In No Hurry to Make Mark, Laura Bush Goes Own Way

WASHINGTON —  To fully appreciate Laura Bush’s unruffled passage from Austin, Texas, to Washington, turn back the clock to Day 2 of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first ladyship. By then, she had moved into the West Wing with the administration’s senior advisors, set out to revamp the nation’s health care system and launched a prickly relationship with a media pack that likened her inauguration hat to a flying saucer.

By contrast, Mrs. Bush’s transition to the role of first lady has been a waltz--carefully choreographed and largely uncritiqued, signaling the nation that she is in no hurry to make her historical mark.

Indeed, 13 days after George W. Bush took the oath of office--with a portrait of the couple’s twin daughters yet unhung and the walls of her office bare--Mrs. Bush left Washington for Texas, to oversee refurbishing at the ranch near Crawford that serves as the family’s retreat. A Fort Worth decorator stayed behind to deal with the White House.

“She had a life when she got to Washington, she’s going to have a life when she leaves and, by George, she’s going to have one while she’s there,” said Anna Perez, former press secretary to former First Lady Barbara Bush, Laura Bush’s mother-in-law.

The new first lady’s first days in Washington were a study in restraint and good breeding. From the ruby-colored ball gown so exquisitely tailored that it held its place when she raised her arms to dance with the new president to the birthday cake she presented the top House Democrat, she revealed herself to be a skilled, if reluctant, public figure who appreciates the importance of the political gesture.

She dolloped out her presence in reserved portions--sitting beside the president in Week 1 as he rolled out his education reform plan, a subject that meshed nicely with her librarian’s passion for reading. She moved the first lady’s office back to its traditional place in the East Wing, a statement that she would not be meddling in matters of policy. She assembled a partial staff of 16, informed staffers, “We always take the high road,” and then left for more than two weeks at the ranch.

The emerging snapshot of the new first lady of America looks a lot like the snapshot of the former first lady of Texas--no reinventions, comfortable in her skin, prefers barbecue to black tie and a bob that works for dressy or casual.

Laura Welch Bush, 54, is a self-described introvert who likes singer Van Morrison and margaritas on the rocks. She smoked for years, then quit, but sneaked a few during her husband’s 1994 run for governor. She has a graduate degree in library science, but is baffled by computers. She goes to bed early with a good novel. Her shoes are organized by color and her books by the Dewey Decimal System. She is a fiercely protective mother and her husband’s best friend--traditional enough to stay home when the couple’s girls were young, contemporary enough to marry at age 30 and have her children at age 35.

While his energy is mercurial, hers is steady. She tamed George W. in his wild days and she grounds him in these heady ones--protective of him and irreverent toward him, sometimes correcting his tortured language with an affectionate “You idiot!”

His nickname for her is “First.” Hers for him is “Bushie.” But she often chides him with an instructive “Oh, George . . . “ whenever he’s in full bloom and bloviating.

During her two weeks at the ranch, she searched for an antique table, picked out drapes and reconnected with the circle of female friends she has had for years. When one friend started to help shelve books, the first lady stopped her, saying, “Let’s just sit and talk.”

“She’s sort of taking a deep breath,” said Anne Johnson, a close friend who spent a recent afternoon at the ranch. “She knows what’s ahead of her. She was very, very active as first lady of Texas. It got to be where we could rarely go to lunch or do any antiquing, she had so many speeches to give. Well, multiply that times 50.”

The recent separation from the president--which ended when he joined her this weekend in Texas--has been one of the longest of their 23-year marriage. He called her two or three times a day. For Valentine’s Day, he sent her roses and she sent him a heart-shaped coconut cream pie, his favorite.

Clearly, theirs is not a Clintonesque political partnership, but a First Marriage that is part conventional, part baby boomer--delighting traditionalists and occasionally horrifying feminists.

Laura Bush is the president’s ballast. Not a politician, exactly, but not a political novice. When his campaign struggled last summer and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Al Gore, pulled ahead in the polls, she counseled him to appear on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” deciding the nation had yet to know the real George W. Bush. It softened his image and gave his campaign a needed boost.

“She has a common touch. She will critique him and he will listen carefully and that means more to him than what some campaign staffers say because she has no motive other than what is best for him,” said one advisor.

Now, the nation is eager to know Laura, and no detail goes unnoticed. When People magazine revealed that she liked Cover Girl makeup, the company sent three bags of it and asked whether she would put her name on a lipstick line. (She said no and returned the makeup.)

Her dogs have been the subject of media attention. The Scottish terrier, Barney, was a birthday gift from the president. Barney came from the litter of a dog owned by Environmental Protection Agency head Christie Whitman; he sleeps in a crate in the White House kitchen, pending housebreaking. Spot the springer spaniel--daughter of the late former first dog Millie--sleeps on a chair in the master bedroom.

Mrs. Bush acknowledges that she and her husband do not always agree politically, but she likes to keep the details to herself--a preference that promptly went awry in the days before the inauguration.

Pressed in an interview with NBC-TV’s Katie Couric, Mrs. Bush revealed that she did not believe that a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion should be overturned. An aide said the question violated preestablished ground rules, which disappointed the first lady. But she did not recant.

Although her candor might have miffed some conservatives, it played well with those stung by the president’s appointment of abortion foe John Ashcroft as attorney general and his ban on U.S. aid for international family planning groups that in any way promote abortions. Newsweek magazine gave the first lady an “up” arrow.

One of Mrs. Bush’s challenges is to pull away from the thoroughly modern Hillary model without looking like “a 1950s dishrag,” said historian Gil Troy of McGill University in Montreal. “So far, she’s done it. Her comments on abortion said, ‘Don’t think that because I don’t speak I’m stupid. . . . It just means I have self-control and a sense of propriety.’ ”

Others, however, said her moderate viewpoint will do little to change the president’s mind and would only make him appear less conservative than he truly is.

“I have some concern about whether Laura Bush as first lady may play some of the role Barbara Bush did in softening the image of her husband’s presidency . . . whether she will be part of an orchestrated PR campaign to say this really is a compassionately conservative administration,” said Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women.

Still, her debut has been a resounding success by most accounts. The honeymoon treatment afforded the president has clearly extended to his wife.

Some historians note that other first ladies have gotten off to more substantive starts. Betty Ford dived into promoting the Equal Rights Amendment. Rosalynn Carter got right to work on mental health.

One of Mrs. Bush’s role models is her mother-in-law, who stuck to low-risk subjects such as literacy, and who had the highest popularity ratings of any modern first lady. The other is the more daring Lady Bird Johnson, who was a trusted advisor to her husband and who did not shrink from a political role. Her beautification program was really a crusade for conservation, and a four-day trip she made through the South to endorse her husband’s civil rights agenda was marked by racist heckling and death threats.

“The country wants someone who is a good wife, a good mom and has a project . . . who fulfills the ceremonial requirements, then goes out and does something,” said Myra Gutin a first-lady historian at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J.

Which path Laura Bush will follow is unknown. This week, it seems she’ll be doing a little of both--accompanying the president on trips to push his agenda while choosing the menu and floral arrangements for the National Governors Assn. dinner on Sunday.

For a woman who once made her husband promise never to ask her to give a speech, she has demonstrated an unpretentious ease in the public eye, and the public seems to have warmed to her.

Indeed, when Good Housekeeping ran a photograph last fall of an unsmiling Mrs. Bush, some readers complained that the magazine was treating her unfairly.

“We knew then that our readers were not only interested in her, but would be very protective of her image,” editor-in-chief Ellen Levine said. “I think women want to like their first lady, so this is a very good time to be Laura Bush.”