"Isn't he the cutest thing?" she asked as Barney turned his attention to a tennis ball on the floor of the yellow living room. "He's everyone's favorite." But Barney, like his owners, had a rocky road to the White House. The president originally promised him to the first lady on her birthday last Fall, after they'd spent a day campaigning with Christie Todd Whitman, the then-governor of New Jersey whose own Scottie had just had a litter. Mrs. Bush told her husband that she had always loved Scotties, and since the gift he'd planned to give her had fallen through, one thing led to another. "And then we got home and thought, you know, we've lost our minds. We didn't know if we were going to be in the White House or the Governor's Mansion. We really decided we didn't want the puppy."

Of course the Bushes—and Barney—did, finally, end up in the White House, although that afternoon it was a hard fact to grasp. Not because of recounts and hanging chads and the whole harrowing postelection period some Bush staffers still refer to as "the 36 days from hell." But because this woman who stood before me with no shoes on, being prodded and poked and turned, was so thoroughly unself-conscious it seemed as though I had plopped down on a friend's couch instead of the Mark Hampton sofa recently moved up from the oval office. I felt immediately comfortable enough to weigh in on the paint color for the bedroom of one of her twin daughters (a pale, pale bluey-green). And she apparently felt comfortable enough to leave the door open when she ducked into the bedroom to change clothes so she could keep on talking.

But it wasn't faux camaraderie, despite the seamstress and the animals underfoot—Millie's daughter, the springer spaniel Spot, had also emerged, as had the black cat India. This was still an interview. It's just that Laura Bush is so completely at ease in her own skin, it's hard not to feel at ease in her presence. "She is so generous with herself without being the kind of person who is out there all the time, trying to be the center of attention," says Regan Gammon, who has known Bush since childhood in Midland, Texas, and who was also her closest friend in Austin. In April, Bush had Gammon and the 12 other members of her Austin garden club to Washington to tour gardens—and to stay, for three nights, in the White House. "It was like a great big slumber party," says Gammon. "One night we had dinner in the family dining room, and the president took us on a tour of the oval office. Everybody was just so honored and thrilled to be there, we were just giddy. But they make you feel like this is so normal."

One of Laura Bush's gifts is the ability to keep her day-to-day universe amazingly the same—and sane—no matter what role or what space she occupies. Jaston Williams, the actor and playwright (Greater Tuna), remembers seeing her when she was still first lady of Texas in line at the post office the morning after he'd performed at the Governor's Mansion. When the startled Williams asked her what she was doing there, she gave him her serene smile: "I'm mailing a letter." Already, as the nation's first lady, she has lunched in a restaurant; she's dropped in on Washington antiques shops; and she's gone back to Austin to shop for sheets for the Bushes' new ranch in Crawford, Texas. Though at least one of her outings, to her chagrin, made it into the papers, she plans to go out so often, she says, "that it will get to be commonplace."

During the campaign, much of the preparation for the debates took place in what is now the guest house at the ranch, while the larger, 4,000-square-foot main house was still under construction. "They just had this little house," says Stuart Stevens, former Bush media adviser, who is writing a book on the campaign that will be published this Fall. "But there were always tons of interesting books lying around, and a very warm feel to the place. It was the most normal American scene you could imagine. [The president] would always cook hamburgers, and you know, [Mrs. Bush] and Condi [Rice, now the national security adviser] would, like, make the salad. There was usually a friend or two from Midland around. It was just this completely reassuring scene."

It is Mrs. Bush's own capacity for reassurance that was an invaluable asset to the campaign, says Stevens. "She's very good at relaxing him. Before a shoot, if she was around, he would go from being pulled from one thing to another to being in a zone where he was relaxing, laughing at all their private jokes. A lot of times, whenever a candidate's spouse is around, it adds tension to a situation. But this was just the opposite." By all accounts she was firm in her opinions—of what venues suited her husband best, of a TV spot she didn't think was up to snuff—and no detail is too small to escape her. At the inauguration, just before the swearing-in ceremony, she asked to see the family's Methodist minister, who was there as a guest. She had a specific Bible verse she wanted her husband to place his hand on, and she couldn't remember exactly where it was.

