Spoken from the Heart (63 page)

Over a whirlwind three days, I made a number of stops. I visited one of Mother Teresa's homes for disabled children in New Delhi; Mother Teresa's ministry cares for some ten thousand children, many of them abandoned. The homes are a true testament to her love for those so many others consider "the least." I chatted with Indian Muppets as they taped part of
Galli Galli Sim Sim,
their version of
Sesame Street.
George and I laid a wreath at the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, then bowed for a moment of silence and threw rose petals in honor of his memory. Before we departed, Prime Minister Singh and Mrs. Gursharan Kaur hosted a lovely lunch for us at Taj Palace Hotel. The prime minister is one of the kindest and gentlest world leaders, a quiet and elegant man, and George and I were happy that the United States had developed such a warm and rich relationship with India. At the lunch George stood up and walked with Prime Minister Singh to each table, to greet everyone in the room. Our final night, the president of India, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, held a giant outdoor dinner for us on the perfectly manicured lawns of the Presidential Palace. Waiters in white gloves served us from overflowing platters of food, and the grounds were decorated with hundreds of glimmering white lights, echoing the bright stars above.

From India we flew to Pakistan, where the previous day a bomb in Karachi had killed a U.S. diplomat. There had also been angry street protests, and the security surrounding us was so tight we barely glimpsed Islamabad. Our ambassador, Ryan Crocker, invited George to take a few swings with a cricket bat, but most of the time was spent on high-level talks with President Pervez Musharraf. At a dinner in our honor, we watched a beautiful display of folk dancing. But at my table, Sehba Musharraf, the prime minister's wife, lamented that so many young Pakistanis knew very little about their nation's arts and culture. When I returned home I reached out to Michael Kaiser, the president of the Kennedy Center and an arts ambassador for the state department. Michael flew to Pakistan to offer advice, and later that year Mrs. Musharraf made her own trip to the United States to attend a Pakistani cultural event at the Kennedy Center. It was the beginning of a number of fruitful arts partnerships between the Kennedy Center and other nations around the globe.

In mid-March I returned to New Orleans for a tour of the levees with the Army Corps of Engineers, who explained where they had been breached and what was being done to repair them. It was six months after Katrina, and there was still devastation. I also visited several schools to follow the rebuilding efforts. On May 3, the Laura Bush Foundation would make its first grants to restock school libraries across the Gulf Coast.

Yet each time I returned to New Orleans, I could see progress. At first it was just the collection and disposal of debris, but little by little the empty buildings were being removed or reclaimed. We saw strip malls and groups of stores slowly return to life. Parking lots that had been empty now had a few cars. Where windows had been dark, there were bits of light. But there was still so far to go.

That spring Andy Card retired from the White House after over five years as George's chief of staff. He had served in the post longer than any other chief of staff in recent White House history. Under incredibly intense pressures, Andy had kept his even-tempered and fair style, which earned him bipartisan praise across Washington. We valued him not just for his skill but for his friendship. We had become especially close with Andy and his wife, Kathleene. They had spent many weekends with us at Camp David, invariably leaving late Saturday night or at dawn on Sunday so Kathi could return to her church in McLean, Virginia, where she was an assistant minister. After 9-11, Kathi and Alma Powell, Colin Powell's wife, had reached out to the spouses of George's cabinet secretaries and White House staff. That September many were new to Washington; some had young children, and now their husbands or wives were gone from their houses and their lives, working at a breakneck pace seven days a week. Kathi, together with Alma, who had spent years managing the separation and sometimes isolation that came when her husband was deployed overseas with the military, gave these spouses refuge, a place to talk, and a way of supporting each other.

Andy and Kathi's caring, calm, and compassion were and are invaluable to us.

The annual White House Easter Egg Roll dates back to Andrew Johnson's administration. Then it was just a family affair. Eggs were dyed on Easter Sunday and rolled along the lawns on Monday morning. The larger gathering of local children, eggs, and spoons was held on the Capitol grounds. But in 1876, Congress grew tired of divots in its grass and rotting abandoned eggs. It passed a law forbidding the Capitol grounds to be used as a children's playground. The roll was rained out in 1877, but in 1878 President Rutherford B. Hayes opened the gates of the White House to the displaced egg rollers. Only two world wars and horrible weather have canceled the event since. When they were six, I had taken Barbara and Jenna to the roll while Gampy was vice president.

By the time George and I arrived at the White House, the roll had become an elaborate production. We hosted entertainers, including the singers Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers, as well as magicians and celebrity storybook readers, featuring sports stars like Troy Aikman of the Dallas Cowboys and cabinet officials. Thousands of small children rolled their eggs with wooden spoons. As a reward, each would be sent home with an inscribed wooden White House egg.

