Spoken from the Heart (31 page)

Each new arrival to the White House finds the residence furnished in the style of his predecessor. Many rooms remain unchanged from administration to administration. The Clintons and the Bushes had kept the black lacquer Chinese screen that Nancy Reagan's much-loved decorator, Ted Graber, had installed in the long, cavernous upstairs Cross Hall. I kept the cheerful, light fabric that the Clintons had used to cover the walls of the small family dining room upstairs.

I set up the girls' rooms first, painting the walls a soft aqua and installing two double beds in each, so that they could have friends sleep over, as they had done in Austin. Many nights during college breaks and summer vacations we had eight girls crowded into the two rooms. In Barbara's room, I hung a loaned portrait of identical twins. My next project was the Treaty Room.

The Treaty Room is quite literally that, a room where the peace protocol to end the Spanish-American War was signed in 1898 and where President John F. Kennedy had signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty some seven weeks before he died. President Grant had used it as his cabinet room, and the room had the original Grant administration cabinet desk, with eight drawers, one for each cabinet member, plus the president. After the West Wing was built, the Treaty Room was intermittently used as a private presidential study. George's father had used it as his upstairs office, and I knew George would like to do the same. Most nights, after we ate dinner, he would head to the Treaty Room to read his nightly briefing papers and make phone calls. I painted the walls cream and brought over Grant's original sofa and two chairs from the White House collection. I wasn't as excited by a room full of Victorian furniture once I saw it arranged, but George said, "I love having Grant's furniture." He did indeed. There is something special about knowing that a previous president has used that same furniture in that very same room. George would gaze up at the famous George P. Healy painting
The Peacemakers,
depicting Lincoln meeting with his generals Grant and Sherman, and Admiral Porter, at the end of the Civil War, and he would sense the history that had already happened here. There is a unique continuity to knowing your predecessors have walked these halls, have written on these tables, have sat in these chairs. And a particular comfort as well. We both felt that comfort in the rooms of the White House.

For our first week in the White House, I also had my friend Lynn Munn in residence. Lynn had helped me move into so many homes, but this time she had stayed in Washington because her husband, Bill, had suffered a heart attack early Sunday morning after the inauguration. She and her daughter, Kelly, and son-in-law, Tom, spent their days at George Washington University Hospital with Bill, but at night they came to stay with us until Bill was well enough to fly back home to Midland.

In mid-February, I was back in Texas. Our ranch house in Crawford was close to completion, and I had another move to oversee. I had to unpack our books, hang our pictures, and stock the cabinets in the kitchen. And I needed to look at the house with a different eye, for how we would entertain foreign leaders in our newly completed home.

We'd already had our first request: Tony and Cherie Blair were coming to visit at the end of February, and Cherie was hoping to be invited to our ranch in Crawford because she had already been to the White House and Camp David with the Clintons. But our guesthouse next to the main ranch house remained unfinished, so we invited them to be our first international guests at Camp David instead.

Nestled in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, Camp David has been a presidential retreat since the time of Franklin Roosevelt, who called it Shangri-La; President Dwight Eisenhower renamed it for his grandson, David. Camp David is a nickname for Naval Support Facility Thurmont, and it is an active naval base. Marines and Navy sailors work and often live on the grounds. The camp itself spans 180 acres, and the presidential section consists of a series of comfortable cabins tucked among the trees and connected by winding paths. Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill at Camp David, Ronald Reagan had invited Margaret Thatcher, and Gampy had hosted John Major.

Camp David is a far more intimate setting than the White House. It is a place where you can get to know another leader without the crush of a roomful of a hundred or so invited guests and an hour or more of receiving lines, with their jumble of announced names, quick pleasantries, and official photos, which are all but required for formal White House entertaining. It is a real treat to show off the White House in its full splendor to visiting heads of state or government, to introduce them to celebrities and other famous Americans. But entertaining at a place like Camp David, or later our ranch, was far more relaxed and casual. A visit to Camp David is more like a visit to someone's weekend place. And it cements a different friendship than simply having a fancy event amid gleaming silver and glittering chandeliers. We could visit with our guests over coffee at breakfast, or have dinner and then watch a movie; for the Blairs, it was
Meet the Parents
. Leaders who came to visit us at the White House stayed across the street at Blair House and invariably showed up at night on the front steps in black tie.

I was a bit nervous about meeting the Blairs. I knew what close friends they had been with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and I wondered how we would get along. The British tabloids didn't help. clash of cherie and dubya's cowgirl headlined
The Daily Record,
frosty forecast as our modern mum meets bush's little woman at summit. The Brits were convinced that it would be torture for Cherie Blair to sit down and have a meal alone with me while George and Tony got to know each other. "Laura is a cookie-baking homemaker," they wrote, "dull, mumsy, and old-fashioned." At least with the British press, one never needs to say "Tell us what you really think."

But Cherie Blair and I did hit it off when we had our private lunch in Aspen Lodge, the president's cabin, while George and Tony Blair and their staffs had a working afternoon at Laurel, the main lodge. Cherie is funny and smart, and we talked about our families; her oldest children and Jenna and Barbara are close in age. We enjoyed talking about topics like women's issues and improving women's health, although what I liked most about our friendship was the intimacy of it, rather like two busy mothers catching up over coffee. Cherie is a wonderful reader, and we shared a love of books, and more than a few favorite authors. She was particularly attuned to the challenges of being an American first lady. In England, the prime minister's wife has no official title and few official responsibilities. Cherie was proud of having kept her day job as a barrister in the British courts.

