American Wife

Blackwell is sometimes made out to be nothing but the First Lady Who Lunches, she’s a former librarian who knows just how crucial privacy and intellectual freedom are to a democracy.

Sitting in bed reading this, I had felt a rise of the sort of anger that I experience infrequently. It wasn’t the sentiment Thea was expressing, which I had heard often enough, but the source—unlike Carolyn Thayer, or my cousin Patty, or even Simon Tornkvist, Thea was a person with whom I’d once felt great kinship. And why couldn’t she give me the benefit of the doubt, why couldn’t she assume I was doing the best I could under the circumstances? Who was Thea to decide the exact quantity or nature of what I ought to say, and to whom, and how? I reminded myself of the decision I’d made years before, walking alone on Maronee Drive after the ridiculous Milwaukee Sentinel article about my molasses cookies—that I could not be defined by others from the outside, and that the fact of something being printed didn’t make it true. Still, this was Thea and the Times.

They think they’ll sway you, but they do the opposite—the more people there are exerting pressure, the more they are part of a pattern. There is also the fact of each individual who lobbies you having a pet issue—Thea objected specifically to the reauthorization of the Patriot Act—and how even in their national concerns, people are driven by a sort of altruistic self-interest. This is what I have done most wrong, this is how I have fallen short. While the criticism I receive can be discouraging, the variations on it negate one another. Whatever I have accomplished that was positive, it wasn’t enough. What’s important is what I’ve overlooked or ignored. (And again: I’m popular, my approval ratings are twice Charlie’s. It doesn’t surprise me that he ignores his critics altogether.)

These are my “issues”: breast-cancer awareness and detection; historic preservation of art and buildings; pediatric AIDS prevention here and abroad, especially in Africa; and literacy. If the issues on which I’ve focused are noncontroversial, I believe they’re legitimately worthy. What has been most wrenching as first lady, however, is that the old sense of obligation, guilt, and sadness I used to get when I read the newspaper in Milwaukee has been dramatically compounded. Though I resist the notion shared by Gladys Wycomb, Thea Dengler, and many others that I ought to lobby my husband, it’s true that if I visit an organization or invite its members to the White House—a veterinary clinic that spays pets for people who can’t afford it, a program that tries to decrease gang violence, an orphanage for homeless children in Addis Ababa—that organization will receive an influx of donations, a shower of publicity. I can change people’s lives, and many times, although it is cowardly, I have wished I didn’t have that ability. The pressure is too great, and the hardest part is not that what I do is insufficient in others’ eyes but that it’s insufficient in my own. I stay busy, I travel, I try with my visits—with my actions, that is, more than my words—to support other people’s good work, but I don’t doubt that I’d have felt better about my contributions to the world if my power were more modest. If I had remained a single woman, a teacher, I have the idea that I might have begun, at the age of forty or so, to take in foster children, and not necessarily white ones; I’d compost, and perhaps by now I’d have purchased a Prius, though I still don’t think I’d have affixed an antiwar bumper sticker to it. In whatever way such things are measured, I probably would have done less, but I wouldn’t have had to face the reality that I could have done far more.

As for those who hate me because they hate Charlie, hate me by extension, I am curious of this: At what point, in their opinion, should I have done something, and what should that something have been? Should I not have married him? Should I not have discouraged his drinking? (“Jim Beam and me, have us both”—is that what I ought to have said?) When he told me that he wanted to run for governor and I told him I’d prefer he didn’t (though I foolishly thought at least it was better than congressman or senator, at least it would keep us in Wisconsin)—when he decided that in spite of my stated preference, he was indeed going to run, should I have left him? Should I have stayed with him but not campaigned for him? Should I have stated explicitly to the public when my views differed from his? Should I have left him when he decided, also against my wishes, to run for president? Anyone who has been married, and especially anyone married for several decades, knows the union is a series of compromises; to judge the compromises I have made is, I take it, easy to do from far away.

If I am diffident, then my diffidence stems in part from my aversion to arriving hastily at decisions. During the lead-up to the war, I sincerely didn’t know what I thought the right course of action was; I read articles for both sides, and I found convincing arguments in each. Because the stakes were so high, I did have an uneasy feeling during the early months of 2003, but Charlie and I talked about the situation less than one might imagine, or I should say we talked logistically more than we discussed the philosophical or historical implications. He’d call from the Oval Office and say, “I’ve got to go to a meeting in the Sit Room, so how about if we watch that movie tomorrow night instead?” Or, as he once put it about the secretary of state, “We’ve been pumping up Stanley for his talk to the UN Security Council on Wednesday, and I think he’s really gonna hit this one out of the park.”

These days, it is common for people in both political parties, for people who don’t consider themselves members of any party at all, to say Charlie’s administration bungled the war and we should bring the troops home. And Charlie’s administration did underestimate how neglected the country’s infrastructure was, how likely an insurgency would be, and how many weapons the insurgents had. All of that is now clear; the question is how to proceed. For America, it would be advantageous to leave, but what about them, the country we invaded?

When Ella was in Montessori at Biddle Academy, the classroom activities included building blocks, wooden puzzles, and, to Charlie’s great amusement, a sink filled with plastic cups and dishes (“So she can learn to be a scullery maid,” he’d joke). The guiding principles of the classroom activities were these: Finish one task before you start another, and clean up after yourself. In the midst of our war in a hot, sandy country over six thousand miles away, a country whose art and culture and language and science stretch back to the beginning of human civilization, I keep returning to these ideas, that it is our responsibility to clean up the mess we made. For the last four years, I’ve wondered if we’ll make things worse by withdrawing, and I’ve remained confused about whether it was right to invade in the first place. If we invaded as a democracy unseating a dictator, does the fact that there were more deaths than Americans expected mean invading was wrong? If we were right to invade but it was sloppily executed, does that make it wrong?

When I see political pundits on television, or meet the Republican ones at events in or outside the White House, what strikes me most is their certainty. Is it exaggerated for the cameras, and do they in the privacy of their homes, at the end of the day, remove it along with their socks or stockings? Or are they always so bombastic and assured? I envy them as I envy the deeply religious, including my husband, but I have felt incapable of joining their ranks. I’ve never tried to assert my views unless they are self-evident, not reliant on an argument from me to prove or disprove them: Breast-cancer awareness and AIDS prevention are good. Illiteracy is bad. Historic preservation will allow future generations to understand what life used to be like and in so doing will help Americans chart a path forward. The issues and decisions that are more complex I have left to others, to those confident of their own rightness. I have imagined that I’ll know what I think of this war when Charlie is long out of office, but that I don’t know now—it is a novel I haven’t reached the end of.

Or so I have often told myself.

And yet if Andrew Imhof’s death was the singular tragedy of my life, if in some ways I have lived since then trying to compensate for my error, trying to be worthy of having survived—if his death was the worst thing I could have imagined, then what words are there, what space in my imagination, for the deaths of thousands of American troops and foreign civilians? If my critics are right that I share responsibility for Charlie’s administrative policies, including the decision to go to war, then Andrew Imhof’s death is the least of what I have caused; it is nothing, and utterly insignificant. What if I believed the consequences of the war were also my fault? The twenty-nine-year-old former high school athlete from Hot Springs, Arkansas, killed by small-arms fire while searching a house in a southern neighborhood of the capital city; the twenty-five-year-old sergeant from Ogden, Utah, killed on his third