Spoken from the Heart (39 page)

Five days after American and British fighters began strikes on the Taliban's strongholds, as additional U.S. Special Forces readied themselves to enter the bleak, mountainous Afghanistan terrain on the backs of horses, weapons slung over their sides, I accompanied George to the Pentagon for a service to mark the one-month anniversary of 9-11. We traveled across the Potomac over streets that had been cleared and sealed off to form an almost perfect security bubble. There could be no more casual breaches of the perimeter. We were in a constant state of vigilance, always saving some awareness for wherever we were standing. This morning was no different, except for the addition of an F-16 fighter cover, flying low and close above the Pentagon.

The hijacked plane had penetrated the entire outer ring, and a good portion of the river side of the building was charred with layers of thick, black soot. But what lingered for weeks, even after the cranes had arrived and the debris began to be collected, was a fierce smell, the noxious, deep scent of burning jet fuel, building materials, and human remains. It was a smell that burned the throat and stung the nostrils, a smell so strong that even commuters in closed subway cars racing underneath the World Trade Center site inhaled it for months after 9-11. And it remained at the Pentagon. We looked at the gouge in the building, and I looked into the somber faces of the men and women who were embarking upon a war.

Before fifteen thousand people, George spoke of a wound to the building that would not be forgotten but that would be repaired. In an overwhelming bit of irony, it was on September 11, 1941, that construction on the Pentagon had first begun. As the cameras clicked, both of us had tears in our eyes.

I felt the grief again at a memorial service sponsored by Elayne Bennett's Best Friends organization for three exceptional eleven-year-old Washington, D.C., students who were on Flight 77 with their teacher, bound for a special National Geographic program on California's Channel Islands. So many lives lost, each one exceptional to someone.

On October 16, five weeks after the attacks, I was attempting to return my official life to a regular routine. I had committed months before to teach in different schools across the country for Teach for America Week, highlighting the program and its efforts to get bright and eager college graduates into some of the nation's toughest classrooms. Teach for America recruits commit to spending two years teaching in public schools in low-income communities. During Teach for America Week, professionals from all across the country spend an hour teaching children in public school classrooms.

There are those who dismiss school visits as photo ops, but there is so much more to them than that. There is a chance to connect with the students and the teachers, to convey how much they are valued. And every school that I visited was thoroughly vetted, so being selected was a significant badge of honor. Many of the schools I saw were in rough areas; they were not wealthy schools, even though the districts had rushed to spruce them up. George and I always noted that we could smell the coats of new paint before we even stepped through the doorways. But paint couldn't camouflage rusty pipes, ancient bathrooms, and dilapidated desks. Or the neighborhoods that I saw on the drives in--graffiti-covered walls, stray bullet holes, abandoned buildings, and makeshift cardboard where glass windows should have been. There were piles of trash, chain-link fences around asphalt blacktops, and hardly anything green, such as a patch of grass to play on.

That week, I was scheduled to teach in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Maryland; Atlanta, Georgia; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My second stop was the South Seventeenth Street Elementary School in Newark, New Jersey, where I was to teach a kindergarten class. South Seventeenth Street Elementary was similar to the John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Houston; 453 of its 537 students were eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, and the majority of them were African-American. Mark Williams, the kindergarten teacher, had graduated from college just over a year before. He had painted a bright mural on his classroom walls.

I spoke to the students and read a story. At one point, a little girl snuggled up next to me and tugged on my arm to whisper in my ear. I bent my head and listened to her hushed, solemn voice. "Did you hear," she asked, "about the buildings?" I very slowly nodded my head. "The bad men knocked them down and all the people died," she said, and then asked, "What do you think about what happened?" I wrapped my arms around her and said, "I'm sad." And she nodded and said, "I'm sad too."

