Spoken From The Heart Part 12

Everyone knew it would take years to undo the damage wrought by the vicious gender apartheid of the Taliban.

The morning began with a simple coffee in one of the building's reception rooms, with stunning views of New York's East River. Nane Annan, wife of UN SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan, orchestrated an impromptu receiving line; I stood and smiled alongside international luminaries, including Jordan's Queen Noor. Then it was on to the conference, with six hundred attendees. My chair was marked as the lead seat of the U.S.

delegation. Not until that moment did I realize that I was, on that morning, representing my country at the United Nations.

I spoke of the U.S. government's commitment to aiding the people of Afghanistan and the more than $4 million donated so far by American children to help the children of Afghanistan. American aid workers were doggedly helping Afghan refugees return home and helping the country's widows, devastated after twenty-three years of fighting, support their families. Some of our contributions were bags of wheat for the twenty-one womenowned bakeries in Kabul. Those bakeries fed over one-quarter of the city's population. I spoke too of helping to educate the children of Afghanistan. "When you give children books and an education, you give them the ability to imagine a future of opportunity, equality, and justice," I said. My favorite line in the speech was a quotation from Farahnaz n.a.z.ir, the founder of the Afghanistan Women's a.s.sociation, who said, "Society is like a bird. It has two wings. And a bird cannot fly if one wing is broken."

We would help bind that broken wing.

My next stop was P.S. 234, the school in lower Manhattan where children had witnessed the horror of the attacks on the Twin Towers from just four blocks away. I had first met many of the students and teachers at the end of September, when they were crowded inside another school, P.S. 41. The students had returned to their original building in early February, once the smoldering fires had finally been extinguished and the worst of the air pollution had cleared. School officials conservatively estimated that at least 5 percent of the students were still suffering from severe emotional trauma. The number was probably far higher. Many children were terrified of getting on an airplane or riding the subway. Low-flying helicopters and planes or sudden loud noises would leave them shaken and in tears. I listened to these ten-and eleven-year-olds and thought of them, like me, still anxiously scanning the skies.

On March 23, school was set to resume in Afghanistan. For most girls, after nearly eight years of Taliban rule, it would be their first time in a cla.s.sroom. The Red Cross had already s.h.i.+pped more than one thousand school kits, with supplies for forty thousand children, to Kabul to be distributed on opening day. George and I helped a.s.semble more kits alongside students at Samuel W. Tucker Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia. But that was only the beginning of the needs. Children, especially girls, were in dire need of school uniforms; those who attended school in ordinary street or house clothes often felt shame. Most Afghans, though, had little more than a needle or thread to sew. Working with Vital Voices, we s.h.i.+pped several thousand manual sewing machines across the Pakistani border--the old foot-pedal style that my grandmother had used, since much of the country lacked any form of electricity. And we sent fabric, yards

and yards, enough to outfit 3 million children. The Liz Claiborne company alone donated a half million yards of material. For the barefoot, we received shoes from Ba.s.s, New Balance, Sebago, and Timberland. The Sara Lee Corporation paid for socks. L.L.Bean donated shoes, jackets, and blankets. Walmart and General Motors gave money to help offset costs. It was, for me, a moment of real pride to see the generosity of these companies and their employees to people in a place half a world away, a place that had given refuge to the plotters of the worst civilian attack in our history.

And other companies came forward to meet other needs. When I met with Afghan judges who told me that they could not even type court records, that every court doc.u.ment had to be laboriously copied by hand, I asked my office to approach the Dell Computer Corporation and Microsoft. The two companies donated computers, software, and printers to bring a bit of modernity to Afghanistan's judicial system. Time and again, Americans from all walks of life gave, and they did so with open hearts.

In New York and Was.h.i.+ngton, the scars from the previous fall were slower to heal. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his wife, Joyce, spent many hours helping the families of those killed and wounded in the attacks of 9-11. They followed the progress of the burn victims, helped when other concerns arose, and did not forget to be encouraging. When plans began for a memorial on the Pentagon grounds to honor those who had perished that September morning, Don and Joyce quietly became one of the memorial's largest donors. Another couple who generously gave were Sharon and Kenneth Ambrose, whose son, Paul, the public health doctor, had been on board the hijacked plane. In the months that followed, I wrote to them several times and told them that they remained in my prayers.

