Barbara Bush would arrive in pearls. The pearls were fake. She wore them to cover the wrinkles on her neck and said so publicly, which made her the first First Lady in modern history to openly discuss a cosmetic strategy that involved admitting she had wrinkles. She was 64 when her husband took office. Her hair was white. She was asked about it. “I’m not going to dye it,” she said. “George Bush married me when I was sixteen and he’d better like it.”
She’d sit down, order something sensible, and immediately ask about your children. Not performatively. Barbara Bush’s entire conversational framework was built around family — who they were, what they were doing, whether they called enough. She had six children (five surviving), fourteen grandchildren, and kept track of all of them with a specificity that staff members described as “the database.” She knew birthdays, grades, relationship statuses, and opinions, and she deployed this knowledge strategically — usually to end arguments.
“I’m not going to talk about that,” she’d say if you brought up politics at the wrong moment. Then she’d talk about it anyway, more directly than her husband or sons ever would.
What the First Hour Would Be Like
She was funny. Aggressively, deliberately funny, in the manner of a woman who had spent forty years in Washington and learned that humor was the only weapon that didn’t create enemies. She described her relationship with George as “the longest-running marriage in American politics, if you don’t count some of the Congressional marriages, which I won’t.”
She’d tease you. Within minutes. She’d find the thing about you that was slightly absurd and name it, warmly, in a way that made you feel included rather than targeted. This was her social gift: she could puncture pretension without causing offense, mostly because the target recognized that she’d punctured her own pretension first.
She read voraciously. She founded the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy in 1989 and spent 30 years working on adult literacy programs. She’d talk about this with more energy than any other topic, including her family. She believed — with the conviction of someone who’d grown up in a household with books everywhere and married into a family where education was assumed — that the ability to read was the single variable that determined everything else. Employment, health, civic participation, parenting. All downstream of literacy.
The Third Hour
By dessert, she’d have told you exactly one story about George that made him look both heroic and ridiculous. She had a catalog of these. The effect was always the same: you’d like George more for the ridiculous part than the heroic part, which was the intention.
She’d mention her daughter Robin, who died of leukemia at age three in 1953. She wouldn’t dwell. She’d mention it in the context of something else — what it taught her about hospitals, or about grief, or about the difference between sympathy and empathy. “Sympathy is ‘I’m sorry.’ Empathy is ‘I know.’ They’re not the same thing, and one of them is useful.”
She’d order dessert. She’d eat it. She’d comment on it honestly — “This is wonderful” or “This is terrible, let’s order something else.” She didn’t perform politeness when politeness conflicted with accuracy. She was unfailingly courteous and unfailingly honest, and the combination was more disorienting than either quality alone.
She’d tell you to call your mother. Whether your mother was alive or not. Whether the relationship was good or not. She’d tell you anyway, because Barbara Bush believed that family was the unit of civilization and that the person who maintained the unit was always the one who picked up the phone.
She wore fake pearls, read everything, and told the truth to two presidents at the dinner table. The warmth was real. The opinions were realer.