The lives of this earlier quartet of women varied in other ways from their counterparts in 2000. Although well-read and smart, none except for Mary Bryan had much formal education or any work experience outside the home. They produced far more children than their counterparts in 2000, who averaged only 2.5 children each. While divorce was a dirty word for Ida McKinley’s generation, it was a fact of life a century later when the previously divorced Hadassah Lieberman maintained a household—as did millions of other Americans—that included children that were “his,” “hers,” and “theirs.”
Because of a dispute over contested ballots, final results in the 2000 presidential election became clear much more slowly than in 1900 (when McKinley won a clear victory with 65 percent of the popular vote). Not until mid-December did Laura Welch Bush know for sure that she would be the first to claim the title of White House spouse in the twenty-first century. Her biography resembled her immediate predecessor more than that of her mother-in-law who had moved out of the White House eight years earlier. Almost a year older than Hillary Rodham Clinton, Laura Bush also boasted a work record of her own. But unlike Hillary she had waited until age thirty-one to marry and had then quit work to devote herself full time to running a household and assisting George W. Bush in his political and business career. Although she sometimes described how her agreement to marry him had included the promise that she would never have to give a political speech, no one quite believed her. When she first met George W. Bush, he was already preparing to run for Congress, and his father stood as a serious contender for the presidency. Anyone marrying into the Bush family in 1977 could expect to see a lot of politics.
The subject had rarely crossed Laura’s mind for the first thirty years of her life. Raised in Midland, Texas, as the only child of house-builder Harold Welch and his homemaker wife, Jenna Hawkins Welch, Laura had little direct exposure to political talk or campaigning. Like George W.’s parents, the Welches had settled in Midland after World War II, when a series of big oil strikes just south of town drew thousands of new settlers to the area. As the population jumped from fewer than 10,000 in 1940 to more than 62,000 in 1960,72 Harold Welch saw a chance to prosper by filling the housing shortage; with his business partner, he built hundreds of new homes.73 But George W.’s father increased his personal fortune far more dramatically by going into the oil business. With their elite Eastern connections (George W.’s grandfather had been Connecticut’s U.S. Senator) and millionaire status, the Bushes did not meet the Welches, even though the two families lived only a few blocks apart in the 1950s. They attended different churches and, except very briefly, their children enrolled in different schools.74
Both Laura and George W. later remembered Midland as an ideal place to grow up in the 1950s—when residents felt no need to lock their doors and the school’s athletic teams made the biggest news. Less than one hundred miles from the New Mexico border, Midland got its name from its location at the halfway point between Fort Worth and El Paso, the two extremes of the Texas and Pacific Railway. Whatever the hardships of the climate in western Texas, where summers could be hot, dusty, and dry, Laura developed a firm attachment to the area. In her preface to a book of poetry, Whatever the Wind Delivers, she wrote proudly that people from her part of the world “don’t simply live on or off the land; they live with it—and thrive.”75
Although neither Harold nor Jenna Welch ever graduated from college, they both held higher expectations for their daughter and began setting aside tuition money when she was in first grade. Jenna, an avid reader herself, fostered Laura’s interest in the subject by reading to her when she was young and encouraging her to break the monotony of long rides by taking a book along. Not surprisingly, Laura decided to become a teacher while she was still very young, and later recalled that one of her earliest childhood memories was lining up her dolls and “teaching them.” Too outgoing to be dubbed a bookworm, Laura also studied ballet and enrolled in Girl Scouts, but she had already settled on a career before graduating from Robert E. Lee High School in 1964.76
At age seventeen, she appeared the healthy, happy, all-American girl—except for one ugly reminder that lives are rarely uncomplicated or neatly summed up. In November of her senior year, while driving near Midland, she went through a stop sign, struck a car driven by a classmate, Michael Douglas, and fatally injured him. For years Laura refused to discuss the incident, and when she finally confronted the subject during the 2000 presidential election, she admitted it was an extremely painful memory. “It was a horrible, horrible tragedy,” she told one interviewer. “But at some point I had to accept that death is a part of life, and as tragic as losing Mike was, there was nothing anyone could do to change that….”77 Close friends insisted the accident had an enormous impact on her and permanently changed her views about personal responsibility. But at the time, neighbors in Midland refused to hold her responsible, and although they grieved, they attributed the death to some horrible “mishap” rather than to any fault of one of their most popular teenagers. Laura suffered no legal consequences and her driving privileges were not affected.78
Going 300 miles away from Midland to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Laura evidently remained unaffected by the student unrest and anti-war movements associated with many campuses during the 1960s. This conservative, private university isolated its students in their own enclave away from Dallas’s poverty and protest, and Laura remembered that smoking cigarettes and drinking beer were about the most rebellious activities that she and her friends ever engaged in. Her biographer later summed up Laura’s college years as a time of playing bridge, listening to Beatles records, and shopping with her friends and their mothers.79 After graduation in 1968, Laura accompanied an aunt, an uncle, and a cousin on a two-week trip to Europe, the only time she had yet ventured beyond American borders (except for a summer studying in Mexico when she was still in high school).80
Following her four college years, Laura moved frequently, changing jobs every year or so but always staying within Texas’s borders. After a short stint teaching third grade in Dallas, she moved three hundred miles south to the John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Houston. “I particularly wanted to teach in a minority school,” she later told an interviewer, and she credited those two years as opening her eyes to the inequalities in life—and a part of the world she had not seen in segregated Midland.81 Many of her African-American students came from poor homes and she found herself shocked by the limitations on their lives—barriers she had not previously understood or noticed. Rather than turning to political action or economic reforms, Laura focused on literacy and books as a way to improve students’ lives. Once again she moved, enrolling in the library-science program at the University of Texas at Austin where she earned a master’s degree in 1972.