That spring, Cherie Blair got her wish, a visit to our ranch in Crawford. She and Tony came in early April with her mother and their two youngest children, as the final stop on a holiday for her family in the United States. That was one of the remarkable things to me about other national leaders and their spouses, the freedom they have to go on holidays, often abroad. Presidents of the United States must get away inside one compound or another, whether it is a rented retreat on Martha's Vineyard, as the Clintons had chosen, or the privacy of their own homes, Crawford for me and George, Kennebunkport for Gampy and Bar, or their California ranch for Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

At our ranch, after dinner, Tony Blair borrowed a guitar and strummed and sang along with the San Antonio band Daddy Rabbit. During the day, we braved a pouring rain to drive across the rugged grounds in George's pickup. Most of all, we enjoyed each other's company. During our final lunch, George and Cherie managed to have another of their good-natured back-and-forths. This time, she was urging him to agree to make the United States a partic.i.p.ant in the newly created International Criminal Court, designed to prosecute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. (The United States, India, China, and Indonesia are among the nations that have not ratified it, citing concerns about sovereignty.) George ran down the driveway as Tony and Cherie were driving off to get in the last word. He joked that Cherie's persistence must have been the reason Bill Clinton had considered signing the doc.u.ment in the first place. But for George and Tony, these couple of days at Crawford had been deeply serious. With the Taliban for now beaten back in Afghanistan, they were looking toward the threat from another country, Iraq, where American and British intelligence, and indeed nearly every intelligence agency in Europe, told them that Saddam Hussein was sitting on a ma.s.sive stockpile of weapons of ma.s.s destruction.

The Blairs departed for London, and so did I, for the funeral of the Queen Mother, who had died just before their visit. I was designated to lead the U.S. delegation, which included the prominent Texas ranch owners Anne and Tobin Armstrong. Anne had been amba.s.sador to the British Court of St. James's under Gerald Ford. The world bade the Queen Mother farewell beneath the glorious Gothic arches and stained gla.s.s of Westminster Abbey. Cars had been banned from the nearby streets; there was only the clop of horses' hooves, pipers playing haunting notes, and the thump of the funeral drum.

It was a scene from another time and place, from a century so very far from our own.

When I returned to Was.h.i.+ngton, my first meeting was about the Christmas holidays. At the White House, Christmas preparations begin in April, from choosing an artist for the card to planning the themes and events. It takes over half a year to organize the three weeks in December during which George and I would often host two events in a single evening and shake well over nine thousand hands.

But even as we planned, we did not know what the future would hold. On April 25, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia came to Crawford to meet with George. I had overseen plans for the lunch. "No pork products, no flesh of scavenger animals, birds, or fish, including sh.e.l.lfish," advised Don Ensenat, Chief of Protocol. "All meat should be cooked until well-done." So we served barbecued beef ribs, and I made myself scarce on other parts of the ranch after the arrival ceremony. Women did not travel with the crown prince. Condi Rice, our national security advisor, would be the sole woman in attendance. Those were the customs in the prince's part of the world.

I was also preparing for my own trip, fifteen days through Europe, starting in Paris with a speech to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's 2002 Global Forum on Education. Jenna was coming with me. Four days before we left, in Kaspiysk, part of Russia's Dagestan republic, land mines placed by the side of the road had exploded, killing forty-three civilians, seventeen of them children who had gathered to watch a parade in remembrance of World War II. The bombers were Chechen terrorists. I tore up much of my prepared speech as we flew over the Atlantic. Instead of the expected lines about the importance of education, I called on parents and teachers to teach their children to respect all human life, and I told the world that it needed to condemn bombings like that in Dagestan, and other recent ones in Pakistan and Israel.

"Every parent, every teacher, every leader has a responsibility to condemn the terrible tragedy of children blowing themselves up to kill others." I added that "prosperity cannot follow peace without educated women and children." It is a simple idea, but it lies at the heart of so much suffering in the world. And I was reminded of exactly what ignorance breeds during the balance of my days in Paris.

The following morning I toured the Guimet Museum's exhibition "One Thousand Years of Afghan Art." The museum's curators had begun the exhibition months before 911, when the Taliban leader Mullah Omar ordered the destruction of the two giant Bamiyan Buddhas that had been carved into majestic sandstone cliffs less than 150 miles northwest of Kabul, in a valley region of central Afghanistan that lay at a crossroads of east-west trade routes along the once-fabled Silk Road. The Bamiyan Buddhas were shockingly dynamited in February of 2001, after inhabiting their niches for almost fifteen hundred years. They had been the largest examples of standing Buddha carvings in the world and had been designated by UNESCO, the United Nation's Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, as a World Heritage site. Now they lay in a pile of rubble.

