Spoken From The Heart Part 11

For a long time afterward, I would look up at the sky and wonder, Are we going to see something else? Every night, I went to bed wondering, What will tomorrow bring?

The next day, Halloween, we met at the White House with the families of the two postal workers who had died the previous week in the anthrax attacks. Joseph Curseen was forty-seven and had spent fifteen years with the post office. Thomas Morris was fifty-five and had been a postal employee for twenty-eight years. Both left behind wives and children. They had merely been in a place that had processed infected mail bound for the Capitol. Unspoken in the room, as we shook hands with the postmaster general, was the question of whether there would be more such envelopes in the weeks and months to come. Anthrax had already been found at a remote White House mail site, and on Monday, after the new threat a.s.sessment, the Secret Service had locked down all the

gates at the White House.

The fall deepened, and more foreign leaders came. Over the course of six days, the presidents of Nigeria and Algeria, Jacques Chirac of France, and Tony Blair flew to Washington to meet with George. But I was focused on another significant meeting: Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putina were about to become our first official guests at the ranch. They were heading to New York for the United Nations General a.s.sembly meeting and then to visit us. I still didn't have all my furniture for the guesthouse--I was frantically borrowing some from my friend and decorator Ken Blasingame. And the day I flew to the ranch to finish the preparations, I first had to give a speech before three hundred journalists sitting amid a sea of banquet tables and starched white cloths at the National Press Club in downtown Washington.

The Secret Service advance team had arrived hours beforehand, walking the hallways with a bomb-sniffing dog. My speech was originally going to be about education, but it was now about something more, about the country I had found after 911. I told of seeing flags waving in front of almost every home and building up and down the streets of Chicago when I arrived a week after 9-11 to tape a television interview with Oprah Winfrey, and of the memorial service at the Pentagon, where a single woman stood up to wave her flag during the singing of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," and how we all stood after that, waving our flags and singing, tears filling our eyes. I told about the women from a Jewish synagogue outside Washington, D.C., who volunteered to shop for Muslim women who were afraid to go out on their own, and about the woman in New York who called her rabbi a few days before she was set to give birth and told him that she wanted to name her child after a World Trade Center victim who didn't have a child of his own. She said good-bye by telling Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, "I promise that I will try to have more children because I know there are so many more names." I told of an art student who signed up to join the military and of hundreds of Washington, D.C., students whose families can't afford to buy lunch but who pinched pennies to give me $173.64 for the Afghan Children's Fund. I spoke of children in Southern California who in early October, before the anthrax attacks, raised $85.75 for Afghan children at their sidewalk lemonade stand and sent the money to the White House, with a letter to the president signed "Your citizens."

If we set aside one day to honor each victim of 9-11, it would take us nearly a decade to complete our tribute. There were, at final count, 2,973 innocent dead from that morning. I closed by saying, "Americans are willing to fight and die for our freedoms, but more importantly, we are willing to live for them." And when I look back now at that fall, for all the worry and the darkness, I do still see, as the Psalmist said, so much goodness in the land of the living.

In sixth grade, our big cla.s.s project was to write a country report. I painstakingly copied mine into a green notebook, with a green and gold compa.s.s that my mother helped me design to decorate the cover. My research came from the encyclopedia, what all elementary school students in Midland used back then. At home, we didn't have a set of leather-bound Britannicas or World Books; Mother and Daddy hadn't wanted to spend the money on them. Instead, our encyclopedia set came from the grocery store. Mother "earned" it one volume at a time as part of a special promotion; whenever she spent a certain amount of money at the store, she received a coupon good for one or two volumes.

The moment I got the a.s.signment, I decided to pick a country that sounded completely exotic and remote compared to anything I knew in Midland, Texas. Our teacher, Mr. Bain, told us to look at a map of the world, and I ran my finger around and picked the crossing point for the ancient Silk Road. And so my sixth-grade country report was on Afghanistan, a nation I never thought that I would encounter again.

The Afghanistan I wrote about in 1957 was very different from the one the United States was confronting in 2001. For thousands of years, it has been a land of high mountain ranges, sweeping desert, and remote green valleys, where goats and sheep grazed and orchards were planted. Landlocked, it was never totally isolated. Trade routes between West and East snaked across its harsh terrain. Nomadic peoples from the Mongolian steppes used its corridors to push east toward Persia or south to India, and it was invaded from the west as well. Alexander the Great conquered Afghanistan in 329 b.c. on his way to India; Arab armies came in the 600s; and Genghis Khan left a trail of carnage in 1219. In the 1300s, Tamerlane made Afghanistan part of his Central Asian empire. Afghanistan became its own confluence of cultures--Persian, Turkic Central Asian, and Indo-Persian--along what would become the Pakistani border. It was tribal and diverse, and repeatedly caught between other empires. In the nineteenth century, the British and the Russians used Afghanistan as a wedge between their two dominions. In the mid-twentieth century, as I was writing my sixth-grade report, Afghanistan was a p.a.w.n between the Soviet Union and the Americans in the Cold War. It was technically a nonaligned nation, and its king and prime minister were hoping to benefit from playing one side against the other. From 1955 to 1957, the United States gave Afghanistan more than $30 million in economic aid. The following year, the Afghan prime minister came to Washington, D.C., and addressed both the House of Representatives and the Senate. But by 1960, the Russians had given $300 million in economic aid to Afghanistan, and its prime minister was meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. After that, the United States largely ceded Afghanistan to Russia's sphere of influence and began looking to other nations arrayed across the vast, global Cold War chessboard.

