Posted on 03/14/2002 3:35:41 PM PST by Bubba_Leroy
When Barbara Bush became the nation's first lady in 1989, the contrast could not have been greater.
There was outgoing first lady Nancy Reagan: petite and doll-like in a size 4, smartly dressed in designer outfits and often wearing dazzling Harry Winston jewels.
And then there was Bush: a size 14, with white hair, fake pearls and sensible shoes.
She summed up the difference between Nancy Reagan and herself this way:
"As you know," Bush said in 1986, during a charities roast in Washington, D.C., "we have a lot in common. She adores her husband; I adore mine. She fights drugs; I fight illiteracy. She wears a size 3 - so's my leg."
American women loved her. When they looked at Barbara Bush, many saw either themselves, their mothers or their grandmothers. Even women who preferred not to look their age admired the first lady's grit.
"I think she's wonderful," said admirer Debbie Bergstrom, president of the 700-member Junior League of Tallahassee. "Her appeal is widespread, and it spans generations."
Which is why, Bergstrom said, she was delighted when the 76-year-old Bush accepted the Junior League's invitation to speak here. The former first lady - long a champion of literacy and volunteerism - will hold court tonight in the Civic Center arena. Following the club's black-tie optional dinner, Bush, who declined to be interviewed for this story, will speak for 30 to 45 minutes on her life since leaving the White House.
"It's all the buzz in the Capitol that she's coming," said Bergstrom, a lobbyist.
She declined, however, to say how much Bush is charging the club for her presentation.
"I don't think it's appropriate to tell you how much we're paying her to come," Bergstrom said. "We aren't looking at it strictly as a monetary thing. We're focused on putting on a first-class event."
Tickets range from $50 per person (for the talk only) to $125 (dinner and talk) to "sponsorship tables" ranging from $1,200 to $15,000. Tickets to attend the speech only will be available until 8 tonight at the Civic Center box office, according to publicist Lisa Hall. (Total ticket cost is $54.50 each when the Ticketmaster fee is added.)
Profits from the event will be used to bankroll the club's various charity works, Bergstrom said, which have included providing meals to kids at the Orange Avenue Boys and Girls Club, and school supplies and clothing to more than 100 low-income elementary school children.
The Woman in Red
Although Barbara Bush apparently sensed that Americans would accept her as she is, her husband's political advisers weren't nearly as sure. They encouraged her to consider a hair color that would make her look younger (she began going gray in her late 20s), or at least to maintain a low profile.
She was so overlooked in the beginning of George Bush's political career that she once told a reporter if she ever wrote a book, she'd call it "Will the Woman in the Red Dress Please Get Out of the Picture." That's what a photographer had yelled during a San Antonio rally when she was standing next to her husband.
"I looked down at my dress," Bush said, "and I thought, 'My Lord, it's me."'
But her forthright demeanor endeared her to Americans - both Republicans and Democrats.
"Here was a woman who could not only do her own hair and iron her own clothes, but also fix a leaky water pipe, rewire an outlet and make minor car repairs," wrote author and White House reporter Donnie Radcliffe in "Simply Barbara Bush." "She played cagey tennis, baby-sat the grandchildren, gave the middle of the bed to the dog and worried more about her garden than whether she got dirt under her fingernails. She also avoided high society, and when she thought she could get away with it, threw protocol to the winds."
Of the photos so often taken of her during her years as first lady, Bush said, "Unfortunately, my winning smile makes me look as if I'm being electrocuted. My kids are always looking at photographs of me and saying, 'Look at Mom, she's plugged in again!"'
Shadows and light
If there's one dark cloud in Barbara Bush's past, it's that she lost one of her six children to cancer.
Robin Bush died when she was just a few months shy of 4 years old. Her death left her young parents with two other children: Jeb, then just 7 months old, and George W., then age 7.
Barbara Bush first realized something was wrong with 3-year-old Robin when, on a beautiful spring morning, the youngster said she wanted to either lie on the grass and watch the cars go by or stay in bed. Such lethargy alarmed her mom.
So she took Robin to the doctor. Later that day, the doctor - who was also a friend - called the Bushes in.
Dabbing away tears, she told them that Robin had leukemia. She told them it was in an advanced stage, and there was no cure.
"Then she gave us the best advice anyone could have given, which of course we didn't take," Bush said in a 1988 interview with Texas Monthly. The doctor told them to "tell no one, go home, forget that Robin was sick, make her as comfortable as we could, love her - and let her gently slip away," the former first lady writes in "Barbara Bush: A Memoir." "She said it would happen very quickly, in several weeks."
Not surprisingly, the Bushes opted instead to do everything they possibly could to save their daughter's life.
Bush writes: "Many people thought it was catching and did not let their children get near Robin." Yet Robin still managed to be "wonderful. She never asked why this was happening to her. She lived each day as it came, sweet and loving, unquestioning and unselfish. How we hated bone marrow tests. They were so agonizing. ...She had many painful blood transfusions. ...Eventually the medicine that was controlling the leukemia caused other terrible problems."
In the end, Robin slipped into a coma and died.
After her death, Bush writes, life was full of shadows.
"We awakened night after night in great physical pain - it hurt that much. I hated that nobody mentioned her; it was as if she had never been."
Nobody, that is, except for 7-year-old George W., then dubbed Georgie.
At a football game with his dad and some of his father's friends, Georgie suddenly announced that he wished he was Robin. The adults stared at him in shocked silence.
Why is that? his dad finally asked.
"I bet she can see the game better from up there," he said.
On another occasion, Georgie abruptly asked his dad: "Did you bury Robin lying down or standing up?"
Again, shocked silence. Again, his dad asked why.
"He said he had just learned that the Earth rotated, and he wanted to know if she spent part of her time standing on her head, and wouldn't that be neat? He made it OK for our friends to mention her, and that helped us a great deal."
If life has taught her anything, Bush writes, it is that "when all the dust is settled and all the crowds are gone, the things that matter are faith, family and friends."
Not surprisingly, those are the topics the former first lady will reportedly touch upon in her speech tonight.
Yes it could. When Hitlary became first "lady" and co-president the contrast could not have been greater.
It is so, so very nice to have a lady of class, grace and dignity in the White House once again.
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