Spoken From The Heart Part 17

Afterward, I gave Charles and Camilla signed books from all the authors who had attended. For our official gift, George gave them each a handcrafted Texas saddle because of their love of horses. They acted thrilled, but I imagine they must have entire tack rooms in their stables devoted to the saddles that have been given to them on various world tours, not to mention the fact that ours were designed for Western-style riding, not English.

On November 9, the Dalai Lama visited George and me for the second time at the White House. The Dalai Lama is a dear and gentle man whose example is an inspiration; he eloquently embodies the hopes for freedom in Tibet. Once, at the White House, he tickled a ramrod-straight, stoic Marine guard under his chin, saying, "Smile." The Marine did. But underneath his soft nature is a man who has been denied his rights and his homeland since he was a boy. He told us that he genuinely feared for Tibet, feared that its culture would be erased from memory as China resettled vast numbers of its citizens inside Tibet's mountainous, landlocked region. George believes that acknowledging the Dalai Lama is a special American responsibility. The world looks to the United States for leadership, and if we do not stand up for freedom, who will? During his eight years in the White House, George met with dozens of dissidents from Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia, North Korea, Burma, Belarus, and other countries.

For the holiday season, I had chosen the theme "All Things Bright and Beautiful,"

and we decorated the White House with flowers and fruit, plants, and things that people can find in their yards and gardens. We put pears in our evergreen garlands and on our centerpieces. After a year of so much natural devastation--a tsunami, Katrina--it was a way of remembering the special beauty of nature. The White House was filled with retired staff who came back to work at the Christmas parties, when the sheer number of guests and events made everything hectic. They had been through so many holiday seasons that they knew the rhythms, knew when the food tables were running low or how to ladle punch without dripping. They knew just what needed to be done, and they would introduce themselves saying, "Mrs. Bush, I am Alfredo. I was here in the Kennedy administration." That is the type of love and devotion the White House inspires.

At the parties, some guests produced unexpected moments of levity. One woman, waiting to be screened by the magnetometers as she arrived for a White House function, asked the Social Office aides if the machine could see that she wasn't wearing any underwear. Another asked if the machine could tell that she was wearing two pairs of Spanx, modern-day girdles. And at the Congressional Ball, one of the members coming through the receiving line told me, "My wife and her friends think you wear a wig." I looked at him dumbfounded, then smiled and said, "No, it's my own hair," and pulled on it, just so that he would know for sure.

I had asked the third-generation artist Jamie Wyeth to paint a scene for the official White House holiday card, and he featured the Andrew Jackson magnolia covered in snow, with Barney, Miss Beazley, and India the cat in front. When we sent out our holiday greetings we wished everyone "hope and happiness" for the season and the year to come.

In any given year, it is possible to count the nationally elected female leaders around the world using little more than the fingers of two hands. Some of the most famous female leaders are women who served decades ago, such as Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher. In January of 2006, on Martin Luther King Day, I represented the United States at the swearing in of Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman ever elected to lead an African nation. Liberia was founded by former American slaves, who colonized the west coast of Africa as early as 1820.

President James Monroe asked for U.S. government funds to purchase the original tracts of land. The Liberian settlements became a haven for slaves freed by the U.S. Navy from the last of the transatlantic slave ships, and today about 5 percent of all Liberians are descended from these early settlers, who escaped slavery for freedom and who, in 1847, created their sovereign state.

But the country's recent history has been brutal and tumultuous. In 1980 a military coup ushered in a decade of authoritarian rule, followed by rebellion and b.l.o.o.d.y civil war. Finally, starting in 1997 the country had two years of calm, until war erupted again in 1999. It took over three years to achieve another cease-fire and the beginnings of peace, and the price of conflict has been enormous. Two hundred thousand people died in the violence; about 1.5 million fled as refugees. Many of the nation's children were forced to fight as tiny soldiers and had grown up with guns and ammunition rather than parents.