But this period was notable in other ways, particularly for women. In 1959 Afghanistan formally abolished the requirement that women wear a veil and a chadri, a shroudlike head-to-toe covering. By 1965 women were allowed to vote in national a.s.sembly elections, and soon after a woman was made the minister of public health.

Women became teachers and doctors and ran businesses; eventually 40 percent worked in paying jobs. They played sports, watched movies, wore skirts and heels, and the few well-to-do copied the fashions in Tehran.

Then in the early 1970s, a severe drought hit. Crops failed, and much of the country's sheep population, a key source of meat, perished. Hunger was rampant, and as many as eighty thousand people died of starvation before international food aid could reach them. From there came coups and then the overthrow of the government. A communist faction took control, but the Soviet Union was still not pleased, and in December of 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. Jimmy Carter announced a U.S.

boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics in protest, and no American athletes partic.i.p.ated.

United States-and Middle Eastern-backed Afghan mujahideen fighters drove the Soviets out ten years later, after the country had been largely left in ruins and 1.5 million Afghans had been killed. Five years later, in 1994, as George was running against Ann Richards for Texas governor, some of those mujahideen regrouped, found fresh recruits, and became the Taliban.

Like most of America, I didn't pay much attention to the Taliban and Afghanistan in the 1990s, although some women did, among them Mavis Leno, wife of the comedian Jay Leno, who made the repression of women in Afghanistan her personal cause. But in the weeks after September 11, what I learned horrified me. Starting in 1994, when they came to power over swaths of Afghanistan, the Taliban imposed a brand of sharia law never before seen in the modern Muslim world. They shut down girls' schools and banned women from working outside their homes. They destroyed television sets, banned dancing and music because it "creates a strain in the mind and hampers the study of Islam." They required men to grow long beards and women to cover themselves in the heaviest and most restrictive style of burka. Women, they decreed, should be neither seen nor heard; otherwise they would tempt men and lead them away from the path of Islam.

When the Taliban seized Kabul, they closed the university. Ten thousand students, including four thousand women, could no longer study. Schools for boys suffered too, because the majority of teachers were women. By December of 1998, UNICEF reported that in Afghanistan nine out of every ten girls and two out of every three boys could no longer attend school. Then the religious police began to patrol the streets, beating women who might venture out alone, beating women who were not dressed properly, beating women who so much as laughed out loud. Women were ordered not to wear shoes that made noise. The Taliban closed female bathhouses and hair salons.

The repercussions for an already impoverished country were staggering. After half a decade of Taliban rule, 70 percent of the Afghan people were malnourished, one in four children would not live past the age of five, and mothers routinely died in childbirth.

Old was age forty-five.

The more I read, in books and briefing papers, and the more I listened to Condi Rice, to George, and to others, the more heartbroken I became. It was late, very late, but after years of repression, the United States needed to speak out on behalf of these women.

And we needed to do more than talk; we needed to reach out and help them.

I became pa.s.sionate about the women of Afghanistan and their children, children who had been scarred not just by sharia law but by the near constant violence of Taliban attacks and civil war. According to reports from UNICEF, almost three-quarters of the children in Kabul had lost a family member during the years of conflict. Half of the children in the capital had watched someone be killed by a rocket or artillery, and many more had witnessed corpses and dismembered body parts scattered along city streets.

Most no longer trusted adults, and most did not expect to survive themselves. On November 17, George was slated to give his weekly presidential radio address on conditions in Afghanistan, and his longtime advisor and now Counselor to the President Karen Hughes raised the idea that I speak for part of it. Karen had been with us since George's early days as governor. We valued her counsel, her creative thought, and her years of unselfish service. Her bright spirits made her a dear friend as well.

George responded, "Why not have Laura give all of it?" And so I was slated to be the first first lady to give a full presidential radio address, and I was to tape it on November 15, the same day that Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putina would be leaving our Crawford ranch after their upcoming visit.

