Posted on 11/11/2001 8:26:50 AM PST by WIMom
The folling interview is an insert in the story found in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that I could not find on line, but wanted to included it. The main story is after the interview.
Where the first lady stands
Washington - Laura Bush offered several glimpses of life in the White House during her appearance last week at the National Press Club:
Will she write a book?
"I guess it'll (depend on) whether or not I can get that $8 million advance or whatever it is." The sum is what former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, her predecessor and now the junior senator from New York, received for a book now in the works.
Does she have literary ambitions?
"It might be fun to write a baby book, the little hard, cardboard books that you read to babies and babies chew on." She may write about Barney, the Bushes; black Scottish terrier; their other dog, spot, who is a springer spaniel born in the White House to Millie, who belonged to Laura's mother-in-law and former first lady Barbara Bush.
Does she plan to cook the turkey on Thanksgiving?
"This year I will not be cooking the turkey. (Laughter.) Why are you laughing? I haven't had to cook in a few years. It's been a great relief to my family."
How has life in the White House changed since Sept. 11?
" There are no tours right now of the White House. That's sad. It's lonely and sort of quiet in there. So I hope (tours) will come back soon."
Has she been sustained by any books or poems since Sept. 11?
Bush named a poem, "Passengers," by poet laureate Billy Collins, about airplane passengers - "a really lovely poem that's hard to read right now."
How will she entertain Russian President Vladimir Putin and his wife, due to visit the Bushes' 1,600-acre ranch in Crawford, Texas, this week?
"We're going to have a chuck wagon out . . . with cowboys cooking, Beef tenderloin, of course, and pecan pie. We have hundreds of pecan trees on our ranch.
"We have a great little Texas swing band, just five members, acoustical, who sing those great Western songs like 'Drifting Along With the Tumbling Tumbleweeds.'
"I think it'll really be a beautiful evening."
Does she view being first lady as being co-president?
"No. No. No. I don't. I mean, I'm a partner to my husband, of course. And when you're in this job, you're in this job. It isn't like . . . I could go away for the weekend and forget my husband is president.
"But he was the one elected, I would have never run."
Does she see her role more as Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton or Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower and Pat Nixon?
"I view my role as first lady as Laura Bush."
- Katheren M. Skiba
Washington -What a week for Laura Bush.
After celebrating her birthday (55) and wedding anniversary (24) and hosting her mother-in-law (wife of president 41), the first lady delivered her longest speech ever, revealing new, poignant details about terror attacks and their aftermath.
Bush called Sept. 11 this generation's "day of infamy," but nonetheless accented the positive before the National Press Club last week.
"We are a kinder nation today," she said. "The attacks have caused all of us to reassess our priorities and our values. Rather than fearing death, we are embracing life."
Though she is, in her husband's words, a mild-mannered West Texas lady, now, step by step in gray suede heels, she is striding into greater prominence as the country's "comforter-in-chief."
The national spotlight is increasingly focused on the former teacher and librarian, as she comforts the wounded, consoles second-graders, encourages donations for Afghan children, drops in on talk shows - such as "Oprah" - and memorializes the dead, even if, in the last case, cameras record her every tear.
"Americans are willing to fight and die for our freedoms," she told the press club, "but more importantly, we are willing to live for them."
Remember, if you will, that this is the modest, self-effacing woman who once extracted from George W. Bush, then her fiance, a promise that she never, ever would have to deliver a political speech.
"So much for political promises," she dead-panned Thursday.
She is a woman, too, who, born an only child, once read to her dolls and imagined herself a teacher, but now finds herself instructing the entire country.
Her staff, in discussing her press club appearance, initially balked at allowing a Q&A with the capital press corps ("It's just not done"). It was envisioned teaming her up with Phil C. McGraw - thepsychologist popularized by Oprah Winfrey - to fill the club's hourlong format.
Instead, Bush took the lectern alone, becoming the third sitting first lady (after Democrats Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosalyn Carter) to address the 93-year-old club.
Echoing her husband, she said the United States is a nation awakened to danger and a nation awakened to patriotism and citizenship and service. "None of us could have imagined the evil that was done to our country, yet we have learned that out of tragedy can come great good."
In more detail than ever, Bush described Sept. 11, a day when the weather was "beautiful" but "such terrible things" unfolded.