Early on, George apologized to the Blairs that we couldn't have them to the ranch--because the final work wouldn't be complete until March. The only thing I felt bad about on this visit was that I don't think the Blairs, Cherie especially, were all that keen on pets. We, of course, had ferried Kitty, Barney, and Spot to Camp David. I asked Cherie if they had any animals, and she paused and answered, "Well, we had a gerbil. Once."

The day that the Blairs arrived, I had spent part of the morning with Oprah Winfrey. There was tremendous curiosity about me as the new first lady, and although I hadn't really done anything yet, reporters from across the country wanted me to sit for interviews.
The Washington Post, Good Morning America,
the Texas papers,
Harper's Bazaar, People,
Reuters, the list was long and growing. I was waiting upstairs for Oprah, who arrived with her best friend and business partner, Gayle King, but before they were escorted to the upper level, George passed by with Condoleezza Rice, his national security advisor, and Colin Powell, his secretary of state. My staff later told me that Oprah was speechless at meeting them. For the first time, the two individuals tasked with overseeing U.S. foreign policy were African-American. Gayle King had to give Oprah a little poke to remind her to talk. And I thought later, what a wonderful moment, to have this crossroads of success in the people's house that was, at the founding of the nation, built by the labor of unknown and unrecognized slaves.

While we hit the ground running, there were a few mishaps. Saturday afternoon after the Blairs departed we helicoptered back to the White House to prepare for the National Governors Association meeting, which George and I had attended for six years while Bill Clinton was in office. Now it was our turn to play host. Sunday night was the opening dinner. During their years, the Clintons had invited many of their gubernatorial friends to spend the night at the White House. We were planning on doing the same for some of our Republican governor friends, including George Pataki of New York and John Engler of Michigan. George and I waited for our overnight guests to arrive. Time passed, and no one appeared. Finally, George turned to me and said, "Well, what did they say when you invited them?"

"When
I
invited them? I thought you did it," I replied. Neither of us had told our staffs to invite anyone; each assumed that the other had taken care of it. At eight o'clock, Jeb and Columba Bush did show up. Jeb was the governor of Florida, and he had called us to see if he could spend the night while he was in town.

In March, I began my education initiatives in earnest. I started out wanting to replicate some of my most successful Texas projects on a national scale. I made school visits to highlight innovative educational programs and started planning an early childhood cognitive development conference to be held in Washington that summer. My other chief focus was teacher recruitment, positive ways to entice more people to work in our nation's schools and classrooms. I began by working with two programs, Teach for America and Troops to Teachers, which encourages members of the military who are retiring from the service to go into teaching. In less than ten years, it had sent almost four thousand troops into teaching. George wanted to boost the program's funding from $3 million to $30 million to help more men and women in uniform find a second career in the classroom. At a Troops to Teachers event at the San Diego Naval Station, I spoke before almost a thousand sailors and Marines and toured the USS
Shiloh,
a ballistic missile defense cruiser, as well as the USS
Decatur,
a destroyer, while the air rushed off the water and the waves broke around their hulls.

And there was another idea that I wanted to initiate, a National Book Festival, to be held in partnership with the Library of Congress, to bring some of the nation's leading authors to Washington and, with the help of cable television's C-SPAN, carry their words to the country at large. I had seen the overwhelming success of the Texas Book Festival, and I believed that it could have even more meaning on a national scale. The Library of Congress would be the perfect co-sponsor and a perfect venue to celebrate authors and promote reading and literacy.

By now, my official duties were in full swing. My chief of staff, the scheduler, and I held near daily meetings to review the hundreds of requests that came to the White House. But we were proactive; my policy director, Anne Heiligenstein, looked for opportunities where I could highlight education issues. My calendar was crowded with official and courtesy duties, like attending the opening of the Washington, D.C., Cherry Blossom Festival on April 9 with the Japanese ambassador. And when George met with a male head of state in the Oval Office, I frequently hosted his wife for coffee. Suzanne Mubarak, the first lady of Egypt, who was a longtime friend of Bar Bush's, was one of my first guests; Bar had shown Suzanne the photos of the girls when they were newborns. Queen Rania of Jordan came to the White House, as did King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain. I needed to master the finer points of protocol that dictated whether I should address a sovereign as Your Highness or Your Majesty. Queen Elizabeth of England and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia are both "Your Majesty," but the legion of crown princes and princesses around the world are called "Your Highness," or sometimes "Your Royal Highness." It's rather amusing that, more than 225 years after the United States declared its independence from the monarchy of Great Britain, American presidents and their spouses pore over protocol briefing books to ensure that they do not make a misstep in addressing foreign royalty.

Indeed, a coffee at the White House is a highly elaborate affair, involving briefing books and protocol notes, as well as carefully selected china, coffee blends, and refreshments. It included not simply me and my guest but ambassadors' wives and staff members murmuring in the background. Some of the wives who came were so nervous either about meeting me or about being in the White House that they read their carefully scripted conversation points off preprinted note cards folded in their hands or perched on their laps. But often these events turned into highly personal visits, in which the wives of other heads of state and I could talk about our lives, our families, and the challenges of balancing public needs with maintaining a private life at home. We were diverse women thrown together by circumstance, but we found much common ground in the way of shared experiences.