The Putins were arriving in Washington, D.C., on the morning of November 13, the day that the U.S. ally, the Afghan Northern Alliance, captured Kabul as Taliban fighters fled in pickup trucks. George and President Putin were scheduled to have a working lunch in the White House's old Family Dining Room, on the first floor. I was hosting Lyudmila for a smaller lunch in the second-floor dining room. After lunch, we left for Andrews Air Force Base and Texas. The Putins would join us at the ranch the following afternoon after a stop in Houston.

My staff, Cathy Fenton, our social secretary, and I had arranged the decorations.

Outside, we had strung lights through the branches of the old live oaks, and in the dogtrot, we'd arranged round tables with orange cloths and pumpkin and hydrangea centerpieces. Tom Perini and his team would be barbecuing out of the backs of old-time covered chuckwagons. Everything was ready by noon. The Putins were scheduled to land at the ranch at 3:05 p.m. By one o'clock, it was raining; two hours later, the Putins got off Marine One in the middle of a thunderstorm. Our ranch is in one of the most arid parts of the country, and it rained almost the entire visit. George spent forty-five minutes driving President Putin around the ranch in our pickup truck, and fortunately they never got stuck in the mud. Rain blew through the screens to our porch, where we were to have c.o.c.ktails before dinner. The staff was frantically moving tables and hunting for umbrellas minutes before we had to start greeting the guests. The cowboys cooked in the rain, and the cowboy band the Ranchhands played on the covered porch. The Putins walked from the guesthouse in the downpour.

We started the meal with fried catfish and corn bread and then mesquite-grilled beef tenderloin, plus a birthday cake for Condi Rice. I had invited twenty people, all of whom we thought a Russian head of state might be interested in meeting, including ranch owners, athletes, and our friend the pianist Van Cliburn, who was the first person to win the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Compet.i.tion in 1958, at the height of the Cold War. He gave a toast to Putin in Russian. I seated the Russian president next to Alice Carrington, one of the heirs to the famous King Ranch in Texas. The Putins thought we had a large ranch at 1,600 acres. Then President Putin asked Alice how big the King Ranch is, and she told him 825,000 acres. The funniest part for me, after all my protocol briefings and binders, was that in Texas it's considered a real faux pas to ask someone how big their ranch is. But it was a perfectly natural question for the head of state of the largest nation in the world.

Jenna came up from Austin. She speaks Spanish, and I sat her next to Lyudmila Putina, who does not speak English but does speak Spanish.

The rain finally abated during dinner, and afterward, we walked outside to have coffee around a crackling bonfire. Vladimir Putin struck up a conversation with Don Evans, the commerce secretary, over the fire pit. Putin said, "You have such a short history. You only have two hundred years of history and look how far you have come.

How have you done it?" We forget that Russian history dates back well over a thousand years, with centuries of czars and dynasties. Donnie looked at him and said the answer is simple, freedom, democracy. "Here in the U.S.," he added, "people are free to run their own lives."

To us, it was a very simple statement of the fundamentals of American life, but George and I and the rest of the administration were never under any illusions about how

hard a concept that is for the most powerful in Russia to grasp.

For the remaining seven years, whenever George was scheduled to meet with Vladimir Putin, leaders from around the world would start calling the White House weeks in advance. First it would be the Baltic countries, then the Balkan ones. Nation after nation wanted George to deliver messages for them. Even Tony Blair would call and say, "You've got to tell this to Vladimir." George would go to the meeting with a string of messages from others. And he would have a few of his own as well.

Both here and in Russia, he repeatedly chided Putin for cracking down on the press, telling the Russian president that his country had to have a free press, that a free press is essential for a democracy. "You need to have an independent press," George would tell him. And Putin would invariably reply, "Well, you control your press." George would shake his head and say, "No, Vladimir, I don't. I wish sometimes that I could control them, but I can't. They are free to say whatever they want. In our country, the press is free to write terrible things about me, and I can't do anything about it."

But Russia is a country without those traditions, and with no memory of them, and many in Russia believed that the U.S. government did control our press. In fact, following a summit meeting, one of the first questions George got from a Russian newsman essentially was, How can you complain to President Putin about the Russian press when you fired Dan Rather?

George worked hard to reach out to Putin in spite of the philosophical divide between them. The next morning at the ranch, the four of us had breakfast and then headed into Crawford, so the two presidents could make remarks to the press at the local high school. First-grade students had hung a banner that read "Howdy, Russian President Putin." Having world leaders visit our private home forged relationships; it helped to make it possible for George to deliver all those messages to Putin for so many years. And we quickly discovered that leaders from all over the world wanted to come to Crawford.

When George invited Chinese president Jiang Zemin to "come and visit America,"

President Jiang indicated that George had invited him to be a guest at our ranch. A few months later, he arrived at our door. We entertained fifteen foreign leaders among the live oaks and wild gra.s.ses of Crawford.

