http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8359-2001Oct4.html
Domestic
Adviser
First Lady Gives and Takes Comfort During
Troubling Times
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By Ann Gerhart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 5, 2001; Page C01
The first lady has not taken any vaccines since Sept. 11, she answered when asked
in an airplane interview Wednesday.
The vaccines have been offered.
She has refused.
"I just didn't really feel like it was necessary," Laura Bush
said, quickly adding, "I'm not suggesting that other people wouldn't want
to. I didn't."
Without much fanfare, the first lady became the first White House principal
to return to the administration's domestic agenda since the terrorist attacks,
when she gave an address Wednesday on early cognitive development at a
Cincinnati education summit she helped organize.
"By this week, we were anxious to get back to our schedule, and this is
always important," Mrs. Bush said.
Her remarks were similar to the one she intended to roll out in her public
policy debut on Capitol Hill, on Sept. 11.
But that was the day her life and her husband's, the presidency and America,
changed forever. As soon as the second plane hit the World Trade Center, she
grasped that enormity immediately.
That day, she was the last to leave the White House for work at 9 a.m. Her
husband had gone off to a Florida school, and she had seen her in-laws out the
door. Former president George Bush and Barbara Bush had spent that Monday night
at the residence, then headed off to Minnesota, where he was to deliver a
speech.
As Mrs. Bush's limousine headed for the Capitol, "my Secret Service
agent said, 'A plane has hit the World Trade Center.' I thought it was an
accident or something. I didn't immediately think it was terrorism," she
said. She anticipated the needs of others. "I thought we probably should cancel
the briefing, because Mrs. Clinton was on the committee and she's from New York
and she'd probably want to rush home at that time."
Her first thoughts after the second plane hit were "thoughts of
horror."
"I didn't have a lot of thoughts of fear or personal worries about my
own safety, but I worried about my husband," she said, and paused. "I
know he had people to protect his safety, but you can't help, when you're
married to the president, not to worry about his safety."
During the interview, while she flew back to Washington, the first lady at
times seemed pensive and solemn, staring occasionally at the sky outside her
military jet, sometimes rubbing her temples.
She said it is hard to be so far away from her twin girls, who are
sophomores in college, Jenna at the University of Texas and Barbara at Yale.
The parents and daughters were together for the first time since the attacks at
Camp David last weekend. "We had really started calling them all the time
since Sept. 11, and the amazing thing was, they were able to start calling us.
Usually, they were so busy, and our calls were mainly left on a recorder."
During those phone calls, their mother heard "a sort of uncertainty.
Their voices sounded a little bit different than they had, and I'm sure that every
parents hears that now," she said.
"Freaked out, the girls are," her husband told a rescue worker in
New York that first week, according to the Associated Press. "Wife's okay.
She understands we're at war -- got a war mentality. And so do I."
But the first lady's stoic and comforting public appearances have rubbed her
own emotions raw, she said, and left her sometimes fighting for control.
That feeling overcame her when she and the president went to visit Pentagon
survivors at Washington Hospital Center, "and the commander in chief
walked in, and one of the military men, his hands were totally wrapped and
bandaged, and he tried to salute. I've had a lot of moments like that, talking
to these children in New York and those people whose relatives were on Flight
93."
And in Cincinnati, she said that her audience of several hundred teachers
and school and day-care administrators "work with children at great times
and in times of national tragedy, like now. All Americans expect them to come
to work every day, no matter how they might feel, to work with children in a
reassuring way, so I'm glad to be here with them." Plus, she had specific
scientific research on brain development she thought they needed.
Many who listened Wednesday were grateful.
The administration's ambitious education reform effort "has gotten
washed away" in the attacks' aftermath, said Kevin Holt, an
early-childhood administrator for the Department of Human Services in
Cincinnati's Hamilton County, "so I appreciate that the first lady is out
pushing this agenda. That speaks volumes to me that these priorities are not
going to wait."
Mrs. Bush's private responsibility is to be the emotional bulwark for her
husband of 23 years. The president is disciplined and focused, she said, and
"doing very well." They sleep well. They exercise. They make sure
they don't miss meals. They get together with their friends. They go out to
dinner. They march toward normalcy, a couple whose life has changed profoundly
twice in 10 months.
"We have a very sustaining relationship. It's always been that way, and
we're lucky to have that relationship," Mrs. Bush said. They spend every
evening together. "He is watching baseball; he's excited about his Astros,
and I listen," sometimes while she reads, because it's comforting, a sound
from her childhood, when the play-by-play floated out of the radio "on
those long, summer days."
She tries to take care of her staff, many of whom are young women "who
wept a lot, during that first day. The next day, the older and more mature
members would sort of fall apart, and the younger ones were comforting them.
You sign on to work at the White House, and you know you can anticipate some
things that may be bad and tragic, but none of us could have expected this.
"But at the same time, we are in a very special place," she said.
"This gave us a chance to actually do something, to be constructive, to
figure out what we could do to help the situation. And that relieves the
feelings of helplessness, for everybody. All those people who stood in line to
give blood, that's why they stood there, because they literally were going to
give a part of themselves to help their fellow Americans."
Next month, she will walk into a classroom and teach as part of a national
event. There are the traditional first-lady duties to fulfill. She has reviewed
holiday plans already underway with an eye and ear toward tone and made few
modifications. She changed the Bible verse on the official White House
Christmas card, "although I cannot reveal that to you at this time,"
she said in mock officialspeak.
Asked if she is afraid of more terrorism, she said, "I don't exactly
know how to answer that," and she looked to her press secretary, Noelia
Rodriguez, who reminded the first lady what she has said in past weeks about living
in a different security climate.
"We know our lives have changed," Mrs. Bush then said. "But
we also know that terrorism is limited. And that is the point. It is more
isolating and therefore more frightening. And destructive. When we do look at
it rationally, then we know that the likelihood of any one of us to be unsafe
is very, very small."
What she does know, she suggested, is that Americans are resilient and
resolute, but they should understand if a sense of buoyancy does not return any
time soon.
"I think that's one thing we really need to be prepared for," said
the first lady, who has taken on the job of tending emotional casualties.
"That is going to last a long time." Reactions will be deferred and
will change.
"I think we may deal with it in different times, have moments of grief
or sadness or even depression.
"Not just in the next few weeks. But maybe in the next few months. Or
even a year."
© 2001
The Washington Post Company
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