Spoken from the Heart (50 page)

As I walked, I realized there are things that textbooks, photographs, or even graying documentary footage cannot teach. They cannot teach you how to feel when you see prayer shawls or baby shoes left by children torn from their mothers, or prison cells with the scratch marks of attempted escape. And I wept when I saw the thousands of eyeglasses, their lenses still smudged with tears and dirt. I, who would be nearly blind without glasses or contacts, could suddenly imagine people being driven into terror, with no way to see, groping about with their hands. And then there was the larger blindness, of the people who lived around the camps and around the world, of all of those who refused to see what was happening.

I thought too of Saddam Hussein, who had said how much he admired Adolf Hitler.

We waited for news out of Iraq. Some of it was positive and historic; we watched Iraqi citizens pull down statues of Saddam as people in the old Soviet Union and the Baltic nations had done to the images of Lenin and Stalin after the fall of communism. We heard reports of the Iraqis' joy at being able to speak freely for the first time in decades and to no longer live under the shadow of fear of Saddam and his henchmen. In some neighborhoods, Iraqi children trailed after American soldiers, staring in wonder at gifts of candy and crayons. But there were other disturbing signs. Museums and stores were looted. In sections of major urban areas, there was no rule of law. And there were attacks on our soldiers. At first, they were scattered incidents, a stray bomb or an errant shooter. But over the months the violence escalated. And no one was certain if the people behind it were disgruntled Ba'athists, the closest associates of Saddam, who had gone underground, or if they were Iranian-backed terrorists, or al Qaeda recruits. What we knew was American troops were under fire in a new kind of insurgent war.

In late September, after we had marked the second tearful anniversary of 9-11, I traveled to Paris as America's representative to the official ceremonies marking the United States' reentry after a nineteen-year absence into UNESCO, the United Nations' leading cultural and educational institution. The United States had withdrawn from UNESCO in 1984 to protest corruption and bias in the organization, but in the intervening years and with the end of the Cold War, UNESCO had made substantial efforts to reform, particularly under the leadership of its last director-general, the Japanese diplomat Koichiro Matsuura. Among its new missions were global literacy and addressing the serious lack of education in the developing world.

I also made a "social call" to President Jacques Chirac, who had been fiercely opposed to the Iraq War. In full view of the assembled photographers, he greeted me by bending over to kiss my hand, and the photo was beamed around the world. When he raised his head, he told me, "Let bygones be bygones."

From Paris I jetted to Moscow to attend Lyudmila Putina's first book festival, which was devoted to children's literature. The Russian press called it the "Festival of School Libraries." When Lyudmila invited me, she asked that I bring along several American children's book authors. I selected two writers whose books were among the few American children's books that had been translated into Russian, R. L. Stine of Goosebumps fame, whose own ancestors had emigrated from Russia looking for freedom in America, and the teen thriller writer Peter Lerangis. Rounding out our delegation was Marc Brown, best known for his chapter books about Arthur the aardvark. At the festival R. L. Stine helped Russian children write a scary story about a boy named Mark and his father's ghostly car. With Marc Brown drawing on a giant paper wall, the Russian children "created" a make-believe creature built from all different parts of the animal kingdom and invented a fairy tale. To the assembled school librarians and other invitees, I spoke about the need for families to turn off the television and read, and confessed my fondness for scary stories and mysteries and also Harry Potter. I added that to celebrate books is to celebrate freedom as much as it is to have fun.

Vladimir Putin joined us for lunch afterward, and he told me, "I heard your speech, and I saw that you had to mention freedom."

Lyudmila was particularly proud that her first book festival was what she called "legitimate." The attendees, nearly all women, were school librarians who had been selected to come to Moscow through an essay contest. They were not there because of family or party connections; none was, as Lyudmila put it, "a provincial governor's sister-in-law." Both Lyudmila and I very much agreed about the importance of education, and how difficult it is for books to compete with television, computers, and video games. The final night I was there, Lyudmila hosted a beautiful performance of the ballet
Don Quixote
at Moscow's enchanting Bolshoi Theatre.

