Spoken from the Heart (69 page)

In contrast to the sometimes testy relationship that George had with Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy was pro-American and interested in building a strong partnership with the United States. It was no accident that he timed his visit to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the birth of the Marquis de Lafayette, the young Frenchman who had become one of George Washington's closest aides during the Revolutionary War and who is buried in France beneath soil that he himself carried home from the ground around Bunker Hill. In January, at the request of Jim Billington, the Librarian of Congress, I had paid a visit to the Marquis de Lafayette's La Grange, a fifteenth-century chateau outside of Paris, where he lived after his brutal imprisonment during the French Revolution. The chateau's attic contained a treasure trove of artifacts and personal Lafayette papers, and the Library of Congress had overseen a special effort to digitize the collection. So entwined was Lafayette's life with the young United States that on the grounds of La Grange are trees from every U.S. state he visited; he brought their saplings home and planted them. He kept a rare letter written by Martha Washington, American newspapers from 1776, a signed copy of the Declaration of Independence, and an American flag that he took with him to prison. Across the ocean President George Washington labored for Lafayette's release, sent his dear friend books, and gave Lafayette's son refuge in the young America.

I thought that to commemorate this extraordinary French aristocrat who had such love for the United States, we should host Nicolas Sarkozy at Washington's Mount Vernon home. My initial hope was to do a formal state dinner on the grounds, but the visit could not be scheduled until November, and by then the weather was likely to be changeable and cold. Instead, on Sarkozy's second day in Washington, D.C., the two heads of state traveled to Mount Vernon and sat at the table where Lafayette and Washington had once dined to discuss the security of the globe. But unlike that George and the marquis, George and Nicolas were banished to Mount Vernon's greenhouse for lunch. The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, which oversees the historic treasure, does not permit food or drink of any kind inside Washington's home, not even for two presidents.

Before he left, Sarkozy also addressed a joint session of Congress--the Marquis de Lafayette had been the first foreign dignitary to do that, in 1824--and told the House and Senate that he was committed to sending more French forces to help secure Afghanistan.

By late fall the Iraq surge had reached its maximum point, with 170,000 U.S. troops on the ground, and there were positive signs of change. In the summer Iraq had met eight of eighteen political and security benchmarks, but on another eight, its progress was still, according to a White House review, "unsatisfactory." There had, however, been no catastrophic bomb attacks. Violence was markedly declining, as were attacks on U.S. troops and U.S. combat deaths. In mid-December, British troops would return control of the once violent port city of Basra to the Iraqis and the Iraqi army. It appeared that the surge, which earlier that year had been so derided by its critics, was beginning to bear fruit.

December brought another round of Christmas parties. Our pastry team commandeered the ground-floor China and Vermeil rooms to frost the thousands of Barney and Miss Beazley cookies they baked each season. The theme I had chosen was "Holiday in the National Parks." I had come to love the national parks from all my summer hiking trips. With my childhood friends, I had hiked not just in Yosemite and Yellowstone but also in Olympic, Glacier, Denali, Mesa Verde, Acadia, the Everglades, Zion, and Death Valley, all truly some of the most beautiful and striking spots on earth.

In 2005 my hiking group and I had returned to the Grand Canyon, where we began our hiking ritual in 1986, the year we turned forty. This time we took our daughters on the route that started with a river trip through the canyon and then a ten-mile hike out along the South Rim. There were five women in their late fifties and six in their twenties. The twenty-somethings walked out in about four hours; their mothers finally made it in seven. The dry heat and the hike had so exhausted me that at one point I thought about lying down to rest alongside the trail. Then I imagined the headlines: "First Lady Carried from Canyon on a Gurney," and I doggedly kept going. When the girls asked us if they could come again next year, we looked at each other for an instant, sweat beading on our faces, and answered with a resounding "No."

During our summer hikes, we always invited the park superintendent and rangers to join us, usually on our last night. After our 2002 visit to Yellowstone, Suzanne Lewis, the superintendent, surprised us by nominating my childhood friend Regan Gammon to the National Park Foundation board. Started in 1967 with support from Lady Bird Johnson and funds from Laurance Rockefeller, the foundation serves as a charitable partner for the park system, helping to increase parkland, protect fragile ecosystems and species, conduct school outreach, and protect park history. Although we had hiked in the parks for years, none of us had been aware of the foundation and its work. After Regan, I joined as well, as the foundation's honorary chair.

To decorate the White House for "Holiday in the National Parks," the official title of the holiday celebration, we sent a plain gold ball to each of the 391 parks and historic sites and asked park service officials to select a local artisan to create an ornament that would represent the site. When we think of national parks, we tend to think of the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite, but the list is long and includes the White House grounds, Independence Hall, the Statue of Liberty, Gettysburg, and Valley Forge. Every state in the nation has a national park or monument except Delaware, which is creating a national historic trail.

