Ann Gerhart - The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush

I know exactly when my fascination with Laura Bush began: when I heard that she wiped her shelves down with Clorox to relax and organized her extensive literary collection according to the Dewey decimal system.

It did not matter that these revelations caused sneering and sniping in certain quarters. The smart set of achiever women interpreted her handiwork as clear sign of compulsion and repression and even delusion, a pitiable pathology most likely caused by her marriage to a warmongering, arrogant man with less intellectual rigor than Laura herself possessed. Those smart women, were they happy?

It did not matter if this was even true. Over time, these glimpses of Lauras habits took on the power of myth. I chose to interpret them as a creation myth, and what Laura was creating for herself was a sense of serene order. She could glide through the messiest of times, composed and controlled. I wanted to figure out how she did this because I wanted some of it, too. I was an often addled woman, a decade younger than she, with three opinionated and zesty children; with fabulously messy finances and files and piles of household detritus, lost permission slips, sodden snowsuits, electronic toys, missing batteries, the works; with an exciting and funny and smart husband who couldnt put oil in the car; with a great newspaper job at a competitive and stimulating place, The Washington Post.

But I did not have a sense of serene order. That utterly eluded me. And when my newspaper assigned me to cover the first lady upon George W. Bushs inauguration in 2001, and I began to try to penetrate her psyche, I found myself facing situations in my own life and asking, What would Laura do? Would Laura send her daughter back upstairs to put on a shirt that covered her belly? (No.) Would Laura think it was all right to have a cigarette in the privacy of a friends house? (Yes.) Would Laura complain about her mother-in-law? (Never overtly.)

Whats so intriguing about Laura Bush is how she can be utterly familiar and, at the very same time, compellingly mysterious. Intensely bright, quietly curious, she appears wholly traditional at every milepost of her life. An only and sometimes lonely child, she decides by the second grade to be a teacher. Goes off to a conventional college for good girls, joins a sorority, plays bridge. Marries at thirty-one, fairly late for her generation, and promptly abandons her career as teacher and librarian. Cuddles the twin girls, irons the husbands shirts, weeds the flower beds, drives the car pool. Squares her shoulders and says, Okay, dear, when he comes home and wants to move to Washington and help run Daddys presidential campaign, wants to move to Dallas and run a baseball team, wants to move to Austin and be governor, wants to move to the White House. Never complains, ever. Through it all, she told me, a year after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, that she regards being the wife of George W. Bush as the most important part of my job, whether my husband is president or not.

And yet.

There lurks this independence that seems almost subversive. Her passions are quite different from the presidents; she indulges them separately, usually without any public display. Her pursuits are those of the intellectualbirding, native plants, decorative arts, art history, opera, and always, the challenging literatureand her mastery of these subjects is that of the meticulous librarian, remembering minute details, extracting themes. Intriguingly, her friends are mostly Democrats, outspoken progressives, and she has held them close for years. There are hints that her own values and private beliefs might horrify the conservative religious right so carefully courted by her husband and his political mastermind, Karl Rove.

The deal always has seemed to be this: Go off to the ballet, Laura, or read Dostoyevsky, but dont expect that George will follow. Through much of her married life, she has managed to do this delicate dance: She will have her friends and her interests, and she will support her husband expertly and never embarrass. She will campaign for other Republicans, but only sparingly, and only within the bounds of her personal integrity. During the 2002 congressional campaign, she changed a speech at the last minute to remove attacks on the candidates opponent, a Texas Democrat she admired, whom she had worked with on education issues. Nevertheless, she showed her talents for accommodating herself to the Bush family business early on, and shes as good as any of them in the absolute loyalty department.

Once, long before George W. had any designs on the White House, Barbara Bush was complaining to a friend that her daughter-in-law Columba, the wife of Florida governor Jeb Bush, was an unpredictable ditz. But Laura, said Bar, now shes the one whos first lady material.

This deal of hers presents an excruciating tension, it seems to me, and requires determined sublimation. Laura manages this tension very privately. By temperament, she is modest and inclined to recede; by design, she is stubbornly protective of the small zone of privacy afforded her in this countrys most visible role for a woman. She is a woman who so closely guards her inner psychological life that many dismiss her for not having one at all. Like all the Bushes in the political dynasty, with their disregard for pop psychobabble, Laura refuses to indulge publicly in examining her motivations and her choices. She wont discuss, with any depth, what shaped her character. In my interviews with her, I have always been struck by her penchant for simple sentences when talking about herself. Its a locution similar to the Dick and Jane primers she must have read to her students years agosubject, verb, object. When I asked for her impression of George W. Bush when she first met him, she said, I thought he was fun. I also thought he was really cute. George is very fun. Hes also slightly outrageous once in a while in a very funny and fun way and I found that a lot of fun. Fun. Five funs in one description. But when she turns to a topic dear to her, like early childhood education or Afghan art, complex clauses tumble from her mouth, one atop the other, studded with the vocabulary one might expect from a woman who devours dense fiction. I dont really know how to teach somebody to read, she told me the first time I interviewed her, and I remember how she straightened up in her chair and leaned forward. Her delivery quickened, and her face grew more animated. One of the initiatives I undertook in Texas was to have a seminar for the legislature, and I brought in all the experts in early reading, who were able to relate all the latest cognitive research, she said, before plunging into a brief discourse on phonics and phonemic awareness. She knew it cold.

Does she doubt policies of her husbands administration, like the wisdom of taking information on condoms off the websites of the Centers for Disease Control or maintaining three strikes legislation for criminals? Did she weep over the destroyed antiquities of the Baghdad Museum? Does she argue in pillow talk for maintaining abortion rights? If I differ from my husband, she once tartly told a reporter, Im not going to tell you. So thats what Laura would do, and every poll suggests the American people appreciate her for it.