The shoe stories behind her, Bush’s first full week on the job has been met with positive–if not rave–reviews. After disappearing to the Bush’s Crawford ranch just after the inauguration to decorate the Bush family’s newly built home, Bush last week was back in Washington hosting her first formal dinner, launching an education initiative and handing out interviews. These public forays are a first glance at what this First Lady will be about. “She’s a very private person, but she knows how to use the public stage,” says a close friend.
So far, Bush has been using that stage selectively. She gave her first TV interview to “Good Morning America” on Feb. 24–the same day George W. Bush delivered his address to Congress. This week, she met with The Washington Post. “She wanted to do it because it’s the hometown paper,” says an aide. Bush has done a photo shoot for O, The Oprah Magazine, which will appear in the first-anniversary issue in May. And she’ll sit for a fashion shoot for Vogue for a spring edition. Not a whole lot of additional press time has been scheduled: In an interview I did with her a few months ago Mrs. Bush said, “I think that if there is one sacrifice [in being First Lady] it is privacy.”
As hard as it must be to give up some of her old life, especially the long walks that were a key part of her routine, Bush has had an easy time settling into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s in large part because she’s seen it all up close before. She already knew some of the permanent White House staff from the days when her father-in-law was president. When she and her husband were living in Washington in 1987, she attended several state dinners. Best of all, she has Barbara Bush to learn from. “She never gives advice,” Bush told me about her mother-in-law. “I just learn by watching her.” The only two pieces of advice Barbara Bush gave her daughter-in-law during the campaign were “wear vivid colors” and always be the first to shake hands with the wives of your husband’s rivals. Many of the tricks Bush says she learned from “Bar” are “mundane”: sending Christmas cards early (the Bushs’ Christmas-card lists are famously long), keeping track of her husband’s schedule and her own with parallel flow charts and, as Bush said, “learning how to live in a house that is really a museum.”
Bush is expected to bring a decidedly Texas touch to the White House. Her entertaining style will be less stuffy and formal than past occupants. She’s already incorporating Texas touches–like Texan wine (yes, wine) that she served at the dinner for the nation’s governors last week. (The dessert was a whimsical chocolate tumbleweed.)
But Bush has no major redecorating plans. She wants to put that energy into the Texas White House in Crawford. “The main thing to understand about the [Crawford] house is it’s unpretentious,” says the architect, David Heymann. During the design of the modest, one-story house, Bush’s guiding question to Heymann was: “Is it pretentious?” The house blends quietly and gracefully into the natural surroundings. To many people, the surrounding landscape is barren, dusty and remote. (President Bush likes to joke that they had to build a swimming pool in order to convince their twins to come visit.) But the ranch is just the kind of stark beauty the couple from Midland likes. As for its remoteness, that’s fine with them. George W. Bush gets a chuckle out of the press corps being stuck in the nearest city, Waco, where there isn’t an expense-account-caliber restaurant for miles. While the reporters grumble, Bush takes his frenetic energy out on the cedar brush and he and Laura walk the canyons that ripple their land.
For the president, the ranch home is much more than it seems. As he explained in an interview I did with him in January, “A good leader is somebody who has got a good steady base from which to lead. That starts for me with a home life that is comfortable and loving and strong,” he said. “It’s going to be important for us to maintain a sense of normalcy. Laura will be an anchor in what I believe is a normal world.”
