Depending on whom you believe, it is either an exposé of ”the secret world of the president’s stealth counsellor”, or a valentine of ”fluffball quotes”. The disagreement will probably only help sales of a biography of Laura Bush, published today after weeks of anticipation.
Notable revelations about the first lady, generally described as intensely private, include the claims she has tried to tone down her husband’s rhetoric on terrorism, and her twin daughters were conceived after three years of trying and fertility drugs. Jenna and Barbara Bush, now 25, were ”miracle girls” conceived when Mrs Bush took clomiphene citrate to induce ovulation, a friend is quoted as saying.
The 59-year-old Bush has also lobbied her husband on causes close to her heart such as HIV/Aids and education — getting some federal budgets increased — and vetoed one nomination for a senior government post, according to the authorised biography by former Washington Post reporter Ronald Kessler, Laura Bush: An Intimate Portrait of the First Lady. ”She’s taken a role in all sorts of personnel appointments, and she’s expanded his worldview, which led to him deciding to give billions to combat Aids in Africa,” Kessler told The Guardian, though he declined to name the person she vetoed.
While burnishing Bush’s image with appreciative quotes from friends and relatives, Kessler fleshes out a woman in certain ways politically at odds with her husband. She was ”on the liberal side” when they married, Kessler says, and friends believe she is firmly pro-choice on abortion. That is where her similarity to her predecessor, Hillary Clinton, ends: she disapproved of the way the former first lady decorated the West Wing, Kessler said, dismissing her tastes as ”gaudy”.
Bush was famously warned by her mother-in-law, Barbara Bush, not to criticise George Bush’s speeches after she once upset the future president so much he accidentally crashed his car. According to accounts of the book, Kessler claims she told her husband she thought describing Osama bin Laden as ”wanted dead or alive” was over the top.When Newsweek reported that US soldiers had flushed a copy of the Qur’an down a toilet at Guantánamo Bay, inciting violent protests, Bush was so angry she banned the ”irresponsible” magazine from the West Wing.
She shows an icier side with Teresa Heinz Kerry, John Kerry’s wife, who told a reporter during the 2004 election that as far as she knew Laura Bush never had ”a real job”. She phoned to apologise, but the first lady — who had been a teacher — declined to take the call. ”Call her back,” she told an assistant, ”and tell her that Mrs Bush understands that when you talk to the media, things get quoted that you didn’t quite say, or mean to say.” Kessler insisted he had had ”complete independence”, including an account of the road accident when Bush was 17, jumping a red light and killing a close friend.
Much of the book has a glowing tone, however, reviewers found it hard to take seriously. ”White House cooperation always amounts to managing the message,” James Wolcott wrote in Vanity Fair, calling the book a ”valentine” full of ”fluffball quotes”. Even the critic of the Washington Times, the paper beloved of the Bush administration, cringed. Interviewees, she wrote, sing the praises of Bush ”in a manner that might make their subject wriggle with embarrassment … it’s difficult to believe she could read this collection of accolades without laughing”.
The publisher’s blurb promises the book will reveal:
- How Laura’s opinions have shaped her husband’s policies
- What President Bush told Laura at the dinner table after giving the ”go” for the invasion of Iraq
- What Laura’s relationship with daughters Jenna and Barbara is like
- What Laura says about Hillary
- And how Laura, at 17, caused a fatal traffic accident – Guardian Unlimited Â