In 2005, when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected, she was one of only four previous Liberian cabinet members who had escaped execution. That January morning she was taking office in a capital city, Monrovia, which had no electricity or running water, and where it was not safe to stay overnight. Instead, Condi Rice, Barbara, and I stayed in neighboring Ghana. To reach downtown Monrovia we pa.s.sed thatched huts made of woven reeds and roofs that were little more than plastic sheets or corrugated metal strips, held in place from wind and rain by rocks scattered about the edges.

Liberians lined the road to watch our convoy pa.s.s, transistor radios pressed to their ears for a bit of news. I smiled and waved, and they shyly did so in return.

It was a remarkable moment of promise to see a strong woman inaugurated as the president of an African nation, a woman so determined to lead her country out of the ruin of decades of war and conflict. As I read the program for the inauguration, I saw the irony that Liberia's early leaders, like ours, were born in Virginia or Kentucky or other Southern states. But while our presidents and statesmen had often been born as sons on landed estates, Liberia's leaders had been born as slaves. When they came to Africa to found a new nation, they created its name as well. The word "Liberia" is meant to denote liberty.

In her inaugural address, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf spoke of how women in Liberia had long been "second-cla.s.s citizens," forced to endure rape during the civil wars, forced to endure the loss of their families and their dignity. She said that she prays for the reconciliation of the country.

Liberia's last leader, Charles Taylor, had allegedly flown arms traded for diamonds into the airport while his own citizens fought and killed each other. In July of 2003, George had repeatedly called for Taylor to resign and leave the country. He then dispatched three American warships with two thousand Marines to Liberia's coast. After weeks of back-channel diplomacy between the United States and Liberia's neighbor Nigeria, Taylor was persuaded to leave, and departed Monrovia on August 11. That summer Charles Taylor did what Saddam Hussein would not the previous spring.

A small group of Marines went ash.o.r.e to a.s.sist West African peacekeepers and to clear the way for humanitarian aid. The United States was the only Western nation to provide such direct political and humanitarian help, and many Liberians were grateful to George; the vice president's wife later told me: "President Bush said 'leave,' and Charles Taylor did."

In Ghana, I launched the Africa Education Initiative, which linked U.S.

universities with African nations including Ghana, Senegal, Zambia, Tanzania, South Africa, and Ethiopia. The first partnership was with six minority-serving universities, most African-American, plus the University of Texas at San Antonio, which is predominantly Hispanic. Each university shares its expertise and its education department to develop kindergarten through eighth-grade textbooks written in native African languages, ill.u.s.trated by African ill.u.s.trators, and if possible, printed in each African country. The presidents and representatives of the American universities--Chicago State, Elizabeth City State, Tougaloo College, South Carolina State, University of Texas at San Antonio, and Alabama A & M--joined me at the launch.

As part of the United States' work in international development, we had made a special commitment to improving education in Africa, where a staggering one-third of young children do not attend school. American resources help provide textbooks and teacher training and scholarships so that orphans and other vulnerable children, especially girls, have a chance at an education. With education we can reduce disease, poverty, suffering, and violence, and with better education, we can work to stop future genocides.

In sub-Saharan Africa, girls especially are denied the opportunity to learn. In 2005, of the 42 million African children who had never set foot inside a cla.s.sroom, who did not know how to read or to do simple math, 60 percent were girls. In fact, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has made it a priority to teach the sidewalk market women in Liberia the basics of addition and subtraction so they might earn a better living.

By 2006, the United States had helped provide more than 2.1 million books to schools and libraries and had implemented programs to train 300,000 teachers. I met with some of those teachers that January morning in Ghana. Then I visited, as I did in every African nation, an HIV/AIDS treatment center. Between 3 and 4 percent of all Ghanians have HIV or AIDS, and as in other African nations, the stigma is particularly great for women.

