Even Barbara Bush’s stepmother is afraid of her. Over the course of a half-hour interview, Willa Pierce, the South Carolina painter the First Lady’s widowed father married in 1952, hasn’t commented on anything much more controversial than her famous stepdaughter’s shoe size. But now, in a quavering voice, she is re-evaluating her decision to say anything at all. “I could get in so much trouble if I said something she didn’t agree with,” the elderly widow says pleadingly. “Because you know how she is: she knows how she wants to appear to the world.” Indeed: Barbara Bush is America’s grandmother, casual, capable, down-to-earth; she is fake pearls and real family. “I’m not a competitive person,” she once said, “and I think women like me because they don’t think I’m competitive, just nice.” She bakes cookies, knits, needlepoints. She is funny, but mostly at her own expense. She is a woman so modest that she writes in the voice of a dog. At a time when George Bush has slid almost fifty points in most polls in a little more than a year, Barbara Bush stands as close to universal popularity as any figure in American life. Her approval rating is forty, even fifty points higher than her husband’s, and she gets as many as eight thousand letters a month. Aides call her “the National Treasure”—“the treasure” for short—in sly tribute to the qualities that make her an awesome asset to her husband. The First Lady’s hard work on causes ranging from AIDS to illiteracy has been justly praised, but it has also helped to obscure the void of the Bush domestic policy with a theater of activism. She is, first and foremost, her husband’s alter ego, charged with showing his compassion in the areas that an aide merrily summarizes as “poverty, pain, and degradation, basically.” “In the thirty-some years I’ve been around American politics, she’s far and away the greatest political spouse I’ve seen,” says political strategist Edward J. Rollins, one of the managers of Ross Perot’s campaign. And her help has never been more important than at the current moment, when political advisers to Bush have taken to joking that every one of the president’s speeches should include the phrase “Barbara and I … ” It is an extra stroke of luck for the president that the Democrats’ answer to Barbara Bush is Hillary Clinton. “I’ll take a matchup between George and Barbara Bush and Bill and Hillary Clinton any day,” says a senior Bush adviser. “People like Barbara Bush. And people don’t like Hillary Clinton.” Even if Ross Perot, not Bill Clinton, proves to be the greater threat to Bush’s re-election, Margot Perot seems unlikely to divert much attention from the symbolic face-off between her more famous counterparts. Republican strategists will be working overtime to remind us that the Arkansas governor’s controversial wife is the perfect foil for the First Lady’s image as the embodiment of all cardinal virtues. It is an image that has been perfectly honed through almost four years at the White House. “Short of ax murder,” says former Bush spokeswoman Sheila Tate, “I think she could get away with anything. She’s so benign.” Then why are people so scared of her?

Current and former associates inevitably set anonymity as the price of any statement at variance with the myth. “People always said Nancy Reagan would kill you if you said bad stuff about her,” says one staff aide who worked closely with the Bushes during his vice presidency. “But I always thought Mrs. Bush was the one who would kill you…. No one sat around and gossiped about Mrs. Bush. I don’t think it was that people loved her; I think everyone was scared of her. It was just like when your mother said, ‘I have eyes in the back of my head.’” People who have worked with the Bushes use words and phrases like “difficult” … “tough as nails” … “demanding” … “autocratic.” A 1988-campaign staffer recalls that “when she frowned it had the capacity to send shudders through a lot of people.” And one longtime associate explained his refusal to talk—even to describe his most positive feelings about Mrs. Bush—by saying, straight-faced, “I don’t want to be dead…. I really like her, but I don’t go anywhere near her.” Some of the fear she inspires is a function of her position: no one wants to piss off a president by crossing his wife. But the widespread apprehension that Barbara Bush creates is also a fear of the woman herself. The same reporters who spin misty reports of Barbara Bush toiling in soup kitchens discuss a different reality among themselves: the flinty stare she fixes on the source of a question she doesn’t like; the humorous dig; the chilly put-down. For behind her rampart of pearls, the nation’s most self-effacing celebrity is in fact a combative politician. Always there, not far below the surface, is the Barbara Bush who briefly emerged in 1984 to denounce Geraldine Ferraro as “that $4 million—I can’t say it, but it rhymes with ‘rich.’” This Barbara Bush has a brilliant grasp of image, and has always understood a chief source of her appeal: that she is—as folks in Washington never tire of pointing out—Not Nancy. During inaugural week in 1989 she made unmistakable digs at her predecessor, especially by spoofing her own new clothes: “Please notice—hairdo, makeup, designer dress,” she said at one event. “Look at me good this week, because it’s the only week.” Washington lapped it up—despite the fact that Barbara Bush had been wearing makeup, designer dresses, and “hairdos” for years. True, her earlier instincts had run to shirtwaists and circle pins. But by the time George Bush became president, his wife was a faithful customer of Arnold Scaasi and Bill Blass. Similarly, she has commissioned interior designer Mark Hampton to work on every house in which the Bushes have lived since 1981, both private and official. Yet, today, she has successfully established her image as one too down-to-earth for fashion. “Personally, I think she’s tougher than Nancy, but in a much more sophisticated way…. She’s a pretty slick lady,” says one sharp-eyed former Reagan aide, who counts such details as the $1,245 Judith Leiber bag that was a gift from the designer. While she has excelled by poking fun at herself—her hair, her age, her waistline—aides have learned that they cannot count on this self-abasement: the First Lady is not amused when someone else tries to inject this note into a speech written for her. Barbara Bush controls her press more tightly than Nancy Reagan ever dreamed of doing. She uses publicity to good effect when she sees an opportunity to deliver a useful message. In one of her first public events as