Spoken from the Heart (45 page)

On July 17, Poland's president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, and his wife, Jolanta, came to Washington for an official state visit. George and I had visited Poland the previous summer, and in one of my albums, I had a collection of photographs from the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw taken several days after 9-11. The entrance overflowed with flowers and notes that read, "We are with you." "We are all American."

In the wake of 9-11, President Kwasniewski had helped mobilize central, eastern, and southeastern Europe to respond more aggressively to international terrorism and pursue terrorists. Although George had held more than fifty meetings with heads of state from around the world in the last eighteen months, this was just our second state dinner, and our first since September 11. State visits are precision displays, with everything organized down to the minute, and the protocol is almost as tradition-bound as the ceremonial opening of Parliament by the British monarch. That morning we hosted a formal arrival ceremony for the Kwasniewskis with four thousand guests on the South Lawn.

As the final bars of the fanfare music, "Ruffles and Flourishes," sounded from trumpets on the Truman Balcony, George and I stepped into a small alcove outside the Diplomatic Reception Room. We stood there, completely still, barricaded behind two very tall, fully dressed Marine Guards until "Hail to the Chief" commenced. Then the guards parted and we began the walk down the red carpet to await our guests, who at that same moment were motoring up in their limousine. Military bands played the two national anthems; there was a twenty-one-gun salute, and the Revolutionary War-era Fife and Drum Corps marched past, playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Together George and Aleksander walked forward to review the U.S. troops representing all the military services, standing at attention in perfect formation. Afterward, both presidents spoke. At the conclusion we walked up the South Portico steps to the balcony and turned for a final wave before entering the Blue Room for an official receiving line. The two presidents departed to confer in the Oval Office; Jolanta and I retired to the Green Room for coffee. Between the arrival ceremony and the dinner preview for the press, and before the dinner itself, I slipped off to the National Cathedral for the memorial service for J. Carter Brown, the longtime director of the National Gallery of Art.

The evening was every bit as ceremonial as the arrival; there was another official greeting, and full-dress members of the Joint Service Color Guard, representing the military services, the Army, Navy, and the Marines--a fourth member is from either the Air Force or the Coast Guard, which alternate events--led us in a formal procession down the grand staircase and to the East Room to greet our guests. After the receiving line, we proceeded to the State Dining Room for the official toasts and dinner. The largest change in state dinner protocol in recent decades had come forty years before, when Jackie Kennedy traded in the traditional long, horseshoe-shaped table for round ones. For the Kwasniewskis, the tables were decorated with red and white roses and daisies, in honor of the Polish flag. I had once heard the horrible tale of an official dinner where the flower arrangements had been in the colors of the guest nation's mortal enemy, and I was always deeply conscious of the flowers we chose. For the place settings, I had selected Nancy Reagan's red china and reproductions of Jackie Kennedy's West Virginia crystal; no one is able to use Jackie's original pieces, because too few remain. The glasses have been broken and chipped over the years; multiple glasses are lost at every party held, and the West Virginia glass blowers that once made them have long since shuttered their doors. Most crystal is now manufactured overseas. Fortunately, Lenox copied the Kennedy pattern, and it has continued to provide the White House with reproductions of Jackie Kennedy's glassware.

China dinner services are almost as much of a challenge. The earliest presidents brought their own porcelain sets, usually made in France or England, and dutifully crated up the pieces and carried them back home when they left office. There are a few scattered plates and teacups remaining in the White House collection, and we did host small dinners in the upstairs residence with plates from the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and Lady Bird Johnson's lovely wildflower pieces. But only the most recent china services, Nancy Reagan's famous red and Hillary Clinton's pale yellow, have enough pieces to be used for a state dinner. Every dinner takes a small toll on the china collections. Before Hillary Clinton ordered her pale yellow pattern, she asked Lenox to rerun pieces from some older china services to fill in the gaps from near constant breakage and chipping. Using privately raised funds from the nonprofit White House Historical Association, I added another china service near the end of George's second term. Manufactured by Lenox, its green lattice design is based on the few pieces of James and Dolley Madison's china in the White House collection. I ordered 320 place settings, but the pieces arrived in small batches, and we never had the chance to host a full dinner with them.

