Laura Bush's memoir is being published.
Two articles:
Later, Mrs. Bush takes on Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat who is speaker of the House of Representatives, for calling Mr. Bush “an incompetent leader” and for saying he lacked judgment, knowledge and experience. She also bristles at the insults thrown at Mr. Bush by the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, quoting him as calling her husband a “loser” and a “liar.”
“The comments were uncalled for and graceless,” she writes. “While a president’s political opponents, as well as his supporters, are entitled to make what they see as legitimate criticisms, and while our national debates should be spirited, these particular worlds revealed the petty and parochial nature of some who serve in Congress.”
Laura Bush Opens Up About Crash
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR
New York Times
April 27, 2010
Laura Bush has finally opened up publicly about the mysterious car accident she had when she was 17, a crash that claimed the life of a high school friend on a dark country road in Midland, Tex.
In her new book, “Spoken From the Heart,” Mrs. Bush describes in vivid detail the circumstances surrounding the crash, which has haunted her for most of her adult life and which became the subject of questions and speculation when it was revealed during her husband’s first presidential run. A copy of the book, scheduled for release in early May, was obtained by The New York Times at a bookstore.
On several occasions in the book, Mrs. Bush admonishes her husband’s political adversaries for “calling him names,” and she pointedly rebuts criticism of some of his key decisions. She suggested that his highly criticized fly-over of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was in the best interests of the victims and aid workers on the ground.
“He did not want one single life to be lost because someone was catering to the logistical requirements of a president,” she says about the Katrina fly-over. “He did not want his convoy of vehicles to block trucks delivering water or food or medical supplies, or to impede National Guardsmen from around the nation who were arriving to help.”
Mrs. Bush also suggests, apparently for the first time, that she, Mr. Bush, and several members of their staff may have been poisoned during a visit to Germany for a G8 Summit. They all became mysteriously sick, and the president was bedridden for part of the trip. The Secret Service investigated the possibility they were poisoned, she writes, but doctors could only conclude that they all contracted a virus. After noting several high-profile poisonings, she wrote, “we never learned if any other delegations became ill, or if ours, mysteriously, was the only one.”
Later, Mrs. Bush takes on Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat who is speaker of the House of Representatives, for calling Mr. Bush “an incompetent leader” and for saying he lacked judgment, knowledge and experience. She also bristles at the insults thrown at Mr. Bush by the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, quoting him as calling her husband a “loser” and a “liar.”
“The comments were uncalled for and graceless,” she writes. “While a president’s political opponents, as well as his supporters, are entitled to make what they see as legitimate criticisms, and while our national debates should be spirited, these particular worlds revealed the petty and parochial nature of some who serve in Congress.”
But it is her description of the deadly accident, and its subsequent impact on her life and her faith, that is the subject Mrs. Bush had most shied away from speaking about in her public life. On a November night in 1963, Mrs. Bush and a girlfriend were hurrying to a drive-in theater when Mrs. Bush, at the wheel of her father’s Chevy Impala, ran a stop sign on a small road and smashed into a car being driven by Mike Douglas, a star athlete and popular student at her school.
“In those awful seconds, the car door must have been flung open by the impact and my body rose in the air until gravity took over and I was pulled, hard and fast, back to earth,” she says. “The whole time,” she adds later, “I was praying that the person in the other car was alive. In my mind, I was calling ‘Please, God. Please, God. Please, God,’ over and over and over again.”
Mrs. Bush concedes that she and her friend were chatting when she ran the stop sign. But she also suggests a host of factors beyond her control played a role — the pitch-black road, an unusually dangerous intersection, the small size of the stop sign, and the car the victim was driving.
“It was sporty and sleek, and it was also the car that Ralph Nader made famous in his book Unsafe at Any Speed,” she states. “He claimed the car was unstable and prone to rollover accidents. A few years later, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration went so far as to investigate the Corvair’s handling, but it didn’t reach the same grim conclusions. I was driving my dad’s much larger and heavier Chevy Impala. But none of that would ever ease the night of November 6. Not for me, and never for the Douglases.”
Mrs. Bush reveals that she was wracked by guilt for years after the crash, especially after not attending the funeral and for not reaching out to the parents of the dead teenager. Her parents did not want her to show up at the funeral, she states, and she ended up sleeping through it.
“I lost my faith that November, lost it for many, many years,” she says. “It was the first time that I had prayed to God for something, begged him for something, not the simple childhood wishing on a star but humbly begging for another human life. And it was as if no one heard. My begging, to my seventeen-year-old mind, had made no difference. The only answer was the sound of Mrs. Douglas’s sobs on the other side of that thin emergency room curtain.”
Mrs. Bush goes on to say that in her public life, she has encouraged young drivers who have been in serious accidents to speak to loved ones, counselors or spiritual or pastoral advisers.