First Lady, for example, she arranged to be photographed holding an AIDS baby, to convey the message that the disease can’t be contracted through casual contact. But she almost never sits down alone with news reporters who cover the White House regularly. Instead, she speaks to them a few times a year over ladylike luncheons in the family quarters, where they feel constrained by her hospitality. Reporters are social creatures, too, and are far less likely to lob a hostile question over the zucchini soup. (Mrs. Bush declined to be interviewed for this article, and most of her family, including her children, followed suit.) Privately, she is a caustic and judgmental woman, who has labored to keep her sarcasm in check—with incomplete success. And once she notes a soft spot, says a longtime associate, “she hangs on forever. She never, ever, ever, ever lets go. She can just get under your skin and needle you.” “I mean,” elaborates a former aide, “she’s a good person, she talks about AIDS and stuff. But she’s not this nice person.” One Washington regular—the second wife of a prominent man—tells of meeting the First Lady at a recent party. Mrs. Bush, who had a slight friendship with the man’s first wife, seemed “hostile” to the couple, “her vibes, the look on her face, everything…. She looked at me, and if looks could kill, I’d be dead,” the woman relates. Hoping at least to make the conversation smooth, the second wife mentioned a mutual acquaintance, a Bush-family friend. She had met him, she said, through political circles, and had supported him in a recent, unsuccessful bid for office. “Well,” retorted the First Lady, “that is undoubtedly why he lost.” On a personal level, she can be domineering. Aides, old friends, even family members give eerily similar accounts of her offering unsolicited advice on appearance: “You’ve got to do something about your hair,” she told one aide; to another, who had just grown a mustache, she said, “Has George seen that? Shave it off!” She is full of admonitions about smoking, now that she has given it up, and diet—especially diet. Peggy Stanton, a friend from the years when Bush served in Congress, remembers being embarrassed at lunches of the congressional wives’ club. “I was a pretty healthy eater, and Bar would say, ‘Now, watch Peggy, she’s going up for her third helping.’ Which was true, but I didn’t necessarily want the world to know.” “You’re too fat,” Barbara tells her younger brother, Scott Pierce, when he puts on weight. And when Bush was vice president, according to an aide, Barbara boiled over one day at the sight of the staffers eating junk food on Air Force Two. “She said we were all fat, we all ate too much, and from then on we would only get fruit and so on,” a change that was instituted immediately. The more people talk about Barbara Bush, the more confusing grows the disjunction between the image and the woman. Two apparently contradictory threads run through her history. The first is her rigorous fealty to the gender roles of her day. And the second is the clear force of her personality—the commanding will that has been diverted and disguised, but never extinguished, by her life as the humble helpmate of George Herbert Walker Bush. The two threads of her life come together in an uneasy suspicion that she has paid a heavy price for the image she has lived.

If this is Tuesday, it must be Miami Beach. Clean white limousines are packed like Chiclets at the curb of the convention center, where a thousand loyal Republicans have gathered to salute First Lady Barbara Bush as “National Statesman of the Year.” They have forked over a little more than $800,000 to their state party, in amounts ranging from $500 to $10,000, for the privilege of eating a chicken dinner in her presence. At seven o’clock they are herded into a curtained-off area of the huge exhibition space, its concrete floor and cavernous ceiling wanly cheered by a few potted ferns draped in Christmas lights. Like all political dinners, this one is interminable, with a dozen separate speeches, an invocation, the Pledge of Allegiance, a twelve-piece band, and a rendering of “God Bless America” by a choir of overmiked children. The First Lady has been up since 5:30 in the morning, and has already flown to San Antonio (for a lunch-hour fund-raiser) and then back East to Miami. But to judge by her facial expressions, greatly magnified on a huge video monitor suspended over the crowd, she would rather be spending this night with a thousand rich Florida strangers in an echoing exhibition hall than spend it anywhere else on earth. She rewards every speaker’s peroration with emphatic nods of agreement; she traverses even the dullest bits with her attentive, First Lady–listening expression firmly in place. And these men do talk. The hour is ticking past 9:30 when Barbara Bush finally rises to speak. She is over-whelmed by this whole evening, she tells the crowd. She thanks the priest for his bee-ooo-ti-ful prayer. She comments on the won-der-ful music. She does so in a rich, cultured, carefully modulated voice that is still soaked, after forty-five years of Texas and politics, in the affluent air of her childhood. A slight shock attends anything she says: for all the familiarity of her image, you suddenly realize that you have almost no memory of hearing her voice. It is one of the chief requirements of her job that she say as few genuinely memorable things as possible. “I’ve known for years that I was the luckiest woman in the world,” she says. “I do have the most marvelous husband, children, and grandchildren. We live in the greatest country in the world. And tonight you have honored me with such a great honor,” she says. “I don’t deserve it. Of course I’m going to accept it, but I don’t deserve it.” To some degree, Barbara Bush’s persona is a simple function of beautiful manners. I have watched her over and over in these First Lady tableaux: at a White House tea, cuddling a child who has a brain tumor; in New Hampshire, choking down yet another chicken breast at a Keene senior citizens’ center; at the home of a grandmother in D.C.’s drug corridor, where she escorted the Queen of England—and where she actually made good enough small talk to bridge the gap between the hostess and her royal visitor. Her exigent private manner is balanced, in public, by a universal graciousness. The only way to reconcile these two facets of Barbara Bush is to understand her as a woman of her class: the American social stratum that has always raised its children to assume their own superiority—and also to mask that assumption at all times.