At the Paris museum, curators had meticulously created replicas of these ancient statues. Displayed alongside were other priceless artifacts from Afghan history, which had been lent from museums and private holdings across Europe. I gazed upon intricate bronze buckets from the year 700, the dawn of the nation's Muslim era, as well as delicate ivory figures and a carved foot of Zeus, all that remained of a statue painstakingly sculpted in the third century b.c. Daring Afghan curators had rescued some of the rarest objects, smuggling them out of the country in the backs of trucks or on horseback after the Taliban looted Kabul's art museum in the mid-1990s. Gazing around the rooms, I wondered about a regime so determined to destroy everything of beauty from its nation's past and about the Taliban's deep hatred of any culture outside its own.

I made another stop in Paris, one so private that it was not listed on my official schedule. Without the press or most of the staff, Jenna and I made our way to the small flat where Mariane Pearl, Danny Pearl's widow, was staying. It was a modest place, with a bit of a student feel, reminding me for a minute of my little walk-up all those years ago in Austin.

Mariane was less than two weeks away from giving birth to their son, and what should have been a buoyant, slightly anxious time was instead framed with sadness.

There would be no father for Adam, no husband beside Mariane. I thought of the pregnant wives of the firemen and other victims on 9-11, how some had asked their lost husbands' brothers or friends to be with them at their baby's birth. But Mariane was alone.

We talked. I asked her about her experiences and what we might learn, and I told her that she would be welcome in the United States if she chose to come. I thought that in a city like New York there would be others who might comprehend her unique pain.

On May 16, as I left Paris, Danny's body was found on the outskirts of Karachi. A week later, the day before her son was born, Mariane received an e-mail that had been intended for another recipient. In its mechanically s.p.a.ced electronic letters, the terse dispatch described how, after his throat had been slit and he had been beheaded, Danny's body was cut into ten parts, then dumped in a shallow grave.

When Adam Pearl was born, both George and Jacques Chirac called Mariane with good wishes. Her heart, she later said, was so heavy that she could barely speak.

From Paris I flew to Budapest, where the focus of my stop was women and disease. In my first few hours on the ground, I met with Hungary's president and first lady, Ferenc and Dalma M'dl, and Prime Minister Viktor Orb'n, lunched with women leaders, many of whom were struggling to establish themselves in their nation's traditionally patriarchical society, and at night attended the opera Madame b.u.t.terfly, Madame b.u.t.terfly, sitting in the gold-trimmed president's box. The opera was in Italian, the subt.i.tles were in Hungarian, and my exhausted staff fell asleep.

The American amba.s.sador to Hungary was my good friend from Dallas, Nancy Brinker, who had become a breast cancer activist after her sister, Susan Komen, died at age thirty-six from the disease. Hungary has the fourth highest death rate from breast cancer in Eastern Europe, and Nancy made it her personal mission to improve cancer screening rates and care for women. Together we visited an oncology clinic where the nurses in their starched white caps reminded me of my childhood Cherry Ames books. I spoke with and tried to comfort women who were days away from major cancer surgery and who were terrified. By October of 2002, Nancy had convinced the reluctant Hungarian government to put aside its fear that pink was the color of h.o.m.os.e.xuality.

Pink ribbons for breast cancer awareness began to appear, and the Hungarians lit bridges linking the city halves of Buda and Pest a bright, rich pink.

My next stop was Prague, where I met V'clav Havel and his wife, Dagmar Havlov'. I had long admired Havel, a gifted intellectual and playwright who had spent years as a political prisoner under the Communists. Both V'clav and Dagmar are funny and charming and wise. They showed me around the famous Prague Castle, the official presidential home, and later hosted me in their modest residence; they had no desire to live in the splendor of a castle. Being elected to the presidency of a nation that in a previous era had jailed him was, V'clav said quite simply, "a gift of fate."

I joined Craig Stapleton, our amba.s.sador to the Czech Republic--Debbie, his wife, is George's cousin and one of my close friends--for the ceremony marking the fiftyseventh anniversary of the liberation of the Terezin (or Theresienstadt) concentration camp. Just a year before, I had gazed upon the drawings made by children at the camp, images of flowers and of loaves of bread carried on hea.r.s.es, displayed in simple frames on a wall of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Nearly every child at Terezin died; only these pictures, hidden away, had survived.

