Laura Bush found stay at White House ’stressful’, felt relieved to be out

WASHINGTON - Former US First Lady Laura Bush says that her post-White House days have been quite liberating. The Bush family have had to weather many a storm at the White House, the biggest of them being the 9/11 attacks.

She elaborates the feeling of relief she felt upon moving out of the White House in her forthrightly written new book aptly titled, “Spoken From the Heart”.

“I didn’t really realize how stressed we were and how vigilant we were - that hypervigilance - until we came home and I wasn’t so stressed anymore,” she said in an interview with Politico.

“It was just something that we lived with every single day. We were used to it, and we didn’t really know we were. I almost stood straighter, just without that weight of worry,” she added.

The First Lady steers clear of controversy on subjects related to her husband’s presidential term, firmly maintaining that she “definitely” does not believe someone lied to her husband about the embarrassing ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iran that led US on a wild-goose chase.

She also spoke about the conception of her husband’s forthcoming memoir, “Decision Points”.

“It’s great to be able to sit back, to look at the photos, to look at the schedules, to look again at the briefing papers - which is what I did when I worked on mine,” she said.

“His researcher would find things that he thought might interest me, I put in a couple of stories in my book, and when George would read them, read those chapters, he’d say: ‘Take those out - those are my stories.’ So I did. And they were his stories. They were things that happened to him that I was going to recount. So we each got to keep our own stories for our books,” she recollects fondly.

She goes on to talk about an amusing incident that took place during her days as First Lady of Texas, “I went to Walmart with [my daughters] Barbara and Jenna, and we were waiting in line to heck out, and the woman kept staring at me. And finally she said, ‘I think I know you.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m Laura Bush,’ expecting her to say, ‘Oh, yes, the governor’s wife.’ And, nstead, she said, ‘No, guess not.’”

Talking about the loss of a suitcase while at the White House , she says, “I had a luncheon speech in Arizona, and so I dressed for the plane in a very casual way, and then my bag did not get n the plane. So when we landed and we realized we didn’t have it, we rushed to a store and bought an outfit as fast as we could. And we went to a luncheon in an outfit that we had just urchased. But, anyway, we felt pretty good that we had spent some money in that economy.” (ANI)