Her roots are in Rye, New York, the kind of town that imparts an unconscious confidence: not quite so rich as Greenwich, Connecticut, just up the way, where George Bush was raised, but secure and Waspy and well-to-do. The Pierces lived on Onondaga Street, in a five-bedroom brick house almost at the border of the Apawamis gold club. They didn’t have a fortune, but they had a large social inheritance: Pauline Pierce was the daughter of an Ohio Supreme Court justice, and Marvin, a member of a once wealthy Pennsylvania iron clan, was a distant relative of President Franklin Pierce. “We weren’t rich” compared with some of the neighbors, says Scott Pierce, who still lives in Rye. “But we were certainly upper-middle-class.” Barbara, the third of four children, had a caustic tongue even as a child. June Biedler, who was one of Barbara’s best friends, remembers her as “very articulate, very witty,” and as “kind of a gang leader.” When the girls boarded the school bus in the morning, “Barbara would have decided ‘Let’s not speak to June today.’ Or Barbara would decide ‘Let’s not speak to Posy today,” and so the rest of us would obediently follow along and give that person a miserable time. And I don’t remember that there was ever a ‘Let’s not speak to Barbara today’ arrangement.” Biedler stresses today that she loves and admires Barbara Bush, and believes that her friend grew up to be a kind and generous woman. But as a teenager, she recalls, “I thought Barbara was really mean and sarcastic.” Among other things, she teased Biedler about her painful childhood stammer. This cruelty, Biedler suggests, may have been the result of having “a mother that was a little mean to her.” Pauline Pierce was a beautiful woman, but an exacting observer of social status. She was rather humorless, “austere,” according to Biedler; “formal,” in Scott Pierce’s memory. She was particularly critical of Barbara, according to Donnie Radcliffe’s biography, Simply Barbara Bush. In several of the stories Barbara tells of her childhood, one makes out Pauline’s unpleasant concern that her younger daughter—a big girl, who by the age of twelve was five feet eight inches and weighted 148 pounds—might not cut it in the marriage market. For her junior year in high school, Barbara followed her sister, Martha, to Ashley Hall, a genteel ladies’ prep school in Charleston, South Carolina, the kind of place where a chaperon accompanied the girls to dances at the Citadel. As photos attest, she had by then developed into a slim and pretty teenager, with pale skin and large, dark eyes. She was “at her prettiest,” muses Biedler, “probably in her early twenties or in her late teens,” but even then “she always had somebody who was prettier, like her sister.” Martha, five years older, was devastating competition, a knockout who during college appeared on the cover of Vogue. Rosanne M. (Posy) Clarke, one of Barbara’s friends, remembers that Martha “was gorgeous—tall and skinny and beautiful. Barbara...was pretty, but Martha was glamour.” Barbara was far closer to her father, a well-liked, genial man, than to her mother. From these parents, she learned her earliest lessons in gender politics, a model of how moms rule the roost but dads win the popularity contests. “Mother was kind of the glue of the family,” says Scott Pierce, “although my dad was the one everybody admired.”

By 1941, the year Barbara turned sixteen, Marvin Pierce was nearing the top of McCall Corp., publisher of McCall’s and Redbook, among other magazines. The company’s flagship magazine, which his younger daughter read avidly in her dorm room, had by then developed the blueprint of her life. Amid cautionary tales about women who were not humble or kind of careful enough to land and keep a man, ads advised that the goal of life was to tie the knot (“She’s engaged! She’s lovely! She uses Pond’s!”). Within weeks of Pearl Harbor, while home from school on Christmas break, Barbara met her destiny. It was at a dance at the Round Hill Club in Greenwich, the kind of tame affair designed so that boys home from Taft and Andover and Deerfield could practice their mating calls on suitable girls home from Miss Porter’s and Saint Tim’s. Barbara and George Bush, only sixteen and seventeen years old, locked onto each other with a striking seriousness, an intense mixture of teenage crush and wartime gravity that is almost unimaginable today. Three years would go by before the wedding, but the outcome was never seriously in doubt. Most of their friends are at a loss when asked what so quickly cemented this couple. The answer often boils down to social class—that they were, as George’s redoubtable mother put it, “sensible and well suited to each other.” On her side, there was the glamour of his enlistment, his string-bean handsomeness, his reputation as a big man on the Andover campus. “He was a real catch,” emphasizes Posy Clarke. “He was terribly attractive—this young naval officer—and the Bush family was certainly prestigious.” On his side, the most intriguing account comes from his brother Jonathan, who once said, “She was wild about him. And for George, if anyone wants to be wild about him, it’s fine with him.” Barbara went—again in Martha’s footsteps—to Smith, but even while she attended classes she seemed hardly there at all. “She was different from the rest of us in that her destiny was already fixed,” says Margaret Barrett, a roommate. “Her whole life was bound up in [George].” She made plans to return sophomore year but canceled at the last minute, in August, dropping out for good. “I was just interested in George,” Barbara has said. They married, with all the trimmings, while he was home on leave in January 1945. Their plan was that after the war he would take up his education at Yale, and she would take up the life of his young bride. They honeymooned on Sea Island, Georgia, where George dashed off a magisterial bulletin to his sister, Nancy: “Married life exceeds all expectations. Barbara is a fine wife!” “It was a real storybook romance,” says Posy Clarke in wry summary. ‘They married and went to New Haven, and she worked her tail off the rest of her life.”

