Spoken from the Heart (70 page)

At the Institute of Museums and Library Services, Dr. Robert Martin, and later Anne-Imelda Radice, worked with the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums to recruit and educate new professionals. I was proud to be part of IMLS's presentations of the annual National Medals for Museum and Library Service. Among its many contributions, IMLS helped to provide opportunities to train Native Americans to preserve their past in Arizona, and support interpreters for African-American history in Brooklyn. It worked with the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo to assist with the conservation of endangered animals, and also to assist with the 190 million objects around the nation that are in serious need of conservation.

At the White House we hosted each year's winners of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards, given to the best architects, landscape architects, fashion designers, and others whose design work make our country more beautiful. I enjoyed meeting many of these talented creators, whose work I had admired for years. At the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, my good friend Adair Margo expanded the Coming Up Taller Awards for excellence in children's arts programs to add an international focus, by recognizing programs in Mexico, Egypt, and China. The idea is that when a child takes a bow, afterward he or she comes up taller. I am proud to have helped make the White House a strong partner for the nation's artistic and cultural life.

Many of our happiest moments came from welcoming Americans from across the nation into the home of presidents. We had military families, from Jewish veterans of the Korean War to the cousins and friends of soldiers in Iraq. Fifteen hundred military spouses came for breakfast. We invited people we'd met out along rope lines or who had written us letters. We hosted Girl Scout troops and school groups. I invited high school students from Washington's Ballou High, which was grieving several murders, to come to the East Room for a special screening of a documentary on their high school band. We invited a dance troupe from Atlanta, comprised of girls from at-risk neighborhoods, to perform for the Coming Up Taller Awards. When travel funds were an issue for this troupe and others, we found the money to pay their way to the White House. We had over a thousand college athletes come for NCAA receptions. Almost every week, Diane Bodman, wife of Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, brought through small groups of wounded soldiers, veterans, and their families. I wanted everyone who walked through the doors or onto the grounds to feel comfortable. During the late-spring and summer months, George and I watched children play T-ball, as a thousand visitors strolled around the South Lawn during each game. We were happy that the White House grounds had become a place where families could gather on a Sunday afternoon. Opening this house, opening our days to others, also opened our own hearts.

In February, George and I made our last trip to Africa. We began in the West African nation of Benin and then flew to Tanzania, where at the airport crowds of dancers awaited us dressed in fabric imprinted with George's picture, surrounded by the country's traditional colors of blue, green, black, and yellow. Tanzania's first lady wore a dress made from fabric with George's picture stamped on it and the American and Tanzanian flags intertwined. On one of her scarves was written the words "We cherish democracy."

Everywhere we stopped, in Benin and Tanzania and Rwanda and Ghana and Liberia, thousands of people lined the sides of the roads, waving American flags and the flags of their nations, singing and cheering, to thank George for what he had done for them, for the lives that his efforts had saved. The Ghanaian president, John Kufuor, invited a thousand people to celebrate at a dinner in an overflowing ballroom, where the band played Ghanaian highlife music, a combination of Glenn Miller-style swing and jazz. President Kufuor asked me to dance, and within minutes everyone was on his or her feet, even George, dancing with Theresa Kufuor.

There had been an incredible change from our first trip, in 2003. I remember one mother in Botswana who had heard that the American president was coming to visit a local medical clinic, so she dressed her daughter in a lovely white, fluffy dress with bits of lavender, already looking like an angel. The little girl lay on an examining table, so frail and sick but with her mother's last hopes to make her beautiful. Today, with antiretrovirals, that child would have a chance. Millions do have a chance. Whereas once a visit to Africa was about holding the hands of the sick and dying, now it is about hope. People who were waiting quietly for death are taking antiretrovirals and, in what they call the "Lazarus effect," are now celebrating a second chance at life.

Our history has made us a free nation, but history has not been so kind to much of Africa, where colonialism, the slave trade, poverty, war, and pandemic disease have ravaged nations not just for decades but for centuries. Yet after just three years, nearly 25 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, living in the fifteen countries of the President's Malaria Initiative, were protected by insecticide-treated nets. In 2003, only fifty thousand people in sub-Saharan Africa received antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. By 2008, after George's PEPFAR program, that number had grown to more than 2 million. Another 4 million orphans and vulnerable children had been cared for, and more than 200,000 babies whose mothers had AIDS were born HIV-free. People thanked us with such enthusiasm and warmth that we left each stop with tears in our eyes.

In March I traveled to Haiti, one of the first nations to receive PEPFAR funding. It is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, with the greatest HIV burden. In the early 1980s, Haiti was the epicenter for HIV. It was the first country on earth to have a clinic devoted solely to HIV/AIDS care, the GHESKIO Center in Port-au-Prince, founded in 1982 by Dr. Jean Pape, a native Haitian who trained as a doctor at New York's Weill Cornell Medical College, one of the center's longest sponsors. Each year the clinic sees over 100,000 people, many of them the poorest of the poor. Even in March, the island heat was stifling, and the brightly colored buildings belied years of suffering. For most of the decade, Haiti's political situation had been so volatile that the Secret Service had refused to allow me to visit earlier in George's term. But in the Haitians I met, I saw a deep warmth, rich spirit, and hope for the future. And there were reasons to hope. By 2008, Haiti's infection rate from HIV had fallen, and PEPFAR programs were helping to provide antiretrovirals to nearly eighteen thousand men, women, and children. We left hoping that more things would change, never imagining the devastating earthquake to come.