In Washington, on Saturday, October 4, I hosted the third National Book Festival and then, two days later, a state dinner for the president and first lady of Kenya, Mwai and Lucy Kibaki. On October 10, at a speech in downtown Washington to the National Association of Women Judges, I was thrilled to tell them that Shirin Ebadi, the first female judge in Iran, had won the Nobel Peace Prize. "There can be no justice in the world," I told them, "unless every woman has equal rights." It saddens me that, in the twenty-first century, this point is one that still needs to be made. I think of our own lives and then of the lives of the women in Afghanistan and in Iraq. That day I spoke to the judges about how Iraqi women who came under political suspicion were "tortured, or raped, or beheaded. Some of Saddam's militiamen carried ID cards listing their official assignment as 'violation of women's honor.' Iraqi men were allowed to kill female relatives for supposed slights to the family name." By 2003, three out of four women in Iraq could not read. Over 60 percent of all Iraqi adults were illiterate. For the literate, Saddam had also succeeded in banning many of Iraq's best writers and poets. Free speech was nonexistent; the Iraqi secret police were known to sit in classrooms to monitor what was studied and what was said. By contrast, American soldiers solicited donations of school supplies from their friends and families for Iraqi children.

We can and should debate all American wars, but can anyone truly say that the world was a better place and Iraq a better nation with Saddam Hussein in power? Or that it would not have become a full-fledged terrorist haven? And then there are the unanswerables. What, for instance, would the world have said if, in 1999, the United States had invaded Afghanistan? But had we done so, might the World Trade Center be standing today, its offices and observation deck crowded? We will never know. The world does not operate according to the principles of "what if?" All leaders make choices, and no one can say for certain what would have happened had a different path been taken. For myself, I prefer to stand against oppression, to stand, with George, for freedom.

In late October I was in Asia with George, stopping in Japan, the Philippines, and then Thailand, where we called on King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Queen Sirikit. During our brief stay, I visited an AIDS treatment clinic and met a young girl, shunned by her family, who came alone for her medicine. In Bali, Indonesia, the scene of a recent terror bombing, the security was so tight that our delegation staff was not allowed to walk in front of the buildings. Every entry, for us and for them, was through a back door. Ships and submarines hovered off the coast.

Meanwhile, Great Britain was reeling from another kind of security breach when we arrived in November for an official state visit. The tabloids went wild with revelations that a reporter for the
Daily Mirror
had spent the last two months working as a "phony footman" inside Buckingham Palace. Among his duties was serving breakfast to the queen and Prince Philip; his last act before he resigned was to arrange fruit and chocolates in the Belgian Suite, the rooms we would occupy on our four-day visit. George and I were amazed at the idea of a tabloid spy, while my staff members were a bit in awe of the palace, each having been assigned her very own lady-in-waiting.

We had a chance to explore Buckingham Palace, and the queen suggested that I go with my staff to watch the preparations for the white-tie state dinner being given in our honor. It was held in the palace's ballroom, which Queen Victoria unveiled in 1856 to honor the end of the Crimean War. At one end is a massive dais with golden columns and two royal thrones. We stood at the room's edge and watched as the royal staff walked on top of the perfectly set tables in their stocking feet, measuring tapes in hand, to check that each knife, fork, and spoon was perfectly placed at each setting.

After well over one thousand years of kings in England, there is a rare perfection to royal events that is truly breathtaking. Even the queen's china is revered. I remember the American ambassador to Liberia telling me the story of the British evacuation from Monrovia in the 1990s, when Liberian rebel forces began advancing on the capital city. As British diplomats prepared to abandon their cliff-side embassy, they opened the ambassador's supply of champagne and announced that they must destroy the china. The porcelain was too heavy to carry out, and it is against British law to allow the queen's china to fall into enemy hands. With champagne flutes in one hand and plates and teacups in the other, everyone stood on the balcony and hurled the pieces onto the cliffs below.