As I laid flowers on the ma.s.s grave of ten thousand victims, I thought of my father and his fellow soldiers who had overseen the burial of some five thousand dead at Nordhausen in April of 1945. All those souls, now resting beneath gra.s.s and stones.

On Tuesday, May 21, I was slated to give a radio address directly to the people of Afghanistan from the studios of the U.S. government's Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which now broadcast into Afghanistan, Iran, and many of the former Soviet republics from the old Czech parliament building. The name was a bit of a misnomer; there was nothing parliamentary about it. Instead, it was the place where Czechoslovakia's former Communist leaders.h.i.+p had met. Sandwiched amid Prague's bright Rococo architecture, the old parliament building is gray, angular, and unadorned, a perfect example of Stalinist construction. Now, in a touch of irony, it housed America's primary means of speaking to the people of Afghanistan. At Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's headquarters, my morning's events also included a media roundtable for the press.

But when my staff and I awoke, the Secret Service told us to cancel the address and the roundtable. They had received a specific threat.

The Secret Service is a remarkable inst.i.tution. Its men and women are willing to risk their lives to guard the president's. They wait in broiling sun and subzero cold; their mission is to protect the first family from harm. My closest agents--Ron Sprinkle, Wayne Williams, Leon Newsome, Ignacio Zamora, and Karen Shugart, all of whom headed my detail--became like family. From the start, George and I made it a policy never to travel on Christmas, so that as many agents as possible could spend the holidays with their families. We knew they gave so very much.

We did not dismiss the risk, but I very much wanted to give the address. Finally, we arrived at a compromise. The agents sent out a dummy motorcade from my hotel. I departed later and was hustled into the parliament building via a rear loading dock, and from there, straight to the sound booth. My words were translated into the Afghan languages of Pashto and Dari. I spoke about the school kits being created, about the

American children who had enthusiastically donated money to the children of Afghanistan, and about the educational, medical, food, and other humanitarian aid the United States was sending. The entire time, a helicopter hovered overhead.

I gave the address, and the threat never materialized.

But there was a constant stream of threats, and they seemed to increase in the following months.

After an overnight in Berlin, I met George and we traveled to Russia, first to Moscow, the sprawling city on the plain with the fortified Kremlin sitting high above, and then to St. Petersburg, with its western ca.n.a.ls, ornate palaces, and czarist heritage.

While George and Vladimir Putin signed a nuclear arms reduction treaty, I read Make Make Way for Ducklings to Russian children at the State Children's Library. They all laughed to Russian children at the State Children's Library. They all laughed when they heard the names "Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack." In St. Petersburg, the Putins put grand Russian culture on display. We saw the sprawling Winter Palace, the place where Czarina Catherine had once ordered a soldier to stand guard over the first snowdrop of spring. At the Hermitage, we glimpsed bits of the art that the czars had collected and other pieces later confiscated from the n.o.bility by the revolutionaries. We saw only a small fraction of what is stored within those walls. There are over 3 million objects in the Hermitage Museum and Winter Palace; their corridors alone stretch for nearly fourteen miles. If we spent just one minute looking at each work of art, it would take eleven years.

By late May, St. Petersburg is light late into the night. Sundown is just before 11:00 p.m. At 9:15, the sky was still ablaze as we boarded a boat to cruise with the Putins along the Neva River. We dined on caviar as the sun slipped toward the western horizon on one side and the moon rose in the east. George looked at me and said, "Bus.h.i.+e, you are in Heaven." The translator immediately repeated it to the Putins, who gasped with pleasure.

We said good night after a barrage of fireworks.

The next morning, we toured the Kazan Cathedral, Russia's adaptation of the Basilica of St. Peter's in Rome and a monument to the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812, when captured French banners were placed in the cathedral. Inside the main basilica, there were no chairs. Wors.h.i.+pers stand as priests in long, flowing robes chant the liturgy. Under the Communists, the Kazan Cathedral had housed a museum of "History of Religion and Atheism." The museum remains, but the word "atheism" has been scrubbed away. From there, we made our way to the Grand Choral Synagogue, the second largest synagogue in all of Europe. It was built in the 1880s, with a special permit from the czar. Only select Jews, those with specific trades or advanced degrees, or those who had served in the military, were allowed to reside in St. Petersburg, and the synagogue's builders were told that they could not construct their place of wors.h.i.+p near any churches or within view of any roads ever traveled by the czars.