After lunch, the Putins departed, and I walked over to our old green clapboard house to tape the president's weekly radio address. I had spent hours editing the draft of the address and going over every nuance with Karen Hughes. I was a little bit nervous, but I was also proud to be able to say something on behalf of the women of Afghanistan, who were threatened with having their fingernails pulled out if they wore so much as a coat of nail polish. I spoke of the Taliban's "degradation" of women and children, forcing them to live lives of poverty, poor health, and illiteracy. "The plight of women and children in Afghanistan is a matter of deliberate human cruelty, carried out by those who seek to intimidate and control. Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror--not only because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us." I wanted the address to be strong, because we needed to speak strongly. But I also wondered if anyone would be listening.

On Sunday, the day after the address aired, I spent the afternoon in Austin with Jenna, doing all those mother-daughter things that I loved doing with my girls as they grew, including shopping. We stopped in the cosmetics section at one of the big

department stores, and the women working behind the counter said something I never expected. They all said, "Thank you so much. Thank you so much for speaking for Afghan women." I was stunned. And for the first time, I realized the degree to which I had a unique forum as first lady. People would pay attention to what I said. I had always known that intellectually, but now I realized it emotionally.

When I had put on the headphones and bent over the microphone to read the address, I had thought of those Afghan women, weighed down under their burkas, with nothing more than tiny mesh slits to uncover their eyes, hidden away from the world and having the world hidden away from them. They were truly powerless. At that moment, it was not that I found my voice. Instead, it was as if my voice had found me.

"Grand Mama Laura"

Upstairs in the private White House residence.

(Tina Hager/White House photo) The eighty-one-foot-tall, eight-ton Norway spruce that towered over Rockefeller Center had arrived on November 9, strapped to a specially designed trailer, with a full police escort. The tree, donated by the Tornabene family of Wayne, New Jersey, required a giant crane to hoist it onto a steel platform located just behind the golden statue of Prometheus, overlooking the plaza's famed ice rink. For days the tree was encased in scaffolding as twenty-four electricians draped five miles of colored lights, thirty thousand red, white, and blue bulbs to be wrapped around its limbs and boughs. All that remained was for the giant evergreen to be lit.

But even Andy Tornabene, who had grown up in Queens and from whose backyard the tree came, at one point had doubted that New York would light any holiday tree this year.

As I made my way into the city just after dusk on November 28, I could sense the security corridor from blocks away, the sky blue NYPD street barricades, the phalanx of

uniformed officers ringing Rockefeller Center, the ma.s.s of steel pens to hold back spectators, and the near total absence of traffic, as the usual sea of yellow cabs and shiny cars was shunted to far-off cross streets and distant avenues. New York still lived under an umbrella of fresh alerts; periodically, police and ant.i.terror task forces would surround Grand Central or Penn Station. There were visibly armed National Guard soldiers walking through the airports and along the commuter rail platforms. A mournful silence seemed to reverberate through the city. The people were fewer, the sounds were quieter, the streets less brilliant and more subdued.

Mayor Giuliani was waiting for me in the holding area, and there we stayed until given the signal to make our way outside. As I stood alongside New York's fire and police commissioners, and the performers, all of us cast brief wary glances up at the night sky. The tree-lighting ceremony was designed to honor the rescue workers and the victims of the 9-11 attacks, and some of their relatives and friends were there. One hundred thousand people filled the streets between Fifth and Sixth avenues. They came for hope; many had tears in their eyes. "America loves New York," I said, adding, "President Bush and I wish for all Americans a happy holiday season and a New Year filled with peace." Then, together, at 8:56 p.m., while television cameras beamed the signal live across the country, Rudy Giuliani and I held our breath ever so slightly and flipped on the lights. That night, the only sounds we heard in return were the cheers and applause from the crowd.

Three days before, the United States had suffered its first casualty in Afghanistan.

Johnny Michael Spann was killed during a riot by Taliban prisoners who launched an attack in the courtyard of a medieval fortress that had been commandeered to serve as a twenty-first-century jail. On that same day, more than seven hundred Marines set up camp in the desert south of the remaining Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. The Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was calling on his forces to "fight to the death."

I had slowly started watching television again. In the first weeks after 9-11, the television had been a constant drone at night as I waited in the residence for George. For the most part, the news was a repet.i.tion of that initial horror. And we lived with threat a.s.sessments more disturbing than any ever spoken on the air. By October, to try to sleep at night, I kept the sets turned off. Finally, on November 12, I turned the TV on to catch up on the news before the Putins arrived. The first images I saw were of a horrible plane crash in Queens, an Airbus that had accidentally gone down just after takeoff. Two hundred and sixty pa.s.sengers died, along with five people on the ground. I stared at the screen, numb, tears welling in my eyes. It was as if I were being transported back to September all over again. And I knew that for the families of these dead and the dead from 9-11, the ache would be harder, the missing greater as the holiday season began.