Meet Mr. and Mrs. Bush, the Wasp patriarch and wife: He is lanky and spare, with sharp bones and a youthful hardness to his jaw, graying but still handsome. She, though, is lined and bowed, snow-topped, spreading at the middle. So unfair, what nature can do to men and women, and what society makes of the results. By the time George and Barbara Bush reached their early forties, she was conscious of the disparity in their looks. Over time she tried different strategies for dealing with this painful contract—including, for a while, unsuccessfully dyeing her hair—until finally she settled on a rollicking self-satire that firmly beat observers to the punch. These days, no one admits to being among the advisers and hangers-on who once carped about her looks (Can’t we do something about Barbara?). Each and every one of her courtiers understood all along how fabulously refreshing she was. The White House had the power to turn her hair from gray to “silver,” and her style from matronly to “natural.” And still, the contrast between her and her husband remains, insistently pointing to another possibility: that she is his picture of Dorian Gray, the one who wears the life they have lived together. “She’s tougher than he is,” runs the standard refrain of friends and aides of George and Barbara Bush. For decades, going back almost to the start of their marriage, Barbara bore the hardest parts of this couple’s lot. The division of the burdens was subtle initially, not untypical of family life in the late forties and early fifties. In almost every account of their first years together in Texas, George Bush is out doing and being—starting his own company, raising money back East, enjoying what he would always describe nostalgically as a great adventure. And Barbara is living a parallel life of grinding hard work. In the first six years of their marriage they moved at least eleven times, first in the service, then to New Haven, and then out West, into the oil business: from Odessa, Texas, to Huntington Park, California, Bakersfield to Whittier to Ventura to Compton, then back to Texas, where they settled in Midland. Over fourteen years Barbara bore six children: George, Robin, Jeb, Neil, Marvin, and Dorothy. For long periods Barbara managed the family alone, while George traveled. “I remember Mom saying she spent so many lonely, lonely hours with us kids,” the Bushes’ daughter Doro told Ann Grimes, author of the book Running Mates. “I can understand how she felt. She did it all. She brought us up.” “The kids were much more afraid of their mother than their father, I think,” says Susan Morrison, who got to know the family well as a press secretary during the 1980 campaign. “If she said it, it went. And if he said it, maybe there was a way around it.” His natural aversion to conflict, his great eagerness to be liked, made him the quintessential good cop; her basic toughness, her acid wit and strong will, made her the perfect disciplinarian. As with Barbara’s parents, Mother was the glue, and Dad was the fun. To this day, says one who knows the family well, “he uses her to throw some bombs, while he sits back and calms the waters.” The greatest burden of Barbara’s young life, though, was the death of her second child, Robin, at the age of three. Here, too, one can see the Bushes dividing roles in a way that assigned Barbara the more painful tasks. In the spring of 1953, Robin, then the Bushes’ only daughter, was diagnosed as having leukemia. “You should take her home, make life as easy as possible for her, and in three weeks’ time, she’ll be gone,” the doctor told the Bushes. But this was not their style. Instead they flew Robin to New York, where George’s uncle was a big wheel at Memorial Hospital, and where doctors from the Sloan-Kettering Institute agreed to treat her aggressively. They managed to gain seven months of life. At almost exactly the time of Robin’s diagnosis George had begun a new business partnership, hugely increasing his business stakes, and the demands of his work presented a welcome escape. It was Barbara who sat with Robin every day in the hospital, she who was a daily witness to her daughter’s pain, the torment of treatment with drugs and needles. She laid down the law: no crying in front of the girl, who was not to know how sick she was. Thomas “Lud” Ashley, a Yale friend of George Bush’s, was then living in New York and saw a lot of Barbara during the ordeal. “It was the most remarkable performance of that kind I’ve ever seen,” he says. “It took its toll. She was very human later, after the death. But not until then.” Only twenty-eight years old, she was alone when she made the final decision of her daughter’s life: while the prognosis was hopeless, the doctors offered a chance to arrest the internal bleeding caused by all the drugs Robin had been given. It was a risky operation, but might buy more time. George, who was on his way to New York, couldn’t be reached. George’s uncle advised against the surgery, but Barbara decided to go ahead. Thirty-six years later, she cried when talking to a reporter about this lonely decision. Robin never came out of the operation, though George reached the hospital before she died.