It is tragic that while the United States and Western nations have made tremendous strides on behalf of women and women's rights, many other parts of the world lag far behind. During a South American summit meeting, when I was attending a lunch with the first lady of Brazil, she told me that she wanted to work on "birth records."

The translation was spotty, and I thought she said "bird records." I immediately started thinking of the Amazon, ecotourism, and the fabulous ways that they could protect their bird species, because I am an avid bird-watcher. And I replied, "Oh, that's great." She never realized that I thought she was talking about birds when she started. But what she was discussing was so much more basic yet vitally important. In Brazil and many other parts of the world, countries do not have adequate data on their populations because they do not record births or produce birth certificates. Tens of thousands of children, especially girls, are never counted. Boys may make it into the system eventually because they join the military, but girls remain invisible. They literally do not count, in nation after nation around the globe.

Before I left Ghana, I had lunch with President John Kufuor at what was then the official presidential palace, inside the Osu Castle, or Slave Castle. It was the place where slaves were shipped to Europe and the Americas, and for years it was where Ghana's president made his official home. Underground, I saw the small "storerooms" where Africans were kept chained in the dark, waiting for months for ships to arrive. Many went blind because, after so much time in the darkness, their eyes were irreparably damaged when at last they stepped into the brilliant tropical light.

On January 26, 2006, I returned to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, along with Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, to visit local schools and a playground. I began at the Alice M. Harte Elementary School in Orleans Parish. It had been one of the lucky schools, suffering only minimal damage. But it had also experienced "the Katrina effect" in education. Before the storm, the state of Louisiana had launched a state takeover of some of New Orleans's most troubled schools. When tens of thousands of families evacuated the city and temporarily enrolled their children in other school systems, many parents realized how substandard the city's schools were. Parents and teachers began to demand better for New Orleans. By November 2005, the Louisiana legislature gave the state full control of 107 of the city's 128 schools. Within eighteen months, half of New Orleans's schools would reopen as charter schools, available to all students but independently operated, with more comprehensive curriculums, and required to meet strict performance standards. One of the first of these public schools to become a charter school was Alice M. Harte, where I helped celebrate the return of its students.

My second stop was the St. Bernard Unified School, which had opened its doors on November 14, 2005, to serve 354 students. That number had risen to 1,500 students, from kindergarten through high school. This was now the only school in the entire parish.

Some students were traveling from Baton Rouge, ninety miles away, where they had been evacuated, so they could attend cla.s.ses in what had been their home. With portions of the school still being cleaned out from the flooding, teachers and administrators were using trailers and tents as cla.s.srooms. Doris Voitier, the determined school superintendent, had been unable to get temporary buildings or emergency funds from either FEMA or the Army Corps of Engineers. But instead of waiting, she took action so her students could resume their education. In St. Bernard Parish, nearly every school, home, church, and business had been destroyed by the flooding in Katrina's wake.

In Mississippi, even before the floodwaters had receded, Governor Haley Barbour had begun putting together a rebuilding commission. Despite the immense devastation, every Mississippi school had reopened by November of 2005. This January afternoon in the tiny town of Kiln, the pro football quarterback Brett Favre and his wife, Deanna, were waiting for me. Favre had grown up in Kiln and had played his first "big-time" football in its modest high school stadium. Together we dedicated a new KaBOOM! playground, built by local volunteers that very same day. Through its Operation Playground, KaBOOM!, a nonprofit that builds play s.p.a.ces for children in low-income areas, had pledged to build or restore one hundred playgrounds across the Gulf Coast over two years. Each project was completed by volunteers. People from around the country came to the Gulf Coast to help with all aspects of the rebuilding. Jenna and Barbara did as well.

They spent a New Year's in Louisiana, constructing a house with Habitat for Humanity.