The Putins hosted a farewell tea for us at the Russian Museum. George walked into the room where elegant tables were laden with trays of pastries and coffee samovars had been meticulously arranged. He turned to Vladimir and asked, "Are we going to eat this food or just look at it?" The Russian leader answered, with a twinkle in his eye, "This is a museum." Everyone in the room burst out laughing.

I did not go with George to the G8 Summit in June. It was held atop a mountain outside of Calgary, Canada, enveloped in a security bubble so tight that spouses were not invited. In Was.h.i.+ngton, my Secret Service detail would no longer allow me to go for a walk outside the White House grounds, which I had done early on some mornings.

Camouflaged in a baseball cap and sungla.s.ses, I would traverse the gravel paths crossing the National Mall or the ca.n.a.l in Georgetown. But now I was to walk on White House grounds. It was ironic that as we hosted an official event in honor of the two hundredth anniversary of the great western explorers Lewis and Clark, my own physical s.p.a.ce was shrinking.

Amid the uncertainty, we treasured the simplicity of our family life. For the girls'

twentieth birthday the previous November, we had suggested that they invite twenty friends to Camp David for the weekend. George devised contests for the guests, including tennis, basketball, and bowling for the boys, and we put a karaoke machine in the main lodge so the kids would have fun activities all weekend. The girls stayed with us for holidays, breaks, and even some weekends, and I talked to my daughters on the phone almost every other day when I was home. On foreign trips, when they could accompany me, I found them to be wonderful companions. I looked forward to long flights and the hours of transatlantic mother-daughter time, chatting about friends and boyfriends, and whatever they found interesting. Echoing my path, Jenna was studying English and writing at Texas, while Barbara had chosen humanities at Yale.

In our own lives, George remained the biggest homebody known to man. When either one of us traveled around the country, we always tried to make it a day trip, flying out at the crack of dawn and returning home in time to eat dinner side by side. Except for solo visits overseas, we seldom spent a night apart. Many evenings we had quiet dinners, just the two of us, in the residence. We spoke about our daughters, about baseball in the summer, about family, and about friends.

But these respites could be measured in minutes; they never lasted long. There was, I realize now, a constant low-level anxiety that enveloped us each day in the White House after 9-11. We were always on watch for the next thing that might be coming. It was far more than simply scanning the skies; it was the threat reports, not merely from countries like Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran but from Yemen or North Korea or Somalia. It was earthquakes, tornadoes, or hurricanes. It was the constant knowledge that, in the span of thirty minutes or an hour, the world could change.

The pace inside the White House was brutal, not simply that year but for the entirety of George's two terms. George would arrive in the Oval Office by 6:30 or 7:00 every morning; his immediate staff came in by 6:00 a.m.; his chief of staff, Andy Card, was often in by 5:00 a.m., and everyone worked deep into the evening.

I remember vividly during 2002, when we would go to Camp David on the weekends, Condi Rice and Andy Card and his wife, Kathleene, would come along.

Cabinet members frequently joined us as well. Condi and Andy would work the entire time, taking phone calls, reading papers, briefing George. Condi and I used to joke about her "inadvertent nap," the one she took when she was sitting on the couch to work and, from sheer exhaustion, fell asleep. Since the late 1990s, Condi had become like family.

She traveled with us, joined us for dinner, and whenever she was in the room, her lively mind and sparkle were on full display. We are fortunate to have had not only her advice but her friends.h.i.+p.

At Camp, our Navy mess chefs became experts at comfort food, like fried chicken and chicken-fried steak, which we seldom had at the White House. Sometimes, early in the morning, Condi, Kathleene, and I would walk the two-mile perimeter trail with the steep hill at the end that we nicknamed Big Bertha. But even when we talked, in some corner, all of our minds were still working. There was no letting go.

In the late spring and early summer I attended the groundbreaking for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a preservation event for Louisa May Alcott's home in Concord, Ma.s.sachusetts. I addressed an Early Learning Summit in Boise, Idaho, the third regional conference my office had helped to initiate after last summer's Early Childhood Summit, and I discussed the need to educate parents on creative ways for them to be their children's first teachers. I dedicated the Katherine Anne Porter home in Kyle, Texas, as a National Literary Landmark. At the White House, I had already hosted a conference on school libraries; now we were addressing character and community, gathering major leaders from character education programs across the nation to discuss what was working and what wasn't. Part of the conference focused on the increasing prevalence of service learning programs, in which students perform outside community service, often as a graduation requirement. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave the keynote address. But that entire summer it felt as if we were waiting, wondering where the next danger might lie, and whether the international community could persuade Saddam Hussein to disarm.

