'Laura Bush: An Intimate Portrait of the First Lady' by Ronald Kessler

April 3, 2006 — -- Ronald Kessler first wrote about President George W. Bush in "A Matter of Character" in 2004. Now, he is the first author with whom Laura Bush has cooperated for a biography, "An Intimate Portrait of the First Lady." As a result, some critics have called the book excessively flattering, but Kessler goes back in time and talks to friends and old boyfriends who had not previously spoken with the press.

You can read an excerpt of "An Intimate Portrait of the First Lady" below.

From the air, Midland looks as if a hurricane had just hit. The few trees are short, like Christmas trees. The grass is yellow, the land flat. Dust coats the paved roads. There are no lakes or rivers. Visitors could be forgiven for thinking they were stepping off onto the moon.

With annual rainfall of only thirteen and a half inches, Midland is so arid that, to keep their lawns green in summer, residents must water them every day. To create flower beds, they often have to use jackhammers to cut through the brittle crust formed from caliche, a weathered soil rich in calcium. Until the city started mixing more surface water from the Colorado River Municipal Water District with its own well water, tap water would cause brown stains on teeth because it had excess levels of fluoride.

Two or three times a year, usually in the spring, a bad sandstorm hits, obscuring the sun as in a total eclipse. The sand stings and enters the nostrils. Drivers peering through their windshield cannot see the front of their car. The sand seeps through the frames of windows and doors and piles up on floors and windowsills. Sand frosts the panes as well.

The wind uproots the tumbleweeds -- tangled balls of light, stiff branches that can balloon to the size of a Volkswagen. The tumbleweeds roll before the wind and clump together in masses of five or ten along the cinderblock walls residents build around their backyards to try to keep out the sand. Into this inhospitable environment, on November 4, 1946, Laura Lane Welch was born.

Located 335 miles west of Dallas in what is known as West Texas, Midland was named for Midway Station, a section house where railroad employees could stay overnight. The Texas and Pacific Railway built the station in June 1881 halfway between Dallas and El Paso, an area crisscrossed by a Comanche trail and wagon roads. The name was changed from Midway Station to Midland on January 4, 1884, when a post office was established. Until Herman N. Garrett moved his herd of sheep there in 1882, the area had no permanent residents. In 1885, Midland County was established with Midland as the county seat.

Soon, Nelson Morris, a Chicago meatpacker, bought 200,000 acres from the state for his Black Angus ranch and introduced cattle to the area. Farmers began moving in, and by 1920 over 4,600 acres in Midland County were devoted to cotton. In 1923, oil was discovered seventy miles southeast of Midland, touching off a boom that has continued, off and on, to this day. Located at the center of the Permian Basin, which has 22 percent of the nation's oil reserves, Midland would become one of the greatest petroleum-producing areas in the country.

Laura's ancestors on her father's side can be traced back to England and to Christopher DeGraffenried, a Swiss nobleman born in 1691. DeGraffenried moved to Philadelphia and eventually to Charleston, South Carolina. Laura's paternal grandfather, Mark Anthony Welch, was born in Texas in 1873. He began as a carpenter and became a homebuilder. According to family legend, he became a friend of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, and sometimes traveled with him. His wife, Marie Lula Lane, was born in Arkansas in 1873. They moved to Lubbock, Texas, 120 miles north of Midland, in 1918.

As with her father's ancestors, Laura's mother's side goes back mainly to England, except that she is "one-eighth French," according to genealogist Robert Battle, who, along with William Addams Reitwiesner, has traced Laura's origins. In doing so, they discovered that Laura, on her father's side, is a very distant cousin of Senator John McCain. Both are descendants of Allen Valentine, who lived in Virginia in the 1700s and served as a lieutenant colonel with the North Carolina Troops during the American Revolution.

On her mother's side, Laura also has an ancestor who fought in the Revolution: John Wiseman, a private in the Pennsylvania militia and a descendant of one Abraham Wiseman, who lived in Philadelphia in the early 1700s. While his name sounds Jewish, he was probably a Mennonite, according to the two genealogists.