On nights and weekends, I had a second career inside the White House: movie critic. After years of barely being able to squeeze in time for a movie or waiting until it came to the video rental stores, George and I were now the happy beneficiaries of the White House movie theater and a supply of feature films from the Motion Picture a.s.sociation (movies have been shown in the White House since Woodrow Wilson was in office). We showed movies to heads of state visiting at Camp David, and Jenna, Barbara, George, and I entertained the girls' friends with new releases and hot popcorn. We loved to have the children of the White House staff in to see the latest Disney offering or movies about Nancy Drew and Kit Kittredge. Each fall, after the National Book Festival, I would spend Sunday afternoon watching a chick flick or a foreign film with my friends.

My inner movie critic decided that many films were too long and could stand a good bit more editing; for his part, George did not like films that depended on the F-word for much of their dialogue.

The White House theater is on the ground floor. For state occasions it doubles as a coat check, but the rest of the time, it looks like an old-time movie theater, with oversize red plush seats and a big screen. Our first showing in 2001 was Thirteen Days, Thirteen Days, the story the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy presidency. We invited Senator Ted Kennedy and many members of his family to attend.

In February of 2006, we debuted Glory Road, Glory Road, the story of the Texas Western the story of the Texas Western Miners, one of the first integrated basketball teams and the first to be desegregated in the South. To win the NCAA championship in 1966, Coach Don Haskins started his five best players, all African-American, making sports history. We invited the producer and the central star, but most of our spots were reserved for the former team players and the family of Coach Haskins. I remembered well the story of El Paso's Texas Western Miners. For two years my mother had gone to Texas Western, when it was called the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy, and I had attended summer school there in 1965.

Afterward, we had the entire team, most of whom were our age, nearly sixty, to dinner in the State Dining Room, where players reminisced and swapped stories.

February was also the month the Winter Olympics opened in Turin, Italy, and I led the American delegation, which included a great group of former Olympians: the skaters Dorothy Hamill and Debi Thomas, the gymnast Kerri Strug, the football star Herschel Walker, who had competed in the bobsled, and the speed skater Eric Heiden, who was now the skating team's orthopedic doctor. In Rome, Barbara and I went to meet the new Pope, Benedict XVI, and all of us visited with our troops stationed at the air base in Aviano. The troops were thrilled to meet the former Olympians.

As with every international event, there were scattered groups of protesters in Turin, arrayed against a variety of causes. Most were antiglobalization; some were protesting Coca-Cola, smog, fast food, and plans for an Italian high-speed train; and some were protesting the Iraq War. Media reports before the Olympics had predicted largescale demonstrations, but they did not materialize. What protest groups did form stayed far away from most Olympic sites. But when Brian Williams interviewed me a few hours before the Opening Ceremony, his second question was: "How much do the protest signs get to you along the motorcade route?" I told him I had seen only a few protest signs.

And I wondered whether he, tucked away in his broadcast booth, had seen any at all.

Inside, at the ceremony, only the Italian athletes received louder and more

resounding cheers than the American team. Spectators stood and clapped.

I sat with Cherie Blair for the opening, and behind us was the very charming Giorgio Armani. I spoke no Italian, he spoke almost no English, and the noise from the celebration was deafening, but we communicated with hand signals and got along fine.

As we were preparing to fly home from Italy, I received word from my Secret Service detail that there had been an accident on a ranch in Texas; d.i.c.k Cheney had accidentally shot a friend while they were hunting quail. I was sick with worry, for Harry Whittington, who had been hit, for d.i.c.k, and also for George. I asked my chief of staff, Anita McBride, to call Andy Card, George's chief of staff, though it was the middle of the night at home. I wanted to urge the vice president's office to state the facts, to be open, and to answer questions. There was no need to say anything but the truth. Silence, which was all that was coming from the West Wing, was worse. d.i.c.k Cheney did speak to the press, and Harry Whittington recovered. And it gave George a great joke for his next black-tie roast: that the vice president had shot the only trial lawyer who'd supported him.

Back home and around the world, there was mounting dissent over the Iraq War, and George was deeply troubled by how badly the situation inside Iraq had deteriorated.