On July 17, Poland's president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, and his wife, Jolanta, came to Was.h.i.+ngton for an official state visit. George and I had visited Poland the previous summer, and in one of my alb.u.ms, I had a collection of photographs from the U.S. Emba.s.sy 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 gla.s.ses have been broken and chipped over the years; multiple gla.s.ses are lost at every party held, and the West Virginia gla.s.s 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 gla.s.sware.

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 a.s.sociation, 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. Winesburg, Ohio. We hung it in our bedroom. 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 ma.s.sive 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, rus.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.sive wildfires had blackened and scarred the trees, and where new, green saplings were now pus.h.i.+ng 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 friends.h.i.+p but for the chance to be out in nature, to be unenc.u.mbered by schedules, appointments, and the constant forward rush of time. We could pick up our friends.h.i.+ps as if one year had not pa.s.sed, 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 gla.s.s 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 sh.o.r.es 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 d.i.c.k 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 Pa.s.sover, first birthday, first wedding anniversary, first Mother's or Father's Day. But I knew that as the years continued to pa.s.s, those absences would acc.u.mulate, 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 a.s.sembly would be reconvening with its usual pomp and circ.u.mstance.

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, G.o.d 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 ma.s.s 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."

What he did not say, but what everyone surmised, was that there were two paths now before us: peace or war. And what we would choose depended in large measure on whether, in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein was listening and would heed these words.

Days later, we had the chance to return V'clav and Dagmar Havel's hospitality with a visit to Was.h.i.+ngton. Both Dagmar and I were wearing navy blue dresses for the black-tie dinner, and when we paused for White House photos on the red carpet, she was overcome with a fit of giggles; neither of us had thought to coordinate what we were wearing. It was a lighthearted evening, especially for the Havels. The previous August enormous floods along the Moldau River had engulfed the city of Prague. Marine guards and other U.S. Emba.s.sy employees, including our amba.s.sador, Craig Stapleton, had gone to work cleaning out the knee-high mud and debris from flooded historic buildings throughout the city, saving priceless artifacts. The Havels wanted to express the deep grat.i.tude of the Czech people. Ours, they told us, had been the only emba.s.sy and the only amba.s.sador to help. It is easy to be proud of our country, because when there is a need, Americans' first instinct is to respond.

On the late afternoon of October 2, a single shot rang out across the D.C. city line in Montgomery County, Maryland. More than twenty-four hours later, after multiple sniper-style shootings in suburban Maryland and Northwest Was.h.i.+ngton, six people lay dead, among them a seventy-two-year-old retired carpenter, a thirty-nine-year-old landscaper who had been mowing a lawn, a fifty-four-year-old man who had been pumping gas, and a twenty-five-year-old mom who had been vacuuming her minivan.

Each had been killed by a long-range rifle shot. Within a day the sniper had extended his deadly attacks into Virginia, shooting a forty-three-year-old woman as she loaded packages from a craft store, and then a few days later killing a forty-seven-year-old woman in the parking lot of a Home Depot. There were no suspects, no witnesses; the only clue was a tarot card left behind at one scene. Was.h.i.+ngton and the surrounding suburbs as far away as Richmond, Virginia, went into panic. Parks and playgrounds were suddenly deserted; parents were afraid to let their children wait at a bus stop or ride the bus to school. Parking lots sat empty. People crouched on their knees to fill their gas tanks, hoping to avoid giving the anonymous sniper a clear target.

After each new shooting, police set up roadblocks on major arteries and searched cars, vans, and trucks. Large black federal response vehicles idled along main roads, waiting to spring into action at the first report of another sniper attack. In the midst of these shootings, on October 6, we were invited to dinner at the Chevy Chase home of the columnist George Will and his wife, Mari, along with David McCullough and his wife, Rosalee, and the Civil War historian James McPherson and his wife, Patricia. It was less than a week after the first sniper attack, and there were still no leads. Hours in advance the local streets were blocked off, and when we arrived, with the usual police escort, a dark helicopter circled overhead, its rotors thumping against the evening sky. On the surrounding streets, neighbors bolted their doors and cringed in fear. They thought all the security gathered on the street meant that the sniper had struck again.

