Spoken from the Heart (42 page)

Inside the White House, I was stuck in a kind of limbo. We had difficulty planning events because of the great uncertainty of the security situation. We would plan cultural or education activities, and just as the invitations were being finalized, the Secret Service or someone on the West Wing staff would say no. We hosted a salute to gospel music in February, and a few White House tours resumed, for prescreened student groups and members of the military and veterans. Otherwise, except for official visitors and the constant stream of heads of state and their spouses, the entry gates remained locked and the house quiet.

We did manage to have a formal unveiling of George's finished Oval Office for the fabric and rug makers and the donors who had helped us redecorate this remarkable room. There were new drapes and new beige and ivory damask sofas, three in total, in case someone spilled coffee on one and the staff had to replace it in a hurry. There was a new pale wool rug, with a sunburst pattern featuring the presidential seal, because George had wanted the room to say, "An optimistic man works here." Adorning the rounded room's walls and niches were paintings and bronzes, including a bust of Sir Winston Churchill loaned to George by the British government. To hang in full view of his desk, George chose the portraits of his two most revered presidents, George Washington, who had created the American presidency, and Abraham Lincoln, who had saved it. George did not hang a portrait of the president he loved the most; that image, of his dad, was, he said, "imprinted on my heart."

While the Oval Office's windows face toward the iconic monuments of Washington, for its remaining walls, we selected images of Texas. On the east and north walls, we hung three paintings by the early Texas artist Julian Onderdonk, a field of Texas bluebonnets, a prickly pear cactus in bloom, and a scene of the old Alamo and its plaza, crowded with local women at their stalls, selling hot, red chilies at dusk, all lent by Texas museums. The fourth painting was a Tom Lea image of the Rio Grande. Tom had been our friend for years, and in his 2000 convention speech, George had quoted Tom's words. Tom wrote that he and his wife "live on the east side of the mountain. It is the sunrise side, not the sunset side. It is the side to see the day that is coming . . . not the side to see the day that is gone."

"Americans," George added, "live on the sunrise side of the mountain. We are ready for the day to come."

A fifth painting was loaned by our longtime friend Joey O'Neill, who had introduced us. Painted by W. H. D. Koerner and entitled
A Charge to Keep,
it shows a lone horseman charging up a steep and rough trail. Joey's father had given it to Joey and Jan as a wedding gift. After hearing the famous Charles Wesley hymn "A Charge to Keep I Have" sung at George's gubernatorial inaugural in 1995, Joey had loaned George the painting to hang in his Texas governor's office.

George had chosen to use the
Resolute
desk, given to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria. In May of 1854, the British ship HMS
Resolute
became trapped in Arctic ice and was abandoned by its captain. An American whaling vessel found and rescued the ship in 1855, whereupon Congress purchased the
Resolute,
had it refitted, and returned it to Queen Victoria as a gift of peace. When the ship was decommissioned in 1879, the queen requested that a desk be fashioned from its timbers and sent to the American president. Queen Victoria had it inscribed with a plaque, noting that the piece was "a memorial of the courtesy and loving kindness" of the Americans. Franklin Roosevelt asked that a panel be added to the desk to hide his wheelchair, but the panel arrived only after his death. Harry Truman installed it anyway. John F. Kennedy was the first president to place the desk in the Oval Office, and his toddler son, JFK Jr., would play underneath. Later Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton spent their working hours in the West Wing at the
Resolute
desk.

Facing south and surrounded by windows, the Oval Office is bathed in light even on cloudy days. The first time Vladimir Putin walked in and saw that brilliant south light spilling through the windows, he said simply, "My God." The room itself is not palatial, like the offices of many leaders in other countries. It is a modest, human-size room, and surprising in its simplicity. The longest point is just over thirty-five feet; at eighteen feet, the ceiling is barely higher than in the Texas Governor's Mansion. At least once, a foreign head of state came through and afterward was heard to complain, "I thought I was going to see the Oval Office." When told that he had, his expression turned incredulous. "But it is so small."