Iraq had already held two sets of national elections, including one in December of 2005 for a 275-member Council of Representatives. But there were near daily terror attacks and bombings, and in parts of the country neither our troops nor the Iraqis were safe.

Suicide bombers were killing day laborers and market shoppers, police and National Guard recruits, and even religious pilgrims at mosques. As many as one hundred Iraqis would be killed in a single incident. One of the most devastating events occurred in late February, when bombers struck a holy Shi'ite shrine, the Askariya shrine in Samarra, some sixty-five miles north of Baghdad. In the weeks and months after the bombing, Iraq would be crippled by fresh waves of sectarian violence between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims. It seemed that each time Iraq began to stabilize, after it held elections, after it began to form a broad-based government, a new incident or threat would appear and undermine that precarious stability. How to drive the insurgents out was occupying most of George's waking hours. This would be a decisive year.

On March 1, Air Force One, with George and me on board, had just finished refueling in Ireland for a scheduled trip to India and Pakistan. I called my a.s.sistant, Lindsey Lineweaver, into the president's cabin and asked if she could keep a secret. "We are not going to be landing in New Delhi," I told her. "Air Force One is headed for Afghanistan."

George and I arrived at Bagram Air Base outside of Kabul and then headed to the city on board Marine One. Hamid Karzai was waiting for us at the presidential palace compound. George and President Karzai conferred while I joined his wife, Dr. Zeenat Karzai, for lunch, a traditional meal of chicken, green vegetables, flatbread, and several kinds of rice. Just as on my previous trip, we spoke intently about the needs of women, especially their medical needs. Even something as simple as cooking can be deadly in Afghanistan. Because so many women cook with primitive fires using highly flammable kerosene, they often suffer severe burns. Their children are frequently burned too, by falling into the flames or as a result of kitchen explosions. We discussed mothers' health and infant mortality. There was still no maternity hospital in Kabul, but I had spoken to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld after my last trip, and by late 2005, the U.S.

military had set up a program to train midwives in Afghanistan.

In downtown Kabul, George cut the ribbon on the new U.S. Emba.s.sy building.

Our day finished back at Bagram with a visit to U.S. troops. At dusk we were in the air flying to India, where Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appeared at the airport to welcome us. I was in awe of the enormous presidential residence, the Rashtrapati Bhavan, which was completed in 1929 by the British as a monument to the permanence of their rule; eighteen years later, India was independent. The palace's walls contained 700 million bricks and 3 million cubic feet of stone. With 340 rooms and 200,000 square feet of s.p.a.ce, it dwarfs the White House.

Over a whirlwind three days, I made a number of stops. I visited one of Mother Teresa's homes for disabled children in New Delhi; Mother Teresa's ministry cares for some ten thousand children, many of them abandoned. The homes are a true testament to her love for those so many others consider "the least." I chatted with Indian Muppets as they taped part of Galli Galli Sim Sim, Galli Galli Sim Sim, their version of their version of Sesame Street. Sesame Street. George and I laid a George and I laid a wreath at the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, then bowed for a moment of silence and threw rose petals in honor of his memory. Before we departed, Prime Minister Singh and Mrs. Gursharan Kaur hosted a lovely lunch for us at Taj Palace Hotel. The prime minister is one of the kindest and gentlest world leaders, a quiet and elegant man, and George and I were happy that the United States had developed such a warm and rich relationship with India. At the lunch George stood up and walked with Prime Minister Singh to each table, to greet everyone in the room. Our final night, the president of India, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, held a giant outdoor dinner for us on the perfectly manicured lawns of the Presidential Palace. Waiters in white gloves served us from overflowing platters of food, and the grounds were decorated with hundreds of glimmering white lights, echoing the bright stars above.