In Baton Rouge, on the morning of October 19, I taught at the Eden Park Elementary School, and then, instead of flying directly back to D.C., I made a stop at the ranch. George had left for China for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit. He had wanted to decline, but the Chinese were determined that the event go forward and had made elaborate plans to host the Pacific Rim nations, so he made the trip. When he arrived, he called me to say that all of Shanghai was a ghost town. The Chinese had cleared it out for the conference; almost 16 million people had been moved. With George away, I did not want to spend the weekend in the White House alone. I invited my good friend Debbie Francis to spend Saturday night at the ranch with me. We were sitting in the living room after dinner, having a glass of wine and talking, when my Secret Service agents burst in. They had received warning of an impending attack on our ranch. I was shocked. When I didn't immediately leave the house, the agents told us to turn off all the lights, and they moved the convoy of blast-proof vehicles into the driveway so we could run to the road if necessary. Debbie and I sat in the pitch black and kept talking, although I'm sure for her it must have seemed unnerving to sit in total darkness before we made our way to bed, where we would try to sleep, waiting for an attack that never came.

There were many such warnings, whispered in my ear when I was at an event or even sitting on a sofa in the White House residence, having a quick cup of coffee with a friend. I would be told of a suspicious plane or vehicle or other concern. One time, when Barbara and Jenna were home on a spring break and we were sitting in the living room with some of their friends, we heard the agents' footsteps pounding down the hall. They raced in and told us that we had to go to the bunker. Everyone jumped up and started running down the hallway to the long, slick marble stairs. Panting, we made it the three long flights down. Then word came that it was only a stray plane that had violated the protected airspace.

We had another evacuation incident in the spring of 2005, when Nancy Reagan was staying with us to attend a lunch that I was hosting in her honor. Again, the agents appeared to hustle us down to the bunker, but this time I insisted on taking the elevator. I was not going to make Nancy Reagan walk down three steep flights of marble stairs. So we dropped in our elevator cage to the subterranean bunker. After we arrived, fighter jets intercepted the plane. It was a pilot from Pennsylvania who had mistakenly strayed into the restricted airspace. Months after the incident, he ran into someone I knew and said, "Please tell Mrs. Bush that I am so sorry."

But there was no way of knowing which threats were accidents and which were real. We grew used to dashing down to the bunker, to always being a bit more aware. It came with our new lives.

George read the daily threat assessments, the pages upon pages of worrisome plots, activities, and chatter. He didn't bring it all home, but he brought enough that I could see the lines cut deeper in his face and could hear him next to me lying awake at night, his mind still working.

But whatever our private anxieties, our public lives required us to go on. Just three days after the ranch scare, I visited the National Gallery to tour its new exhibition of Renaissance art, featuring a portrait by Leonardo da Vinci.

It is hard to recall now just how empty parts of the nation were in the months after 9-11, especially museums, movie theaters, malls, restaurants, and hotels. Washington, D.C., hotels were all but vacant. There was a collective unease about large public spaces, and one of the things that mattered most was interrupting that cycle of fear. I walked through the National Gallery of Art with its charming and smart director, Rusty Powell, and the exhibition's wonderful curator, Russell Sale. Over the years, I would visit many exhibitions in Washington, usually quietly, just to take in the beauty and power of the creations. In a time of destruction, art reminds us of the ennobling impulses that exist in human beings, the desire to create, to beautify, to build, to educate, and to make something that will last for generations. Art and artists are among our bulwarks against ruthless terrorists who would fashion bombs or commandeer and crash planes. Art reminds us too that time passes and things change; peace may not always be permanent, but neither is war. On that morning, going to this museum, I brought the press with me. If I was unafraid to go, perhaps others would begin to feel the same. And I remember the gratitude of Rusty Powell and Russell Sale, for the simple effort of my coming. "You just can't know," they said, "what it meant for a first lady to come to the museum at all, and then to come so soon after 9-11."

But there were still moments when fear crept in.

On Monday, October 29, a second national terror alert was issued. The FBI announced that it expected terror strikes against the United States, either at home or abroad. Among the most specific warnings, the CIA believed that al Qaeda had plans to attack a nuclear facility with a hijacked aircraft. The next day, we were back in New York City.