I had chosen the theme for the White House's Christmas, "Home for the Holidays," back in the humid heat of summer, when everything was lush and green. Now that theme had a far greater meaning, for those who had lost loved ones, for those whose loved ones would be fighting overseas, and for the nation as a whole. One of the White House trees was decorated with snowflakes from third graders who attended school at the various military bases scattered around Washington, D.C. Carpenters, plumbers, and electricians who worked in the White House had built eighteen miniature replicas of former presidents' homes. Using original floor plans, they re-created John and John Quincy Adams's Peacefield, Lyndon Johnson's ranch, James Madison's Montpelier, George Washington's Mount Vernon, Ulysses S. Grant's and Abraham Lincoln's Illinois homes, and Woodrow Wilson's birthplace in Staunton, Virginia. Our pastry chef, Roland Mesnier, made a gingerbread house based on the original White House of 1800, before British troops attacked the city and the house burned practically to the ground. We also asked the nation's governors to select local artisans to create handmade ornaments representing a special historic home or structure in each state, using shades of white. We received cut-paper sculptures, fabric, and leather to adorn the Blue Room tree. One ornament was a little cotton cloud from which the Twin Towers rose, as if they had been transported whole to Heaven.

The other trees scattered through the rooms and halls were draped in lights and frosted with shimmering snow. That season, the White House had the quality of stillness after a snow. Almost no one was allowed inside to see the decorations. On Monday, December 3, the threat a.s.sessments arriving in the West Wing were so great that George placed the entire nation on high alert for possible terrorist strikes. The Secret Service insisted that all public tours be canceled. Some of the guests we invited to White House Christmas parties turned us down; many were still too afraid to fly or to visit a city where terrorists had struck. I wore a red dress and walked cameras through the rooms for a video of the decor.

With the absence of visitors, we worked on expanding the virtual White House, and in addition to the television special, the White House communications office created the "Barney Cam," a specially mounted camera that followed Barney and Spot through the decorated rooms and the grounds. Each year at Christmastime we debuted the footage for the young patients at Washington's Children's National Medical Center. One of our press aides, Jeanie Mamo, became an expert at launching bright plastic Christmas b.a.l.l.s around the East Room, which Barney chased, slipping and sliding across the glossy waxed floors. In subsequent seasons, we developed more elaborate story lines and included celebrity guests. One Barney Cam video ended with Kitty serenely sitting on my lap. Unlike our canines, she steadfastly refused to mug for the camera.

On December 10, we hosted the White House's first-ever Hanukkah party, which I had begun to plan in August. The Jewish Museum in New York lent us a century-old menorah for the candle lighting, and we had a catered kosher buffet. That holiday season and all others to come, we took special pride in two sets of parties, one for the Secret Service and their families--I loved watching year after year as new babies appeared and children grew older--and our final party of the season, for the residence staff. They were the ones who showed us every small kindness, who cared for us, who came to serve under every condition, and we are grateful for their generosity and constant, unflagging goodwill.

On December 22, when the last holiday party had ended and the last hand had been shaken, at just before 8:30 in the morning, the Olympic torch arrived at the White House on its way to the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. We watched the torchbearer, Elizabeth Anderson Howell, whose husband, Brady, had been killed on 9-11 at the Pentagon, carry the flame up the Southeast Drive. She handed her torch to George, who dipped it into the Olympic cauldron, setting it alive with fire. "We pray for peace and comfort for you and your family," he said, before dipping a second, unlit torch into the cauldron and handing it ablaze to Eric Jones, a George Washington University student who, on the morning of 9-11, left campus and headed for the Pentagon. He spent four days helping with the rescue efforts there before driving to New York to do the same for ten days at the still burning remains of the World Trade Center. Eric had been among those to carry the tattered Marine Corps flag out of the Pentagon debris. We watched as he strode down the drive and off the White House grounds. He and Elizabeth represented the best of our country.

A few hours later, Richard Reid would attempt to detonate a bomb onboard a Paris to Miami flight as it raced above the dark waters of the Atlantic. Inside the sole of his shoe was a sophisticated explosive capable of blowing a hole in the plane's fuselage.

He was lighting a match when a flight attendant caught him and screamed to the pa.s.sengers to pa.s.s her "water, contact solution, anything you have!" After he had been subdued, pa.s.sengers offered up their belts as restraints and a doctor on board injected Reid with Valium. We remained on high alert as U.S. troops and Afghan forces battled against enemy fighters in the mountains around Tora Bora, and remnants of the Taliban found sanctuary in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

And we waited for the coming of 2002. Our official holiday card was a serene still life depicting a corner of the residence, painted by Adrian Martinez, who had grown up in poverty in Washington, D.C., and had found refuge in the art of the Smithsonian museums. Inside, we wrote, "May the New Year bring peace on Earth."

