Spoken from the Heart (64 page)

We now had two late-summer anniversaries to mark, the one-year anniversary of Katrina and the five-year anniversary of 9-11.

For the Katrina anniversary, George and I returned to New Orleans on a day that was bright and sunny with thick, swampy heat. We stopped for hotcakes at Betsy's Pancake House and visited a school. We also visited the devastated Ninth Ward and Lower Ninth Ward, which before it was settled had been a low-lying cypress swamp and early plantation land. Sitting below sea level, and positioned between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain, the Lower Ninth Ward had been the site of some of Katrina's worst flooding. More than four thousand homes had filled with water; many had washed away or been destroyed.

We called on the music legend Fats Domino, who had been born in that ward and whose rhythm and blues had poured out of my radio when I was a teenager in Midland. When the floodwaters came, Fats's tan-brick house was engulfed. The waters rose past the priceless collection of gold and platinum records adorning his walls. Decades of mementos washed away or were ruined in the flood. One item that had been lost was the National Medal of Arts given to him by Bill Clinton. Before we left George had asked Bill whether he would mind if we had the medal recast. Bill was thrilled. So we presented Fats Domino with a second gold medal, cast from the same mold, and draped it over his neck.

Our final event was held on the tarmac at the airport, where we met the New Orleans Saints football team, who were about to play their first game of the season in the Superdome. A year before, the Superdome had held thirty thousand evacuees from the floodwaters. Now New Orleans was happily celebrating the Saints' return to the city for NFL competition.

For the five-year anniversary of 9-11, in addition to the traditional wreath laying and visit to Ground Zero, we made a special visit to the "Fort Pitt" firehouse to observe the day with rescuers who were mourning their buddies, some who had been lost and some who were still scarred by that day.

The UN General Assembly opened immediately after the remembrances for 9-11. I was there to hear George's address to the UN, and I had a special event of my own.

In 2003 I had been asked to serve as UNESCO's honorary ambassador for its Decade of Literacy, and my staff was working feverishly to convene a White House global literacy conference at the New York Public Library to coincide with the United Nations meeting.

Almost three-quarters of a billion adults in the world cannot read or write; two-thirds of the illiterate are women. UNESCO's focus was on the thirty-five countries with the highest illiteracy rates, where less than half the population can read and write. But although the problem was easy to enumerate, the solutions are far more challenging. In 2003 UNESCO had announced its goal of increasing global literacy by 50 percent by the year 2015. By 2005 UNESCO realized that it could not meet its goal. That fact alone gave this September 18, 2006, meeting particular urgency.

At the New York Public Library, amid great books by some of the finest writers, the White House Conference on Global Literacy brought together forty-one education ministers, thirty-two first ladies and spouses, and literacy experts from seventy-five countries to share information and learn about which programs work best. Among our presenters was Dr. Perri Klass, a renowned pediatrician who is also the director of the Reach Out and Read National Center. I had started the organization's first programs in Texas when George was governor. Reach Out and Read was founded in 1989 by Doctors Barry Zuckerman and Robert Needlman, along with three early childhood educators. Pediatricians like Zuckerman, Needlman, and Klass saw the absence of reading and literacy skills among their young patients and began giving parents "prescriptions" to read aloud to their children just as they prescribed medicines to combat disease. Each child is given a free book at every checkup from age six months through five years, about ten books in all. More than 4,500 Reach Out and Read programs nationwide serve 3.8 million children.

We heard from Dr. Klass about encouraging family literacy and from Florence Molefe of South Africa about how parents who learn to read and write become role models for their children. Two other panels discussed literacy for health and literacy for economic self-sufficiency. Those who cannot read are limited to the most menial jobs, and they cannot follow simple directions to take lifesaving medication or to administer it to their children.

Late that afternoon I took some of the presenters down to Wall Street, where we toured the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and I rang the exchange's closing bell. It was a far cry from my first visit with Regan, nearly forty years before. Traders on the floor applauded, and I leaned over to shake their hands. But not quite everything had changed. I smiled when I saw that
The Wall Street Journal
began its coverage by reporting that I was wearing "a pink skirt-suit."

The United States is the world's largest supporter of public health improvements overseas. We generously provide medicines, materials, training, and lifesaving aid. Our hospital ships set sail for the Indonesian coast to treat tsunami victims or Haiti after a devastating earthquake. American doctors spend their vacation weeks in Africa or Asia or South or Central America, treating those who otherwise would not have care and performing operations, like eye surgery that returns a patient's sight. Two American doctors, twins named Vance and Vince Moss, have traveled twice at their own expense to Afghanistan. Working sometimes in caves and in bombed-out buildings, with only flashlights and cell phones to see by, they have operated on sick and injured Afghan men, women, and children. When villages heard they were coming, hundreds would line up to be seen by the men they called the "same-face healers." Through the passionate work of private citizens like the Mosses, private foundations, and government programs, the United States shares its ingenuity and know-how to save lives. Fortunately, we are not alone. French doctors helped to found Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, in 1971; it now operates in nearly sixty nations. Israeli doctors created Save a Child's Heart, the world's largest global pediatric heart surgery program, which operates in Africa, China, Jordan, Iraq, Vietnam, and the former Soviet republics, and also treats hundreds of Palestinian children.

