美国前第一夫人劳拉吐露心声

爱思英语编者按：众所周知，美国前第一夫人劳拉并不喜欢过多地干预政治，更不喜欢成为大众瞩目的焦点。然而三十年前，正是这位德州姑娘用耐心和真爱感化了布什这位流连于灯红酒绿的花花公子；并用贤惠与温柔使丈夫戒掉了嗜酒的恶习。然而我们不禁要问：为什么这两个性格迥异的人能够彼此吸引？劳拉的稳健持重如何平衡布什的莽撞冲动？劳拉是如何帮助布什克服妄自尊大的性格，并让他戒酒的？这对曾经闪耀于国际舞台的夫妻究竟又有着哪些不为人知的故事？劳拉新近撰写的回忆录《心声》或许能从当事人的角度给出答案。更多信息请访问：http://www.24en.com/

President George W. Bush and Laura Bush at a campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio, in 2004. Theirs is a marriage of “two symbiotic souls,” she writes.

Left, Mrs. Bush"s high school graduation photo; right, George W. Bush and Laura Bush at the 1984 Republican convention.

Laura Bush’s new memoir, “Spoken From the Heart,” is really two books. The first is a deeply felt, keenly observed account of her childhood and youth in Texas — an account that captures a time and place with exacting emotional precision and that demonstrates how Mrs. Bush’s lifelong love of books has imprinted her imagination. The second book is a thoroughly conventional autobiography by a politician’s wife — a rote recitation of travel, public appearances and meetings with foreign dignitaries that sheds not the faintest new light on the presidency of the author’s husband, George W. Bush.

Throughout her tenure in the White House, Laura Bush was often described in faintly condescending terms as an old-fashioned first lady, as “the perfect wife,” as the anti-Hillary who “knows her place” and wanted only to stand by her man. At worst, she was described as a Stepford wife with a faintly medicated aura; at best, as a gracious foil to her blustering frat boy of a husband. Commentators found it hard to believe that her favorite book was “The Brothers Karamazov,” or if they did, they wondered what she was doing married to that language-mangling gut player, George W.

In “Spoken From the Heart” (which was written with Lyric Winik, “who helped me put my story into words”), Mrs. Bush acknowledges the role playing required of a political spouse. On election night, she writes, you are to wear “the look of radiant relief at victory or brave composure at defeat.” And the second half of this volume is filled with the sort of spin and canned platitudes common in political autobiographies.

There are a few crumbs of political interest strewn along the way: The usually charitable Mrs. Bush chastises the Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for their “nasty personal criticisms of George,” and she writes that she has often wondered if Jacques Chirac of France or Gerhard Schröder of Germany “could have done more” to prevent the Iraq war, “if one of them could have persuaded Saddam to go into exile, if they could have conveyed that the United States was not bluffing.”

For the most part, however, the White House portions of this book feel carefully prepared and vetted: Mrs. Bush lays out a predictable defense of her husband’s decision to invade Iraq and his decision not to visit New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, and she offers only the blandest portraits of administration figures like Dick Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld and Karl Rove. In these chapters there is no daylight between Laura Bush and her highly groomed role as first lady.

The opening sections of this book, however, are as revealing and evocative as the later ones are guarded. Writing with impressive recall, Mrs. Bush conjures her hometown, Midland, Tex., with enormous detail, lyricism and feeling. It’s a small town in the 1950s and early 60s, when children looked forward to ice cream sundaes and pony rides, and teenagers hung out at drive-in movies and drive-in restaurants.

The world is part “The Last Picture Show” and part “American Graffiti,” but less sophisticated — a place where people gather the tumbleweeds that blow through town in the winter, tie them into threes and spray “them with white flocking to make desert snowmen for their lawns.” A place where people want houses with familiar floor plans (“a living room at the front, a den behind it, and a hallway with three bedrooms”) and think nothing of driving six hours to Dallas or El Paso for something to do.

“It was easy perhaps to be sad in Midland,” Mrs. Bush writes, “sad from loss, sad from loneliness. ‘Terrible winds and a wonderful emptiness’ were the painter Georgia O’Keeffe’s double-edged words about the Texas desert plains, which I read years later, after I was grown.”