Three months of planning and preparation had gone into this dinner, but I had not planned on Jolanta wearing a long dress with a gauzy silk 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."

After the high precision and gloss of the state dinner, Jolanta and I spent the next day in Philadelphia, where we toured the Thaddeus Kosciuszko house, home to the famous Polish soldier who was instrumental in our own Revolutionary War. Many Polish-Americans still lived in the neighborhood. I hosted a luncheon for Jolanta at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and to commemorate the visit, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts offered to loan us a painting for the White House. I chose a Karl Anderson piece, painted by the brother of the writer Sherwood Anderson, best known for his
Winesburg, Ohio.
We hung it in our bedroom.

The following week, I traded in my blush-colored tulle state dinner gown for jeans, a floppy hat, and hiking boots. My destination was Yellowstone National Park. I was meeting four of my childhood friends.

Our first summer hiking trip had been to the Grand Canyon National Park, the year we turned forty. For three years in the 1990s, we had entered the lottery to stay at the tented campsites inside Yosemite National Park in California. But we were never picked. After George was elected president, I told my friends, "We finally won the lottery." In the summer of 2001, we at last hiked around Yosemite's gorgeous scenery. Then Ron Sprinkle, the head of my Secret Service detail and a former law enforcement ranger in Yellowstone, told me we had to visit his former national park. We stayed in rangers' cabins in the deserted backcountry and rode horses through a massive downpour one afternoon. We camped in a lone cabin on Peak Island, where an enormous old tree blew over and nearly landed on our roof, and in another spot where at dusk an awkward and skinny-legged teenage moose wandered past the five of us. We dipped our feet in hot, rushing creeks and watched as the mighty geyser Old Faithful spewed its water aloft. We hiked past the bubbling mud pots and gazed upon the forests where massive wildfires had blackened and scarred the trees, and where new, green saplings were now pushing their way up from the once-charred ground. With the cool tree canopy gone, the old forest floor was carpeted with wildflowers, blooming in the unexpected sunlight. We talked as we walked the trails and read poetry at night as the stars hung above us in the sky.

I came to cherish these annual trips, not simply for the uninterrupted pleasure of friendship but for the chance to be out in nature, to be unencumbered by schedules, appointments, and the constant forward rush of time. We could pick up our friendships as if one year had not passed, as if we had all been together the month or week before. It is hard sometimes, for women especially, to steal time for friends. The demands on us from families, from jobs, from every other commitment are so strong and unrelenting. But friendship is what nurtures us. My friends were often my sustenance during the White House years. We could talk, laugh, and simply be. Sharing those trails renewed me, body and soul.

I returned to Washington, and George and I began to contemplate the first anniversary of 9-11. On September 10, I spoke at the opening of the 9-11 exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. It was in the same building that housed the first ladies' inaugural gowns, including my own. Gathered with me among the invited guests were Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, and Pentagon rescue workers. The exhibition, "September 11: Bearing Witness to History," was a collection of objects and artifacts from 9-11, including the briefcase that belonged to a woman who worked on the 103rd floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She had miraculously escaped. There was a squeegee that had been used by maintenance workers to pry open an elevator in the Trade Center's North Tower and a metal crowbar used by a fireman to break through wallboard.

Fire Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer, who had helped direct the rescue operations that morning, stood beside the crowbar and spoke of sending another firefighter up into the burning towers. "I told him to go up, go up with his company, but not to go any higher than seventy. . . . After I told him, he stood there, and in the silence we looked at each other, and he turned around and he walked over to his men and took them upstairs. That was the last time I saw that lieutenant. That lieutenant was my brother, Kevin." The crowbar on display was the one that Kevin had been carrying. It was found next to his body in the rubble.