Reassuring and calm are two words used to describe her so often that they've become clichés, but her own husband can't think of anything more accurate. "She has," then-Governor 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. It is the middle of a presidential campaign, and we're designing and building [a house at the ranch]. My point is that she is able to live an interesting life that is apart from the political campaign, which I think is very appealing. In other words, politics doesn't totally consume her, and as a result, it doesn't totally consume me."

His wife says the responsibility of overseeing the construction of the house did indeed keep her balanced during the rough spots. "I love houses. It really helped to have that to think about and to daydream about. It was just a great diversion. And there was a nice juxtaposition between running for an office that has a definite end and building something that we'll have the rest of our lives." Now that the house in Crawford is finished, she has turned her attention to her new passion, the rooms on the second floor of the White House that are suddenly hers to decorate. Still covered in safety pins, she warned me about wet paint as she led me on an impromptu tour of the cache of furniture she had chosen from the plentiful White House storage rooms. "This is the fabulous desk that Jackie Kennedy brought into the White House in 1962 . . . that Chippendale couch is one of the oldest pieces here. Look at this fabulous Gothic secretary and this chest for the girls' rooms." We oohed and aahed over a Martin Johnson Heade seascape, and she reminded me that Heade's portrait of Sam Houston hung in the Texas Governor's Mansion. She told me she's "not really crazy about Victorian" but that the president thought it would be "great" to use Grant's furniture in his upstairs office, and she loves the "beautiful portrait" of the Union general she's hung between the two enormous windows. She's taken down the heavy print curtains the Clintons put up in the big yellow living room, but she's brought back chairs covered in Kennedy-era cut velvet. She marveled over the fresh condition of the fabric in the "only room that is totally intact the way Jackie Kennedy did it—isn't it great with the black furniture?"—and told me she was considering borrowing a Rothko from the National Gallery.

Though she's mad about Jackie's taste in furniture, she has no aspirations to become a fashion icon. "She is not a shopper," says Gammon. As first lady of Texas, she often wore simple slacks and sweater sets even to official functions; in her new role, she's been forced to trade up to fitted skirt suits. So far the designer she has turned to most has been Dallas-based Michael Faircloth, who made her red inaugural gown and who also happens to dress the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. "I think he's made clothes that have made her feel comfortable," says Gammon, "and she doesn't have to shop." Since the first lady herself is not obsessed with her appearance, she almost forgot that almost everybody else would be. "I guess I should have expected it," she says. "I mean, I have a mother-in-law who was first lady. But I can take that sort of scrutiny or criticism with a grain of salt because I think there are things more important than how I wear my hair." She means it. During the Vogue photo shoot, the stylist loosened up Mrs. Bush's coif by yanking her fingers through it, followed by a few blasts from the blow-dryer. I don't know a single woman in the world who wouldn't have checked the results in a mirror before smiling into a camera after such an onslaught, but Laura Bush didn't.

During the campaign, she displayed the same 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." Still, for someone of her nature, being subjected to endless rounds of interviews must be hard. "It's not hard," she says. "It's just all the questions, the sort of psychological questions—it's kind of boring, really." And then she laughs her deep, hearty laugh again.

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. Her speech at the San Diego naval base encouraged retiring military personnel to turn to the classroom as part of the Troops to Teachers program, for which her husband has pledged to boost funding from $3 million to $30 million. This summer she plans to join forces with the Library of Congress to launch an American Book Festival on the Washington Mall.

As a former teacher and librarian, she has rare hands-on expertise in her chosen causes, and her credibility makes her a valuable presidential surrogate. California voted overwhelmingly against her husband, and he hasn't visited the state since. But his wife has been to two cities there. "Education may seem like a safe issue, but it is not trivial," says Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who studies the gender gap in politics. "And to the extent that Mrs. Bush reinforces her husband's credentials as the education president, she becomes a powerful piece of the strategy of wooing women voters." The First Lady certainly wins over the women at the schools where she speaks. "She brings grace and empowerment and authenticity and pride to teachers everywhere," effused the principal at Cesar Chavez Elementary School in Hyattsville, Md., where she recently made an appearance. "She's a champion and inspiration in a society that pays too little attention to our profession."

