Spoken from the Heart (49 page)

On a trip to Arizona, I stopped to see the family of Army Private First Class Lori Piestewa, a twenty-three-year-old Hopi mother who had been killed during the first week of the war after an ambush by Iraqi forces near Nasiriyah. She had fought back bravely and had paid with her life. Lori was the first Native American woman to die in combat while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. For two weeks she was listed as missing in action, until her body was found in a shallow grave. Her roommate and friend, Jessica Lynch, who was riding in the truck that Lori drove, had survived.

Lori Piestewa came from Tuba City, Arizona, home also to Moenkopi, a Hopi enclave in the heart of the Navajo Nation reservation. Some homes in the Hopi village still did not have running water; women and men carried buckets to a nearby river. For heat they burned tree branches, and the air hung with the scent of char and smoke, even in the spring. Most of the houses were the same adobe style that had been built for centuries in these dry desert lands. Lori, whose parents had both worked for the Tuba City schools, had grown up on the Navajo side of the reservation. Her father had fought in Vietnam; her grandfather had served in World War II. Lori had been the commanding officer of her high school Junior ROTC program. Her parents buried her on Hopi land. I met them, along with her three-year-old daughter and four-year-old son, one of her sisters, a brother, a sister-in-law, and her four nieces and nephews in a room at Page Municipal Airport, a tiny airstrip overlooking the Colorado River and Lake Powell. We had decided on this location so they would feel no obligation, on top of their grief, to host a first lady in their home. I invited them to come to the White House on Memorial Day.

George read the names of every man and woman who died in Iraq and wrote a personal letter to each family. The stories of those who received Medal of Honor citations deeply affected him. There was Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith, who after a surprise Iraqi attack leapt aboard a damaged armored vehicle and, completely unprotected, manned a fifty-caliber machine gun alone. He laid down his life for his friends and his men, and his selfless bravery saved the lives of more than one hundred American soldiers. There was Marine Corporal Jason Dunham, who played street soccer with Iraqi kids and who, when a grenade was thrown by an Iraqi insurgent, jumped on the explosive to save the lives of two other Americans. On a rooftop in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, Petty Officer Michael Monsoor of the U.S. Navy did the same, flinging himself upon a grenade to save two teammates.

Every day George read the casualty reports. He knew which military service, what city or province, and how. It was heartbreaking. One night at dinner he was particularly silent. Barbara and Jenna were there, teasing him, trying to get him to laugh. Eventually he just got up and excused himself. I told them then that a packed military helicopter had been shot down that morning over a field outside Baghdad.

But as George read the casualty reports, he read the threat reports too.

Just one week after I met with the Piestewa family, I was expected at an annual Washington tradition, the Congressional Club First Lady's Luncheon, for the wives, and occasionally the husbands, of senators and representatives. The luncheon is a fund-raiser for the club and is designed to honor the first lady. It is a demanding event for the organizers and the office of the honoree. Early in George's term, Hillary Clinton's former White House chief of staff confided to my chief of staff, Andi Ball, that "each year, the Congressional Club ladies made the Clinton staff cry."

Andi soon came to understand what she meant. In 2001 I had been told to walk on an elevated catwalk, like a fashion runway, so that the nearly two thousand women packed inside a giant hotel ballroom could catch a glimpse of me. As first lady I was accustomed to doing almost anything, but this was a bit too much. In 2002 I politely declined to do the runway. I also left the four-hour event a little early because Barbara had to move out of her dorm that afternoon, and I wanted to rush up to New Haven to help her. Indeed, it is rare for any first lady to stay for a four-hour-long luncheon. This year the organizers had started besieging my staff in February: they had specific requests for my remarks; they insisted that I stay for the entire lunch; and they wanted me to walk the runway again. The constant back-and-forth for these luncheons invariably, as with Hillary Clinton's staff, reduced one of the women in my office to tears.

But we admired and appreciated the enormous complexity of putting on such a large event, and at the lunch itself, the congressional spouses went out of their way to make me feel welcome. They invited singers they thought I would like, including Wynonna Judd. One year they even named a perfume for me and had tiny bottles of the scent waiting at each place setting as luncheon favors. There were other moments of genuine fun with the congressional spouses. I always looked forward to the smaller and more intimate annual Senate Spouses Lunch. Karyn Frist, wife of former Senate majority leader Bill Frist; Kathy Gregg, Senator Judd Gregg's wife; and Tricia Lott, wife of former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, were three of my closest friends in Washington. The Senate spouses, Republicans and Democrats, created special events for me each year. Once they surprised me with a re-creation of my first classroom, at Longfellow Elementary. Another year we ate at tables under the glass ceilings of the U.S. Botanic Garden, surrounded by exotic plants.