From India we flew to Pakistan, where the previous day a bomb in Karachi had killed a U.S. diplomat. There had also been angry street protests, and the security surrounding us was so tight we barely glimpsed Islamabad. Our amba.s.sador, Ryan Crocker, invited George to take a few swings with a cricket bat, but most of the time was spent on high-level talks with President Pervez Musharraf. At a dinner in our honor, we watched a beautiful display of folk dancing. But at my table, Sehba Musharraf, the prime minister's wife, lamented that so many young Pakistanis knew very little about their nation's arts and culture. When I returned home I reached out to Michael Kaiser, the president of the Kennedy Center and an arts amba.s.sador for the state department.

Michael flew to Pakistan to offer advice, and later that year Mrs. Musharraf made her own trip to the United States to attend a Pakistani cultural event at the Kennedy Center. It was the beginning of a number of fruitful arts partnerships between the Kennedy Center and other nations around the globe.

In mid-March I returned to New Orleans for a tour of the levees with the Army Corps of Engineers, who explained where they had been breached and what was being done to repair them. It was six months after Katrina, and there was still devastation. I also visited several schools to follow the rebuilding efforts. On May 3, the Laura Bush Foundation would make its first grants to restock school libraries across the Gulf Coast.

Yet each time I returned to New Orleans, I could see progress. At first it was just the collection and disposal of debris, but little by little the empty buildings were being

removed or reclaimed. We saw strip malls and groups of stores slowly return to life.

Parking lots that had been empty now had a few cars. Where windows had been dark, there were bits of light. But there was still so far to go.

That spring Andy Card retired from the White House after over five years as George's chief of staff. He had served in the post longer than any other chief of staff in recent White House history. Under incredibly intense pressures, Andy had kept his eventempered and fair style, which earned him bipartisan praise across Washington. We valued him not just for his skill but for his friendship. We had become especially close with Andy and his wife, Kathleene. They had spent many weekends with us at Camp David, invariably leaving late Sat.u.r.day night or at dawn on Sunday so Kathi could return to her church in McLean, Virginia, where she was an a.s.sistant minister. After 9-11, Kathi and Alma Powell, Colin Powell's wife, had reached out to the spouses of George's cabinet secretaries and White House staff. That September many were new to Washington; some had young children, and now their husbands or wives were gone from their houses and their lives, working at a breakneck pace seven days a week. Kathi, together with Alma, who had spent years managing the separation and sometimes isolation that came when her husband was deployed overseas with the military, gave these spouses refuge, a place to talk, and a way of supporting each other.

Andy and Kathi's caring, calm, and compa.s.sion were and are invaluable to us.

The annual White House Easter Egg Roll dates back to Andrew Johnson's administration. Then it was just a family affair. Eggs were dyed on Easter Sunday and rolled along the lawns on Monday morning. The larger gathering of local children, eggs, and spoons was held on the Capitol grounds. But in 1876, Congress grew tired of divots in its gra.s.s and rotting abandoned eggs. It pa.s.sed a law forbidding the Capitol grounds to be used as a children's playground. The roll was rained out in 1877, but in 1878 President Rutherford B. Hayes opened the gates of the White House to the displaced egg rollers.

Only two world wars and horrible weather have canceled the event since. When they were six, I had taken Barbara and Jenna to the roll while Gampy was vice president.

By the time George and I arrived at the White House, the roll had become an elaborate production. We hosted entertainers, including the singers Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers, as well as magicians and celebrity storybook readers, featuring sports stars like Troy Aikman of the Dallas Cowboys and cabinet officials. Thousands of small children rolled their eggs with wooden spoons. As a reward, each would be sent home with an inscribed wooden White House egg.