At the end of January, I finally returned to the Senate to give my education briefing to Senator Kennedy's committee. It was two weeks after George had signed the landmark No Child Left Behind Act, which Democrats Ted Kennedy and Rep. George Miller and Republicans Judd Gregg and Rep. John Boehner had shepherded through Congress with the help of Education Secretary Rod Paige and George's Domestic Policy advisor, Margaret Spellings, in the previous session. I thought back to what Ted Kennedy had written on the daffodil print he had given me that September morning, "To the First Lady of Education, whose impressive leadership is enabling millions of American children to dance with the daffodils! Your friend Ted Kennedy Sept. 11, 2001." I was still able to visit schools and to highlight innovative educational programs, but now we were a nation at war. When I finally donated my inaugural gown, coat, purse, and shoes to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History for its first lady exhibit on January 20, a year to the day since George had been sworn in, it seemed as if that glittery red dress had been worn by a woman who existed in another era.

Three days later, on January 23, Daniel Pearl, the South Asia bureau chief for
The Wall Street Journal,
was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan. He was investigating ties between the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, al Qaeda, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.

The kidnappers e-mailed photos of Danny, hunched and holding up a newspaper, with a gun pointed to his head. They claimed that he was working for the CIA, and they demanded that Pakistani terror detainees be freed and that the United States ship disputed F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan's government. For weeks, Danny's wife and American and Pakistani agents scoured the country searching for him. But it was too late.

On February 1, Danny Pearl's captors had slit his throat and then sliced off his head. Only on February 21 did we learn the grisly truth. American FBI agents, posing as journalists, obtained a video in which Danny Pearl confirmed that he was "a Jewish American." The video continued with a longer list of the captors' demands, and then, nearly two minutes in, it showed the beheading in full, gruesome detail. The final scene was of a captor holding up Danny's severed head by its hair. The video ended with the words "And if our demands are not met, this scene shall be repeated again and again."

The man who would later confess to beheading Daniel Pearl is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who also claims to be the mastermind behind the attacks of 9-11.

Among those whom Danny left behind were his parents, Ruth and Judea, and his wife, Mariane, who was six months pregnant with their first child.

As we waited for news of Danny Pearl, I invited a couple to the White House who had lost their son on September 11. Sharon and Kenneth Ambrose's son, Paul, a doctor with the U.S. Public Health Service, had been on board the flight that crashed into the Pentagon. I had heard about Paul not long after 9-11 from our longtime Midland friend Penny Slade-Sawyer, who now worked with the Public Health Service. She said that in Paul the service had lost one of its brightest stars. But it was the message from his parents that truly broke my heart. In clusters of suburbs across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and around Washington, D.C., there were hundreds of families devastated by grief. But in some small measure of comfort, they were not alone. The Ambroses were the only family in all of West Virginia who had lost someone in the horror of 9-11. In their particular grief, they knew no one else who could truly understand. On February 7, the Ambroses came to the White House. Over coffee we sat and talked about Paul, about his life and his dreams. I listened to their words of love and loss. They had already suffered the death of another son. Paul was their one remaining child. Long after they left, I thought about them and that depth of sadness. And I thought of all the parents who now wondered what could happen to their children when they did something as routine as board a plane.

I turned to books for comfort. The quietest part of my day was always late afternoon, when my official schedule was finished but George was still at work in the Oval Office. I no longer ran errands, the way I had in Texas. In Dallas, by four o'clock I would have been pushing my cart around the supermarket aisle, trying to come up with something to fix for dinner. I would be waiting for the girls to return; I would be rushing to pick something up at the dry cleaners, or driving car pool, or taking Barbara and Jenna to a lesson or an activity. In Austin, when the girls were in high school, I would go to a game or a practice or be around to make sure that they did their homework. Every moment would be accounted for until bedtime, when I could finally take a breath. Now, those pre-evening hours had become the emptiest.