As a child Laura Bush lined up her dolls in a classroom format and read to them; in second grade, inspired by a teacher she loved (and whom she had as her guest to the presidential inauguration), she announced that she wanted to teach school too. By the time she met her husband, in 1977, she had earned a master's in library science from the University of Texas in Austin and worked at a school library there. The now-famous setup at mutual friends Joey and Jan O'Neill's house in Midland wasn't intended to be for keeps. Laura had already told Jan, with whom she had roomed in Houston when she taught school there, and Joey, who had played on George W. Bush's Little League team (which George H. W. Bush coached), that she was not interested in meeting anyone political. She preferred the profession of her own father, a developer who put up spec houses in Midland during the oil boom, because "it's tangible. It was very satisfying to be able to drive down the street and see what he'd done."

Jan O'Neill says she knew something was up when George Bush, a man who liked his sleep even in his bachelor days, stayed at her house past 9 o'clock for "the first time ever." But the real tip-off came after George arrived at Walker's Point, the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, for the usual hyper summer interlude of golf, speedboats, tennis and cocktails with Dad. Laura had liked the hard-partying Bush well enough ("I thought he was very funny"), but for Bush it was, he says, "love at first sight." When she professed to be too busy to take his constant calls, he did something so radical in the Bush culture that his mother knew this hard-to-reach girl might be the one: He left Walker's Point almost as soon as he got there and flew back to Texas. Three months later he and Laura were married.

When introduced to his family, Laura withstood the haughty questioning of Bush's steel-willed grandmother Dorothy ("What do you do?" she asked the pretty young librarian, who replied, "I read") and the boisterous teasing of Bush's brother Jeb, who dropped down on one knee before her and asked his brother if he'd popped the question yet. "As a matter of fact, he has," she answered for her future husband. "And I've accepted." It was a meeting that would likely have traumatized a less secure woman, but "Gampy" and "Ganny" (or "Big George" and "Bar," depending on who's talking) were charmed. "Look," says Karl Rove, Bush's longtime political strategist and now senior adviser to the president, "what people don't realize is that this is a woman of enormous strength. You have to be, I suspect, to be married to a Bush."

Friends describe the couple's morning nuptials at Midland's First United Methodist Church (where Laura had been christened) as the "first adult wedding" any of them had ever attended. Laura wore a pink-tinged beige silk skirt and blouse she'd bought in Austin with Regan Gammon. There were no attendants and only 75 guests; each parent was allowed to invite only two couples. "We thought we were doing them a favor," Mrs. Bush says. "But some of the [Bush] uncles got their backs up." The couple's extended honeymoon was spent on the roads of west Texas in a white Cutlass convertible during George's failed campaign for Congress. She says the only advice her mother-in-law ever gave her was not to criticize her husband's speeches, but she ignored it almost immediately. "How was it?" he asked one night as they pulled into their driveway. "It wasn't very good," she said. He drove into the garage wall.

Since then, her husband told me during the campaign, she has always been "the last onboard when it came to my ambitions. She is hesitant because she knows what I'm getting into—you know she's been through enough campaigning, particularly with my dad, to know it can get tough at times. In other words, she is not one to find bearings in her husband's life. If I'd chosen not to run, that would have been fine with her, and fortunately, when I did choose to run, she became a willing participant."

A number of observers have implied that she served as more than a participant, that she gave him the grounding that made it possible to win in the first place. "Golly, she calmed him down," says Bush's own father, expressing an oft-repeated sentiment. "He was hell-bent for leather, and she definitely focused him," says Joey O'Neill. "She mellowed him. Once you find the right person, that part of the equation is done and you can get on with the other things. I don't know how to say it. There's no burning ambition there. She's not pushing George from the back, but she truly changed him."

The first lady is widely believed to have brought about her husband's most important life change—his decision, shortly after his 40th birthday, to give up alcohol cold turkey—but she refuses to take credit. "I mean, I said I thought he ought to quit drinking. Of course I told him that. But at the same time, no one stops drinking unless they stop drinking. George is actually very, very disciplined."

After that first failed congressional race was over, she shrugged it off with typical equanimity as "a lot of fun" and concentrated her own energies on creating the family life they still enjoy. She says that since they married "late" (they were both 31, unusual for the southern culture of the time) and didn't have children until four years later (they were in the process of adopting when she became pregnant with twins), she thinks it makes them more careful of protecting each other and what they have together. For example, there was never any question that the twins—Barbara, a freshman at Yale, and Jenna, a freshman at the University of Texas—would be used in the campaign. "There was this whole area of stuff in the campaign known as 'the nonstarters,'" says Stuart Stevens. "Even filming the girls' graduation from their Austin high school for later use came under that heading."

