The Family (84 page)

“Maybe it was because she knew her husband was flirting a little too aggressively that evening,” said von Eichel, “but when I met her, she looked like a cardboard cutout with a rictus grin and a glassy-eyed stare. Her face, which looks so pleasant from a distance, up close looked like a Stepford-wife mask, and her handshake . . . well . . . have you ever touched dry ice? But as I say, her husband was coming on strong to my friend [Mrs. John Kluge, the wife of Metromedia’s chairman] and also hitting on me . . . Laura reacted like the classic wife of an alcoholic—the police person who is constantly watching and waiting for her husband to screw up.”

The First Lady had opened the National Book Festival gala that evening by sharing a poem she said her husband had written to her. “President Bush is a great leader and husband, but I bet you didn’t know he is also quite the poet. Upon returning home last night from my long trip, I found a lovely poem waiting for me. Normally, I wouldn’t share something so personal, but since we’re celebrating great writers, I can’t resist.” She then read:

Dear Laura,
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Oh, my lump-in-the-bed
How I’ve missed you.
Roses are redder
Bluer am I
Seeing you kissed by that charming French guy.
The dogs and the cat, they missed you too
Barney’s still mad you dropped him, he ate your shoe
The distance, my dear, has been such a barrier
Next time you want an adventure, just land on a carrier.

At the end of the evening, the Kluges said good night to the First Lady, and the President made another beeline for von Eichel.

“That was a pretty funny poem you wrote,” she said.

“Ha! Never heard the damn thing before tonight!” said the President. “Didn’t write a word of it.”

The First Lady admitted a few weeks later on NBC’s
Meet the Press
that her husband did not write the poem she read that evening. She did not say who did, or why she had presented it as his, but she left the impression that someone with a sense of public relations might have been trying to make the Bushes’ marriage appear more affectionate. “Some woman from across the table said, ‘You just don’t know how great it is to have a husband who would write a poem for you,’” Laura told Tim Russert.

The family friend who described the Bushes’ marriage as workable, thanks to Laura, purposely did not address the issue of the Bushes’ indulged twins, Barbara and Jenna. Barbara, who went to Yale, heard much more criticism of her father and his policies at college than Jenna, who went to the University of Texas.

“There is plenty that the Bushes don’t ask their daughters to do, that much is clear,” Ann Gerhart wrote in her biography of Laura Bush,
The Perfect Wife
. “Jenna and Barbara have not been asked to campaign. They have not been asked to rein in their adolescent rebellions. They have not been asked to appear even nominally interested in any of the pressing issues affecting this world their generation will inhabit . . . These girls have all the
noblesse
with none of the
oblige
.”

The girls’ various arrests for underage drinking during their father’s presidency seemed to mirror their parents’ past behavior with alcohol and drugs. One observer quoted Euripides to remind the President that “the gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.” Pictures of Jenna Bush drunk with a cigarette in her hand and rolling on the floor on top of another woman appeared in a supermarket tabloid. Cited twice for trying to use a false ID to drink, Jenna was fined six hundred dollars and ordered to perform thirty-six hours of community service and to attend sessions where victims of alcohol-related crimes talk. After two convictions, she was put on probation for three months. Soon T-shirts sprouted on campuses around the country with huge letters asking: “WWJD? What Would Jenna Drink?”

Jenna’s twin compiled a similar record of misdemeanors. Photos of Barbara dancing suggestively in nightclubs, where she was reported to be partying late into the night in “pot-clouded” rooms, appeared in New York newspapers. Barbara, too, made it into the supermarket tabloids. She was arrested with her sister for using a false ID to buy alcohol in Austin, Texas. She was caught a second time in a bar in New Haven. Both girls made the cover of
People
: “Oops! They Did It Again.” Barbara pleaded “no contest,” and was ordered to pay a hundred-dollar fine, perform eight hours of community service, and attend six hours of alcohol-awareness class.

As the President coped with the police-blotter publicity of his two daughters, his brother Jeb was dealing with a similar situation in Florida. The governor’s daughter, Noelle, was arrested in Tallahassee in January 2002 for trying to fill a false prescription for the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. She was sent to a drug-rehabilitation program in Orlando. Six months later she was jailed for three days in Florida’s Orange County Correctional Center for violating the rules of her drug-treatment program. She reportedly had stolen pills from the nurse’s office at the rehab center. Her father e-mailed the state’s political reporters:

My family is saddened to share that our daughter Noelle has not abided by the conditions of her drug treatment plan. Unfortunately, this happens to many individuals even as they continue their journey to full recovery. There are consequences for every action we take in our lives, and as her parents, Columba and I wish we could have prevented our daughter from making the wrong choices.

After her jail time, Noelle returned to the rehab center. On September 9, 2002, one of the rehab patients called 911 to report that staffers had found crack cocaine in Noelle’s shoe.

“She does this all the time, and she gets out of it because she’s the governor’s daughter,” the caller told the police. “But we’re sick of it here, ’cause we have to do what’s right, but she gets treated like some kind of princess . . . We’re just trying to get our lives together, and this girl’s bringing drugs on [the] property.”

Six police cars arrived at the center to investigate the complaint. The staff admitted finding the drug on Noelle but refused to cooperate with the police, and the employee who made the discovery ripped up her written statement to protect Noelle and uphold the center’s confidentiality policy. No charges were filed, but a judge sent the governor’s daughter to jail for ten days for violating the terms of her treatment.

