A new biography of Laura Bush describes a First Lady who can give as good as she gets, writes Denis Staunton in Washington
She accidentally killed one of her best friends when she was 17, she cleans compulsively and smokes cigarettes on a White House balcony, yet Laura Bush can't shake off her image as an achingly conventional, if sweet-natured, wife and mother.
That image has done her no harm with the American people, who have made her the most popular First Lady in history, with approval ratings more than double those of her husband.
Ronald Kessler's Laura Bush: An Intimate Portrait of the First Lady has been widely dismissed in the US as a soft-focus hagiography that glosses over Mrs Bush's faults and plays down embarrassing episodes in her marriage to President George W Bush. Like many authorised biographies, however, the book is often revealing in ways that may not have been intended by either the author or the subject.
Kessler reports that when Hillary Clinton took Mrs Bush on a tour of the White House in December 2000, the new First Lady was horrified by the state in which the Clintons had left the place.
"Not only were carpets and furnishings fraying and in disrepair in the West Wing and public areas, the Oval Office was done in loud colours - red, blue and gold. The Lincoln bedroom looked worn because it hadn't been decorated in so long," Kessler writes.
Mrs Bush never, apparently, "said anything critical about Hillary" but she has a nice line in understated bitchiness. One of the First Lady's friends recalls once saying something negative about to Mrs Bush about her predecessor. "I'm just surprised her book is selling so well," Mrs Bush replied.
Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, got a taste of the First Lady's formidable style during the 2004 presidential campaign after she suggested to a reporter that Mrs Bush, who worked as a librarian for 10 years, had never had a real job. Mrs Kerry apologised publicly within hours but when she phoned the White House to apologise personally, Mrs Bush refused to take the call.
"Call her back and tell her that Mrs Bush understands that when you talk to the media, things get quoted that you didn't quite say or mean to say," the First Lady said sweetly.
Born Laura Lane Welch in the West Texas town of Midland in 1946, Mrs Bush shared a classroom with her future husband for a couple of years but they didn't really get to know one another until they were both over 30. An only child, she developed a habit for neatness early on, organising her books according to the Dewey decimal system even before she became a librarian and enjoying nothing better than a long scrubbing session with chemical cleaning agents.
"Laura is the Clorox queen," her friend Nancy Weiss told Kessler. "When she dusts her bookshelves, she takes the books out and sprays Formula 409 on the shelves. Clorox, Formula 409 and Windex are her favourite substances." When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans last August, Mrs Bush dealt with the stress by "going through bookshelves, dusting off books and weeding out duplicates".
At 17, she killed her friend Mike Douglas by accidentally crashing into his car at a junction, an event Kessler says "deepened her understanding of how precious life was and made her grateful for what she had". Mrs Bush stayed away from the funeral and never spoke of the accident again until reporters raised questions about it during one of her husband's campaigns.
Mrs Bush and the future president married within weeks of their first date but she had difficulty conceiving and needed fertility treatment before giving birth to twins Barbara and Jenna. The girls' brushes with the law over underage drinking have exposed Mrs Bush to criticism but she comes across in Kessler's book as an admirably relaxed mother - although she apparently shares her husband's stinginess with money.
Kessler reveals that, after dinner, Mr Bush likes to disappear into his office to do jigsaw puzzles and that Mrs Bush will often slip out onto the balcony for a smoke.
Her favourite pastime is reading and Kessler reports with amazement that Mrs Bush sometimes reads an entire book in a week. "Her favourite books are plague books, a genre that includes literature on the bubonic plague and other epidemics," he writes.
A former Democrat who says she married into the Republican party, Mrs Bush is more liberal than her husband on social issues and remains committed to abortion rights.
As the US prepared to invade Afghanistan, the First Lady delivered the president's weekly radio address, speaking about the oppression of women by the Taliban.
'If Hillary Clinton had done that, they would have said she was trying to take over the presidency," Mrs Bush said. As Mr Bush's administration sinks further into a morass of incompetence, sleaze and political impotence, America's First Lady keeps smiling, dusting her bookshelves, sneaking the occasional cigarette and being her own, extraordinary self.