TRANSCRIPT: Interview with First Lady

ByABC News
June 9, 2008, 5:43 PM

June 9, 2008 <br>Brdo Castle<br>Kranj, Slovenia&#151; -- The following is the transcript of Jonathan Karl's June 9 interview with First Lady Laura Bush.

JONATHAN KARL: Well, thank you again for talking to us, and for an amazing trip to Afghanistan.

MRS. BUSH: It was great, wasn't it? Really terrific.

JONATHAN KARL: So tell me -- watching you, it was fascinating to watch you as kind of a foreign policy player, and I'm wondering your thoughts on what the foreign policy role of a First Lady is.

MRS. BUSH: Well, I mean, I think there -- obviously I'm not a foreign policy player. I mean, I'm not privy to all the information that the Secretary of State, obviously, who is a foreign policy player, or the President gets every single day. I don't get that, those sort of briefings. But on the other hand, I do think there's a diplomatic role that the First Lady can play by reaching out to countries that she happens to have a particular interest in.

And so for me that's Afghanistan. I've been very interested, especially in the plight of women and children since September 11th when all of us in the United States looked at Afghanistan and saw how oppressive the Taliban was and how particularly brutal life was for women and for children. And so that's just been something I've been interested in the whole time George has been President.

JONATHAN KARL: But it seems that recently you've had a very public role on the diplomatic front, and maybe even on the policy front. I mean, you became the -- I think the first First Lady in American history to do a press conference in the White House briefing room -- of course on Burma. Have you -- are you taking a more assertive role than you have in the past?

MRS. BUSH: Well, I don't know if I would call it that. I think I just know more. You know, I'm more educated about the situation in Burma and the situation in Afghanistan, just after having lived here in the White House for seven years. I've just learned more about it and know more about it, and Burma certainly. And especially after the cyclone we all looked at Burma and it's just so difficult and so sad and so really, I think, very, very difficult for people in the United States to know that we had all the help we had right off the coast of Burma and that the government would never allow us in.

There's something that's really disappointing, really frustrating about that. And it's just really one of the most difficult things that's happened, I think, since my husband has been President, and that is to know that we had help there and that they wouldn't allow it in.

JONATHAN KARL: When you look at that and you consider more than 2 million people affected and all that American help was right off the coast, the --

MRS. BUSH: Should we have gone in?

JONATHAN KARL: Should we have gone in anyway?

MRS. BUSH: You know, I don't know. I mean, I think that's the question. I think that's what goes over and over in my mind is, I want the people of Burma to know that the people of United States know what their situation is, that we knew what their situation was before even the natural disaster, but the detention of their Nobel Prize winner, the woman whose party was elected overwhelmingly and then never allowed -- that party was never allowed to govern, and the country has been decimated, just like Afghanistan was under the Taliban. But I want the people of Burma to know that, and I don't think they'll ever know, although I do think they listen to Voice of America and BBC and some other radio stations that go into Burma. So maybe they'll know by that.

JONATHAN KARL: But do you think there will come a time when we look back on this and we realize --

MRS. BUSH: And wonder if we should have --

JONATHAN KARL: Yes.

MRS. BUSH: I don't know. I mean, it's always easy to look back and it's very hard to project what really would have happened if we had done that. And so it's always easy to look back and say, oh, we should have done this or we should have done that, but without knowing what the real consequences would have been. We did fly in over 100 big cargo planes of aid, and I think that was good.

JONATHAN KARL: Did you ever talk to the President about the possibility of going in?