As the sniper's rampage continued, we were preparing for the second National Book Festival, to be held outside, underneath tents on the National Mall. Forty-five thousand people came to hear over seventy authors, and I brought a special guest, Lyudmila Putina. I had invited her during our spring visit. I liked Lyudmila, even though our conversations always had a slightly stilted quality because they were conducted via an interpreter. Lyudmila was engaging, and we both loved reading and books. I found myself thinking back to that long-ago Houston summer when I sat in the sweltering heat and read the cla.s.sics of Russian literature, never knowing that my journey would lead me here.

Lyudmila accompanied me to the opening ceremonies for the festival in the East Room and then to the festival itself, where we walked through the tents and listened to authors. This was her first trip to the United States without her husband. She told me that she wanted to host her own book festival in Moscow, a remarkable step in a country where little more than a decade ago the bookstores were government-controlled. Many moments from that day stayed with me, but of particular note were the closing remarks by the historian David McCullough, in which he described John Adams's quest for knowledge: "The greatest gift of all, he was certain, was the gift of an inquiring mind."

McCullough quoted Adams, saying, "I shall have the liberty to think for myself," and he added, "We face a foe today who believes in enforced ignorance. We don't." That plainspoken statement says so much about America, then and now.

On October 24, the Beltway sniper, John Allen Muhammad, and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, were finally captured, sleeping in their car at a rest stop off a Maryland highway. Malvo later testified that one of the aims of the killings had been eventually to extort money from the government so that they could "set up a camp to train children how to terrorize cities." On December 12, I made the annual Christmas visit to the Children's National Medical Center, a tradition among first ladies dating back to Bess Truman and Jackie Kennedy. One of my escorts was Iran Brown, a thirteen-year-old boy who had miraculously survived being shot by the sniper in the chest outside his middle school in Bowie, Maryland, just after eight o'clock in the morning on October 7. He was one of only three victims who survived. Ten others died.

At the end of October, I was in the air again with George, off to Mexico for the APEC Leaders' Meeting. In November it was back to Europe with George for a NATO meeting and stops in Lithuania and St. Petersburg, where I saw Lyudmila. Our friends.h.i.+p was built not simply out of frequent meetings but the common threads of our lives. Like me, Lyudmila had two daughters, Maria and Yekaterina, both close in age to Barbara and Jenna. The Putins were proud that their daughters were fluent in English and several other languages. During a visit that previous summer to the Putins' dacha--a sprawling, steep-roofed house in the middle of a birch forest just west of Moscow--the girls played violin and piano for us. Another time, Vladimir proudly showed George the chapel he had built inside the compound and his stables, where a troop of Russian riders treated us to a command acrobatic performance. And as I walked through the dacha's brightly painted rooms with their ma.s.sive fireplaces, I thought back to Lyudmila's surprise at seeing all the windows and open doors at our Texas ranch. Frigid Moscow winters and nights do not lend themselves to vast expanses of clear gla.s.s.

On this November visit to St. Petersburg, Lyudmila and I toured the beautifully restored Catherine Palace, and we were both drawn to Catherine's large, even indulgent, windows. Outside, the ground was covered with snow, and the lights from the palace reflected off the snow and then back off the windows until they resembled a kind of infinite light. I stood gazing out, imagining myself in some past century racing in a horsedrawn troika across the white, frozen ground. Off in other rooms, George and Vladimir discussed the complex issues of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Republicans had won an unprecedented victory in the 2002 midterm congressional elections, the first time the party of a newly elected president had won seats in both houses of Congress since Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. According to a Gallup poll, George's approval rating stood at 68 percent. He was, the pollsters declared, "wildly popular." But we did not spend our days thinking about those numbers. Poll numbers are ephemeral; we did not live our lives by them. With the election now in the past, what stretched before us was the future, and every contour of it was unknown.

On December 4, I hosted thirteen women teachers from Afghanistan at the White House. Selected from across the country's provinces, they had already spent five weeks in a special professional training program run by the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where they lived with local families. I thought of them being welcomed into those solid, loving midwestern homes, eating Thanksgiving dinner, with heaping plates of turkey and dressing, biscuits and pie, and getting to know their American hosts. Each teacher who came had pledged to teach ten new teachers once she returned home. I hoped they would teach them everything they had learned, in the cla.s.sroom and beyond. We had coffee, and as I walked them through the White House, I started to dream of making my own visit to Afghanistan.