Why I love Laura Bush

In addition to her work on early childhood cognitive development, teacher preparation and recruitment, and women's heart disease, Laura, Gerhart indicates, actually does stay on top of and weigh in on issues behind the scenes. Talking to an Associated Press reporter, Laura once seemed to inadvertently reveal that she was far more familiar than anyone expected with the exact amount her husband's administration had refused to give the United Nations Population Fund. More publicly, her National Book Festival last October brought 70,000 people (one of whom was me) to the Mall in Washington to hear various writers. After Sept. 11, she appeared on five television networks and, as Gerhart told me, "She was very comforting and nurturing. And while that seems like real bland bromides to a lot of people, all the men of the administration were running around scaring everybody half to death. She's the one who says, 'Let's be sensible. Let's turn off the television set -- that freaks kids out.'"

There's also what Laura doesn't do: function as a mindless Republican mouthpiece. Gerhart recalls that in "the 2002 congressional campaign, she changed a speech at the last minute to remove attacks on the candidate's opponent, a Texas Democrat she admired, whom she had worked with on education issues." And I'd argue that Laura derives some of her power from using it sparingly; when she told Katie Couric in January 2001 that she did not believe Roe vs. Wade should be overturned, it attracted attention partly because it was the only time she has commented publicly on abortion.

There is a final reason I find Laura Bush both charming and fascinating, and it might seem, from the outside, like the most peculiar reason of all: To an uncanny degree, Laura Bush's own life resembles a great novel. Big, dramatic things have happened to her, certain themes have recurred, and she is such an easy heroine to root for -- smart and nice but just flawed enough (she still sneaks cigarettes!) to remain likable. A often-repeated maxim of writing workshops, typically attributed to Flannery O'Connor, is that a story's ending should feel both surprising and inevitable. For surprising and inevitable, try this:

Laura is born in West Texas in 1946, a much-loved only child who grows up on Humble Avenue. At the age of 17, in a tragic accident, she hits another car being driven by a handsome, athletic high school classmate, a boy she's believed to have had a crush on. She is single until the age of 30 -- relatively old for 1970s Texas. When friends want to set her up with George Bush, she is reluctant because "I thought he was someone real political, and I wasn't interested." But already, they have been circling each other for years without meeting -- they attended the same Midland junior high for seventh grade and lived, as 20-somethings, in the same apartment complex in Houston. They meet, fall in love quickly and have a six-week courtship and a six-week engagement. She marries the son of a former congressman, ambassador to China, and CIA director in a "two-piece dress she had bought just days before the wedding, off the rack."

They are newlyweds during his campaign for Congress in 1978. He loses, and it does not appear, for many years, that he's all that ambitious or really that inclined toward politics. She encourages him to curb his heavy drinking, and he gives it up altogether at the age of 40. She is ambivalent about his running for governor, and he becomes governor. She definitely does not want him to run for president, but what better way is there to ensure that something unlikely will happen than not to want it? Ten months after their arrival in the White House, her husband's administration, and the country, face one of the worst crises in American history.

In the first version of the Laura Bush novel that exists in my head, Laura married George because she wanted to have a family and they were the last two single people left in their extended social circle. (She has jokingly said as much.) My doubts about how much she actually liked her husband made her sympathetic to me; she had settled, but for ordinary, understandable reasons -- who wants to grow old alone? -- and if her decision to marry him brought unwanted consequences, with their life together becoming increasingly political and public, she was stoic about them. However, any good novel, even an imaginary one, should contain surprises for its author, and after reading "The Perfect Wife," I think George and Laura Bush have one of the healthiest marriages I can imagine, that they genuinely enjoy each other's company and are at their best together. He makes her laugh, and she calms him down and looks after him -- according to Gerhart, when she leaves town, she calls one of his fraternity brothers to come stay at the White House so he won't get lonely.

As a Democrat, I cannot completely reconcile my admiration for Laura Bush with her marriage to someone whose professional decisions are affecting so many people in ways I believe to be negative. And even the strength of the Bushes' marriage is, no doubt, partly a result of their privileged life and the fact that Laura hasn't had to work -- she's had time to be "the perfect wife." But I'm still impressed. As for the cover of "The Perfect Wife," where Laura is gazing up at George Bush while he speaks -- take a closer look. It's not a vacant, worshipful expression on her face at all. "She looks like she's really keenly paying attention," says Gerhart, who selected the photograph. "It's open to interpretation [and] that's what I liked about it."