In defining herself solely as a wife and mother, Barbara Bush was like millions of other women of her generation, sold on a romantic vision of domesticity. Even so, she seems to have pursued the whole package more emphatically than most, working at homemaking like the strong-willed woman she is. “Bar was the leader of the pack,” says Marion Chambers, a friend from Barbara’s Midland years. “She set the example for us.” Her children had the best, most elaborate birthday parties in the neighborhood, as well as the most carefully nametagged clothes. Her house was spotless; others felt, in contrast, like slackers. She ground her teeth at night and smoked Newports by the pack. Every year, a week before Christmas, she made an elaborate gift of cookies to her friends’ children—a decorative packet for each child, containing a differently shaped cookie for each day before Christmas; the idea was to tie it onto the tree so the child could work his or her way toward the big day. She also threw herself into charity work, the hospital, the local women’s league. Above all, her rule was to accommodate her husband. “The one thing she made sure of was that George Bush was comfortable—she’s been very clear about that,” says Susan Morrison. At first glance this, too, seems an unremarkable policy for a woman of Barbara Bush’s generation. But women who have known her in different stages of their married life say that she went even farther to cater to her husband than most of her peers did in their marriages. “She was very thoughtful of him in every way,” says Peggy Stanton, who befriended Barbara in the congressional wives’ club after Bush was elected to Congress in 1966. “Probably more so than most of us...I just remember that she wouldn’t impose on him in any way.” George Bush is famously frenetic, “desperate to be in constant motion,” in the words of one of his oldest friends, FitzGerald Bemiss. His omnivorous sociability has meant constant hard work for his wife. Peter Teeley, a longtime adviser, says, “Look, he is very boyish in the sense that he would say, ‘Let’s have fifty people over this weekend, we’ll serve ‘em so-and-so and so-and-so,’ and then not worry about how the food is going to be purchased, and who’s going to get it there, and who’s going to cook it, and so on. He’d say, ‘Well, I’ve got to go golfing.’ Or ‘play tennis.’” Barbara would sometimes grumble about this, but she never seemed to say no. By 1974, when other women were discovering the wounded, angry sister who had so often shadowed the bouncing figure in the women’s magazines, Barbara could still send this description of her activities to the Smith Alumnae Quarterly: “I play tennis, do vol. work and admire George Bush!” From the very beginning, George Bush’s political career was simply a larger canvas on which to pain her domestic destiny. All that discipline she had; why, sacrifice was her middle name—of course she was happy to visit all 189 precincts in Harris County, Texas, in 1962, to help him win the post of Republican Party county chairman in his first race ever. By the time he ran for Congress, of course she would listen to the same speech, over and over and over and over, while madly needlepointing red, white, and blue patches bearing his name for the good ladies of Houston to sport on their purses. Her iron manners, too, made her a champion political wife. Admiral Dan Murphy, who was Bush’s first vice-presidential chief of staff, remembers sitting next to Barbara at an official dinner somewhere in Africa. “We had been warned by the doctors not to eat any salads, anything that hadn’t been cooked. So I didn’t, but she was going along eating the salad. I said, ‘Mrs. Bush, the doctors told us we shouldn’t eat things like that.’ And she said, ‘This is their country, and they’re serving salad, so I’m going to eat it.’” She soldiered her way through a losing Senate race, two terms in Congress, and a painful second Senate loss. She smiled at George Bush’s side through his stints as Richard Nixon’s ambassador to the U.N. and then as chairman of the Republican Party—though she had strongly counseled him to avoid the G.O.P. post, which was offered him in the midst of the Watergate cover-up. They spent fourteen months in Beijing, where he was special envoy to the People’s Republic of China. And suddenly, after their return to the U.S. in late 1975, she fell into a black depression—the only time that Barbara’s will openly rebelled against Barbara’s life.

‘I would feel like crying a lot and I really, painfully hurt,” she later told U.S. News & World Report. “And I would think bad thoughts, I will tell you. It was not nice.” In some interviews, she has attributed her depression to “a small chemical imbalance.” In some, she laid it at the door of the women’s movement, saying, “Suddenly women’s lib had made me feel my life had been wasted.” But in others she has hinted that it was the classic mid-life crisis of the woman who had been raised to gain all her identity through the service of others, whose lives had now left the cozy orbit of her care. Not only was 1976 the year her youngest child, Doro, turned seventeen, but it also marked a devastating shift in her relationship with her husband. She had suddenly gone from feast to famine. In Beijing, with the younger children off in boarding school, the Bushes were alone for the first time since their marriage, exploring their strange new world together. “I loved it there,” she has said over and over. “I had George all to myself.” When he was called back to Washington to become director of the C.I.A., he was all at once in a job whose very nature reinforced the old divide in the Bushes’ daily lives: this time, he couldn’t talk about his job at night. But if 1976 was the year Barbara’s frustration reached a crisis, it was not the only time she expressed it. The Bushes’ history is full of poignant references to her unrequited desire for his company. Even if his work didn’t draw him away from home, his frenzied social life did. “His attitude is ‘If you want to see me, great, get your clubs.’ I think she’s constantly trying to make the marriage work that way,” says a former aide. “Do you think they ever sit alone and have dinner? I think she’d like that, but she knows it’s never going to happen.” Barbara Bush took up golf last year, she told reporters, in the hope of spending more time with the president. But he declined to play with her—just as he had stopped playing tennis doubles with her years before, because he didn’t think she was a good enough player. In what one person on the scene described as a “pathetic” tableau, Barbara and her friend Betsy Heminway went “tagging after him” while he and three buddies played Kennebunkport’s Cape Arundel Golf Club. As Maureen Dowd of The New York Times reported then, the president gleefully announced to the press that his wife’s game “stunk.” “When the president, pressed by journalists, finally agreed to play with his wife, the disillusioned First Lady shot back, ‘When? Just like he’s going to garden with me one day.’” “The joking wasn’t pleasant,” reports one person who saw the scene. “It wasn’t fun, Nick-and-Nora repartee.” Even at times when the Bushes’ lives meshed more closely, there was an undercurrent of insecurity in Barbara. “She was very aware that he was so young-looking,” says a friend from the late sixties. By then Barbara was already hardening her defenses, beginning to make jokes that lanced the wound before someone else could press on it. “I noticed that years back, that she would joke about her appearance,” says Peggy Stanton. Bush often seems to treat Barbara more like a buddy than a wife. In public they present their relationship as a partnership that had transcended sex, entering the realm of teasing friendship. Last summer, on Barbara Bush’s sixty-sixth birthday, the millionaire president gave her twenty pairs of Keds as a gift, When he was vice president, says a former aide, his advance teams would joke about having to remind him to open doors for her. With other women, however—the dozens of attractive young women he meets in his work—George Bush is famously flirtatious. “A biiiiiiig flirt,” says a female former aide. Rumors have circulated since 1980 that Bush has had extramarital affairs. But they are unlikely to be proved unless a party involved chooses to talk about it. All we can intuit, through outward signs, is Barbara Bush’s long, more subtle struggle to remain as important a part of her husband’s life as he has been of hers. In this regard, his sporting relationships with his male buddies, his manic insistence on constant motion and the presence of crowds, seem as great a challenge as other women do. During the Thanksgiving weekend after his election, the Bushes invited the reporters covering them in Kennebunkport to come to the house for wine and cheese. When USA Today reporter Jessica Lee burbled her thanks to Barbara, the future First Lady responded grimly, “Don’t thank me. Thank George Bush. He invited you.” (In these moments of exasperation or pain she often refers to him by both his first and last names.) “I think there’s an essence of sadness about her, way deep down,” says someone who has worked with Barbara Bush in politics. “Maybe a lot of who she is developed in reaction to sadness.” When her depression hit, she was not the type to deal with it introspectively. Her husband urged her to talk to someone about it, but her style was to tough it out. She was helped, paradoxically, by Bush’s growing political ambitions. His entry into presidential politics opened up a new world, and a more expansive role for her beyond the threshold of their house. The higher George Bush rose, the more he needed Barbara in his political life.

In pictures taken of the early planning meetings for the ‘88 campaign, there are seven or eight advisers lounging around the pretty green living room of the Bushes’ Kennebunkport home. In the background, intent on a jigsaw puzzle or a knitting project, hardly paying any attention at all, is Barbara Bush. She is doing what she once did as a young bride at Yale, sitting for long hours behind home plate while George played ball—keeping score. This is the first of her two roles in his career: the watchful monitor of internal politics who judges each man and woman by the standard of his or her devotion to George Bush. This role is mysterious to almost everyone who works with Bush, for she is infinitely careful. Yet no one around them doubts that she has great power to influence her husband, especially in his views of people. Some go as far as to suggest that she is his number-one political adviser, “first among equals.” But at almost all times she maintains the ultra-traditional façade of the old-style political wife, who is there only to see to her husband’s comfort. Aides and associates from every period of his political career hasten to explain that Barbara Bush is not Nancy Reagan. She does not carry her own agenda, or choose political goals for her husband; she doesn’t muck around with policy or sit in on Cabinet meetings. Aides to Sam Skinner and John Sununu say that neither chief of staff, even in the most troubled passages of his tenure, heard often from the First Lady. But every successful politician has a quasi-official “family” around him, an inner circle in which personality has a great impact on politics and policy. It is in this realm that Barbara Bush is influential. Here, staffers learn that Barbara is always “just within earshot, just out of sight,” in the words of one campaign staffer. Courtiers tread very, very carefully in this domain, knowing, in the words of media adviser Roger Ailes, that “she wants what’s best for her husband, and boy, she’s strong.” Her second role in George Bush’s career is a version of the role she played in their family life—the disciplinarian. Bush is skilled at surrounding himself with others who will draw the heat away from him. Says Ed Rollins, “George Bush is a man who wants to be loved. As opposed to respected. It’s very important to him that everybody like him.” Thus Bush works harder than most at delegating the more unpleasant parts of his job. In 1988, for example, Bush assigned the role of bad cop to Lee Atwater; for the first three years of his presidency, John Sununu played the heavy. (The effectiveness of having such a tool has become clearer than ever since December, when