Since early October, the former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge had been working in the West Wing as chief of Homeland Security. His office was a tiny, windowless room with a desk. There was barely enough s.p.a.ce for two full-size chairs.

The West Wing had become a nerve center for terror watches, and the December watch was now extended through the February Winter Olympics. News reports would soon describe the fighting in Afghanistan as "winding down," as Time Time magazine put it on magazine put it on February 16. The worry now was other terror cells around the world. And there was still the unanswered question of what had happened to Osama bin Laden.

Inside the White House, I was stuck in a kind of limbo. We had difficulty planning events because of the great uncertainty of the security situation. We would plan cultural or education activities, and just as the invitations were being finalized, the Secret Service or someone on the West Wing staff would say no. We hosted a salute to gospel music in February, and a few White House tours resumed, for prescreened student groups and members of the military and veterans. Otherwise, except for official visitors and the constant stream of heads of state and their spouses, the entry gates remained locked and the house quiet.

We did manage to have a formal unveiling of George's finished Oval Office for the fabric and rug makers and the donors who had helped us redecorate this remarkable room. There were new drapes and new beige and ivory damask sofas, three in total, in case someone spilled coffee on one and the staff had to replace it in a hurry. There was a new pale wool rug, with a sunburst pattern featuring the presidential seal, because George had wanted the room to say, "An optimistic man works here." Adorning the rounded room's walls and niches were paintings and bronzes, including a bust of Sir Winston Churchill loaned to George by the British government. To hang in full view of his desk, George chose the portraits of his two most revered presidents, George Washington, who had created the American presidency, and Abraham Lincoln, who had saved it. George did not hang a portrait of the president he loved the most; that image, of his dad, was, he said, "imprinted on my heart."

While the Oval Office's windows face toward the iconic monuments of Washington, for its remaining walls, we selected images of Texas. On the east and north walls, we hung three paintings by the early Texas artist Julian Onderdonk, a field of Texas bluebonnets, a p.r.i.c.kly pear cactus in bloom, and a scene of the old Alamo and its plaza, crowded with local women at their stalls, selling hot, red chilies at dusk, all lent by Texas museums. The fourth painting was a Tom Lea image of the Rio Grande. Tom had been our friend for years, and in his 2000 convention speech, George had quoted Tom's words. Tom wrote that he and his wife "live on the east side of the mountain. It is the sunrise side, not the sunset side. It is the side to see the day that is coming . . . not the side to see the day that is gone."

"Americans," George added, "live on the sunrise side of the mountain. We are ready for the day to come."

A fifth painting was loaned by our longtime friend Joey O'Neill, who had introduced us. Painted by W. H. D. Koerner and ent.i.tled A Charge to Keep, A Charge to Keep, it shows a it shows a lone horseman charging up a steep and rough trail. Joey's father had given it to Joey and Jan as a wedding gift. After hearing the famous Charles Wesley hymn "A Charge to Keep I Have" sung at George's gubernatorial inaugural in 1995, Joey had loaned George the painting to hang in his Texas governor's office.

George had chosen to use the Resolute Resolute desk, given to President Rutherford B. desk, given to President Rutherford B.

Hayes by Queen Victoria. In May of 1854, the British ship HMS Resolute Resolute became became trapped in Arctic ice and was abandoned by its captain. An American whaling vessel found and rescued the ship in 1855, whereupon Congress purchased the Resolute, Resolute, had it had it refitted, and returned it to Queen Victoria as a gift of peace. When the ship was decommissioned in 1879, the queen requested that a desk be fashioned from its timbers and sent to the American president. Queen Victoria had it inscribed with a plaque, noting that the piece was "a memorial of the courtesy and loving kindness" of the Americans.

Franklin Roosevelt asked that a panel be added to the desk to hide his wheelchair, but the panel arrived only after his death. Harry Truman installed it anyway. John F. Kennedy was the first president to place the desk in the Oval Office, and his toddler son, JFK Jr., would play underneath. Later Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton spent their working hours in the West Wing at the Resolute Resolute desk. desk.

Facing south and surrounded by windows, the Oval Office is bathed in light even on cloudy days. The first time Vladimir Putin walked in and saw that brilliant south light spilling through the windows, he said simply, "My G.o.d." The room itself is not palatial, like the offices of many leaders in other countries. It is a modest, human-size room, and surprising in its simplicity. The longest point is just over thirty-five feet; at eighteen feet, the ceiling is barely higher than in the Texas Governor's Mansion. At least once, a foreign head of state came through and afterward was heard to complain, "I thought I was going to see the Oval Office." When told that he had, his expression turned incredulous. "But it is so small."