Each generation has a day of infamy, she said. For her parents, it was Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. For her, it was Nov. 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas.
She was in Midland, Texas, a senior at Robert E. Lee High School, sitting in class when word filtered in that the president had been killed. "I remember feeling as if a blanket had been thrown over the school, suffocating all the usual sounds of scraping chairs and classroom chatter. People cried. The horror was so sudden and so unimaginable."
She went home for lunch that day, saw her parents' sadness and with them watched events unfold on television. "A terrible blow, almost too much to bear," she remembered.
Bush was en route to meet with Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) on Capitol Hill when a Secret Service agent told her that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. "We thought it was an accident" until word came of a plane striking the second tower, she said.
"We knew then that it was terrorism. And I remember thinking that nothing would ever be the same."
Kennedy, with Splash, his Portuguese water dog, was waiting for Bush. The coincidence hurt. "Words can't describe the depth of feeling I had being with President Kennedy's brother as another tragedy broke our nation's heart."
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) joined them. Bush said she felt "as if we were going through the motions, pretending to be normal, when we all knew 'normal' would never again be what we knew it to be on September 10th."
On a morning riddled with rumor, one hit close to home. It was thought - inaccurately - that Camp David had been attacked. Bush said she worried for those at the presidential retreat, particularly since she and her husband worship there with 70 or so people, mostly young couples with children.
She and the church's chaplain share an alma mater - Southern Methodist University - and Bush recalled that the following weekend, he read from Psalm 27: "Your face, Lord, I do seek. . . . I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living."
She is funny. Listening to her introduction - when she was reminded that after her first date, she found George W. "fun and really cute" - she said wryly to those at the head table, "All the important things."
She is a savvy politician. In describing acts of kindness that met the acts of horror, Bush, in a Reaganesque turn, recalled good deeds in Washington, New York, Chicago, Boston - and in smaller places from Bethesda, Md., to South Pasadena, Calif.
She is complimentary to her husband - "very focused, very disciplined, tenacious. Very resolved. Very focused on what's ahead of us" - just as she turned away a question on whether the two have differences of opinion: "One thing about politics for sure is you nearly always have an opponent, so it doesn't have to be your spouse." (Publicly, in the past, she has said she favored the Roe vs. Wade ruling legalizing abortion nationwide.)
And she is careful - mostly - to remain above the fray. She refused to take the bait when asked whether she plans to be co-president and had praise for Hillary Rodham Clinton, her predecessor. But when asked whether Bush herself would write a book, she blurted out: "I guess it'll be whether or not I can get that $8 million advance. . . ."
Author Letitia Baldrige - Jackie Kennedy's social secretary - stopped in for lunch. Billy Graham came by for his 83rd birthday. Barbara Bush, wife of 41, George H.W., was on hand for her daughter-in-law's birthday, celebrated Sunday. And Monday, the president and first lady had a night at the opera, "Madame Butterfly," on their anniversary.
And British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a flight here on the Concorde, joined them for dinner at the White House on Wednesday night.
Keeping busy helps her unwind, just as reading and exercising do. "I'm also working out," she reveled before the press club. "Can y'all tell?"
Historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony, who writes about first ladies, said in the days after Sept. 11 that her performance had been "stellar."
Anthony said then that there is a long history of first ladies taking on significant symbolic roles in times or war or war preparedness. "It is a role that might be described as the nation's mother," he told an interviewer.
Bush, he said, "has done that in what is emerging as her signature quiet, yet firm way."
But judging by last week's address, Bush - who shuns the title "first lady," preferring "Laura Bush" - seems quiet no more.
Katherine M. Skiba, correspondent in the Journal Sentinel's Washington bureau, is the National Press Club member who invited Bush to speak last week.
It never ceases to amaze me the way the media pretended that Hillary was some kind of amazing career woman, when she was riding her husband's coattails and was given major political jobs to which she was never elected or officially appointed. And when she WAS finally elected to something, she managed it without campaigning or giving an interview, again purely on the prominence of her husband's name.
Can you imagine what the press would have said if President Reagan had made Nancy the head of a huge health task force whose proceedings she illegally kept secret?
"I view my role as first lady as Laura Bush."
That says volumes about a woman who has esteem for herself and need not don other's mannerisms or behaviors. I'm so glad she is Laura Bush.
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