Spoken from the Heart (48 page)

We ultimately had rich discussions, and all our literary events included Washington, D.C., high school students. But that was the end result. The first impulse, too often, was prejudice. Most of us over the course of our lives are guilty of some kind of stereotyping, but I have always found it a uniquely distressing attribute in people who study and teach. For these are the people who have chosen as their profession the life of the mind, and they are the ones whom we trust to teach our children. They, who have had every educational benefit, should welcome different thoughts and viewpoints. But so many responded to a White House invitation with their minds closed. And that was particularly true of a significant group of poets.

I have long been a reader of poetry, and I very much wanted to host a symposium featuring the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and Walt Whitman. I planned the gathering for February 12, 2003. But one of the invited poets sent a blast e-mail to fifty friends asking for antiwar poems and statements. He refused to attend but wanted another guest to present me with an antiwar anthology and have the event become an antiwar protest. What would have brought the works of three great American writers into American homes via C-SPAN was now set to become a forum for a purely political agenda. With real regret I postponed the event. It was never rescheduled. I had not selected the poets on the basis of politics, nor had the guest list been political. I wondered what victory the invitees thought they had won by keeping the East Room dark and silencing some of the nation's most eloquent writers.

In March of 2004 I held a symposium on Southern writers featuring Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor. It was to be my last literary symposium in the White House. Each of these writers was in his or her own way familiar with prejudice, which comes in many forms. I find particular beauty in the words of Eudora Welty, who over the years grew hunchbacked and misshapen but who created some of the most complex characters ever to appear on the printed page. She was a reader as well as a writer and once penned, "I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that storybooks had been written by
people,
that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass."

The girls came home often that spring. Jenna flew up to spend a weekend with us at Camp David; Barbara spent her spring break at the White House. They wanted to be with us as the nation edged toward war. I tried to keep things as normal as possible inside the White House. Old friends, including Roland Betts, one of George's best friends from Yale, and his wife, Lois, and Mike and Barbara Proctor, came. Mike was George's childhood best friend, who had lived across the street and was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Mike and Nancy Weiss, our friends from Lubbock, also came. They all wanted to be there for George because they knew how their friend was agonizing.

The usual round of Washington events continued unabated. We hosted a reception for the annual Ford's Theatre gala to celebrate President Lincoln and dressed in white tie for the dinner hosted by the Gridiron Club, Washington's oldest journalistic organization, founded in 1885. Jeannette Kagame, the first lady of Rwanda, visited Washington, and I had her to coffee at the White House. But with war increasingly looming, George's every thought was on our troops, Iraq, and Saddam.

For the better part of six months, I had been planning to host a group of my old Midland friends for four days at the White House, to tour Washington gardens, including Mount Vernon. I had been looking forward to seeing them, as had Susie Evans, my kindergarten friend and George's second-grade friend, who had moved from Midland to Washington, D.C., when her husband, Don, became the secretary of commerce. But when the days arrived, I regretted the invitation. I could tell that it irritated George to have a group of women sitting around, laughing, talking, opening a bottle of wine as he strode off to the Treaty Room after dinner for one of his frequent nighttime meetings with Condi Rice and her National Security Council deputy, Stephen Hadley. Many evenings, after most of official Washington had left its offices and gone home, they met in the residence to review, strategize, and question. The butlers put out chips and drinks, but they remained largely untouched.

Late one afternoon, Barbara called home. The teaching assistant in one of her classes at Yale had starkly told her, "I will only give you an A in this class if you tell your father not to go to war." Barbara handled the situation herself, making an appointment to speak to the dean of her residential college, who said that she should submit all her coursework directly to her professor.

We knew exactly how deep the passions ran before any American soldiers set foot on Iraqi sands.

In early March, antiwar protesters converged on Washington, waving signs and shouting epithets while George and Tony Blair worked to get the United Nations to vote on a final resolution taking Saddam to task for violating seventeen previous UN resolutions and authorizing military action if he refused to cooperate. In Washington, London, and New York, the days and nights turned into a marathon negotiating session, as our military began the final preparations for war.

On the night before the scheduled UN vote, George, Condi Rice, and I were eating dinner in the residence. All afternoon George had been placing last-minute calls to world leaders, including Vicente Fox of Mexico and Ricardo Lagos of Chile, soliciting their support for the resolution. George and Tony hoped the UN vote would convince Saddam of the international community's resolve and lead to a peaceful outcome, but other leaders were fearful that the two men were asking them to commit to war. The mood was somber as Condi and George reviewed the latest vote count and waited for word.