Up until that time, she had worked in elementary schools where she had few chances to meet young single men and, at age twenty-six, she decided to change that. “I thought by working in a big public library in downtown Houston, I might have a different social life,” she told USA Today.82 But after one year in Houston, she returned to Austin as a librarian in a heavily Hispanic elementary school. From Austin it was only a two-hundred-and-fifty-mile drive back to Midland to visit her parents, and it was on one of those weekend trips in the summer of 1977 that old friends invited her over to share a barbecue and to meet George W. Bush, aspiring candidate for congress.
Laura later said that she had resisted earlier attempts to be introduced to one of Midland’s most eligible bachelors because she did not want to get involved with “someone real political.” One meeting with George W. quickly changed her mind, and four months later, on November 5, 1977, she married him. “I don’t know that it was love at first sight,” she recalled, “[but] it was pretty close,”83 Presidential historian Lewis Gould suggested that the timing of their meeting was propitious for both—“a married congressional candidate would have an advantage over a bachelor, and for Laura Welch her future husband promised
more excitement than a school librarian’s career would provide.”84
Whatever the motivation for the match, Laura Welch brought to the spunky, athletic Bush clan a noticeably independent perspective. Her mother-in-law later recalled that the young librarian had amazed them all when, on first meeting George’s outspoken grandmother, Dorothy Bush, Laura had asserted herself. Asked what she “did,” Laura replied, “I read, I smoke and I admire.”85 (Laura later insisted that the story was apocryphal but Barbara Bush stood by it.) The steady, word-wise Miss Welch presented a striking contrast to the young George W., who already had a reputation for rebelliousness and malapropisms.
For the first fifteen years of her marriage, Laura fit her world into a pattern common among the wives of most successful CEO’s. In 1978, George W. started his own small oil and gas company, and subsequent mergers and acquisitions increased his responsibilities considerably, along with his income. Bigger money resulted from his foray into the world of baseball. As managing partner of the Texas Rangers from 1989 to 1994, he earned a substantial salary, and eventually converted an investment of just over $600,000 into more than $10 million (helped by a new stadium paid for with tax dollars).”86 This represented a new level of wealth for Laura, and managing the household and caring for twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna, born November 25, 1981, took up most of her time.
Some friends speculated that George W.’s success in the baseball business helped him escape the long shadow cast by his high-achieving father and changed his mind about running for office. After his one unsuccessful run for congress in 1978, he stayed clear of politics (except for serving as senior adviser to his father’s 1988 presidential campaign.) By 1994, however, he was ready to test the waters himself and that year he won the governor’s mansion in Texas. One other development helped make a political career possible. Around the time of his fortieth birthday, he determined to control his alcohol problem, and although he credited religious influences with helping him, friends also singled out his wife who had, they said, a remarkably steadying effect.87 Laura attributed the change to “enormous discipline” which he also showed in other areas of his life, such as his physical exercise regimen.
Six years in the Texas governor’s mansion provided a valuable apprenticeship for Laura, and she became very popular. The Texas Book Festival, which she started in 1996 to highlight the state’s authors, turned into her most notable achievement after it helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for libraries to expand their holdings. She also promoted other educational programs such as “Ready to Read” for very young children, “Reach Out and Read,” for older youngsters, and a magazine for parents, “Take Time for Kids.” Austin’s Habitat for Humanity, breast cancer awareness, and the problems of Alzheimer’s sufferers all received some of her time, but her deepest commitment remained to reading programs and literacy campaigns. Popular across party lines, she impressed Texans with her warmth and genuine friendliness, and criticism of her was, according to one Texas historian, “virtually nonexistent.”88
By the time Republicans met in July 2000 to name George W. Bush as their presidential nominee, his wife had become such a confident and popular speaker that she seemed the obvious choice to keynote the convention. In a speech carried live on national television, Laura impressed millions of Americans with her down-to-earth comments about teaching and her enthusiastic support of her husband’s candidacy. She joked that George W.’s run for the White House was a “pretty drastic” antidote for the empty nest syndrome (their daughters were entering college that fall), and she gave examples of her family’s genuine interest in education.89 In the weeks that followed, she traveled thousands of miles and sat for dozens of interviews, many of them televised live. For a woman who insisted she had once vowed to stay clear of politics, this marked an important change, and it underlined how much Americans had come to expect a candidate’s wife to play a part in the campaign.