Jeb and Columba did not appear in court with their daughter. “I just can’t believe that they weren’t there for Noelle,” said Sharon Bush. “My kids are my life, and I know I would be at their side in a courtroom if they were in trouble, no matter how politically embarrassing it might be . . . My former in-laws think it’s shameful about all the arrests of George’s daughters and Jeb’s daughter because it hurts the family’s image, . . . but if they practiced the family values they preach all the time, they would’ve been in that courtroom beside Noelle . . . I feel so sorry for her. She’s almost thirty years old.”

On the day Noelle was sentenced, her father was raising funds in Florida with his brother George, but neither the governor nor the President appeared in court to stand beside the young woman. Noelle’s brother George P. Bush was there, along with their Aunt Dorothy Bush Koch.

The public scrutiny of his family’s substance abuse was only part of the new President’s problems. By Labor Day 2001, he faced a deteriorating economy, a lopsided federal budget, slumping consumer confidence, and limited political capital to push through his legislative agenda. He confronted an opposition-controlled Senate with controversial proposals that included education reform, a new missile-defense system, a trade bill opposed by labor, an HMO-reform bill, a proposal to restructure Social Security, and an energy bill that contained drilling rights in wilderness areas, which pleased oilmen and angered environmentalists. His approval ratings had dropped below 50 percent, because a majority of Americans felt he was not up to the job of being President.

Then the gates of hell flew open.

At 8:45 a.m. and 9:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001, two hijacked airliners carrying twenty thousand gallons of jet fuel dove into two towers of concrete, steel, and glass in New York City. As the north and south towers of the World Trade Center collapsed in the inferno, sending 2,821 people to their deaths, a similar conflagration shook Washington, D.C.—another hijacked plane hit the west face of the Pentagon, killing 184 people. Less than thirty minutes later a fourth plane aimed for the U.S. Capitol crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all 40 passengers on board, who had overtaken the hijackers, diverted the plane, and saved the lives of many people in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. At the end of the day of the worst terror attack the United States had ever endured, a shattered nation faced the loss of 3,000 lives and financial wreckage estimated to be over $27 billion.

At the time of the first attack, the President was sitting on a little wooden stool speaking to second graders at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. Early on he had dubbed himself “The Education President” after declaring, “The illiteracy level of our children are appalling.” He sought to prove his commitment to learning by reading to seven-year-olds, which is what he was doing when his chief of staff, Andrew Card, whispered in his ear that the United States was under attack. The President continued sitting with the children for seven more minutes, reading from their textbook
My Pet Goat
and posing for the cameras. Then he moved to the school library to make a statement.

“Today we’ve had a national tragedy,” he said. “Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.” He said that the federal government would “conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.”

After characterizing the terrorists as “folks,” the President departed and flew from Sarasota to Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, Louisiana, where he got off Air Force One to make another statement: “I want to reassure the American people that the full resources of the federal government are working to assist local authorities to save lives and to help victims of those attacks. Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.”

He returned to his flying bunker and headed for Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska. He emerged from his plane, which was now guarded by Humvees and soldiers in fatigues gripping machine guns. His motorcade passed through the security gate outside U.S. Strategic Command headquarters, but the President did not go into the command building. Instead, he entered a squared-off structure that looked like the top of an elevator shaft, where he was to receive a briefing from his National Security Council. The White House press corps was left on the plane. When the ABC News anchor Peter Jennings later asked Ann Compton where the President had gone, the White House correspondent replied, “He went down the bunny hole.”

While the President was in hiding, his role as commander in chief was shouldered by New York City’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who rushed to survey the devastation at Ground Zero. He was on television all day and all night—informative, accessible, and spontaneously human. The death toll, he said, will be “more than we can bear.” He was a constant reassuring presence to a frightened nation reeling from the attacks and the searing images of airplanes smashing into buildings and human beings leaping to their deaths to escape incineration. In the absence of presidential leadership, the President’s televangelist friends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson stepped forward to fan fear and hatred by suggesting the bombings might be God’s wrath on homosexuals, lesbians, feminists, and civil libertarians—words that George W. Bush never repudiated.

Breaking through the world’s stunned disbelief was Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, who reinforced the special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States by offering the comfort of comradeship. He said that Americans were not alone, that decent people of the world would join them and make common cause against terrorism.

The President’s absence from Washington was psychologically jarring for the country. Presidents have always returned to the White House in times of crisis—from Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War to Lyndon Johnson after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. No President had been persuaded by security concerns to avoid the U.S. capital since the British burned the White House in 1814. “President Bush made an initial mistake,” the historian Robert Dallek told
USA Today
. “The President’s place is back in Washington.”

The next day Karl Rove, senior adviser to the President and the man frequently called “Bush’s brain,” read Dallek’s comment in the nation’s largest newspaper and telephoned the historian.

“The day after the bloodiest attack on U.S. soil and the President’s special assistant is wasting his time calling me to say that the President’s plane was targeted,” recalled Dallek. “I told him that I was not indifferent to the President’s security, but the President’s place is in the nation’s capital . . . I knew then Bush had no brains. Now I knew he had no guts.”

Karl Rove’s claim that Air Force One was the target of terrorists was not true, but presidential security was the most acceptable excuse for the Bush White House to offer to explain the President’s absence from the nation’s capital.

Mary McGrory wrote in
The Washington Post
: “Bush said the attack was a test for the country. It was also one for him. He flunked. But he says he believes in education and he has three years to take a makeup exam in leadership.”

Overshadowed by Mayor Giuliani, eclipsed by Prime Minister Blair, and dwarfed by the enormous catastrophe, the President of the United States finally returned to the White House on September 11, 2001, at 7 p.m. He addressed the nation at 8:30 p.m., blinking nervously as he read from the teleprompter for five minutes.