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Reassuring and calm are two words used to describe Laura Bush so often that they've become clichés, but her own husband can't think of anything more accurate. "She has," then-Gov. Bush told me several months into the electoral fray, "a reassuring calm. As a man who goes about a hundred miles an hour, I find that attractive."
During the campaign, she displayed unflinching confidence by answering, "I think I'll just be Laura Bush" to the oft-asked question about which first lady she'd emulate, but she does have favorites: Barbara Bush ("How could it not be?") and Lady Bird Johnson. "I just love the way she expresses herself," she says, explaining that she once invited her to an event honoring the first ladies of Texas. "She wrote back and said, 'I'd love to go, I'm planning to go, but I just want you to know I don't even buy green bananas anymore.'" Mrs. Bush laughs her deep laugh a long time, and no wonder. She and her fellow Texan have much the same dry, tell-it-like-it-is sense of humor. On the trail, she deflected jokes about her husband's perceived lack of intellect with some of her own: "George thinks a bibliography is the story of the guys who wrote the Bible." Her often pointed humor is an example of what another of her close grade-school friends from Midland, Peggy Weiss, has always taken pains to remind me: "Laura is an introvert, but she's not shy."
In her official pursuits, she is also as single-minded as Lady Bird, who improbably covered hundreds of thousands of acres beside our national highways with native wildflowers. "Actually, one of the blessings of being first lady is you have the chance to focus on one or two major interests," she says. "And in the end it makes an impact that some presidents can't make, because their legacy is much more mixed." As first lady of Texas, she actively pushed through legislative reforms that pumped $215 million into early-education programs. She was also the driving force behind the Texas Book Festival, which raised nearly $1 million for the state's public libraries. As first lady of the United States, she plans to concentrate on early-childhood reading and teacher recruitment.
"First in Command," by Julia Reed, has been edited for STYLE.com; the complete article appears in the June 2001 issue of Vogue.
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