For me 2006 will always be known as the year of the great egg caper. That Easter Monday morning, a member of the Social Office noticed a seventy-year-old lady who was a longtime volunteer at the roll. Instead of working she was repeatedly visiting the Porta-Potty on the South Lawn. Concerned, the staffer told a member of the White House Visitors Office, who walked over and opened the bathroom door. Inside the volunteer was stuffing masses of wooden Easter eggs into her girdle. The White House staff then began a search of other senior citizen volunteers and uncovered a widespread ring. The women were surreptitiously taking the eggs and coloring books into large Porta-Potties and slipping them under the stalls to a "ringleader," who was hiding the contraband in a bright yellow trash bag that she had removed from a bathroom trash can. From there they planned to smuggle them off the grounds. Instead of creating a scene, White House staff redirected the women to work at the food tent, serving egg salad. The staff then took down their names, and they were permanently removed from the volunteer list.

Sadly, pilfering was a common problem at the White House. Guests would walk out of the washrooms with hand towels stuffed in their jackets or purses. One prominent television personality was known for having a collection of White House paper hand towels, monogrammed with the presidential seal, in her powder room. She had "accumulated" them when she came for interviews. Over the years, guests had removed pieces of flatware to the point where one set of silver engraved with the words "The President's House" was so popular as a "souvenir" that we used it only in the private dining room upstairs. Guests also helped themselves to the vermeil eagle place card holders. After these repeatedly vanished from the dinner tables, we asked the butlers to remove the card holders before dessert was served. Some visitors even took the dangling cut glass pieces from the sconces that hung in the ladies' room on the ground floor. There were times when the social secretary's staff joked that we should have guests walk through the magnetometers on the way in, and again on the way out.

Occasionally a guest was apprehended before making it onto White House grounds. One very well dressed woman, who had been placed on a guest list at the request of a Senate office, was detained by the Secret Service at the entry gate. She had three federal bench warrants out for her arrest. The warrants popped up when the officers ran her Social Security number through the database. As the officers led her away in handcuffs, she insisted upon draping her fur coat over her wrists and hands. Another time an aide accompanying a preschool tour group was detained because she was in the country illegally, and one guest's driver was nabbed for having thousands of dollars in outstanding parking tickets.

There were also moments of entrepreneurial daring, such as the time a group of singers opened huge black cases inside the Vermeil Room, placed them on the antique furniture, and began selling jewelry to the other performers right underneath Eleanor Roosevelt's portrait. They had concealed the jewelry inside their voluminous clothing bags, and the Secret Service had assumed it was for them to wear.

Some other performers who came to entertain would send over pages of requirements, down to what type of water they wanted to drink and what snacks they would eat. One celebrity singer wanted us to create a White House dressing room for him, complete with a star on the door.

On April 20, we hosted the president of the People's Republic of China, Hu Jintao, and his wife, Madame Liu, for a state visit. The United States' relationship with China is one of our most important, and George had his own special Chinese relationship. His father had served as the U.S. envoy to the People's Republic in 1974-75, after relations between America and China were reestablished following the Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War. As a young man, George had bicycled through the streets of Beijing. But this morning disaster lurked at every turn. At the arrival ceremony, President Hu was introduced as being from the Republic of China, which is the official designation for Taiwan. During the ceremony itself, Wenyi Wang, a forty-seven-year-old woman who had been admitted as part of the press pool--she had credentials from
The Epoch Times,
a newspaper that had covered other White House events--stood up and began to scream at the Chinese leader, denouncing him for his treatment of Falun Gong, a Chinese religious sect. She yelled, "President Bush, stop him from killing." It took several minutes for uniformed security officers to remove her--the plainclothes Secret Service are charged to act only if there is an immediate threat to the physical security of the president--and until the officers arrived, her curdling, high-pitched cries echoed across the South Lawn. President Hu and his wife were gracious, but George and I were embarrassed. There are no do-overs for events like state visits. Controversy can follow any state leader, not only Americans, abroad.

Two months later we were back on the South Lawn to welcome Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan. Koizumi, who had become our good friend, would be staying for two days, and that night we planned an official dinner in his honor, with flower arrangements reminiscent of a Japanese garden, green orchid topiaries rising over the tops of tall glass cylinders. More than the black-tie evening, we knew Koizumi was looking forward to the following morning, when we took off from Andrews Air Force Base for Memphis, Tennessee. He is a huge fan of Elvis, so we had planned a trip to the King's home, Graceland. Waiting on the front steps to take us through the house were Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley, and when Koizumi saw them, he began singing the Elvis classic "Love Me Tender" to Priscilla. After the tour, we stopped for lunch at the famed Memphis barbecue restaurant the Rendezvous, where Koizumi donned big gold sunglasses, hopped up on the stage, and asked a three-piece band to play the Elvis hit "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You," while his face beamed and he sang along. He was overjoyed. As a gift, we gave him a 1950s jukebox filled with songs by Elvis and other rock 'n' roll classics.

My late spring was filled with return trips to New Orleans, projects for Helping America's Youth, and a UN General Assembly High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS, as well as another trip with George to Austria and Hungary. In June, U.S. troops in Iraq had reached their lowest levels in two years, 125,000, but the violence around the nation was not abating. On June 13, George made another surprise visit to Baghdad to meet with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. He increased U.S. troop levels and knew that the 2006 midterm election would likely be a referendum on the Iraq War.