, as we had done after the tsunami, but the ruling junta would rather inflict more loss of life than give up an inch of power. So at three in the afternoon on May 5, I walked into the White House briefing room to speak to the press, and via them to the world, about Burma, including the fact that the only warnings about the cyclone the Burmese people had received had come from the United States, from our Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. I hoped that Burma would accept aid from India at least. In my remarks, I called on the junta to postpone a scheduled May 10 vote on a new sham const.i.tution, written largely to bar Aung San Suu Kyi from running for office. The const.i.tution banned anyone who had ever been married to a foreigner from holding office--as it happens, her late husband was British.

The vote was postponed, and as the days pa.s.sed, the junta did relent and allow one hundred American C-130s flights fully loaded with emergency medical supplies to land in Rangoon. But the devastation outside the capital was far worse, and the junta would not permit our s.h.i.+ps to dock and offer immediate, lifesaving aid. To maintain their brutal control, Burma's rulers preferred death and disease to life.

On May 10, Jenna married Henry Hager at our ranch, overlooking our tiny lake, the old cattle watering hole, where we now stocked fish and grew prairie gra.s.ses. Henry was waiting for her as the sun set. Barbara was her maid of honor, and Jenna's tearful dad walked her down the aisle as mariachis played "Here Comes the Bride." Our longtime friend the Houston pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell performed the service. Jenna and Henry were wed before an altar and cross carved from the same limestone that forms the walls of our house. It was the st.u.r.diest of foundations for their new life together.

Mother was there, and Bar and Gampy read to Jenna and Henry from First Corinthians. Jenna's cousin Wendy and her husband, Diego Reyes, read a Pablo Neruda poem in English and in Spanish. And Henry's parents, John and Maggie Hager, spoke of what they had learned about how to keep a marriage strong, of how they had faced and triumphed over adversity when John Hager contracted polio shortly after Henry's older brother was born.

That evening, as Jenna and Henry slipped on their s.h.i.+ny new rings, George and I basked in their love. Come fall, we would mark our thirty-first year of marriage. Our daughter was a newlywed, and we had now been together for exactly half our lifetimes.

We held their celebratory dinner in a large tent decorated with giant festival staffs, trailing flowers, and streams of brightly colored ribbons. After tearful toasts the guests danced to the music of Super T and then, late in the evening, gathered around the warm glow of a firepit. A few weeks later, we hosted a reception for Jenna and Henry in the White House.

Jenna had dreamed of marrying at the ranch since we first bought the land, and she and Henry very much wanted to marry at a place they could return to. Each spring, when the bluebonnets open and the pink evening primrose blooms, carpeting the ground as they did on that perfect early evening, I am reminded of how Henry and Jenna took their first steps together as husband and wife, beaming smiles on their faces, walking beneath a shower of fragrant rose petals.

As Jenna and Henry left on their honeymoon, George and I made our final presidential visit to the Middle East. We arrived to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. After joining in the official commemorations, George and I walked the heights of the ancient desert fortress of Masada, atop a ma.s.sive, weathered outcropping of rock where 960 defenders held out for three years against the Roman Tenth Legion's attempt to conquer them all. Today Israeli soldiers make the promise that "Masada shall never fall again." On May 15, the anniversary of Israel's birth, George addressed its parliament, the Knesset. "The alliance between our governments,"

he said, "is unbreakable, yet the source of our friends.h.i.+p runs deeper than any treaty. It is grounded in the shared spirit of our people, the bonds of the Book, the ties of the soul.

When William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower Mayflower in 1620, he quoted the words of in 1620, he quoted the words of Jeremiah: 'Come let us declare Zion in the word of G.o.d.' The founders of my country saw a new promised land and bestowed upon their towns names like Bethlehem and New Canaan. And in time, many Americans became pa.s.sionate advocates for a Jewish state."

George recalled how he too, on previous visits, had prayed at Yad Vashem and touched the Western Wall.

We paid a call on some of our Arab friends as well, first King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. There I returned to visit with breast cancer patients at King Fahd Medical Center.

The same female doctor, covered entirely except for the slit for her eyes, approached me and then was surprised when I did not immediately recognize her through her veils. I was delighted to learn that, though its partners.h.i.+p with the United States was less than two years old, the King Fahd Center had already scheduled a breast cancer conference for October, to include oncologists and cancer specialists from around the Middle East.

In Egypt I visited the coral reefs around the Red Sea port of Sharm al-Sheikh and from a gla.s.s-bottomed boat watched as sea life moved in silence among the brilliantcolored coral. On land I launched an international Big Read program between American and Egyptian high school students. The Egyptians read To Kill a Mockingbird, The To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath, and and Fahrenheit 451, Fahrenheit 451, while the American students read while the American students read The Thief and The Thief and the Dogs, a novel by the n.o.bel Prize-winning writer Naguib Mahfouz. a novel by the n.o.bel Prize-winning writer Naguib Mahfouz.

Come June, I made my third and final visit to Afghanistan.

I began in Bamiyan Province, where those ancient Buddhas had been destroyed seven years earlier. From almost any spot in the valley I could gaze up and see the empty niches, hollowed deep into the stone. Today Bamiyan has a female governor and is one of the safest provinces in the nation. In my 2005 visit, when I met her in Kabul, I had promised Dr. Habiba Sarabi that I would come to her home. When my helicopter landed, Governor Sarabi was waiting on the dusty ground. We embraced, and I said, "I told you I would come."

On full display was a group of Kiwi troops, who were there as part of the New Zealand army and New Zealand's provincial reconstruction team. In tan desert camouflage, they did a full native Powhiri dance; a few men had donned body paint and waved long, pointed spears as the Secret Service watched warily.

