Spoken from the Heart (59 page)

For eight years, every day that I was in the White House, I walked past the black lacquer screen that Nancy Reagan had added to the cavernous, yellow upstairs hallway to make it appear a bit smaller and more intimate in scale. Day after day Bar Bush and Hillary Clinton had passed it too, and there was great comfort in that continuity. To live in the White House is to live with your predecessors, with their decorating, their renovations, their furniture; Bill Clinton's Oval Office couches, re-covered, were now in our residence upstairs. George and I both pored over biographies and histories of the men and women who had inhabited these walls; our bedside tables were crowded with books about their lives. And there was a real solace to these constant reminders of what had gone before, to know that from within these walls Franklin Roosevelt had faced the Pearl Harbor attack, Abraham Lincoln had agonized over the Civil War, and tens of other presidents had struggled with their Congresses and their consciences as well. Our presidents have overwhelmingly been good and decent men, men who did the best they could under the circumstances they faced, with the knowledge they had. They loved their country and wanted the best for it and for the office they held.

I loved the White House. I took great pleasure in the chance to keep and to conserve it, restoring the elegant silk wall covering in the Green Room that Jackie Kennedy had selected more than four decades before, or embarking on a project to renew the library and many of the ground-floor rooms, as well as to restore the Lincoln Bedroom, working on each space with White House curators and preservationists. I was delighted too whenever former presidents and their families returned. We had Nancy Reagan to the White House on several occasions, sometimes to stay overnight in the Queens' Bedroom. We hosted a ninetieth birthday party for Gerald Ford. And in the fall of 2005, Lynda Johnson Robb called to tell me that her mother, Lady Bird Johnson, would be making what was probably her last trip to Washington, D.C. I gladly invited her to the White House. I had always admired Lady Bird, the first Texas first lady, and had been so proud that she had recognized the great natural beauty of our home state and nation. When we drive our vast highways, past waving grasses and blooming flowers, acres of bluebonnets or black-eyed Susans or Queen Anne's lace, that is the legacy of her touch, of how she worked to beautify America with native plants and wildflowers.

A series of strokes had left Lady Bird unable to speak or walk. I met her in her wheelchair with Lynda at the South Portico. Joining me was the retired White House maitre d', Wilson Jerman, who had worked under President Johnson, and when the two of them saw each other, they fell into each other's arms. We wheeled Lady Bird inside to the Vermeil Room, so she could see her portrait hanging above the carved mantel. Her face broke into the most beautiful smile. When I began redoing the Vermeil Room on the ground floor, I had asked the painters to adjust the color of the walls to more closely match the pale gold-yellow of the dress Lady Bird is wearing in her portrait, which also blends with Jackie Kennedy's pale and elegant column dress in her portrait on the adjoining wall, so the room is all of a piece.

When we took Lady Bird up to the State Floor to see the portrait of her husband, she reached her arms out as if to touch him. And as we passed through the rooms, she would put her hands together and clap lightly or utter a bit of gasp when she saw a piece of furniture or a painting that she remembered.

By 2007, when the U.S. Department of Education building was renamed in honor of Lyndon Johnson, who had signed some sixty education acts as president, Lady Bird was too frail to travel to Washington. George invited her daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren to the bill signing. Inside the Oval Office, he placed a call to Texas so Lady Bird could listen to the ceremony. George said, "I'm signing this bill right now, Lady Bird." Then we had the whole Johnson family up to the residence so that Lynda and Luci, now long grown, could see their old rooms and show their children and grandchildren the home where they had once lived.

The months of travel during the 2004 reelection campaign had given me time to reflect, and as I moved about the country, I began to consider what I would like to work on if George won a second term.

For years I had known that, as a nation, we are not focusing on boys the way we should. The statistics tell a particularly bleak story: Boys are more likely to drop out of high school than girls; boys are more likely to have a learning disability; fewer boys than girls attend college--girls are soon expected to make up 60 percent of all college undergraduates; fewer young men than young women attend graduate school. Boys are much more likely to be incarcerated and to get into trouble for drug and alcohol use. In the last forty years, the nation has entirely rethought how we raise girls, fostering their belief that they have every opportunity. But we have not given that same thought to boys; they are still locked in traditions as much as our daughters were two generations ago. And as they grow into men, the importance of their role as fathers is often demeaned. We expect men to provide financial support, but many of their other skills have been marginalized. They are too often viewed as the television caricatures of bumbling, hapless people, not as vital nurturers.

Yet that is very far from the truth. Since I was a young child, I had seen the difference that fathers made, in my life and others. I remember my second-grade friend Georgia, whose own father had died, and how my father would take her and me to the father-daughter events at school or with the Girl Scouts. And I remembered the many boys I met on school visits or during other events, such as the twelve-year-old in Austin who talked to me about not having a dad to play catch with and do the things that dads do. As he spoke, he struggled with the words; he felt the loss of a father so deeply. And of course, I had seen the consequences of absent fathers when I taught and worked in Dallas, Houston, and Austin. When you are missing a parent, you live with a special sadness for your entire life.

