OPINION:
SPOKEN FROM THE HEART
By Laura Bush
Scribner, $30, 456 pages, illustrated
Reviewed by Priscilla S. Taylor
The next time you go to a White House reception, take the president’s proffered hand, say “I’m so happy to be here,” and move on. This and much more practical advice comes from former first lady Laura Bush in her best-selling memoir that begins and ends with a paean to Texas, from Midland, her birthplace in 1946; to El Paso, the home of her beloved grandmother; to Dallas and Houston, where she taught school; to Austin, where she was a school librarian and wife of the governor; and to Crawford, where the Bushes’ retirement ranch is located.
The acknowledgments at the back of the book begin with one to the aptly named Lyric Winik, “who helped me put my story into words.” (The second acknowledgment is to her lawyer.) But for the first third of the book, the story seems spoken, and straight from the heartland.
One can almost feel the sting of Midland’s dust storms and the ennui of summer evenings when preteen girls sneaked out of their houses to stroll the neighborhood streets in their pajamas, and young teens entertained themselves by just driving around town. Laura keenly felt the absence of siblings because her parents, Jenna and Harold Welch, lost three just before or at birth.
Laura’s youth was unremarkable - lots of fun, friends and football games - until that fateful night when, at age 17, she drove through a stop sign at a dark crossroads and crashed into the car of a friend, killing him. Her guilt over time was intensified by the fact that she had been advised not to attend the friend’s funeral or to console his family - a lapse she has subsequently tried to compensate for by counseling others to express their compassion.
Laura Welch’s father was an Army veteran who, after World War II, built modest houses in Midland for workers in the expanding oil industry. The family moved constantly, if only down the block; once, her father spontaneously sold the house they were living in to a stranger, without regard to the fact that the sale meant that Laura had to change school districts. Both parents eventually developed Alzheimer’s disease.
After college, Laura continued a peripatetic path, mostly as a teacher or a school librarian reading books to children (good practice, she says, for making political speeches), although, she says, she might have fetched up in Washington as a Texas congressman’s secretary had she been willing to take a course in typing. At age 30, she was introduced to George W. Bush by mutual friends. A few months later the two were married, and, it would seem, have lived happily ever after, especially after George quit drinking at age 40.
Their wedding ceremony was so low-key that Laura’s nervous, nearsighted mother was tasked with taking the wedding photos: “When they were developed, all of our honeymoon departure photos were shots of our driveway and the tips of Mother’s dainty feet.”
Midland, she comments, was a drinking town; when no drinks were served in restaurants, people provided their own and drank before, during and after meals. Her father, she comments, drank a great deal too, but her mother said she had never thought to ask him to stop, as Laura would ask George.
Several years into their marriage, the Bushes applied to adopt a child, but that measure became unnecessary after the hormone treatments Laura took enabled her to produce twin daughters.
The Bushes had begun their married life with an unsuccessful run for Congress; subsequently they were absorbed with their growing daughters’ activities, George’s baseball empire, and, in due course, his election as governor of Texas. As the governor’s wife she established a state festival to celebrate books and authors - a forerunner of the National Book Festival she later championed in Washington - and worked to provide help to abused children.
The author comments that for the first decade of her marriage, the couple had almost no contact with her husband’s parents except at the summertime family rallies in Kennebunkport. It was only after the junior Bushes were enlisted in the Bush-Quayle campaign of 1988 that Laura began to connect with her formidable mother-in-law, Barbara Bush, who had previously “managed to insult nearly all of my friends with one or another perfectly timed acerbic comment.”
In contrast, George H. W. Bush, then vice president, won Laura’s heart when he heard a commotion at 6 a.m. in his official residence - caused when his visiting daughter-in-law dropped a contact lens down a drain - and “still in his bathrobe, went downstairs, got a wrench, came back up to the bathroom, and proceeded to take off the trap and rescue my contact.”
The latter part of the book is a detailed chronicle of campaigns endured, official trips taken, disaster victims comforted, Christmas card sentiments selected, dinners hosted, hospitals visited. There are paragraphs of statistics one doubts Laura Bush ever compiled, and fatuous comments like “The word ’Liberia’ is meant to denote liberty,” about a visit to that country.
But there are many amazing anecdotes, for example, how the staff discovered that a ring of septuagenarian volunteers at the annual White House Easter egg roll were smuggling “masses of wooden Easter eggs” into their girdles and off the grounds. And she relates how White House butlers were instructed to remove the vermeil eagle place card holders from tables in the State Dining Room before dessert was served, to avoid their being stolen by diners.
Not to mention an awkward moment at an official dinner for the president of Poland and his wife, who appeared in an elegant gown with a long train: “When we were walking into the State Dining Room, she stopped short. I stopped behind her, with an entire line of guests awkwardly pausing behind me. In a whisper I urged her forward, but she did not move. I spoke again, and at last she murmured, ’I can’t. You are standing on my dress.’”
The most sobering sections of the book concern the lingering aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the president and his wife were repeatedly hustled out of one public place after another, or even to the subterranean bunker of the White House, because of threats that the Secret Service believed they had to act upon immediately.
Mrs. Bush comes through as a thoughtful, compassionate woman who has developed a balanced approach to life and manages to connect easily with people from New York City to Afghanistan and Burma. The solitary, myopic little girl whose mother sent her out for “solo picnics” with her book in a Midland park has produced a memoir her friends worldwide will enjoy reading.
Priscilla S. Taylor is a writer in McLean, Va.
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