Why I love Laura Bush

As a young woman, she purposely sought out poor, nonwhite schools to work in as a teacher and librarian, and as a political wife, when Laura visits classrooms, "Hers is not the usual condescending conversation with children that is actually aimed at the adults listening in," Julia Reed noted in the Vogue profile. Gerhart similarly observes that "there is never a child who hugs her too tightly. She is not a woman to worry about getting a nose wiped on her silk sleeve. Over and over, I have seen her intuitively drop into a teacher's crouch so she can look right into their faces."

And then there are the dozens of smaller daily examples of Laura's unpretentiousness and modesty: When George Bush was governor, Laura's favorite place to hang out during parties at the mansion was outside with the dogs; she'd shop at Wal-Mart and fly Southwest Airlines to visit her friends around Texas (friends who are, notably, political liberals she has known since grade school); her favorite outfit is jeans and white shirts and her ideal restaurant is a cheap Mexican place. In other words, Judy Dean has nothing on Laura Bush in the squished cupcake department. Laura Bush cannot stand the title first lady and instructs her staff to refer to her as Mrs. Bush or Laura Bush. During her first year in the White House, Gerhart writes that "even after she had walked hundreds of times into rooms where people cheered, she would look over her shoulder involuntarily, to see who they might really be applauding."

To be sure, all of this is excellent P.R. fodder, and certainly the Bush camp has tried to exploit it. "She cuts right through the posturing and positioning," her husband once told a New York Times reporter. "America's starved for something real. And that's what she brings." But Laura, who is known to closely monitor media coverage of her husband, does not seem to care all that much how she herself comes across. Revealingly, she did once object when she was quoted by newspapers as saying to an audience that, as a former librarian, she could tell them to "shut up" when she had actually used the far more refined "hush up." But more often, Laura's "management" of her own image seems to waver between strikingly unvain and downright uncooperative. She often must be prompted by others to discuss her work, such as her role in obtaining $215 million for a reading readiness program in Texas. "This is as startling as it is refreshing, in Washington," Gerhart writes, "a city where people fall over each other to take credit for things they didn't do."

Gerhart also touches on the first lady's relationship with the media in the book's discussion of Laura as a mother. The depiction of the Bush twins as obnoxious and indulged is, not surprisingly, the part of the book that has attracted the most media attention, but it left me unpersuaded. The anecdote about then-20-year-old Jenna Bush calling her father right before he was to deliver the post-9/11 State of the Union address to announce she'd lost the sticker for her car -- an anecdote clearly meant to exemplify Jenna's self-absorption -- was, to me, so funny and normal that I called my own father to tell him about it. Of the White House's "no comment" stance on the twins, Gerhart writes, "The problem with such a communication strategy was that the only public image of the twins was a highly unflattering one [e.g., Jenna being cited for underage drinking]. If they were feeding the homeless, or tutoring poor children, or writing impressive senior theses, no one would ever know."

But if the Bush twins were feeding the homeless or tutoring poor children or writing impressive senior theses, they would know -- and more to the point, so would the homeless, or the poor children, or their thesis advisors. The notion is widespread in our culture that if something isn't documented by the media, it didn't happen. Laura Bush's refusal to buy into that notion, or to sacrifice her daughters for it, is all the more impressive given her powerful position.

More personally, I suspect my admiration for Laura Bush is tied to the fact that we share major interests: I teach ninth grade English and I like that Laura was a teacher herself and continues to advocate for education. I write fiction, too -- my first novel will be published next year -- and I love that Laura Bush is a voracious reader of fiction. In fact, I see this as the defining aspect of her personality.

It's the reason I believe she's smart: For one thing, her favorite book is "The Brothers Karamazov." Besides that, for Laura Bush, as for most people who aren't professors of English, reading fiction is ostensibly useless and therefore without motive; it can only be something she does for pleasure. Her love of fiction is also what allows me to accept the contradictions in her life that other people find either mystifying or just appalling: How can she really be a good person if she's married to him? How can she be married to him if she really is more liberal than he is? But ambiguities are the foundation of fiction; it is only in the world of politics that they're met with hostility.

Literary fiction acknowledges the discrepancy between how we act and what we feel. When I teach creative writing to teenagers, I tell them to think about going with their parents to a party. The people are boring, and the house smells bad, and you just want to leave. In real life, you say to your hosts, "Thanks so much! I had such a great time!" But fiction admits how boring and smelly it was.

Reading a lot of fiction can, I believe, make a person expect the nonfictional world to operate by fiction's rules: There will be revelations and climaxes, people will speak eloquently, events will progress coherently and conclude satisfyingly. And, of course, massive contradictions -- personal, moral, situational -- can exist quite comfortably. A year ago, a symposium Laura Bush had organized on the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman was canceled after some contemporary poets who had been invited revealed plans to read poetry protesting the impending war in Iraq; the entire symposium series was, effectively, brought to an end.

An argument can be made that Laura was naive to believe she could smoothly import lefty writers into a right-wing White House. But I actually think it was the poets -- specifically, Sam Hamill, founder of the Copper Canyon Press, who organized the protest poetry -- who were naive, and who shot themselves in the foot. I bet Hamill could have gotten away with showing up and reading antiwar poetry, but how could Laura, as first lady, let him do so knowing about his plans ahead of time? Instead of chatting with reporters before the symposium, he should have been more subtle -- he should have taken a lesson in stealth activism from Laura herself, that mastermind of stealth independence.

The central question raised by Laura Bush, Gerhart told me in an interview, is this: "You didn't do anything to get the megaphone, you didn't seek to have the megaphone, your association to the megaphone is purely derivative power -- but if somebody hands you the megaphone, are you supposed to pick it up and yell through it?" Gerhart herself answers the question by saying, "I would argue that you are."

But I think it's trickier than that, and this is something else that fiction acknowledges: that there is plenty in the world a person can literally do without realistically being able to do it all. We are constricted by manners and appearances and obligations, and I suspect that if Laura Bush told reporters that, say, she had opposed the war in Iraq, such a statement would do more to make the public question the stability of the Bush marriage than it would to support peace efforts. (I am aware, by the way, of no evidence to suggest she did oppose the war.) Could Laura Bush do more for women's rights and poor kids and the environment? Sure. But I'd say that she already does more than she gets credit for.

Next page: Laura Bush derives her power from using it sparingly