George never wavered under the pressure. It was the same as that moment after 9-11 at the height of the anthrax attacks, when he strode out to the mound, alone in the middle of Yankee Stadium, and threw out the first pitch. He has never been afraid to step up to the plate for whatever was required. When he first ran for president, he told his staff that he didn't want to make campaign promises that he could not deliver. He said, "If I run on something and say I'm going to do this, make sure it's something that really can be done." He is very disciplined and practical. He did not want to invade Iraq, but most of the global intelligence community was telling him that, the next time, a 9-11 could happen with chemical or biological weapons. We had been brutally attacked once; he would not allow it to happen again.

I remember too how during those weeks I would glance out from my sitting room window and see George walking Spot outside the Oval Office. On the lawn he could be alone with his thoughts. He was sending the best of America to fight and even die in Iraq because he thought it was the safest thing to do for our country. It was a decision that he had always hoped he would not have to make.

The UN resolution to authorize force was withdrawn in mid-March, after France, Russia, and Germany came together to announce their opposition. George and Tony Blair went ahead with their plans to depose Saddam Hussein. Troops from the United States, Great Britain, Poland, and Australia were readied; ultimately, more than forty nations would send troops or military support. On March 17, George gave Saddam and his sons one more chance, a forty-eight-hour deadline to leave the country and avoid war. Saddam and his sons did not leave. On March 19, at just past 9:30 p.m., U.S.-led coalition forces began high-precision bombing strikes on Baghdad. Less than twelve hours later, Americans and Iraqis had their first skirmish on the ground. We were at war.

I have often wondered if Jacques Chirac or Gerhard Schroeder could have done more, if one of them could have persuaded Saddam to go into exile, if they could have conveyed that the United States was not bluffing. After Saddam was finally pulled from his spider hole, looking like a madman, he said that he had not believed the United States would invade; he had not believed we were serious.

By June of 2003, American and British forces had located eighty of the countless mass graves in Iraq. Buried within were the remains of thousands of people whom Saddam Hussein had ordered to be killed. Long hair still hung from some of the skulls; they belonged to the women. United States forces found a police station with torture hooks hanging from the ceiling and a special "electrocution room," bare except for two tires and an electric cable. Saddam Hussein's regime was a regime of terror, in large ways and small ones. Uday Hussein, Saddam's son, who headed Iraq's Olympic committee, would torture athletes who failed to win, beating the soles of their feet until they could no longer walk. He raped women with impunity. In fits of rage, he would hit his victims with a metal bar or a cane.

When U.S. troops captured the Baghdad mansion of Uday and his brother, Qusay, I was in Austin, visiting Jenna. I was just walking into Regan's house when the head of my Secret Service detail, Wayne Williams, took me aside. He told me that pictures of Barbara and Jenna were found plastered on the walls of Uday's palace. American troops had torn them down, he said. He was stone-faced, but inside I felt as though we were both shaking. I spoke with George, and for months afterward, I was sick with worry. But we did not say a word to the girls.

George and I worried for our troops every day. I thought of them in the harshest conditions, sleeping, when they could, with the sand and the wind. I had told a group of soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, about how guilty I felt with my comforts while they went off to fight and had none. And each one immediately said, "Mrs. Bush, that's where we want to be." They loved their country, and they would do anything to protect it and to protect the men and women who served with them. But night after night I would picture our troops, I would worry, and I would pray.

Once, during an interview, Barbara Walters asked me if I could empathize with a mother who sent her child to be a suicide bomber. I said no, I could not imagine a mother who would want her child to blow himself up and kill other people at the same time. Mothers in our country have watched and prayed as their children left our shores to defend our freedom, and the freedom of people we will never meet in places we will likely never visit. Not only can't I empathize with the mother of a suicide bomber, I can't even imagine her.

On April 3, U.S. forces were racing toward Baghdad. Early that morning George and I flew to North Carolina, to the Marine training ground and base at Camp Lejeune. Already seventeen Marines from Lejeune's overseas division had been wounded and fourteen killed. Two were missing. They had lost the most of any base so far. George spoke to the troops still there and their families, as well as the loved ones of those who had been deployed. After lunch in the mess hall, we met with the families of the fallen Marines. One sergeant had left behind a six-year-old, a two-year-old, and two-month-old twins. We cried with their wives, parents, and children. The following week I joined George as he awarded Purple Hearts to wounded soldiers in the intensive care unit at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and to wounded Marines in the ICU at Bethesda Naval Hospital. We visited some seventy wounded troops and many of their families, and together we watched as two wounded Marines were sworn in as U.S. citizens. Twenty-year-old Lance Corporal O. J. Santamaria, from the Philippines, broke down as he took his oath. George walked over to hug him. Master Gunnery Sergeant Guadalupe Denogean from Mexico, the son of migrant farm workers, had spent twenty-five years in the Marine Corps and had fought in two wars before taking his citizenship oath. George told both men he was proud to call them "fellow Americans." We have, he said, an amazing country, where people are willing to risk their lives without even being full citizens.