For me 2006 will always be known as the year of the great egg caper. That Easter Monday morning, a member of the Social Office noticed a seventy-year-old lady who was a longtime volunteer at the roll. Instead of working she was repeatedly visiting the Porta-Potty on the South Lawn. Concerned, the staffer told a member of the White House Visitors Office, who walked over and opened the bathroom door. Inside the volunteer was stuffing ma.s.ses of wooden Easter eggs into her girdle. The White House staff then began a search of other senior citizen volunteers and uncovered a widespread ring. The women were surrept.i.tiously taking the eggs and coloring books into large Porta-Potties and slipping them under the stalls to a "ringleader," who was hiding the contraband in a bright yellow trash bag that she had removed from a bathroom trash can. From there they planned to smuggle them off the grounds. Instead of creating a scene, White House staff redirected the women to work at the food tent, serving egg salad. The staff then took down their names, and they were permanently removed from the volunteer list.

Sadly, pilfering was a common problem at the White House. Guests would walk out of the washrooms with hand towels stuffed in their jackets or purses. One prominent television personality was known for having a collection of White House paper hand towels, monogrammed with the presidential seal, in her powder room. She had "acc.u.mulated" them when she came for interviews. Over the years, guests had removed pieces of flatware to the point where one set of silver engraved with the words "The President's House" was so popular as a "souvenir" that we used it only in the private dining room upstairs. Guests also helped themselves to the vermeil eagle place card holders. After these repeatedly vanished from the dinner tables, we asked the butlers to remove the card holders before dessert was served. Some visitors even took the dangling cut gla.s.s pieces from the sconces that hung in the ladies' room on the ground floor. There were times when the social secretary's staff joked that we should have guests walk through the magnetometers on the way in, and again on the way out.

Occasionally a guest was apprehended before making it onto White House grounds. One very well dressed woman, who had been placed on a guest list at the request of a Senate office, was detained by the Secret Service at the entry gate. She had three federal bench warrants out for her arrest. The warrants popped up when the officers ran her Social Security number through the database. As the officers led her away in handcuffs, she insisted upon draping her fur coat over her wrists and hands. Another time an aide accompanying a preschool tour group was detained because she was in the country illegally, and one guest's driver was nabbed for having thousands of dollars in outstanding parking tickets.

There were also moments of entrepreneurial daring, such as the time a group of singers opened huge black cases inside the Vermeil Room, placed them on the antique furniture, and began selling jewelry to the other performers right underneath Eleanor Roosevelt's portrait. They had concealed the jewelry inside their voluminous clothing bags, and the Secret Service had a.s.sumed it was for them to wear.

Some other performers who came to entertain would send over pages of requirements, down to what type of water they wanted to drink and what snacks they would eat. One celebrity singer wanted us to create a White House dressing room for him, complete with a star on the door.

On April 20, we hosted the president of the People's Republic of China, Hu Jintao, and his wife, Madame Liu, for a state visit. The United States' relationship with China is one of our most important, and George had his own special Chinese relationship.

His father had served as the U.S. envoy to the People's Republic in 1974-75, after relations between America and China were reestablished following the Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War. As a young man, George had bicycled through the streets of Beijing. But this morning disaster lurked at every turn. At the arrival ceremony, President Hu was introduced as being from the Republic of China, which is the official designation for Taiwan. During the ceremony itself, Wenyi w.a.n.g, a forty-seven-year-old woman who had been admitted as part of the press pool--she had credentials from The The Epoch Times, a newspaper that had covered other White House events--stood up and a newspaper that had covered other White House events--stood up and began to scream at the Chinese leader, denouncing him for his treatment of Falun Gong, a Chinese religious sect. She yelled, "President Bush, stop him from killing." It took several minutes for uniformed security officers to remove her--the plainclothes Secret Service are charged to act only if there is an immediate threat to the physical security of the president--and until the officers arrived, her curdling, high-pitched cries echoed across the South Lawn. President Hu and his wife were gracious, but George and I were embarra.s.sed. There are no do-overs for events like state visits. Controversy can follow any state leader, not only Americans, abroad.

