In her latest book, Laura Bush is more candid than she has ever been about her life story, but she stays on-message about the public parts of the 43rd presidency. | MICHAEL SCHWARTZ/POLITICO Laura: I 'stood straighter' after W.H.

Former first lady Laura Bush says a surprising “sort of buoyancy” kicked in a few days after she returned to Texas after her eight years in the White House — a vivid feeling of relief from the post-Sept. 11 pressure cooker.

“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 recalled in a video interview in the POLITICO newsroom last week, immediately after signing her newly published memoir, “Spoken From the Heart,” for customers at a nearby Costco.


“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.”

In her latest book, Bush is more candid than she has ever been about her life story, but she stays on-message about the public parts of the 43rd presidency. She told POLITICO that despite George W. Bush’s unpopularity when he left office, she doesn’t think her husband was ill-served by any of the aides around him.

“Most of the people that were close to us are still very, very close to us, and they were outstanding people with really great character who served our country for the right reasons,” she said.

Bush added that she “definitely” does not believe anyone lied to her husband about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “That was the intelligence from everybody,” she said.

Her husband’s newest book, “Decision Points,” is due out this fall, and she said they both enjoyed digging back into their distant — and recent — past.

“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 recalled.

“I went back home to Midland [Texas] and drove by all those houses my daddy built and all the ones we lived in with my mother and dad, and then the ones George and I lived in. All of that has been really very interesting. It’s cathartic, in a way, to go back over those years, and especially the consequential years [of] this first decade in the new century, when we lived in the White House.”

The two of them traded notes, she said, and shared researchers.

“His researcher would find things that he thought might interest me,” she said. “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.”

The former first lady laughed when asked if she had any sympathy for President Barack Obama’s struggle with smoking.

“I did smoke,” she said, adding that her last cigarette was a long time ago. “I wrote about that in the book a lot and how, when I became a public librarian at Houston Public Library, I read every single book about how to quit smoking, and it helped. And finally I was able to quit smoking. But it’s hard.”

Bush said she continues “to work on all the things that interested” her through the George W. Bush Institute, the policy arm of the presidential library, in Dallas, on the campus of her alma mater, Southern Methodist University.

“I’ve already hosted the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council as part of the institute,” she said. “I found that American women were so shocked by the way women were treated and oppressed in Afghanistan — that American women feel a very strong sense of sisterhood with Afghan women, and we want to see them succeed.”

Among the book’s revelations is the brief concern among U.S. officials that someone had tried to poison the presidential party in 2007 during the Group of Eight summit in Heiligendamm, Germany.

“I was the first one to get sick, and I went to bed; and then I got up and I felt a lot better,” she recalled. “With an abundance of caution, the Secret Service and everyone that was with us looked at all the food we had had. The European press, particularly, was interested and looked at all the menus. But in fact, what we found out was that it was a virus that attacked a nerve close to the inner ear.”

The former first lady, who was often reticent in the White House, spoke confidently and cheerfully on a wide range of issues.

On a post-college road trip: “I traveled from Texas to Boston with a friend of mine. We stopped in a lot of cities on the way and visited with friends that we had in Nashville and other cities as we drove up. We went up with the idea that we would get a job in Boston. But when we got there, we started looking around. We didn’t know one single person there to call, so we came back down to Washington, and I interviewed with our congressman at the time from Midland, Texas, Congressman [George] Mahon. ... And because I couldn’t type very well, I didn’t get a job with him. So I guess my life might have been a lot different if I’d gone to work then, in 1969, on the Hill.”

On an amusing encounter as first lady of Texas: “I went to Walmart with [my daughters] Barbara and Jenna, and we were waiting in line to check 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, instead, she said, ‘No, guess not.’”

On the loss of a suitcase while in the White House: “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 on 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 purchased. But, anyway, we felt pretty good that we had spent some money in that economy.”

On the news now: “We read The Dallas Morning News. We read some things on our BlackBerry, as well, and on our computer, like POLITICO. And we probably watch about the same amount of news, and we still watch a whole lot of sports.”

On Jenna Bush Hager as an NBC “Today” show contributor: “It has given George a great punch line for his speeches — that Jenna’s just continuing the tradition of warm relations with the media for our family. She’s doing great.”

On Crawford, Texas: “We spent all of last week at the ranch. We scheduled two weeks there — the last week of March and the last week of April — so we could be there for the wildflower bloom, and we’ve gotten a lot of rain this year, so the blue bonnets were really pretty. We try to go as often as we can. We went for Christmas, which was fun, with Jenna and Henry [Hager, Jenna’s husband] and Barbara.”

Some other key exchanges with POLITICO:

Of your accomplishments as first lady, what do you feel has been most lasting?

“I’m very proud of the National Book Festival, which continues today and, I think, drew about 130,000 people to the National Mall last year. ... But I think my work both with the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and ... the President’s Malaria Initiative in sub-Saharan Africa will continue. More and more people are getting on anti-retrovirals in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Do you think the Bush presidency will be seen differently in the long run than it is now?

“George’s presidency will be seen as a presidency where two countries were liberated from tyrannical governments. And if we can see a good democracy stand up in Iraq, and if we can see more progress against the Taliban in Afghanistan, I think that the people who live there will be a lot happier, and Americans will be, too.”

What it’s like to have a Clinton in the family, with President Bill Clinton’s work with former President Bush on Haiti relief?

“Well, that’s been fun for George and President Clinton. They’ve given four or five speeches together around the country. ... They have a duet now that they do. ... You have a great empathy and sympathy for people who’ve been in that job. ... The handful of people who have been president really know what the other people who served — what they went through. And so I think there’s a lot of similarities, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on.”

What will help the current first lady, Michelle Obama, succeed with her “Let’s Move” campaign against childhood obesity?

“Probably a lot of it’ll be how well she’s covered by the media. It looks like she’s being covered pretty well, so I think that’s terrific.”