Excerpt: 'Ten Minutes from Normal'
— -- Former White House communications director Karen Hughes writes about her experiences working closely with President Bush in a new book, Ten Minutes from Normal, which hits bookstores March 29. Below is an excerpt.
Chapter 1 — Tug-of-War
I still remember the moment I first said it out loud. My husband and I were standing at the sink in the kitchen of the beautiful house that wasn't ours, talking as we cleaned up the dinner dishes.
"Maybe we should just move back home this summer," I said, and the look of relief that immediately crossed his face confirmed what I had suspected, what my husband still denies, but that all our friends believe—that he deeply missed Texas and was ready to go home.
"Why do you say that?" he asked, cautiously, much more cautiously than in the usual after-dinner, after-eighteen-years-of-marriage conversation. This was uncharted territory, and only I could venture there first.
"Robert's unhappy; I'm not even relevant in his life anymore. He misses his friends; we miss Leigh and Lauren and all our friends. Everyone said it would take a year to adjust, but it's been more than a year, and I don't see signs that we're making any progress," I said, the months of frustration and worry about my family spilling out into the open yet again. "Robert doesn't go out or have fun or have friends over or do anything except sit downstairs and watch TV and study. He's never even had a single kid come to our house except for the ones we invited with their parents," I said, my voice getting louder as I recited the litany that had played too many times in my head. The subject of our greatest concern, my teenage son, was away on a school baseball trip, so my husband and I didn't have to worry about his overhearing.
"I go to work when you all are asleep and I come home long after Robert's home from school and he's downstairs studying and he doesn't even want to talk to me. He never asks me to do anything for him anymore because he knows I probably can't. And if he did, I would probably be too tired, as I was last week when he wanted to make brownies. Too tired to make brownies-what does that say about our life?"
"We've been talking about reevaluating after next year, after tenth grade," my husband replied calmly. He had been saying this every time I raised concerns, which was becoming more and more frequent: It was his holding pattern, a quick way to quell the questions.
It reminded me of another pat answer, years before, which had also proved wrong-this one not from my husband, but from my boss. Back in 1997, when reporters had first started asking Governor Bush whether he would run for president, he had put them off with a quick, "I'll talk about that when I announce my campaign for reelection."
Something about the timing was wrong, and it had nagged at me. I walked into the governor's office early one morning after it had finally hit me: "If you wait until your reelection announcement to answer whether you might run for president, all the news coverage will focus on that," I said. "Don't you want to start your reelection campaign by talking about what you still want to accomplish as governor, not by refusing to rule out that you might run for president? That will be the lead of every story, and what you want to do for Texas will get lost in speculation about the presidency."
"You're right," he said, nodding thoughtfully. "So what's the alternative?" Governor Bush asked. "I don't know whether I'm going to run for president or not, and I'm not going to be one of these politicians who says he won't run and then changes his mind later when it's convenient. As long as it's a possibility, Texans need to know that and take it into account when they vote."
"Then we need to find a way for you to say that before you announce your reelection campaign," I responded, which led to our scheduling a news conference in late October 1997 to deal with what I called the P question.
"P question" was the inscription I had written in black Sharpie marker on the thin but growing green file I carried in my car to keep anything related to a possible presidential campaign separated from my official work at the state capitol. If only separating the P question from the rest of my life had been so easy!
The mere existence of the question was already changing our lives, a fact underscored by the scene at the governor's mansion that fall morning. A huge crowd of reporters, including some national ones who didn't usually cover much state news in Texas, waited in the garden, and satellite television trucks lined the streets surrounding the stately white house. Governor Bush stepped up to a small podium and delivered the statement we had worked on: "I hope Texans have come to know that I'm a straightforward person, and I want to deal with the question in as straight a way as I know how. I have not made a decision to run or not to run for President. I do not know, and I cannot possibly know at this time whether I would ever run for President … I can promise I will always do what is best for Texas …"
"You mean you called a news conference to say he might or might not run?" Mike Holmes, the bureau chief for the Associated Press and thus the dean of the Texas Capitol press corps, asked me incredulously.
"That's right; he thinks people deserve to know before he asks for their votes to reelect him," I replied.
Mike walked off, shaking his head. What was the news here? He might or might not run? We all know that, Mike's body language seemed to say disapprovingly.
Yet from our perspective, it was news, news that underscored our view that our boss was different. Politicians from both parties had previously promised home-state voters they would not seek the presidency, and then changed their minds later. Governor Bill Clinton had done so in Arkansas; so had Governor Pete Wilson in California. By choosing a different course, Governor Bush was doing a rare thing in politics: letting people know something that might not serve his own best interests. Our staff in the Texas governor's office had seen him do it many times: when he spoke out against California's proposition 187 and said Texas would educate children whether their parents were here legally or not; when he took on a massive tax restructuring that one of our savviest friends described as politically suicidal but otherwise exactly the right thing to do; when he commuted the death penalty to a life prison sentence for a despicable murderer who had killed many women but probably had not killed the one for which he had been sentenced to death.
It was one of the things I most admired about Governor Bush, one of the things that had earned the trust and loyalty of all of us on his senior staff: he was too astute to ignore the political risks of any situation, but they didn't govern him. He listened to all the arguments and opinions, but the final compass was his own conviction.
In the case of a possible presidential campaign, the risk was not great. Most Texans are proud when their fellow Texans seek national office. But Governor Bush's refusal to rule out seeking the presidency could cost him votes in his reelection, reducing his margin of victory and the appearance of strong home-state support. And it would hand his opponents an easy issue. We could all imagine the television commercials: "He's asking you to hire him," the announcer would intone, "but he won't even promise he'll finish the job."
And as we expected, the chairman of the Democratic Party immediately criticized him: "The people of Texas deserve to know whether Governor Bush will be a full-time Governor," he said. Some of the cynics thought Governor Bush had already decided to run for president, and was therefore misleading Texans by not acknowledging that fact, but I knew better.This son of a president had seen firsthand how seeking the presidency would change his life, especially if he won. He was thinking it through, calculating its impact on the rest of his life. Many times, I thought he just might decide the cost was too high, though it had nothing to do with money.
From Ten Minutes from Normal, © 2004, by Karen Hughes. All rights reserved. Viking Press.