Throughout the six-month frenzy that characterized the 2000 presidential race, Laura Bush sometimes appeared alongside her mother-in-law (the first time a former First Lady ever campaigned for her son for the presidency) but she also asserted her own independence.90 Whenever she was asked (and it happened often) to choose as her model either Barbara Bush or Hillary Clinton, she distanced herself a bit from both, promising, “I think I’ll just be Laura Bush.” In an interview with Barbara Walters, she eschewed the tag of “traditional First Lady” and insisted she would shape the job to suit herself.
In a pre-inaugural interview, she spoke out against reversing the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade guaranteeing women a right to abortion. “No, I don’t think that it should be overturned,” she told NBC news. Since that view seemed to contradict her husband’s position on the subject, it made frontpage headlines.91 She shied away from such statements in the future, proving she could be flexible. When she named her staff, she dipped into her mother-in-law’s talent pool and appointed people familiar with the capital to fill the delicate and politically sensitive jobs of social secretary and scheduler. For other posts, she chose women whom she had worked with in Texas.92 One of the very few First Ladies who could claim familiarity with the 132-room presidential mansion before moving in, she could truthfully quip, “I have slept in the Lincoln bedroom and the Queen’s bedroom.”93
Literacy took first place on her White House agenda. When Laura launched a national initiative called “Ready to Read, Ready to Learn,” she directed much of her attention to the needs of pre-school children and to the parents who could assist them. She also put out a call to young college graduates, urging them to consider teaching as a career. Nine months into her tenure, on September 8, 2001, she opened the first National Book Festival, a joint production of the First Lady’s office and the Library of Congress.94 Unlike the book festival in Texas, this one did not raise money but sought to draw Americans to the world of books by offering a free day of storytelling sessions, tours of the Library of Congress, and conversations with popular authors from across the nation. The First Lady used the occasion to announce the formation of the Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries.95
Three days later, on the morning of September 11, Laura was on her way down Pennsylvania Avenue to meet with Senator Edward Kennedy’s subcommittee on education when the first plane hit New York’s World Trade Center. She would have become the fourth First Lady (after Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosalynn Carter, and Hillary Clinton) to testify before a congressional committee had her schedule not been so tragically altered. During the following terrible hours and days, she quietly encouraged calm and urged parents to take time to tell their children that they were safe. She encouraged families to spend more time together and gently listed her own thoughts on ways to make youngsters feel loved and secure. On September 23, the New York Post praised her for becoming “the First Mom, comforting and reassuring the entire nation.”96
Even without the terror of September 11, Laura would have raised her popularity ratings. Americans who knew little about her and those strongly opposed to her husband’s positions found themselves drawn into her fan club because of her genuine commitment to books. Prominent historians such as Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer David Levering Lewis and feminist writer Ursula Smith, who had outspokenly opposed the president’s stance on the environment, foreign policy, and other matters, were dismayed when they received invitations from Laura Bush to speak at White House symposia on topics on which they had written. Both ended up accepting, however, and each came away from the East Room impressed with how she had managed to transform that most political of places into an arena for discussing ideas that reached beyond politics. Differences in political ideology receded in importance when symposium attendees shared admiration for the writers under discussion, such as Mark Twain and Eudora Welty. When queried on the subject, Laura Bush told New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, “There’s nothing political about American literature…. Everyone can like American literature, no matter what your [political] party.
”97
Participants in the invitation-only events insisted that the two-hour discussions often moved outside what one would ordinarily expect to hear in the president’s front room and delved into various authors’ writings on prickly subjects such as race and class in America. The First Lady typically sat in the front row, ready to comment knowledgeably on the authors being discussed, even when their books seemed critical of the Texas oil world in which she had grown up. One invited author, Patricia Nelson Limerick, admitted that she had done “Mrs. Bush a terrible disservice” thinking she was so unacquainted with the writers and naïve about how deeply critical some of their writings about America were. Arnold Rampersad, the respected Stanford professor and biographer of Langston Hughes, also confessed that he had been surprised by the First Lady’s genuine understanding of literature. After talking with her at one White House symposium, he concluded, “… it became very clear that she was seeing this world [of literature] from the inside, not the outside.”98
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