The Perfect Wife The Life and Choices of Laura Bush [Paperback]

The intimate and critically acclaimed biography of the much-admired First Lady -- now in paperback with a new post-election Afterword by the author --The Perfect Wifetells the complete story of Laura Welch Bush. From Mrs. Bush's upbringing in West Texas to her whirlwind romance with George W. Bush to the Governor's mansion to her roles as mother, Bush family member, First Lady, and savvy political campaigner, Gerhart reveals her as never before.Chapter One: Midland

We feel really fortunate to have grown up in West Texas where I think values are really rock solid. It's not very easy to be pretentious....West Texans will call you down immediately. I think that gave us a really solid base.

-- Laura Bush, in theMidland Star-Telegram,September 5, 2002

She was seventeen, a few days past her birthday in her senior year, a girl with her daddy's car keys. There was a party, on a weeknight. That wasn't much the sort of thing Jenna and Harold Welch let their girl do, go to a party in the middle of the week. But really, Laura was such a good girl, this only child of theirs, an angel, a love. She had never given them a moment's trouble. She was steady and smart and quiet, and her friends were the Brownies she knew from grade school. She always laughed at her father's jokes; he was a cutup, easy and friendly and open. She always sat by her mother, though. On visits to her grandmother some hours away, Laura and her mother would take turns reading in the car out loud to each other, the huge sky of West Texas arching out before them, vast and familiar, Manifest Destiny beckoning in the shimmering of the nighttime stars.

That sky, it let you see forever. Between Midland and Lubbock, some 150 miles apart, nothing stood but a few villages and scrub and electric poles and those lonely oil pumps, dipping up, swinging down, up and down, up and down, a rhythm that gave pace and purpose to an entire region. Midland proper was so orderllc