Mrs. Bush adds that life with her parents was “not sad,” but a sense of loss and loneliness does blow through her descriptions of her childhood. Her mother had three miscarriages, and those “lost babies” haunted the young Laura. She says she knew how much her father wanted a son, and she longed for siblings when she found herself a solitary “child among the throngs at a crowded amusement park.” Instead there were solo picnics in the park over on the next street and hours spent reading books like Nancy Drew, whom she identified with as another only child.

A terrible car accident on the night of Nov. 6, 1963, when Laura was 17, would come close to derailing her life. On the way to the movies with a friend, she ran through a stop sign and crashed into another car; the other driver, a good friend from school named Mike Douglas, was killed. Mrs. Bush rarely spoke of the accident in later years (it surfaced briefly in the national news media during her husband’s first run for the White House), but she offers here a remarkably raw and searing account of what happened.

“I can never absolve myself of the guilt,” she writes. “And the guilt isn’t simply from Mike dying. The guilt is from all the implications, from the way those few seconds spun out and enfolded so many other lives. The reverberations seem to go on forever, like the ripples from an unsinkable stone.”

Mrs. Bush says she lost her faith “that November, lost it for many, many years.” She was always the model-student type who strived not to disappoint, and the accident and her poor eyesight (corrected with glasses only in the second grade) seem to have intensified her sense of caution and love of order. She is someone who organized the books in one of her houses by the Dewey decimal system and writes here that she not only dislikes “clutter and its complications,” but is also “wary of the responsibility of too many things.”

That someone with such a heightened sense of the precariousness of life should have agreed, however reluctantly, to a life in the tumultuous, high-stress world of politics underscores both her devotion to her husband and her willingness to let him steer the course of their lives.

Over the years much has been written about the marriage of Laura and George W. Bush — how opposites attract, how her steadiness and calm balanced his impulsiveness and bravado, how she tamed his swagger and got him to give up drinking. In their book, “The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty,” (2004) Peter and Rochelle Schweizer quote Marvin Bush, a brother of George W., as likening Laura’s entry into the Bush family to Katharine Hepburn starring in “Animal House.” In these pages Mrs. Bush recalls that the mother of one of her friends marveled at the marriage of “the most eligible bachelor in Midland” to “the old maid of Midland.” (She was all of 31 at the time.)

For the most part Laura dwells less on her and her husband’s differences here than on their being “two symbiotic souls.” Without being gooey about it she gives us a portrait of herself and George (whom she calls “the biggest homebody known to man”), and their twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, as a thoroughly unpretentious, close-knit family.

She writes nostalgically about her days as first lady of Texas, when she had the freedom to stand in line for stamps at the post office and take her daughters to Wal-Mart, and how life in the White House changed all that. The late afternoons in Washington, she writes, became “the emptiest”: the hours in Austin where she would have been grocery shopping or doing errands, became quiet time, where she “turned to books for comfort.”

Two leitmotifs wend their way through “Spoken From the Heart”: one is the sense of love, safety and groundedness that Mrs. Bush found in her marriage and family; the other is a more existential sense of isolation. She describes life in West Texas as “isolated” with “an underlying sense of hardship, a sense that the land could quickly turn unforgiving.” She writes about the “isolating” aspect of her pre-marriage life as a schoolteacher — “it happens behind closed doors, one adult navigating the needs and complexities of twenty or more children.” And she describes life in the post-Sept. 11 White House, when anthrax attacks cut off the mail and she was no longer permitted to take strolls outside the gates, as increasingly constrained, her “own physical space” shrinking.

It was with a sense of relief, then, that Mrs. Bush returned to private life in Texas in 2009. “Sometime during that first spring and summer back in Texas, I began to feel the buoyancy of my own newfound freedom,” she writes at the end of this odd and poignant book. “After nearly eight years of hypervigilance, of watching for the next danger or tragedy that might be coming, I could at last exhale. I could simply be.”