Near the crowbar, Joseph Pfeifer's helmet, boots, and coat were now also preserved. "My definition of a hero," Pfeifer said that morning, "is one of ordinary people doing the ordinary right thing at an extraordinary time." The exhibition also included a twisted piece of steel from the South Tower, a crushed fire truck door, and a partially melted television screen from the Pentagon. In its own glass display was the bullhorn that George had used, standing on the towers' rubble, to tell the rescue workers, "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

There was also a section from one of the many walls of prayers that had dotted Manhattan, this one by Bellevue Hospital, where people had posted notes and pictures, searching for loved ones. I spoke of the love we will always share with the heroes, "both here and beyond."

The following day, we began with a service at St. John's Church, across Lafayette Square from the White House. The Reverend Luis Leon, a refugee from Cuba sent to our shores by his parents to start a new life in freedom, delivered the sermon. He had fled on the frantic "Pedro Pan," or Peter Pan airlifts of children as Fidel Castro was seizing power. He would never see his father again. Leon spoke of that terrible morning of September 11. He likened it to a tattoo on our national soul. We who were alive on that morning were marked by it, indelibly and forever. "Mr. President," he said, "you never asked me why the terrorists did it. But I think they did it because this is a country where an immigrant can preach to the president."

At precisely 8:46 a.m., the moment the first plane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center one year ago, we stood on the South Lawn of the White House and bowed our heads for a moment of silence. Standing with us were Dick and Lynne Cheney, the cabinet, and the senior and White House staff, including the residence staff, the chefs from the kitchen, the doormen, the ushers and butlers, telephone operators, and maintenance workers, all of whom had come together to remember those we had lost. We observed that moment of silence each September 11 for the next six years, and the tradition continues still.

From there we went first to the Pentagon, where twelve thousand men and women in uniform had gathered, then to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and then to New York. We laid wreaths and listened to prayers; in Pennsylvania the two ministers who spoke were relatives of the victims of Flight 93. At the Pentagon, in Pennsylvania, and in New York, we spent time visiting with the families of those who had died. They had survived their year of firsts--first Thanksgiving, first Christmas or Hanukkah, first New Year's, first Valentine's Day, first Easter or Passover, first birthday, first wedding anniversary, first Mother's or Father's Day. But I knew that as the years continued to pass, those absences would accumulate, and at some terrible tipping point, the days dead would outnumber the days alive. Nearly all the families had brought pictures, and they wanted me to know about the person they had lost. They talked about how funny he was, what a great mother she had been, or what a wonderful brother or sister. It was important for them to talk about those whom they had loved and lost. The talking soothed, and it helped to keep the one they loved alive in their hearts. So many had lost the person they loved the best.

We stayed in New York that night because on the heels of September 11 came the annual opening of the United Nations. It had been postponed the previous year, but this fall the General Assembly would be reconvening with its usual pomp and circumstance. The streets would be clogged with arriving heads of state and other world leaders making their way to grand receptions; roadblocks and traffic barricades would bring much of midtown Manhattan to a standstill. I had been working for weeks on a reception that George and I would host that night at the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center, just steps from where the Twin Towers had stood. But first, in the morning, George was slated to address the international delegates at the UN.

His announcement that the United States would rejoin UNESCO was warmly received. But the balance of his speech dealt with Iraq. He cited that fact that it had been four years since the last UN inspectors had set foot in Iraq. He reviewed Saddam Hussein's flagrant defiance of multiple UN resolutions. I listened as George said, "The first time we may be completely certain he has a nuclear weapon is when, God forbid, he uses one." He laid out a series of steps for Saddam, giving him a road map to peace, including disclose, remove, and destroy weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles; end all support for terrorism; cease persecuting his civilian population; and stop exploiting the oil-for-food program for his personal gain. He then called on the world to hold Iraq's regime to account. "With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. . . . We must choose between a world of fear and a world of progress. We cannot stand by and do nothing while dangers gather."