Sununu left. Lacking this essential foil, Bush has assigned the role piecemeal to various aides, as when spokesman Marlin Fitzwater was sent out to blame the Los Angeles riots on the programs of the Great Society. But because the men who now fill the White House seem too bland to personify evil, responsibility seems to get laid at Bush’s door faster than it used to.) On a subtler level, Bush has always cast family members in similar roles. Today his son George W. Bush plays the role of enforcer or executioner when a tough call must be made: it was the younger Bush, for example, who told Sununu that his time had run out. And many suggest that, especially during a political race, Barbara plays a more light-handed version of the same role. “She definitely is the institutional memory of slights,” says one former political staffer. “She is one distinct other level of the Praetorian Guard.” “I think George Bush has gotten a whole lot of mileage out of letting Bar be thought of as the heavy,” says a former political associate. For example, several reporters have been casually told by the president, during one-on-one interviews, that Barbara was angry over something they wrote about him. “Look out, the Silver Fox is really mad at you...,” he’ll say, effectively delivering the warning that the reporter’s copy has offended, without having to risk any personal conflict himself with the reporter. Whether Barbara’s role is conscious and deliberate, or something that evolved wordlessly out of a long marriage, only the Bushes know. Some believe that it is more conscious on her part than on his. “She knows this man very, very well, and his strengths and weaknesses, and I think she probably compensates for his weaknesses,” says Rollins. “She’s probably a better judge of character than he is.” “I think she’s much more judgmental about people than he is,” says another longtime associate. “I think she really takes a bead on someone, and for good or for bad, you’re in that box; she’s got you pigeonholed.” It is widely believed in Washington that Barbara Bush got fed up with John Sununu earlier than her husband did. But “she’s wily in that regard,” says a former staffer. “She knows how things work, and if she doesn’t want to read about what she did, she won’t do it in that way.” Sometimes, however, her intercession is in a staffer’s favor. When Transportation Secretary Sam Skinner took over from Sununu, one of his first instincts—clearly communicated, through the grapevine of leaks, to the newspapers—was to replace David Demarest as communications director. But Demarest kept his job—reportedly because Barbara defended him. “Word around the White House was she liked him a lot,” says one senior White Hose aide. It was an important bureaucratic defeat for Skinner, contributing to an early perception that he couldn’t follow up on his own intentions. Typically, Barbara works at the margins, letting staffers know obliquely—but unmistakably—when they are coming up short. In one legendary story, Barbara clipped the wings of Craig Fuller, chief of staff in Bush’s second term as vice president. Word got back to her from friends and supporters around the country that Fuller was out of touch, hard to reach. So one day on Air Force Two, seeing him leaf through an inches-high stack of phone messages, she told him—in a voice carefully modulated to reach her husband—”Keep looking...you’ll find a couple from me.” She uses humor, too, to keep staffers on their toes. In ‘88, she closely monitored the negative campaign tactics of Atwater and Ailes, because she was concerned they would bring too much criticism down on Bush. When Ailes entered a room in which she was present, she would sometimes greet him jovially, “Here’s my bad boy.” Coming from Barbara, it’s hard to read as anything but a reminder: I’m watching. If George Bush walks a fine line in his political tactics, Barbara is the line referee—making sure that he doesn’t cut it too close. Aides expect her to have a large role in monitoring the propriety of the Bush campaign this fall. While she has not yet shown a strong influence on campaign strategy, she has expressed concern over how tight—and negative—a race is shaping up. Campaign operatives have been warned that the First Lady will not tolerate tactics so inflammatory that they will provoke retaliatory attacks on the Bush family—especially on her sons. In talking about Barbara Bush’s great influence, however, almost everyone agrees that its boundary is clear. All of her vigilance is directed solely to the greater glory of George Bush. Aides who have tried to draw her into the open on substantive matters have been firmly turned down. Deborah Steelman, Bush’s adviser on domestic affairs in the ‘88 campaign, tried to draft Barbara Bush as an ally on issues like child care, health care, and early education. “It just was rebuffed, officially, at every turn,” Steelman recalls. “You only had to do that to her a couple of time to realize that was off bounds.” To the extent that Barbara weighs in on policy, it is in the dimension of taste—as a protector of her husband’s reputation. She is said to disagree with the president’s stated opinions in several areas; White House aids are especially eager to suggest that she differs from him on abortion and gun control, fanning some faint hope among Republican moderates that she is fighting a good fight over morning coffee every day. But it seems unlikely that Barbara Bush actually works to change her husband’s mind on such issues: his positions in those areas are dictated by politics, and she is as shrewd a politician as anyone around him. Her role in placating moderates may be more important this year than ever before. In a three-way race that includes Perot, the two major-party candidates will likely be forced to defend their traditional bases, which means they will have to appease the most extreme elements in their coalitions, For Bush, this means waging a fall campaign that offers lots of red meat to social-issue conservatives. Barbara Bush’s help will be crucial in telegraphing a contradictory message to more liberal Republicans, especially women angry at Bush over Clarence Thomas and the issue of abortion.