I knew the statistics, I knew the stories, and in August of 2004, I decided that if George won, I would start a special White House initiative to focus on boys. By January of 2005, I had expanded that idea to include troubled and at-risk girls as well, but the major focus remained on boys. George announced the Helping America's Youth initiative in his 2005 State of the Union speech. The initiative was my responsibility to lead. My goals were several: to raise awareness about the problems young people face and to motivate caring adults to connect with our nation's young people in their families, schools, and communities. I also wanted to examine the myriad of federal programs for at-risk youth, scattered across twelve departments as diverse as defense, justice, education, and health and human services. Each agency gives millions of dollars in grants every year to programs that serve youth. But sometimes programs duplicated each other, or the effect was unfocused or uncoordinated, and the different agencies did not always communicate with one another. As part of Helping America's Youth, my staff and I created one interagency working group, bringing together all these agencies and government entities so this disconnect would change.

Almost immediately that winter, I began traveling the country to visit some of the most innovative and daring private programs focused on at-risk youth, such as a Chicago program that cut shootings by 68 percent in one police district and the largest gang intervention program in the nation, in Los Angeles. Over the next four years, I would do fifty separate events around the nation, focused solely on Helping America's Youth.

Starting in the winter of 2005, my staff and I also began planning a major conference, to be held in October at Howard University, a historically African-American university chartered in 1867 and located in Washington, D.C. We gathered over five hundred civic leaders, educators, faith-based and community service providers, teen experts, and parents to highlight the most serious problems facing American boys and youth--and to showcase successful solutions. In this way, individual communities would not have to keep reinventing the wheel. The thought was, where success stories exist, let's find them and share them, so that more children and teens have a chance. We invited people from all political persuasions; this is an issue beyond politics.

On the day before the Howard University conference, I sat for an interview with the
New York Times
reporter Jason DeParle. Jason's beat was poverty and welfare, and on the campaign trail the previous year, I had read an article he had written for
The New York Times Magazine
about a young man named Kenyatta Thigpen, who was trying to turn his life around. Ken had been a drug dealer and pimp who had done time in jail, but now he had a three-year-old son, and he was determined to be a good parent. He was trying to become the father that he had never had, even driving a pizza delivery car at night so that he could be with his boy during the day. I had met Ken, his girlfriend, and his son in March during a visit to the Rosalie Manor Community and Family Services Center in Milwaukee. When we met, I told him that this article about his life and struggles had helped crystallize my thinking about ways to reach out to the young people who are most in need. Now, as we prepared to open the Howard University conference, where I had invited Ken to speak, I was also eager to meet the reporter who had first written about him.

I had long ago resigned myself to what was written about me in the press. First ladies generally have an easier time than presidents, but that doesn't exempt them from criticism. In the beginning, much of the commentary focused on how I looked. Whereas Hillary Clinton was mocked for her hairstyles and headbands, I was told, "Laura Bush is begging for a makeover" and "She's no Jackie O." On January 15, 2001, before George had even taken office,
The New York Times
wrote, "Some historians predict that the first lady she may come to resemble most is Mamie Eisenhower . . . whose division of labor was simple: 'Ike runs the country and I turn the lamb chops.' And," the
Times
continued, "Mamie wasn't such a great cook either, but understood the symbolic need to look as if she were a great cook," thus managing to zing me and Mamie Eisenhower in the same line.

In March of 2001,
The Washington Post
asked: "Everybody wants to know: Is she publicly genteel and privately tart? Is she smarter than he is? Does she work to make herself somehow smaller next to him?" By George's second term, it was lines like
The Boston Globe
's "Maybe Laura Bush will finally break out of the plastic." I was used to all of this. It comes with the job.

I was also used to questions that began with negative poll numbers about George, and then went on to ask "How does that make you feel?" such as when Ed Henry of CNN said, "But you know what people are saying, which is that your favorability rating in the latest CNN poll is 68 percent, about twenty-two points higher than your husband. . . . Does that annoy you?" Or the reporter who began our interview by asking me if I had ever Googled myself, then proceeded to discuss nasty entries about me that popped up on a Google search. I was used to having my words reinterpreted, as when, on my July 2005 Africa trip, I was asked if I wanted George to name a woman to Sandra Day O'Connor's soon-to-be-vacant spot on the Supreme Court. "Sure," I said, "I would really like for him to name another woman. I know that my husband will pick somebody who has a lot of integrity and strength. And whether it's a man or a woman, of course, I have no idea." But the headline was "First Lady Wants New Female Justice," as if I were pointedly instructing George and drawing a line in the sand.