Standing by her man

MEMOIR: Spoken from the Heart,by Laura Bush, Simon and Schuster, 456pp. £20

OVER THE PAST few weeks Americans have heard more about the political views of Laura Bush than they did during her eight years at the White House or the previous six when her husband was governor of Texas.

In a series of interviews promoting her memoir, Spoken from the Heart, the former first lady has spoken in favour of gay marriage and abortion rights, criticised Arizona's tough new immigration laws and backed Elena Kagan, Barack Obama's latest nominee for the US supreme court.

As George W Bush watched his approval ratings plunge to new depths in the final years of his presidency, his wife remained throughout the most popular first lady in history. Much of her appeal lay in a cultivated ambiguity about her political outlook, offering hints from time to time that she was a lot more liberal than her husband.

Spoken from the Heartlifts the lid only a little on Laura Bush's views on controversial issues, and she complains in the book about journalists' attempts to discover points of disagreement between herself and her husband. "It was an odd sort of Washington parlour game," she writes.

The book reveals that Bush urged her husband not to make gay marriage an issue during the 2004 presidential campaign, reminding him that they had gay friends and friends with gay children. She treads a careful line on abortion, bemoaning the lack of understanding on both sides of the debate and opposing abortion itself while upholding women’s legal right to it.

Bush’s popularity may also have owed something to the fact that she didn’t appear to enjoy a moment of her official duties in Washington. At White House receptions she smiled and nodded enough to avoid being rude but never quite avoided giving the impression that she couldn’t wait to get back to Texas.

Born Laura Lane Welch in 1946 in the west Texas town of Midland, which had more oil rigs than trees, Bush was an only child. Her parents’ loss of three children, two to late miscarriages and one a few days after being born, cast a pall of loneliness and a sense of loss over her early years.

“It was easy perhaps to be sad in Midland, sad from loss, sad from loneliness. ‘Terrible winds and a wonderful emptiness’ were the painter Georgia O’Keeffe’s double-edged words about the Texas desert plains, which I read years later, after I was grown,” she writes.

Bush says that being an only child helped to give her a lifelong love of reading, and she spent much of her time as first lady promoting books and literacy. As a child she organised her books according to the Dewey decimal system used in libraries and even called her cat Dewey, so it should have surprised no one when she eventually became a librarian.

Before she left her home town, however, Bush was to experience a trauma that haunted her down the decades but that she refused to talk about until it was raised during one of her husband’s campaigns.

Driving her father’s Chevrolet Impala as a teenager in 1963, she missed a stop sign while chatting with a friend in the passenger seat and crashed into a car driven by 17-year-old Mike Douglas, a friend from school. The impact knocked Bush out of her car and left her with a slight injury to her knee, but it killed Douglas.

“The whole time, I was praying that the person in the other car was alive,” she writes. “In my mind, I was calling ‘Please, God. Please, God. Please, God,’ over and over and over again.”

Bush says that she was plagued by guilt for many years after the crash, not least because she didn’t show up to Douglas’s funeral. Her parents didn’t want her to go, and she slept late that morning, only waking up after the service was almost over. “I lost my faith that November, lost it for many, many years,” she writes. “It was the first time that I had prayed to God for something, begged him for something, not the simple childhood wishing on a star but humbly begging for another human life. And it was as if no one heard.”

Bush’s account of her early years provides the most compelling part of her memoir, and the book’s insights dwindle as her story progresses. She acknowledges that her husband could be a bore before he stopped drinking and admits to teething troubles in her relationship with her “ferociously tart-tongued mother-in-law”, Barbara Bush.

Bush’s harshest words are held for her husband’s political critics, and she scolds the Democratic congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, now house speaker, for describing the president as an incompetent leader. “The comments were uncalled for and graceless,” she writes.

Bush is bewildered by the difficulty many Democrats had in accepting that her husband won the disputed election in 2000, when the conservative majority on the supreme court ordered a halt to the recount in Florida.

“I had thought that once a winner was formally declared, the post-election rancour would die down, that everyone would move on,” she writes. “But in the years to come, we found that, for some, the bitterness remained.”

Bush defends her husband’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and his decision to invade Iraq. She goes as far as suggesting that Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder and France’s Jacques Chirac, who opposed the Iraq war, could have prevented it by persuading Saddam Hussein to go into exile.

For the most part, however, Bush’s account of her White House years lacks spice, revealing little about the relationships within her husband’s team. Bush laments that life back in Texas has yet to return to normal and wonders when public curiosity about her life will start to fade. Despite its length and the publicity surrounding it in the United States, this memoir will do little to satisfy that curiosity.

• Denis Staunton is Foreign Editor of The Irish Times