For the fir tree in the Blue Room, we received ornaments painted or etched with scenes from the Shiloh battlefield and from the Pennsylvania site where Flight 93 had crashed, which was now our newest national monument. In the niches at the entry to the State Floor, we hung oil paintings by Adrian Martinez of Hopi Point at the Grand Canyon and a waterfall in Zion National Park to bring scenes of the parklands into the White House. He created the paintings especially for the curved spaces, working on scaffolds as well as down on his knees. White House carpenters built replicas of the missions in San Antonio, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, and the Statue of Liberty to decorate the rooms and halls. The chefs reproduced Mount Rushmore in chocolate. In the Palm Room, the decorative tree was made entirely from seashells to represent our national seashores. It was a wonderful chance to showcase our diverse parklands, and our holiday card depicted a scene from the first lady's garden--itself national parkland--painted by David Drummond. We added our wishes that "the joy of all creation fill your heart this blessed season."

At our Hanukkah party, Judea and Ruth Pearl, the parents of Danny Pearl,
The Wall Street Journal
reporter kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan, lit the menorah. For the six previous years, we had borrowed magnificent menorahs from Jewish museums and synagogues around the nation. Many had been saved from Europe before the Holocaust. But this year the Pearls brought their family menorah.

The Pearl family menorah had belonged to Danny's great-grandfather Chaim, who had carried it with him when he moved from Poland to Israel to help found the town of Bnei-Brak, where today there is a street named in Chaim Pearl's honor. From there the menorah had come to the United States. Year after year it was lovingly lit in the Pearls' home. Judea, who is also a cantor, movingly sang to us during the ceremony and his melodic voice left many guests wiping their eyes. When George spoke, he said that Daniel Pearl's "only crime was being a Jewish American--something Daniel would never deny. In his final moments, Daniel told his captors about a street in Israel named for his great-grandfather. He looked into their cameras and said, 'My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, and I am Jewish.' These words have become a source of inspiration for Americans of all faiths. They show the courage of a man who refused to bow before terror--and the strength of a spirit that could not be broken."

On December 10, International Human Rights Day, I spoke via teleconference to Burmese refugees living in Thailand and then issued a call for greater international pressure on the junta, which was still persecuting those who had peacefully protested in the late summer. In Iraq the violence was continuing to ebb. The surge was showing further signs of working.

For us, the year 2008 was to be a year of lasts, the last NATO Summit, last Summit of the Americas, last international trips and visits, the last state dinner, the last chance for me to work on the White House initiatives I had begun. The final year in office, especially after seven years, is in many ways its own long good-bye. But there were firsts as well, and though the year was sometimes difficult, it was also remarkable.

I could now walk the halls of the White House and have my own memories come flooding back, such as the 2006 Veterans Day, when we invited all the living members of my father's World War II unit, the Timberwolves. Those who could came to the White House with their wives and children. Some apologized that they didn't have a jacket or a tie to wear, and we said, Come just as you are. One veteran didn't believe that he was actually being invited to the White House--he thought it was a scam and called the Better Business Bureau. After a chain of phone calls up to his congressman, he was assured that the invitation was in fact real. I watched those men, who had once been so young and brave, come with their canes, walkers, and wheelchairs to the house of presidents and wished my father could have been among them.

In June 2008, we invited the Classes of 1964 from all three Midland high schools--Midland, Lee, and George Washington Carver--for a reunion at the White House. In the fall we held a dinner for the justices on the Supreme Court and their spouses.

And now, in addition to our American guests, I could recall the many times when I had walked women from Africa and Afghanistan through these famous rooms and halls, so they might glimpse our history as well. In the East Room, George had paid tribute to Medal of Honor recipients, his voice breaking as he recited their acts of heroism until he himself could barely speak. I could pass each doorway and remember a conversation I had had, a person I had met, a memory that was my own.

We had hosted dinners in the State Dining Room in honor of Benjamin Franklin and William Shakespeare as well as two black-tie dinners to recognize Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Special Olympics, which she helped to found. We had celebrated the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, Thomas Jefferson's 265th birthday, and also baseball. For my entire eight years, I had wonderful partnerships with our leading national cultural arts agencies. The poet Dana Gioia, who headed the National Endowment for the Arts, helped Americans rediscover the pleasure of reading through his Big Read program, highlighting such classics as
To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451,
and
The Joy Luck Club.
I was there when Dana and the NEA launched the largest tour of Shakespeare in American history, bringing the Bard's words to some 2,300 small and midsize communities in all fifty states, as well as to 3,600 schools and major military bases. Dana pioneered a special NEA effort called Operation Homecoming, which paired returning war veterans with writers to help them tell their stories. A special anthology of soldiers' writings was published in 2006.

I was happy to support Chairman Bruce Cole's efforts at the National Endowment for the Humanities to reinvigorate the teaching of history through programs such as We the People, which put some of our most important national documents within reach of school classrooms. I helped launch Picturing America, which gave public and private schools, libraries, and communities access to top-quality reproductions of iconic images of America's past, so they might experience our history through art, from
Washington Crossing the Delaware
to the works of Winslow Homer, Depression-era photographs by Dorothea Lange, and the scene of Martin Luther King marching from Selma to Montgomery.