The Perfect Wife; The Life and Choices of Laura Bush

by Ann Gerhart

• ISBN13: 9780743243834
• ISBN10: 0743243838
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-01-06
• Publisher: Free Pr

Summary

Laura Bush is arguably the most popular figure in the Bush White House. Even the President's detractors would not hesitate to describe the First Lady as utterly sincere and devoted to family and country, whether she is advocating on behalf of education and libraries or comforting the nation in times of crisis.

Ann Gerhart of The Washington Post has covered Mrs. Bush since 2001, and no other reporter has interviewed the First Lady more often. Through this unparalleled access Gerhart has been able to uncover the woman behind the carefully maintained image. Far more than an uncomplicated maternal figure and dedicated wife, Laura Bush emerges as a complex and fascinating woman in her own right, who has composed a life of accomplishment for herself alongside her husband's tremendous ambitions.

The Perfect Wife tells the complete story from Mrs. Bush's upbringing to her whirlwind three-month courtship by George W. Bush and her role as a mother, wife, and public figure. An only child raised in a segregated and fiercely traditional West Texas town, she is less conservative than her husband and appealingly down-to-earth despite the extraordinary privileges of her position. Two tragedies have defined her: a car accident when she was seventeen and September 11, when she suddenly had to transform her job and take herself far more seriously. Ann Gerhart examines the First Lady's influences and motivations, reveals the depths to which her husband relies upon her, and assesses her achievements. Compelling and insightful, this is the first comprehensive account of a woman who has won the admiration of the nation and of the compromises and challenges that come with taking on the most examined volunteer job in the world.

Laura Bush is arguably the most popular figure in the Bush White House. Even the President's detractors would not hesitate to describe the First Lady as utterly sincere and devoted to family and country, whether she is advocating on behalf of education and libraries or comforting the nation in times of crisis.

Ann Gerhart of The Washington Post has covered Mrs. Bush since 2001, and no other reporter has interviewed the First Lady more often. Through this unparalleled access Gerhart has been able to uncover the woman behind the carefully maintained image. Far more than an uncomplicated maternal figure and dedicated wife, Laura Bush emerges as a complex and fascinating woman in her own right, who has composed a life of accomplishment for herself alongside her husband's tremendous ambitions.

The Perfect Wife tells the complete story from Mrs. Bush's upbringing to her whirlwind three-month courtship by George W. Bush and her role as a mother, wife, and public figure. An only child raised in a segregated and fiercely traditional West Texas town, she is less conservative than her husband and appealingly down-to-earth despite the extraordinary privileges of her position. Two tragedies have defined her: a car accident when she was seventeen and September 11, when she suddenly had to transform her job and take herself far more seriously. Ann Gerhart examines the First Lady's influences and motivations, reveals the depths to which her husband relies upon her, and assesses her achievements. Compelling and insightful, this is the first comprehensive account of a woman who has won the admiration of the nation and of the compromises and challenges that come with taking on the most examined volunteer job in the world.

Author Biography

Ann Gerhart has worked at the Style section of The Washington Post since 1995 and wrote the paper's "Reliable Source" column for three and a half years. She lives with her husband and three children in Bethesda, Maryland.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One Midland

Chapter Two The Young Librarian

Chapter Three Bush Boy

Chapter Four Motherhood and Baseball

Chapter Five The Governor's Wife

Chapter Six The White House

Chapter Seven The Twins

Chapter Eight September 11

Chapter Nine War and Poetry

Acknowledgments

Sources

Index

Excerpts

Chapter One: Midland We feel really fortunate to have grown up in West Texas where I think values are really rock solid. It's not very easy to be pretentious....West Texans will call you down immediately. I think that gave us a really solid base. -- Laura Bush, in the Midland Star-Telegram, September 5, 2002She was seventeen, a few days past her birthday in her senior year, a girl with her daddy's car keys. There was a party, on a weeknight. That wasn't much the sort of thing Jenna and Harold Welch let their girl do, go to a party in the middle of the week. But really, Laura was such a good girl, this only child of theirs, an angel, a love. She had never given them a moment's trouble. She was steady and smart and quiet, and her friends were the Brownies she knew from grade school. She always laughed at her father's jokes; he was a cutup, easy and friendly and open. She always sat by her mother, though. On visits to her grandmother some hours away, Laura and her mother would take turns reading in the car out loud to each other, the huge sky of West Texas arching out before them, vast and familiar, Manifest Destiny beckoning in the shimmering of the nighttime stars.That sky, it let you see forever. Between Midland and Lubbock, some 150 miles apart, nothing stood but a few villages and scrub and electric poles and those lonely oil pumps, dipping up, swinging down, up and down, up and down, a rhythm that gave pace and purpose to an entire region. Midland proper was so orderly, a firm societal stand against the whims and sins of the prairie. There were no bars, and dozens of churches, and the streets were testament to the disciples of commerce who had delivered the good people from a lifetime of grit and toil. Laura lived on Humble Avenue, named, transparently enough, for one of the petroleum conglomerates; the next streets over were Shell and Sinclair. That was Midland in the 1960s, the Midland that Laura's father, Harold Welch, helped to build: Your aspirations could be realized in your address -- Lockheed or Cessna or Boeing avenues for the white-collar engineers, or Yale, Harvard, and Princeton avenues for the East Coast elites like George Herbert Walker Bush who came west to seek their fortunes in the fossils.Those streets were laid out on a tidy grid, with millions of gallons of water sent to sustain lush lawns hardly native to West Texas, lawns that decades later Laura would decide were environmentally incorrect. The people in the houses liked to think they lived tidy lives -- two parents, a carport, drinks at the country club, touch football after church. Beyond the town limits was untameable terrain, a flat expanse of ranchland, parched brown and ocher, unbroken by trees. You could see for miles. And it was dry, and it was clear, and it was so bright at night under the star canopy, and there wasn't traffic back in those days, not like there is today, everybody hurrying over to the Target or the Sam's Club or the Jumburrito. So there would have been no reasonable excuse for even protective parents to say no to a daughter who wanted to go to a party, especially when she was such a good and responsible girl.And so they said yes.And Jenna would have had her book, and Harold would have had his television, and after a spell, the phone would have rung with the news, preceded with an, "Ah'm so sorry to have to tell you..." My word, she hadn't been gone but a little while, and now Laura's parents were being summoned to Midland Memorial Hospital.Laura, they learned, had been speeding blithely out of town about 8 P.M., east on Farm Road 868, her high school friend Judy Dykes in the passenger seat. She never saw the stop sign. She never saw the other car. She plowed right through that stop sign and slammed hard into the 1962 Corvair coming south and with the right-of-way, on State Road 349, the La Mesa Highway. She was fine, really, the officer assured her parents,