But while the Senate Spouses Lunch, at roughly one hundred, is a friendly, personal gathering, events held for the entire Congress instantly passed the one thousand mark: 535 elected officials, each with one invited guest. In sheer numbers, entertaining the Congress was one of the biggest challenges the White House Social Office faced, and we always looked for engaging ways to entertain the congressional multitudes. There are two events designed for the full Congress each year. The first is the Congressional Picnic, for all the members and their families, and the second is the Congressional Ball, held in December, for the members and their spouses. Every year the Social Office began working months in advance to develop a suitably exciting picnic theme that would honor different parts of the United States. One year it was cowboys, with pony rides for the small children. Another year, it was Mardi Gras, with a horse-drawn carriage on the White House drive and Paul Prudhomme as our celebrity chef, cooking up New Orleans fare. In 2006 the social secretary, Lea Berman, organized mini-Broadway musical numbers inside a large tent on the South Lawn, televised by PBS. In 2008 we borrowed a miniature train for the kids to ride. Beyond the numbers, though, there were other challenges that tested the patience of every social secretary and her staff.

Each year the social secretary's office would report that there were members who would not RSVP to the picnic, no matter how often White House staff called their offices to see if they were coming. Other members would call the Social Office and insist upon bringing more people, or they would arrive at the gate with eight interns in tow and expect to be cleared immediately, producing an outcry from the Secret Service, which required everyone's Social Security number days in advance in order to be admitted inside the White House grounds.

Occasionally the White House Social Office would find itself attempting to save members from themselves. At one picnic a member of the House leadership got drunk and threw up in the bushes. The social staff tried to maneuver him away from the nearby press pool. Alcohol is no stranger to some members of Congress. Social Office staffers were waiting to greet another member when he arrived at the White House. When his driver pulled to a stop, the man, who was already tipsy, took a swig of something and then proceeded to hop out of his car and teeter over to spit it into the bushes. It was mouthwash, presumably to mask whatever he had imbibed before.

The Congressional Ball, the largest event of the holiday season, was a substantial undertaking and often an adventure. It was held on a Monday night, always the night after the Kennedy Center Honors. The receiving line for photos lasted for three solid hours. Some senators and representatives wanted to bring additional guests, even their entire families, although the ball numbers already topped one thousand guests and the event was spread over every inch of two full floors of the White House.

Rather than just an outsize buffet, we worked to make the ball a real party. Downstairs was quieter and more reserved, but on the State Floor we had music and dancing. We searched the country for great, unusual bands, beginning with Rotel and the Hot Tomatoes in 2001. At every ball, by midnight, there would be sixty or more hardened partygoers still dancing, and more than once the staff had to intervene to prevent a conga line of senators and representatives from parading up the marble stairs to the private residence, where George and I were already in bed.

We invited members of Congress to the White House residence all the time, and these smaller events produced many memorable, laughter-filled evenings. We hosted cocktail parties for Republicans and Democrats in our private living room. When Nancy Pelosi became the House Speaker, George and I invited her and her husband, Paul, to dinner, just the four of us, in the residence dining room. Numerous times, when representatives or senators and their spouses arrived, my staff would hear them say as they rode the elevator, "I can't believe I'm going up here." One senator's wife wanted to take pictures of everything in the White House, even the basement kitchen, with racks of raw chicken waiting to be roasted in the oven.

On May 22, the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, came to visit us at the ranch. Koizumi had been one of the first world leaders to offer aid and assistance to the United States after 9-11, and he and George developed a close friendship. It was all the more remarkable because their two fathers had fought against each other in World War II. Indeed, in 1946, the year George and I were born, no one could have imagined that Japan would become one of our most steadfast international allies. During the war George's dad had been a naval aviator. In 1944 his plane had been forced down by enemy fire in a bombing raid on Japanese military installations; Gampy had survived by ejecting and parachuting into the Pacific. That same year Koizumi's father had worked to build an airfield for kamikaze pilots taking off to crash into American ships and carriers. Koizumi himself had been born in 1942, at the height of the war, when American forces were in retreat across Asia. And now, in a true historical irony, the sons of former enemies had become close friends. There is a comforting aspect to seeing history unfold in that manner and to knowing that the world can, in fact, change. After American and coalition forces entered Iraq, Koizumi later volunteered to deploy Japan's Self-Defense Forces in support of the mission, the first overseas deployment of Japanese troops since World War II.

When he arrived in Crawford, Koizumi and George walked out to our pool and sat side by side, talking for two hours. That kind of conversation, the personal give-and-take, was difficult to have inside the White House, with a legion of staff or formal seating arrangements. The following afternoon we had a cookout with hamburgers made from Texas beef. When I next saw the Japanese prime minister, he raised his arm and made a muscle, telling me, "That hamburger made me strong. I went home to do political battle, and I was strong because of that hamburger."

The 2003 G8 Summit was again held on a remote mountain. This time, the location was Evian, France. Before the summit opened, George traveled to Poland and then Russia to meet Vladimir Putin; for that leg of the trip, I joined him. In Poland we made a special visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous Nazi death camp. George and I quietly walked along the train tracks that had carried carloads of human beings, piled on top of each other, without light or fresh air. I laid a single red rose at the terminus, where men, women, and children began to be herded left or right, to the gas chambers or to the labor camp, to work first and then die. We passed the barracks and the crematoriums, and I tried to imagine a blue sky that had once been covered over, black and gray, with human ash. "The inconvenient smell of smoke" was how one Nazi officer, who had gone free, later described it.