In April, Benedict XVI made the first visit by a Pope to the White House in almost thirty years. He came on April 16, his birthday, and more than thirteen thousand guests welcomed him on the South Lawn, spontaneously serenading the Pontiff with "Happy Birthday" during the arrival ceremony. It was the largest gathering on record at the White House.

The papal nuncio told the White House that the Pope had decided to arrive on his birthday because "you spend your birthday with your friends." He wanted the visit to be a reflection of his respect for the United States, for its generosity and charity. We were deeply touched.

We decorated with yellow and white tulips, in honor of the papal colors, and under a sky of brilliant blue, the soloist Kathleen Battle performed "The Lord's Prayer," rather than a traditional anthem or marching song. We had asked if there was any song the Pope would like to hear, and the papal nuncio said the song with the words "Glory! Glory! Hallelujah." So Sergeant Alvy Powell led the Army Chorus in singing the Civil War anthem "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Then George spoke. "Here in America, you'll find a nation of compassion. . . . Each day citizens across America answer the universal call to feed the hungry and comfort the sick and care for the infirm. Each day across the world the United States is working to eradicate disease, alleviate poverty, promote peace and bring the light of hope to places still mired in the darkness of tyranny and despair. . . . In a world where some invoke the name of God to justify acts of terror and murder and hate, we need your message that 'God is love.'"

Pope Benedict talked of America's pluralistic society and how "all believers have found here the freedom to worship God in accordance to the dictates of their conscience." He continued, "Freedom is not only a gift, but also a summons to personal responsibility. Americans know this from experience--almost every town in this country had its monuments honoring those who sacrificed their lives in defense of freedom, both at home and abroad."

He ended with the words "God bless America."

When the arrival ceremony was complete, we walked inside the White House and up to the State Floor. I'd asked the pastry chef to prepare a birthday cake for the Pope. When we wheeled out the four-tier cream and white cake, adorned with white icing ribbons and a single white candle, his eyes lit up with surprise.

The visit was deeply meaningful for George and for me, and also for the many members of our family who are Catholic, including Jeb and his wife, Columba, and Doro's husband, Bobby Koch, and their children.

That night Pope Benedict had a private dinner with his American cardinals while we held a special dinner in honor of his visit, inviting Catholic bishops and other Catholic leaders, especially from charities, who had done so much to help at home and abroad. We had Catholic members of the cabinet and the Congress, including Nancy Pelosi, and Catholic members of the Supreme Court, as well as many of our good friends who shared the Pope's faith, including Joey and Jan O'Neill, who had introduced George and me, now more than thirty years ago. That April 16 was one of the loveliest days we spent at the White House.

Just over two weeks later, on May 2, Cyclone Nargis devastated the Burmese coast, causing the worst natural disaster in Burma's recorded history. More than 100,000 were reported dead, and many, many more were missing. And that was just the official count; unofficial totals suggested that the number of deaths might be far higher, approaching the toll of the deadly 2004 tsunami. To add to the suffering, the Burmese government would not allow outside aid. The United States had naval vessels that could have docked and provided clean water and medical care for those in need, as we had done after the tsunami, but the ruling junta would rather inflict more loss of life than give up an inch of power. So at three in the afternoon on May 5, I walked into the White House briefing room to speak to the press, and via them to the world, about Burma, including the fact that the only warnings about the cyclone the Burmese people had received had come from the United States, from our Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. I hoped that Burma would accept aid from India at least. In my remarks, I called on the junta to postpone a scheduled May 10 vote on a new sham constitution, written largely to bar Aung San Suu Kyi from running for office. The constitution banned anyone who had ever been married to a foreigner from holding office--as it happens, her late husband was British.

The vote was postponed, and as the days passed, the junta did relent and allow one hundred American C-130s flights fully loaded with emergency medical supplies to land in Rangoon. But the devastation outside the capital was far worse, and the junta would not permit our ships to dock and offer immediate, lifesaving aid. To maintain their brutal control, Burma's rulers preferred death and disease to life.

On May 10, Jenna married Henry Hager at our ranch, overlooking our tiny lake, the old cattle watering hole, where we now stocked fish and grew prairie grasses. Henry was waiting for her as the sun set. Barbara was her maid of honor, and Jenna's tearful dad walked her down the aisle as mariachis played "Here Comes the Bride." Our longtime friend the Houston pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell performed the service. Jenna and Henry were wed before an altar and cross carved from the same limestone that forms the walls of our house. It was the sturdiest of foundations for their new life together.

Mother was there, and Bar and Gampy read to Jenna and Henry from First Corinthians. Jenna's cousin Wendy and her husband, Diego Reyes, read a Pablo Neruda poem in English and in Spanish. And Henry's parents, John and Maggie Hager, spoke of what they had learned about how to keep a marriage strong, of how they had faced and triumphed over adversity when John Hager contracted polio shortly after Henry's older brother was born.