Throughout their lives in Midland, where Bush ran a failed oil company; in Dallas, where he was managing partner of the Texas Rangers; and in Austin, during his governorship, the Bushes managed to surround themselves with a close-knit circle of friends, like the O'Neills and Regan Gammon and her husband, William, whom they have known almost their entire lives. Two of those couples have even gone with them to Washington: Clay Johnson, Bush's Andover and Yale buddy who now serves in the White House as chief of personnel, and his wife, Ann, with whom the first lady loves to go antiquing (a pair of Ann Johnson's mother's chairs now sits in the living room of the private quarters); and Don Evans, a former Midland oilman who ran Bush's campaign and is now secretary of commerce, and his wife, Susie, who went to elementary school with the president.

It is this circle of childhood and college friends that has formed a sort of second family to the Bushes. They are the people who spend holidays with them, who used to go with them to their lake house, and who will now visit the White House and, later, the ranch. "They take very good care of their friends. They have a real talent for surrounding themselves with people who are with them for the long haul," says Ann Johnson.

"They're so loyal that everybody around them is the same way." While Bush is obviously close to his family, and Mrs. Bush says she loves being close to her two sisters-in-law in Washington, Doro Bush Koch and Margaret, Marvin Bush's wife, she has joked in the past that her husband was attracted to her because she was an only child. And it's true that the president has always enjoyed more solitary pursuits—running and fishing—than the rest of his clan. In any case, his wife has carved out an existence for them that is distinct from the more competitive, rough-and-tumble Waspy world of her in-laws—what writer Richard Ben Cramer once called the Kennebunkport "web"—and her husband seems to revel in it. "She is," says Mark McKinnon, a close Bush adviser who handled the advertising for the campaign and frequently traveled with both Bushes, "his safety net for life."

Laura's own safety net lies in her west Texas roots. Her mother, Jenna Welch, says she read to her daughter even "before she could open her eyes," and kept the books for her husband's business. Harold Welch was funny and outgoing in the mode of the president, who reports that his father-in-law liked to hang out at Johnny's Barbecue, watching football games. "I don't know if there was wagering going on or not, but let me just say that the boys seemed to take an avid interest in the outcomes of the games." Bush laughs with obvious affection. "He was a gentle, decent man. He didn't have a mean bone in his body." Laura Bush's vacations were spent not in Maine (the first time the first lady ever saw Fall foliage was on a campaign trip to New Hampshire) but at her maternal grandparents' "little-bitty house on the outskirts of El Paso," says her husband, who adds that his wife's grandfather was "a character who would sometimes drink Texas Select bourbon in the mornings," and that her grandmother died working in her garden. "So Laura comes from very down-to-earth, very unpretentious folks that were easy to be around."

Her mother says that her daughter was "just born a happy little kiddo," and she seems to have stayed that way, with that remarkable knack for being content in whatever situation she finds herself. Mrs. Bush recalls idyllic evenings working in her yard as a young mother in Midland. "When Barbara and Jenna were babies, I'd still have a few hours of light after they went to bed," she told a reporter recently. "One night I was in the garden; the babies were asleep, safe in their beds, and I remember thinking, This is the life." But she also loved her baseball life. "It was fun going to 60-odd games a year. Baseball's so slow you can daydream. It's a very relaxing evening." She described her life in Austin as no less than "perfect" and always maintained that if her husband lost the election, they would be fine, an assertion that made his advisers more than a little nervous, since most politicians thrive on hunger. "No man can know the gnawing until he has had it," Lincoln said. But in Bush's case, says Stevens, "he clearly did not have to win to be a happy man."

Their next life will be centered at their ranch, midway between Austin and Dallas. The president says the house there reflects a lot about his wife because "it's not ostentatious in the least." Designed by David Heymann, an associate dean in the school of architecture at the University of Texas, in close consultation with the first lady, it is situated on 1,600 flat and often pretty dusty acres, and is smaller (just three bedrooms, one story) than you'd expect given the fact that it is owned by a wealthy president of the United States. It is made of a local limestone known as Leuders stone, but not the smooth gray center cuts that are most coveted. Instead, Heymann and the First Lady chose to use the leftover, rough-edged end cuts in creamy beiges and caramels so that it sits unobtrusively in the landscape—an effect heightened by the fact that there are no thresholds or steps.