At the end of January, I finally returned to the Senate to give my education briefing to Senator Kennedy's committee. It was two weeks after George had signed the landmark No Child Left Behind Act, which Democrats Ted Kennedy and Rep. George Miller and Republicans Judd Gregg and Rep. John Boehner had shepherded through Congress with the help of Education Secretary Rod Paige and George's Domestic Policy advisor, Margaret Spellings, in the previous session. I thought back to what Ted Kennedy had written on the daffodil print he had given me that September morning, "To the First Lady of Education, whose impressive leadership is enabling millions of American children to dance with the daffodils! Your friend Ted Kennedy Sept. 11, 2001." I was still able to visit schools and to highlight innovative educational programs, but now we were a nation at war. When I finally donated my inaugural gown, coat, purse, and shoes to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History for its first lady exhibit on January 20, a year to the day since George had been sworn in, it seemed as if that glittery red dress had been worn by a woman who existed in another era.

Three days later, on January 23, Daniel Pearl, the South Asia bureau chief for The The Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan. He was investigating ties was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan. He was investigating ties between the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, al Qaeda, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.

The kidnappers e-mailed photos of Danny, hunched and holding up a newspaper, with a gun pointed to his head. They claimed that he was working for the CIA, and they demanded that Pakistani terror detainees be freed and that the United States ship disputed F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan's government. For weeks, Danny's wife and American and Pakistani agents scoured the country searching for him. But it was too late.

On February 1, Danny Pearl's captors had slit his throat and then sliced off his head. Only on February 21 did we learn the grisly truth. American FBI agents, posing as journalists, obtained a video in which Danny Pearl confirmed that he was "a Jewish American." The video continued with a longer list of the captors' demands, and then, nearly two minutes in, it showed the beheading in full, gruesome detail. The final scene was of a captor holding up Danny's severed head by its hair. The video ended with the words "And if our demands are not met, this scene shall be repeated again and again."

The man who would later confess to beheading Daniel Pearl is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who also claims to be the mastermind behind the attacks of 9-11.

Among those whom Danny left behind were his parents, Ruth and Judea, and his wife, Mariane, who was six months pregnant with their first child.

As we waited for news of Danny Pearl, I invited a couple to the White House who had lost their son on September 11. Sharon and Kenneth Ambrose's son, Paul, a doctor with the U.S. Public Health Service, had been on board the flight that crashed into the Pentagon. I had heard about Paul not long after 9-11 from our longtime Midland friend Penny Slade-Sawyer, who now worked with the Public Health Service. She said that in Paul the service had lost one of its brightest stars. But it was the message from his parents that truly broke my heart. In cl.u.s.ters of suburbs across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Ma.s.sachusetts, and around Washington, D.C., there were hundreds of families devastated by grief. But in some small measure of comfort, they were not alone.

The Ambroses were the only family in all of West Virginia who had lost someone in the horror of 9-11. In their particular grief, they knew no one else who could truly understand. On February 7, the Ambroses came to the White House. Over coffee we sat and talked about Paul, about his life and his dreams. I listened to their words of love and loss. They had already suffered the death of another son. Paul was their one remaining child. Long after they left, I thought about them and that depth of sadness. And I thought of all the parents who now wondered what could happen to their children when they did something as routine as board a plane.

I turned to books for comfort. The quietest part of my day was always late afternoon, when my official schedule was finished but George was still at work in the Oval Office. I no longer ran errands, the way I had in Texas. In Dallas, by four o'clock I would have been pushing my cart around the supermarket aisle, trying to come up with something to fix for dinner. I would be waiting for the girls to return; I would be rushing to pick something up at the dry cleaners, or driving car pool, or taking Barbara and Jenna to a lesson or an activity. In Austin, when the girls were in high school, I would go to a game or a practice or be around to make sure that they did their homework. Every moment would be accounted for until bedtime, when I could finally take a breath. Now, those pre-evening hours had become the emptiest.

I thought about Nancy Reagan, lying down late one afternoon to rest after breast cancer surgery and learning that her mother had died. Ronald Reagan opened the door and told her; he had gotten the word first.

Day after day, as the afternoon waned and darkness settled over Washington, D.C., I would read, newer works, such as Leif Enger's Peace Like a River; Peace Like a River; histories, such histories, such as Jay Winik's April 1865; April 1865; or cla.s.sics, such as Willa Cather's or cla.s.sics, such as Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Death Comes for the Archbishop, just as my mother had done all those years ago in Midland when I would just as my mother had done all those years ago in Midland when I would come home and find her with a book in her hands. I read as I waited for George to arrive for dinner, and I was grateful to have words to keep me company.