I thought about Nancy Reagan, lying down late one afternoon to rest after breast cancer surgery and learning that her mother had died. Ronald Reagan opened the door and told her; he had gotten the word first.

Day after day, as the afternoon waned and darkness settled over Washington, D.C., I would read, newer works, such as Leif Enger's
Peace Like a River;
histories, such as Jay Winik's
April 1865;
or classics, such as Willa Cather's
Death Comes for the Archbishop,
just as my mother had done all those years ago in Midland when I would come home and find her with a book in her hands. I read as I waited for George to arrive for dinner, and I was grateful to have words to keep me company.

I looked too for ways to bring words and writers into the White House, hosting symposiums on authors such as Mark Twain or on schools of literature, including the Harlem Renaissance. We gathered literary figures and scholars in the East Room and invited students and teachers from local schools. It was a chance to discuss some of the most powerful works in the American past and the writers who speak to all of us through the humanity of their characters. Our guest lists were limited, but we made sure the events were televised around the nation via C-SPAN.

And I looked for ways to help the women and children of Afghanistan.

At the time, there were 10 million children in Afghanistan; one in three was an orphan; one in four would not live to see a fifth birthday, and more Afghan mothers died in childbirth than mothers in almost any other part of the world. On October 12, 2001, George had announced the creation of America's Fund for Afghan Children. He asked children across the United States to donate one dollar to help the children of Afghanistan. The response was overwhelming. In less than four years, the program would raise more than $11 million. Thousands of those donations were sadly "lost" for years in the bags of potentially anthrax-contaminated White House mail.

By early December, though, the fund was sending humanitarian aid. The world is full of suffering peoples and nations, but in the harsh, remote hills and plains of Afghanistan, the deprivation has been particularly cruel. Afghanistan was a place where children came of age barefoot and where many of them could not imagine something as simple as a bright, soft plastic ball. In a Red Cross warehouse in New Windsor, Maryland, George and I saw the first-aid pallets. Bundled together were winter coats and tents and ten thousand individual gift parcels, which included wool socks, knit hats, soap, pencils, paper, and inflatable balls. FedEx had offered to ship the packages free of charge to Germany, where they would be loaded onto U.S. military transport planes, flown to Turkmenistan, and then trucked across the border into Northern Afghanistan. The formidable logistics were a reminder of how isolated this region and its people are.

On December 12, at a special ceremony at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, where I had once loved to stroll through exhibitions with Bar, George signed into law the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act of 2001 to provide health and education assistance to women and children in Afghanistan. One woman in attendance was known only as Farida. She had come to the United States as a refugee in 2000. She was a former aid worker who had tried to promote basic human rights for women. Even with the Taliban being driven from power, she was afraid to use her full name.

I had already seen that wary-eyed fear firsthand in late November of 2001, when I hosted a group of Afghan women for coffee.

Melanne Verveer, Hillary Clinton's White House chief of staff and now head of the organization Vital Voices, had phoned Andi Ball, my chief of staff, to say that eleven Afghan exiles, some living in the United States, some living overseas, were arriving in Washington. Would I consider meeting with them? I immediately said yes and invited them to the White House. I still remember the women's amazement at being welcomed into the home of presidents. Inside Afghanistan, under the Taliban, they had been banned from almost all government buildings and public places. We gathered in the Diplomatic Reception Room, which until Teddy Roosevelt's time had housed the White House's massive coal furnace. During the Depression and World War II, it would become the iconic scene of Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats. Jackie Kennedy had installed the room's fanciful French wallpaper, printed in 1834, depicting scenes from early America, including Niagara Falls and Boston Harbor. I watched the women's eyes move across the walls, taking everything in.

In speaking to reporters, I said that I hoped "one principle of that new government will be human rights, and that includes the rights of women and children." And I hoped that the new Afghan government, then being formed at a special gathering of Afghan nationals and exiles in Bonn, Germany, would "include everyone." I wanted women to have seats at the table and every Afghan child, girls as well as boys, to be offered an education.