"Laura has a very, very clear emotional knowledge about her world and the way she wants it to be, and she uses that to make decisions," says Heymann. "She wants you to feel about the house that while it is not demanding of you, it is clearly intelligent." For the most part, the house is only one room deep to take maximum advantage of the breeze with glass French doors that open onto porches, which are protected by deep galvanized-steel roof overhangs that have no gutters. When it rains, the water falls off in sheets into gravel troughs that channel it into a cistern for irrigation; a geothermal system, which uses a fraction of the electricity most systems consume, heats and cools the house. "It has all this ecological stuff that Gore would have made a commercial about," says Stuart Stevens. Even the landscaping echoes the theme. The first lady has planted an alley of live oaks up the long drive and native red oaks and cedar elms near the house. She says she wants to plant the rest of the 10 acres immediately surrounding the house with native grasses and wildflowers, the only garden being "drifts" of blooming things to hide the pool her girls insisted on having. "Nothing screams to be noticed," says Heymann, and the whole effect is very chic in its natural simplicity, sort of like a canyon wall rising up out of an epic landscape. "It ain't Dallas," I say when I get out of my car, referring to South Fork. She laughs. "No, but we hope it's got a little Midland."

Even now, although the ranch is currently occupied by more secret service than guests, it still manages to seem like a low-key, family place. "It's wonderful to go to the ranch and not worry about what you're going to wear at all," says Ann Johnson, "because you know they're not." Johnson once joked that "Laura's had the same friends and George has had the same clothes for 30 years—they don't upgrade."

On the day I visit, casual is definitely the order of the day. The first lady greets me, with Barney in tow, in a pair of faded jeans, one of the tailored cotton shirts she likes, and an ancient pair of athletic shoes. She's preparing for Easter, when she and her husband and daughter Jenna will play hosts to Jenna Welch, Barbara Bush, the former president (or "41," as he is now known in family parlance, as opposed to his son, who is "43"), and Marvin and Margaret Bush and their children. The first lady is making Easter baskets for everyone and plans a lunch of ham, cheese grits, and asparagus. "I wanted a place that could accommodate all the things that I'd need should I win," the president told me as the house was being built. "But I also wanted a place that was really unique and where we could hang out for the long run. I suspect that when all is said and done, we'll probably have a place either in Austin or Dallas—a town house—but also spend a lot of time at the ranch as well."

In the meantime, the next trip to Crawford probably won't be until Congress breaks for August, when the lush winter rye will have given way to dry brown tufts and the heat hanging over the landscape will be dense and heavy and almost unbearably still. Until then, Laura Bush will go about her new life in Washington, finishing up her White House redecorating, tending to her friends and family and her new staff of 19, and reading to schoolchildren every chance she gets. She's come full circle in a way, expertly reading upside down so she can show the pictures to the always rapt children at her feet, just like when she taught second grade, just like when she was the elementary school librarian. At each of these sessions she is, as usual, entirely in the moment, despite the microphones and booms thrust over her head, despite the tape recorders and cameras whirring away.

And the children invariably stop twisting around to inspect the commotion behind them and gaze up at this strangely accessible grown-up who sits before them. She always talks only to them—hers is not the usual condescending conversation with children that is actually aimed at the adults listening in. At one such session, on the morning she visited Cesar Chavez Elementary School, she chewed on a mint and read If You Give a Pig a Pancake. "Do you think the little girl who was having to do all those things for the pig got tired?" she asked when she was finished. They all thought she did. Then she asked them what else they liked to read, and someone said Clifford, the Big Red Dog. "Do you wish you had a big red dog like Clifford?" Everybody said they wished they did.

She had them completely, a group of 5- and 6-year-olds—the one constituency guaranteed to detect the slightest bit of artifice, a single false note. No wonder Laura Bush seems so quietly in command, so at ease, so herself, with all the rest of us. No wonder she can handle whole convention halls, heads of state, and Larry King with the same effortless poise and self-possession. She came into her own, after all, in front of the toughest audience in the world.

"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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