Up to now, Barbara Bush has been able to have it both ways. She has offered herself as evidence of her husband’s good intentions, while going out of her way to disclaim any power at all to shape the policies that affect the lives—the squalid schools, the threadbare health care, the marginal services—of the unfortunates who people her photo ops. When Bush decided, in the late seventies, to run for president, Barbara pondered what her major “issue” should be and came up with literacy, a canny choice. On the one hand, as she often explains, it touches on every problem in society, ranging from crime to childhood poverty; on the other hand, it doesn’t invite any controversy. As the vice president’s wife she joined the board of the child-oriented Reading Is Fundamental, and as First Lady she founded the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, to which she has donated all the profits from Millie’s Book. It gives away half a million dollars in grants every year to programs that address illiteracy as a self-perpetuating problem passed from parents to children. But if her signature issue was chosen with calculation, there has been nothing artificial about her good works. Even before Bush’s political career began, she was a dedicated volunteer in hospitals; over the years, she has quietly worked at such places as the Washington Home for Incurables, and has served on boards ranging from that of the Ronald McDonald House to that of the predominantly black Morehouse School of Medicine. Today you can easily see that she has a greater capacity than her husband has to look death and pain in the face. To cancer wards and AIDS clinics, she brings not only helpful publicity but a full self, a capacity to let in the suffering around her and give it its due, which is one of the few gifts any stranger can confer. The president, on the other hand, is famous for squirming through visits to hospitals. When he visited the bed of a Los Angeles fire fighter shot during the riots, the only consolation he could think to offer was for himself: “I’m sorry Barbara’s not here,” he said miserably. Every afternoon the First Lady has her staff send up to her office in the family quarters a clip file of stores related to poverty, education, literacy, child care—her issues. And sometimes she reacts quickly to what she reads. In 1989, for example, she was angered by reports that the Salvation Army had been barred from making Christmas collections at some of the snootier local shopping malls. She made a trip to a mall that did permit the solicitations and took along a press pool to capture her dropping some change into the bucket, which successfully shamed most of the Scrooge-ish merchants into line. This is as good a use of celebrity as exists in America. It is, by the accounts of Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, all of those who have fallen in love with the grandmotherly image of the First Lady, the very best of Barbara Bush. But even in the uprightness of this image lies a certain moral complexity. For the past three and a half years, the First Lady had almost single-handedly symbolized her husband’s good intentions in the realm of domestic affairs. Extended to a society’s breadth, the Bush model implies a return to an era in which women relieved their powerful men—relieved government—of responsibility for the disadvantaged. It is the old Victorian contract, in which life was divided into two spheres, male and female; while men ran the world, their women ran the soup kitchens. Bush advisers have worked hard over the years to suggest that Barbara’s compassion will one day rub off on her husband, to imply that she can (and should) be relied on to police his interest in social services. “Every time he says ‘Head Start,’ that’s Bar,” spokeswoman Sheila Tate told reporters at the dawn of his administration. And for some time the country seemed to accept the idea that Barbara was a facet of George—a reliable indicator of his goals. At the time of Bush’s inauguration, columnists raved about how Barbara would be “the conscience of the White House.” But without Barbara, Americans might have noticed sooner that the self-styled “education president” had offered nothing meaningful in the way of education reform. Without Barbara, voters might have noticed from the start how disengaged Bush seemed from domestic concerns. Barbara Bush successfully silenced the logical question that called out for response: Isn’t the president supposed to be the conscience of the White House?

As George Bush campaigns for a second term, a lot rides on Barbara Bush’s careful balancing act. She is the answer to a frightened campaign’s prayers, a surrogate campaigner who can command almost as much press and hoopla as the president can—while incurring comparatively little risk. As early as last winter one could trace the dawning importance of her role. She was sent to New Hampshire to file the papers for Bush’s candidacy, “because nobody would dare to boo Barbara,” in the words of a strategist. She spent more time campaigning in the state than the president did. And when Bush officially announced his candidacy, it was Barbara Bush who introduced him. In a classic reversal of roles, the candidate quoted his wife, referring to “my favorite political philosopher, Barbara Bush.” All through the spring, once the threat of Buchanan’s primary campaign had faded, she traveled far more than her husband did, headlining as many as thirty major fund-raisers around the country. Republican strategists go as far as to say that they believe voters ambivalent about George Bush may think twice about voting his wife out of the White House. It’s an extraordinary exception to the normal wisdom, which suggests that the best most spouses can do is adhere to the Hippocratic oath of politics: Just do no harm. Opinions differ about how badly Barbara Bush wants to stay in the White House. She is said to blame the presidency for the problems of her son Neil, implicated in the Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan Association debacle. Friends also surmise she has had a more difficult time than she lets on dealing with Graves’ disease, the thyroid condition that has tired her and painfully distended her eyes. But by most accounts she has reveled in her time as First Lady. Even as the president floundered through the spring and early summer, his polls in free-fall, Barbara Bush lived in a charmed circle within her control. She has reached the apotheosis of the life she read about in her daddy’s magazines, a victory she presents as grand affirmation of the ultra-traditional plan she has lived by. “My mail tells me that a lot of fat, white-haired, wrinkled ladies are tickled pink,” she said on the eve of Bush’s inauguration. “I mean, look at me—if I can be a success, so can they.” But only one person gets to be married to the president of the United States. It is a rare full-time homemaker and college dropout who receives an honorary degree from Smith, who is asked to speak to the graduating class at Wellesley, who appears on the covers of Time and Life. George Bush’s political ascent allowed her to enact her role of helpmate on a vast, symbolic scale—one that offered more ego gratification than the same role performed as an anonymous daily sacrament. This was how she staved off the fated collision between her cramped idea of women’s role and her great strength of personality. It is also how she tamed the most turbulent themes of her own life.