I looked too for ways to bring words and writers into the White House, hosting symposiums on authors such as Mark Twain or on schools of literature, including the Harlem Renaissance. We gathered literary figures and scholars in the East Room and invited students and teachers from local schools. It was a chance to discuss some of the most powerful works in the American past and the writers who speak to all of us through the humanity of their characters. Our guest lists were limited, but we made sure the events were televised around the nation via C-SPAN.

And I looked for ways to help the women and children of Afghanistan.

At the time, there were 10 million children in Afghanistan; one in three was an orphan; one in four would not live to see a fifth birthday, and more Afghan mothers died in childbirth than mothers in almost any other part of the world. On October 12, 2001, George had announced the creation of America's Fund for Afghan Children. He asked children across the United States to donate one dollar to help the children of Afghanistan.

The response was overwhelming. In less than four years, the program would raise more than $11 million. Thousands of those donations were sadly "lost" for years in the bags of potentially anthrax-contaminated White House mail.

By early December, though, the fund was sending humanitarian aid. The world is full of suffering peoples and nations, but in the harsh, remote hills and plains of Afghanistan, the deprivation has been particularly cruel. Afghanistan was a place where children came of age barefoot and where many of them could not imagine something as simple as a bright, soft plastic ball. In a Red Cross warehouse in New Windsor, Maryland, George and I saw the first-aid pallets. Bundled together were winter coats and tents and ten thousand individual gift parcels, which included wool socks, knit hats, soap, pencils, paper, and inflatable b.a.l.l.s. FedEx had offered to ship the packages free of charge to Germany, where they would be loaded onto U.S. military transport planes, flown to Turkmenistan, and then trucked across the border into Northern Afghanistan. The formidable logistics were a reminder of how isolated this region and its people are.

On December 12, at a special ceremony at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, where I had once loved to stroll through exhibitions with Bar, George signed into law the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act of 2001 to provide health and education a.s.sistance to women and children in Afghanistan. One woman in attendance was known only as Farida. She had come to the United States as a refugee in 2000. She was a former aid worker who had tried to promote basic human rights for women. Even with the Taliban being driven from power, she was afraid to use her full name.

I had already seen that wary-eyed fear firsthand in late November of 2001, when I hosted a group of Afghan women for coffee.

Melanne Verveer, Hillary Clinton's White House chief of staff and now head of the organization Vital Voices, had phoned Andi Ball, my chief of staff, to say that eleven Afghan exiles, some living in the United States, some living overseas, were arriving in Washington. Would I consider meeting with them? I immediately said yes and invited them to the White House. I still remember the women's amazement at being welcomed into the home of presidents. Inside Afghanistan, under the Taliban, they had been banned from almost all government buildings and public places. We gathered in the Diplomatic Reception Room, which until Teddy Roosevelt's time had housed the White House's ma.s.sive coal furnace. During the Depression and World War II, it would become the iconic scene of Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats. Jackie Kennedy had installed the room's fanciful French wallpaper, printed in 1834, depicting scenes from early America, including Niagara Falls and Boston Harbor. I watched the women's eyes move across the walls, taking everything in.

In speaking to reporters, I said that I hoped "one principle of that new government will be human rights, and that includes the rights of women and children." And I hoped that the new Afghan government, then being formed at a special gathering of Afghan nationals and exiles in Bonn, Germany, would "include everyone." I wanted women to have seats at the table and every Afghan child, girls as well as boys, to be offered an education.

Most of these women had served as aid workers, trying to improve life for the millions of others left behind. One, Mary Chopan Alamshahi, a nurse-pract.i.tioner who now lived in exile in California, thanked me for "giving voice to us" in the November 17 presidential radio address. "The entire world listened," she said, as her words caught with emotion.

Not everyone was quite so willing to let my voice be my own. Writing in Newsweek after the White House event, reporter Martha Brant said, "If I had closed my eyes, I could have sworn it was Hillary Clinton talking."

On January 28, Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's new interim leader, came to Washington to meet with George at the White House. Before he left, I gave him an inscribed children's English dictionary, to emphasize the importance of education.

On March 8, I was at the United Nations in New York for International Women's Day. The UN's gla.s.s tower rises like a glittery monument to postwar optimism. But inside, it is old. The once state-of-the-art linoleum floors are worn with age, the back hallways drab and industrial. The escalators that cart people between floors look like relics from another era; ironically, the Pentagon has similar metal escalators linking its floors. Newer, high-gloss models can be found in almost any shopping mall.

As I walked beneath the flags of the member nations, I hoped that today's UN would not forget Afghanistan's women and children. Hamid Karzai had already signed a Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women, legally granting women equality with men. But a sizable gap remained between paper pledges and people's lives.