At Home on the Trail

AUSTIN, Texas —  When Laura Bush was honored last fall as a distinguished alumna by Dallas’ Southern Methodist University, she accepted with typical modesty and candor. As an SMU student in the 1960s, she said, “I was just worried about becoming an alumni. I suspect,” she added wryly, “I might have married into the distinguished part.”

Actually, Bush has drawn praise in her own right as a promoter of literacy, art and education in Texas where her husband, George W. Bush, is governor.

And now that George W. is running for president, his spouse has moved into the fast lane on the “well-grooved highway” of the Texas political wife, according to Jan Jarboe Russell, author of “Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson.”

“The goal,” she said, “is to be purposeful, earnest; not terribly ambitious. To do things that matter, but not things that are controversial. To have enough spunk so you’re not boring, but not too much spunk so that you’re ornery or anything like that.”

Laura Bush seems to fit that model to a Texas T. She gave up her career as teacher and children’s librarian when she got married 22 years ago. She kept a low profile as she campaigned with her husband, first when he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1978, later in two victorious races for governor of Texas in 1994 and 1998. She has devoted much of her time to raising their twin daughters.

Throughout it all, her West Texas drawl has stayed light and charming, her necklines moderate, her shoes sensible, her auburn hair bobbed and under control.

“People say to me all the time, ‘Is she really that way?’ ” her friend Debbie Francis said. “They wonder if someone is really that sincere and genuine. And she really is.”

She’s even won over Democrats such as Mary Margaret Farabee, chair of the Texas Book Festival, one of the projects Bush works with as the state’s first lady.

“I’m going to vote for George W. in the election because I love Laura Bush,” Farabee said.

Next to George W. himself, Laura is their campaign’s greatest asset, his spokesmen say, partly because she embodies a positive, inclusive message. Political observers also say she may help soften her husband’s image and counter claims that he isn’t very smart.

Laura Bush can hold her own among the competitive Bush clan. Once, during a day of sports at the family’s Kennebunkport, Maine, retreat, her husband’s grandmother, family matriarch Dorothy Walker Bush, reportedly asked her, “What do you do?”

According to the Washington Post, she replied: “I read, I smoke, and I admire.” At that, former First Lady Barbara Bush said, everyone “sat back on their haunches with their mouths on the floor.”

Laura Bush enjoys a mutually respectful relationship with her sharp-tongued mother-in-law and with former President Bush. She can deflate her husband’s bombasts with a crisp “Bushie, cool it,” or, “You’re not president yet.”

Even with friends, Bush is quiet about parts of her past--including a fatal accident in 1963 when her car crashed into a high school classmate’s.

She is circumspect about her political opinions. She calls herself “pro-life” and a “feminist”--supporting equal pay for equal work. But she doesn’t talk about abortion rights, gun control and other topics her husband campaigns on.

Quietly, Laura Bush also exerts a profound and soothing emotional influence over her husband.

At public appearances, George W.’s biographer Bill Minutaglio says, she often stands inches behind her husband. “He reaches out without seeing her, as if he’s a sprinter reaching behind him for the baton. And it’s her hand he’s reaching for.”

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Laura Welch and George W. Bush grew up in the remote high-rolling West Texas oil town of Midland. Harold Welch--a successful building contractor--and his wife, Jenna--a Sunday school teacher--were Democrats who never finished college. They doted on their only child.

Bush, 53, recalls her hometown as a place with high moral values where anything seemed possible. “We all actually felt very free in Midland,” she said in an interview at the governor’s mansion in Austin. “Maybe it literally has to do with the landscape. . . . The sky is not obscured anywhere by a tree.”

Laura was quiet and book-loving, said Regan Gammon, a longtime confidant. As girls, they rode bikes around town, stopping for cherry Cokes at the Rexall drug store, and sneaking a smoke in the back seats of cars. In high school, they would put their hair up in rollers and talk about boys as they lay by the pool.

Her childhood idyll was shattered on Nov. 6, 1963, when the car she was driving went through a stop sign at a dark intersection and crashed into a vehicle driven by classmate Michael Douglas. “He was a wonderful bright light,” Gammon said. According to news accounts, he died almost instantly.

“It was a bad deal,” said friend Robert McCleskey of Midland. At first Laura, then 17, blamed herself, he said, but townsfolk called the tragedy an accident. No charges were filed in the incident.

“I was lucky to have so many loving friends that were there that loved Mike and loved me,” said Bush, who was slightly injured in the accident. “It affected me in a lot of ways. One thing it did was, it made me see how temporary life is.” As a result, she said, she has been extra protective as a parent.

After high school, her parents sent her to SMU, a gracious, church-owned campus. She studied education and pledged Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, known for having some of the prettiest and classiest young women on campus.

The social-cultural hurricane of the 1960s barely touched SMU. “It was like a little lapping at the shore,” said Marshall Terry, a professor of English. Far from burning their bras, most women obeyed without complaint rules requiring them to wear dresses and observe 10 p.m. weeknight curfews.

The Thetas lived in a Georgian brick home with a curving staircase and had houseboys to serve their dinners. Upstairs, her room was “central headquarters,” sorority sister Susan Nowlin said. Laura dated a lot but never went steady. She was more “other-focused” than the rest, taught Sunday school and studied harder, Nowlin said.

In her first job, Bush taught second grade at Houston’s Kennedy Elementary School. She was shy around other teachers, but good with children, retired principal Vestophia Gunnells recalled.

Bush had been working for nine years when Midland friends Joe and Jan O’Neill asked if they could fix her up with George W., then winding down his self-described “young and irresponsible” years. He had returned to town after leaving in 1959 with his parents for Houston, and finishing his education at Yale and Harvard. He had just decided to run for Congress.

Laura had put the O’Neills off because George was too “political.” But during a visit to Midland in early summer 1977, she agreed to meet him at the O’Neill home.

That night, George W. saw a 30-year-old woman who was “gorgeous, good-humored, quick to laugh, down-to-earth, and very smart,” he wrote in his autobiography, “A Charge to Keep.” She saw a 30-year-old man who made her laugh like her father did. Her friend, Anne Lund Stewart of Houston, said: “It was the first time I’d seen her sure she was in love.”

After a three-month romance, they were married in a small ceremony in a Midland Methodist church. She became a Republican and they took off on their first campaign.

Laura was warmly welcomed into the Bush family, an “almost closed society,” like that of the Kennedys, according to author Minutaglio. Now, he said, “she sits at the inner circle. . . . She understands the requirements: ‘My role is to let go and submerge my own ambitions in some way in service to this family.’ . . . It’s for the greater good.”

The couple tried to start a family, but, in 1981 after three years without success, they took out adoption papers. Then they learned Laura was expecting twins. After a difficult pregnancy, Jenna and Barbara were born. Both daughters are set to enter college this fall.

Bush often is asked about her role in her husband’s decision to give up alcohol 14 years ago, supposedly in response to her ultimatum: Jack Daniel’s or me. “The fact is,” she said, “George is the one who deserves all the credit. You can’t make anyone do anything.” Her husband also was influenced by male friends in a Bible study group in Midland, she said.

So far, the public has seen little of the spirited Laura Bush that her friends have described. But that may change.

“If George were to be in the White House, we’d see a different Laura than the U.S. is seeing now,” former sorority sister Nowlin said. “I think you would see a Laura that was more like George’s mother, that had a spirited personality of her own. . . . I think they would begin to embrace her like they did Barbara Bush.”