George had been asked to throw out the first pitch at the opening New York home game of the World Series, where the Yankees were playing the Arizona Diamondbacks. Barbara came down from Yale to be with me, and we were perched in the box of George Steinbrenner, the Yankees' owner. George would be walking onto the field alone. He would stride from the dugout to the empty mound and stand with no agents beside him and a packed crowd filling every seat in the stands. George was focused on his pitch. Under the stadium, as George was warming up, the Yankees star Derek Jeter had already asked him if he was going to throw from the mound. As George worried about throwing a strike, I was worried about far more. Every entry point had metal detectors; bomb-sniffing dogs roamed the grounds, and sharpshooters took up positions on the roof. Evacuation information flashed across the scoreboard as both teams began batting practice. The official start to the evening was a phalanx of fighter jets flying overhead, after which we all observed a moment of silence to honor the fallen and our troops. The flag that snapped in the air was one recovered from the wreckage at Ground Zero, where buried fires were still smoking. It was partially torn and missing twelve stars.

I smiled and watched as my husband raised his arm and hurled the ball straight into the grooved leather of the catcher's mitt. I heard the chants of "USA, USA, USA," but inside my heart was racing, my hands were cold, and my mind was wondering, What if? It was the same feeling that followed me when I glanced at pro football stadiums packed for weekend games or when we began planning the 2002 National Book Festival. For a long time afterward, I would look up at the sky and wonder, Are we going to see something else? Every night, I went to bed wondering, What will tomorrow bring?

The next day, Halloween, we met at the White House with the families of the two postal workers who had died the previous week in the anthrax attacks. Joseph Curseen was forty-seven and had spent fifteen years with the post office. Thomas Morris was fifty-five and had been a postal employee for twenty-eight years. Both left behind wives and children. They had merely been in a place that had processed infected mail bound for the Capitol. Unspoken in the room, as we shook hands with the postmaster general, was the question of whether there would be more such envelopes in the weeks and months to come. Anthrax had already been found at a remote White House mail site, and on Monday, after the new threat assessment, the Secret Service had locked down all the gates at the White House.

The fall deepened, and more foreign leaders came. Over the course of six days, the presidents of Nigeria and Algeria, Jacques Chirac of France, and Tony Blair flew to Washington to meet with George. But I was focused on another significant meeting: Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putina were about to become our first official guests at the ranch. They were heading to New York for the United Nations General Assembly meeting and then to visit us. I still didn't have all my furniture for the guesthouse--I was frantically borrowing some from my friend and decorator Ken Blasingame. And the day I flew to the ranch to finish the preparations, I first had to give a speech before three hundred journalists sitting amid a sea of banquet tables and starched white cloths at the National Press Club in downtown Washington.

The Secret Service advance team had arrived hours beforehand, walking the hallways with a bomb-sniffing dog. My speech was originally going to be about education, but it was now about something more, about the country I had found after 9-11. I told of seeing flags waving in front of almost every home and building up and down the streets of Chicago when I arrived a week after 9-11 to tape a television interview with Oprah Winfrey, and of the memorial service at the Pentagon, where a single woman stood up to wave her flag during the singing of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," and how we all stood after that, waving our flags and singing, tears filling our eyes. I told about the women from a Jewish synagogue outside Washington, D.C., who volunteered to shop for Muslim women who were afraid to go out on their own, and about the woman in New York who called her rabbi a few days before she was set to give birth and told him that she wanted to name her child after a World Trade Center victim who didn't have a child of his own. She said good-bye by telling Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, "I promise that I will try to have more children because I know there are so many more names." I told of an art student who signed up to join the military and of hundreds of Washington, D.C., students whose families can't afford to buy lunch but who pinched pennies to give me $173.64 for the Afghan Children's Fund. I spoke of children in Southern California who in early October, before the anthrax attacks, raised $85.75 for Afghan children at their sidewalk lemonade stand and sent the money to the White House, with a letter to the president signed "Your citizens."