Two months later we were back on the South Lawn to welcome Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of j.a.pan. Koizumi, who had become our good friend, would be staying for two days, and that night we planned an official dinner in his honor, with flower arrangements reminiscent of a j.a.panese garden, green orchid topiaries rising over the tops of tall gla.s.s cylinders. More than the black-tie evening, we knew Koizumi was looking forward to the following morning, when we took off from Andrews Air Force Base for Memphis, Tennessee. He is a huge fan of Elvis, so we had planned a trip to the King's home, Graceland. Waiting on the front steps to take us through the house were Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley, and when Koizumi saw them, he began singing the Elvis cla.s.sic "Love Me Tender" to Priscilla. After the tour, we stopped for lunch at the famed Memphis barbecue restaurant the Rendezvous, where Koizumi donned big gold sungla.s.ses, hopped up on the stage, and asked a three-piece band to play the Elvis. .h.i.t "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You," while his face beamed and he sang along. He was overjoyed. As a gift, we gave him a 1950s jukebox filled with songs by Elvis and other rock 'n' roll cla.s.sics.

My late spring was filled with return trips to New Orleans, projects for Helping America's Youth, and a UN General a.s.sembly High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS, as well as another trip with George to Austria and Hungary. In June, U.S. troops in Iraq had reached their lowest levels in two years, 125,000, but the violence around the nation was not abating. On June 13, George made another surprise visit to Baghdad to meet with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. He increased U.S. troop levels and knew that the 2006 midterm election would likely be a referendum on the Iraq War.

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

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

We called on the music legend Fats Domino, who had been born in that ward and whose rhythm and blues had poured out of my radio when I was a teenager in Midland.

When the floodwaters came, Fats's tan-brick house was engulfed. The waters rose past the priceless collection of gold and platinum records adorning his walls. Decades of mementos washed away or were ruined in the flood. One item that had been lost was the National Medal of Arts given to him by Bill Clinton. Before we left George had asked Bill whether he would mind if we had the medal recast. Bill was thrilled. So we presented

Fats Domino with a second gold medal, cast from the same mold, and draped it over his neck.

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

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

The UN General a.s.sembly opened immediately after the remembrances for 9-11.

I was there to hear George's address to the UN, and I had a special event of my own.

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

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

At the New York Public Library, amid great books by some of the finest writers, the White House Conference on Global Literacy brought together forty-one education ministers, thirty-two first ladies and spouses, and literacy experts from seventy-five countries to share information and learn about which programs work best. Among our presenters was Dr. Perri Kla.s.s, a renowned pediatrician who is also the director of the Reach Out and Read National Center. I had started the organization's first programs in Texas when George was governor. Reach Out and Read was founded in 1989 by Doctors Barry Zuckerman and Robert Needlman, along with three early childhood educators.

Pediatricians like Zuckerman, Needlman, and Kla.s.s saw the absence of reading and literacy skills among their young patients and began giving parents "prescriptions" to read aloud to their children just as they prescribed medicines to combat disease. Each child is given a free book at every checkup from age six months through five years, about ten books in all. More than 4,500 Reach Out and Read programs nationwide serve 3.8 million children.

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

Late that afternoon I took some of the presenters down to Wall Street, where we

toured the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and I rang the exchange's closing bell.

It was a far cry from my first visit with Regan, nearly forty years before. Traders on the floor applauded, and I leaned over to shake their hands. But not quite everything had changed. I smiled when I saw that The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal began its coverage by began its coverage by reporting that I was wearing "a pink skirt-suit."

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

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

In the twenty-first century, we know that systematic programs can wipe out the mosquitoes and arrest transmission of the disease. Something as simple as sleeping under a bed net or treating infested areas with insecticide can greatly reduce malaria outbreaks.

But in some of the poorest countries in the world, very little was being done to combat malaria, which is every bit as deadly as AIDS. George wanted to change that. In June of 2005, he announced the President's Malaria Initiative, which focused on combating malaria in fifteen of the world's hardest hit nations, where more than 80 percent of all malaria deaths occur. To receive aid and funds, these nations' governments had to become active partners in malaria eradication.

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

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

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