A short way from the landing strip, where the helicopters remained parked and ready and surrounded by armed guards, Governor Sarabi and I entered a police training facility. In spare prefab buildings, Afghans were learning the basics of law enforcement, and in one room, with dark curtains on its high, tiny rectangular windows, the trainees were women. Eleven Afghan women had come here to study basic police work. Seated at their rows of desks, their slightly bent heads veiled and bodies fully covered, they asked that no photographs be taken of their faces. At that moment, I felt the depths of their bravery; they were concealing their ident.i.ties not merely from local insurgents or opium poppy merchants. Many of these women's own families did not know that they were training to be police officers.

From the academy, Governor Sarabi and I traveled farther into the valley, past scrubby fields. There, in the shadow of the ancient Buddha's remains, mud-brick walls were rising. It was the first floor of what would become a new, two-story school for Afghan boys and girls. The school was being constructed by the Ayenda Foundation, an offshoot of the U.S.-Afghan Women's Council. Ayenda was founded in 2006 by two council members, Shamim Jawad, the wife of the Afghan amba.s.sador to the United States, and Timothy McBride, who had worked for Gampy as an a.s.sistant to the president in the White House. The money to build the school had been donated entirely by American and Afghan citizens.

Before I left Bamiyan, I cut the ribbon for a new highway built by the U.S.

Agency for International Development. The new road followed one of the ancient Silk Road pathways, but today it led not over the mountains but to the airport, so local entrepreneurs might sell and s.h.i.+p their goods to Kabul and beyond. Then the helicopters lifted off for Kabul and the Presidential Palace, where President Karzai was waiting. We met and spoke to the press. In other rooms of the palace I visited with students, young men and women from Kabul University, as well as from the new American University of Afghanistan and the International School of Kabul, whose formation I had announced only three years before. For these students it was their first time on the Presidential Palace grounds. But I had to remain inside the palace compound; I could not walk the streets of Kabul, past store windows and open front shops, and my plane had to be in the air by dusk.

Vast swaths of Afghanistan still had no electricity or running water. But the lack of knowledge was the worst of all. Bamiyan, for example, has for years been a rich potato-growing region. But local farmers now had no storage facilities for their crops.

They could not preserve their harvest to eat during the harsh winters, nor could they keep their surplus to sell when prices were high. Instead, they hawked their freshly dug crops in local markets, and whatever they did not sell rotted. Then an Idaho potato farmer recalled how his own grandparents had stored their potatoes, in a simple dugout cellar.

He taught Afghan farmers to do the same. There are hundreds of stories like this, of soldiers who came back after they left the army, of retired police officers who came over as police trainers. Colonel Gary Davis, who served as surgeon general for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, returned to Kabul after he retired from the military to teach Afghan doctors and nurses how to care for some of the country's most serious pregnancy-related complications. Despite the obstacles and the dangers, these Americans have given so much of themselves to make other lives better and have asked nothing in return.

And the obstacles are many. In January of 2008, a group of female Afghan parliamentarians came to see me at the White House. They spoke of the severe threats that women continue to live under in all parts of Afghanistan and of how much they feared the Taliban's return. One of them told me, "This is our only chance."

But I remember too one of my friends who said, "We talk so much about helping Afghan women. What about the men? It seems to me they are the ones who need to change most of all."

Slowly, some are changing. There are illiterate men who are happy to have their daughters enrolled in school and learning to read. Days after my Afghan visit ended, I spoke at an international donor conference in Paris hosted by President Nicolas Sarkozy.

He had convened eighty nations and organizations to secure more global aid for Afghanistan. Already over 6 million Afghan children were attending school; 1.5 million of them were girls, who had been banned from the cla.s.sroom before 2002.

I made my case and hoped that this "only chance" would be enough.

After Paris, George and I traveled together to Slovenia, to attend our last U.S.European Union Summit. As I left Europe, I thought of the many friends.h.i.+ps we had made with foreign leaders. I would miss German chancellor Angela Merkel and her husband, Joachim Sauer, whose quick minds and lively conversation warmed our visits.

We had stayed with them in the German version of Camp David, an old manor house located in the former East Germany that had been fully restored. In return, we had invited them to visit our ranch, where we hiked and talked. I had built a friends.h.i.+p with Aliza Olmert, wife of the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who was herself an accomplished artist. And I had taken great joy in my visits with the king and queen of Jordan. But it was also time for us to move on. Tony and Cherie Blair had already left 10 Downing Street. Soon we would be leaving the White House.

But first I wanted to see the Burmese border lands.

From the air, on August 7, everything below me was green, that rich, overgrown green of Southeast Asian jungles and the wide plumes of stunted mangrove and towering native oak trees. As the small American military cargo plane descended, I could see the roadways cutting through and catch a quick glimpse of the narrow city streets of Mae Sot, punctuated by the brilliant gold-leaf dome of the temple paG.o.da. I was in northern Thailand, and just beyond lay the country of Burma.

George and I and Barbara were on our way to the Beijing Olympics, and George had wanted to make one last visit to South Korea and then to Thailand before we arrived in China. If we were going to Thailand, the two places I wanted to go were the Mae La Refugee Camp and the Mae Tao Clinic. Barbara was eager to join me.

The summer air was wet and humid, and people were waiting impatiently for the onslaught of the rainy season. My clothes stuck to my skin almost from the moment I stepped off the plane. A large welcoming party was waiting for us on the tarmac, the governor of Thailand's Tak Province, the deputy governor, the chief judge, the Mae Sot district officer, the commander of the provincial police, the mayor, the chairman of the munic.i.p.al council, the U.S. consul general, and sixty schoolchildren waving flags. From there we departed for the Burmese border.