Yet in 2006, every day around the world, 3,000 children under the age of five were dying from malaria; 1.5 million lives were lost each year. Hundreds of thousands of children and adults were succumbing to malaria comas and never waking up. Malaria, which is transmitted by a single mosquito bite, is a preventable disease. The United States eradicated malaria from our swamps and lowlands in the early part of the twentieth century; before then Washington had regular malaria outbreaks. George's great-grandparents the Walkers, who lived in St. Louis, started going to Maine in the summer to avoid malaria outbreaks along the Mississippi River.

In the twenty-first century, we know that systematic programs can wipe out the mosquitoes and arrest transmission of the disease. Something as simple as sleeping under a bed net or treating infested areas with insecticide can greatly reduce malaria outbreaks. But in some of the poorest countries in the world, very little was being done to combat malaria, which is every bit as deadly as AIDS. George wanted to change that. In June of 2005, he announced the President's Malaria Initiative, which focused on combating malaria in fifteen of the world's hardest hit nations, where more than 80 percent of all malaria deaths occur. To receive aid and funds, these nations' governments had to become active partners in malaria eradication.

Eighteen months later, the President's Malaria Initiative was entering its next phase. As we had done with Helping America's Youth, I wanted to get all of the organizations that were addressing malaria to meet in the same room on the same day. On December 14, for the first time, experts from the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and UNICEF met with Admiral Tim Ziemer, director of the president's initiative, as well as with representatives from private foundations, such as Malaria No More and the Gates Foundation, which was announcing $84 million in new grants; it had already spent $682 million to combat the disease. They came together as part of the White House Summit on Malaria, which I led at the National Geographic Society. Our goal was simple: cut malaria deaths by one-half across these fifteen nations and share the resources and knowledge to do it.

Already there were signs of progress. After the initiative began, communities on the island of Zanzibar reportedly cut their infection rates from 45,000 cases to near zero in a mere four years. When George left office, the overall number of malaria deaths among children under five had dropped by one-third in both Zambia and Rwanda. And on the island of Zanzibar, where just three years before, 22 percent of all children seen in local health clinics had tested positive for malaria, now that number was less than 1 percent. I thought of the female leaders I'd met in Rwanda, all of whom had contracted malaria. Now their children might be spared. Thanks to the compassion of the American people and the President's Malaria Initiative and its partners, there are now tens of thousands of mothers who no longer have to weep over the death of a child from an entirely preventable disease.

The week before the malaria summit, I was reminded of the less than life-or-death issues that dominate the news from the White House. My ultimate in clothing faux pas received about as much attention as the summit. The dress debacle occurred on December 3, 2006, at a White House reception before the Kennedy Center Honors, and the guilty party was a red Oscar de la Renta gown. George and I were standing for the long receiving line greeting guests when I saw a good friend of mine from Houston. She was wearing the identical red lace dress. We posed for the camera with slightly awkward smiles. A few minutes later a friend from Washington walked through in the exact same gown. Then came a good friend of mine from California. Now there were four of us in the identical dress. We tried to turn it into a lighthearted moment, and the four of us gathered for a group photo, but I could tell that no one was amused. I had chosen the de la Renta gown because it blended so nicely with the brilliant red of the Kennedy Center's interior. But after the last camera click, I raced upstairs to change into a navy blue dress from the back of my closet to wear to the awards ceremony.

Thus continued my fashion education. It had started when the press made fun of the purple suit I wore to that first White House visit with Hillary Clinton. After that I had begun visiting New York fashion houses; my favorites were Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera. I paid for all my own clothes and took to attaching an index card to each outfit, writing down what event it had been worn to, so that I could avoid duplications. Each season my assistant would remind me of the different occasions for which I would need a new dress or outfit: state dinners, annual galas, and the like. I would glance through the designers' "look books" and make selections, usually asking that the color or style be slightly altered. But in the book, that red dress had looked perfect. It had vaguely crossed my mind that someone else might see the dress and think exactly the same thing, but what were the odds of that woman wearing it to a White House party? I let the thought pass from my mind until December 3. Unfortunately, no one else had thought to check on how many of the red lace dresses had been sold around the country, and one of the women who wore hers to the White House that night was so infuriated that she returned it to the store and demanded they give her a refund.

My dress, however, had a long life. Not only did I wear it for the official White House holiday photo but I sent it to travel the country as part of the Heart Truth Red Dress campaign to raise awareness about heart disease.

When I arrived in the White House, if I had been asked what was the leading cause of death among American women, I would have replied cancer. But the correct answer is heart disease. In 2003 heart attacks and related diseases were responsible for one out of every three female deaths in the United States. Very few American women knew this devastating statistic, and thousands of doctors were insufficiently aware of the risk for women's heart health. Most modern heart procedures, like stents and angioplasty, had been developed for men. Even the instruments used by heart surgeons were designed to fit men's far larger arteries and veins. At the start of 2003, Dr. Elizabeth Nabel of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute asked me to be the ambassador for Heart Truth, a campaign to educate women about the risk of heart disease, and what they could do to prevent it. The keys to prevention are exercising, maintaining a healthy weight, quitting smoking, and monitoring blood pressure and cholesterol. I immediately said yes.