The royal family is not without its quirks. When Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, came to visit us, they requested glasses of ice before we began a long receiving line. The staff dutifully produced them, and the prince removed a flask from his pocket and added to each a small splash of what I presume was straight gin, so that they might be fortified before the hour or more of shaking hands.

The night of the royal state dinner for George and me at Buckingham Palace, I donned a Carolina Herrera burgundy dress, a fitted velvet top over a tulle skirt. Barbara Bush had loaned me the "Bush family jewels," diamonds and pearls. The next evening we reciprocated the hospitality of the queen and Prince Philip with a dinner at the American ambassador's residence, Winfield House, where the ambassador's dog roamed freely through the room. He began barking as George stood to give his toast, and Cathy Fenton, our social secretary, was left to scramble to scoop up the dog and remove him from the room so he wouldn't howl or yap when the queen rose and lifted her glass. After dinner Andrew Lloyd Webber and a small ensemble performed in honor of the queen. Our last stop was Sedgefield, England, Tony Blair's childhood home and his longtime parliamentary constituency, the British electors who placed him in Parliament. There we dined at the Dun Cow Inn with some of the Blairs' oldest friends.

The following week was Thanksgiving, which we were to spend at the ranch with Bar and Gampy and Barbara and Jenna, but for weeks I had known that George would likely miss our family feast. He was making a surprise visit to Baghdad to see the troops. I knew the exact moment he was supposed to land, and I immediately turned on the television to wait for the news. An hour passed. Then two hours. Still there was no film footage, no live feed. Late in the morning, I called the Secret Service agents' outpost on the ranch and asked, "Where's the president?" The agent in charge replied, "We show him in the ranch house, ma'am." I quickly said, "Oh, I'll go look again." The Baghdad trip was so secretive that even our own agents didn't know where George was. Condi Rice's Secret Service detail had spent the entire night in a car, with the motor running, outside our little clapboard house, where she usually stayed when she was in Crawford. They had no idea that she was on her way to Baghdad. A commercial plane in the sky that glimpsed Air Force One was told it was mistaken. When I did finally see the footage of George on television, I called Lisa Gottesman, the mother of George's personal aide, Blake. He was in Iraq, serving the troops from the chow line, alongside the president. I told her to turn on the television and see her son. She was in her kitchen making Thanksgiving dinner. When she looked at the screen, she burst into tears. Not because she was scared but because she was so proud of her son for having gone with George.

Our soldiers were thrilled to see George, who served a bunch of them supper in the chow line, visited, and ate a Thanksgiving meal. But it was he who was most grateful. His was a small gesture. Their service, every day, was the large one.

The December season was subdued that year. Every White House has had parties, even in wartime. The Lincolns hosted gatherings that lasted until the early hours of the morning. Eleanor Roosevelt installed an elaborate swing set on the White House grounds for her granddaughter's sixth birthday in 1933, during the height of the Great Depression. Lyndon Johnson ended the cycle of mourning for John F. Kennedy with a spur-of-the-moment decision to invite Congress over for a Christmas party. Layers of black crepe were removed and evergreens and poinsettias placed around the house. The kitchen rushed to prepare food and, at Johnson's request, mixed gallons of spiked punch.

This year we knew that, in many homes, families were missing a father or a mother, a son or a daughter, who was fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. We held our annual children's party for military children who lived in or near Washington. Roland Mesnier, the pastry chef, displayed his cake-making skills, entertaining them with fabulous sweet creations. For our holiday theme, I chose "A Season of Stories," featuring favorite timeless storybook characters. The White House Christmas tree was decorated with storybook character ornaments that my mother-in-law had used over a decade before. There is great pleasure to be had in giving new life to old ornaments, just as many families over the generations do on their own trees. To adorn our annual card, I chose an image of the Diplomatic Reception Room, with a warming fire and George Washington above the mantel, painted by artist Barbara Prey. Our verse came from the book of Job: "You have granted me life and loving kindness; and your care has preserved my spirit."

On December 13, a grimy, unkempt Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a hole in his hometown of Tikrit. We had hope, but we were wary. Next year, 2004, would be another year of war abroad. At home, it was a presidential election year.