“But while I give this advice in my letters, I didn’t do any of that,” she reveals. “Most of how I ultimately coped with the crash was by trying not to talk about it, not to think about it, to put it aside. Because there wasn’t anything I could do. Even if I tried.”
nytimes.com
From Politico (Mike Allen's Playbook):
LAURA BUSH’s memoir, “Spoken from the Heart” (Scribner, 456 pages), is officially out Tuesday. $16.20 on Amazon amzn.to The New York Times has published an account based on a copy obtained at a bookstore, freeing POLITICO to report the contents of an embargoed hardback provided by the publisher.
Mrs. Bush writes about the many and frequent ways she used her platform on behalf of women in Burma and Afghanistan, and about how much she traveled internationally on her own, especially in the second term. She recalls that her first solo trip to the Middle East, in spring 2005, turned out to be “a series of landmines”:
“For a first lady, there are moments of maximum political controversy, and they often strike without warning. Mine was to come, just after … I arrived at the Ittihadiyya Palace on the outskirts of Cairo to call on Suzanne Mubarak, first lady of Egypt. … I had arrived two days before a nationwide referendum on future presidential elections. I had known that elections were scheduled, but in weeks of staff meetings and in my National Security Council briefing for the trip, no one had mentioned that my visit would be so close to the referendum vote. Egypt is an important U.S. ally, but it also jails political opponents. I had walked, unprepared, into a potential minefield. In retrospect, it was probably one of the worst possible times for me to be in Egypt. Right away the Egyptian and American press asked me about the upcoming vote. And while I had reams of official talking points on educational programs and compliments about cultural sites …, no one had thought to include a detailed briefing paper on current political issues in the country. I answered that holding elections was a ‘bold step’ toward democracy, but both the referendum and the actual presidential elections that followed were later criticized as insufficiently democratic for not allowing a full slate of opposition candidates to participate. Days after I left, protesters against the May referendum were beaten in the streets.” (pp. 323-5)
Other memorable passages:
--2007 G-8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany: “I arrived and began my events, but by the afternoon of [June] seventh, I could barely stand up. … Over the next day nearly a dozen members of our delegation were stricken, even George, who started to feel sick during an early morning staff briefing. … [O]ne of our military aides had difficulty walking and a White House staffer lost all hearing in one ear. Exceedingly alarmed, the Secret Service went on full alert, combing the resort for potential poisons. In the past year, there had been several high-profile poisonings, including one with suspected nuclear material, in and around Europe. The overriding fear was that terrorists had gotten control of a dangerous substance and planted it at the resort. … [O]ur military aide’s gait has never returned to normal, no has our senior staffer regained full hearing in that ear. The most concrete conclusion any doctors could reach was that we contracted a virus that attacks a nerve near the inner ear and is prevalent in Heiligendamm.” (pp. 390-1)
--“On December 18 [2002], ABC broadcast Barbara Walters’s annual special on the Ten Most fascinating people of the year. Barbara had selected me as 2002’s most fascinating person, calling me a ‘beacon of calm in the center of the storm.’ It was flattering, but even as it aired, I said to George with a smile, ‘Bushie, what goes up must come down.’” (p. 275)
---After a Christmas 2002 visit to Camp David by his 21-year-old daughters, President Bush “sat down and typed out a thank-you note to them for his gifts. … He told Jenna and Barbara that he prayed Saddam Hussein would disarm, that he would give up his weapons of death and destruction, and that there would be peace. … George did not want war. No president ever does. He knew how precious any child is, and every person sent into war is someone’s child, and often someone’s mother or father too. … There were be no war for oil or some kind of U.S. presence in the Middle East. There was war because only one man would not choose peace. That was Saddam Hussein.” (pp. 275-6)
--“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 of shaking hands.” (p. 296)
--“In 2004 the social question that animated the campaign was gay marriage. Before the election season had unfolded, I had talked to George about not making gay marriage a significant issue. We have, I reminded him, a number of close friends who are gay or whose children are gay. But at that moment I could never have imagined what path this issue would take and where it would lead.” (p. 303)
--“When Bill and Hillary Clinton entered the White House, Saturday Night Live debuted a few particularly cruel skits aim at their then twelve-year-old daughter, Chelsea. The Clintons took a hard line, and the press was shamed into leaving Chelsea alone. The press did largely the same for Barbara and Jenna, although reporters from the tabloids and from more mainstream publications frequently called their friends, trying to entice them to talk about the girls. None ever did. But a postscript to the 2004 campaign was that it changed, perhaps irrevocably, how the families, especially the children, of national candidates are treated. The strategy of making Mary Cheney’s private life an issue failed with the voters in November of 2004. But in the years since, it has become acceptable to mock candidates and their families, and other elected officeholders, in highly personal ways; David Letterman feels free to ridicule Sarah Palin’s teenager daughters, and the audience laughs. That is the legacy of the 2004 campaign.” (pp. 306-7) |
